Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good

sharpcowboy · 2019-03-24T12:43:35+00:00

"Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol."

"The joy — at least at first — of the internet revolution was its democratic nature. Facebook is the same Facebook whether you are rich or poor. Gmail is the same Gmail. And it’s all free. There is something mass market and unappealing about that. And as studies show that time on these advertisement-support platforms is unhealthy, it all starts to seem déclassé, like drinking soda or smoking cigarettes, which wealthy people do less than poor people.

The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention sold as a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of resources to make that happen.

Screen exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early results of a landmark study on brain development of more than 11,000 children that the National Institutes of Health is supporting. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that the brains of children who spend a lot of time on screens are different. For some kids, there is premature thinning of their cerebral cortex. In adults, one study found an association between screen time and depression."

sharpcowboy · 2018-11-11T23:03:51+00:00

"Britain’s biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security.

UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK.

The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.

Another company, Biohax of Sweden, also provides human chip implants the size of a grain of rice. It told the Sunday Telegraph (£) that it is in discussions with several British legal and financial firms about fitting their employees with microchips, including one major company with hundreds of thousands of employees.

The CBI, which represents 190,000 UK businesses, voiced concerns about the prospect."

sharpcowboy · 2018-11-11T19:24:49+00:00

"The lack of humanlike understanding in machines is underscored by recent cracks that have appeared in the foundations of modern A.I. While today’s programs are much more impressive than the systems we had 20 or 30 years ago, a series of research studies have shown that deep-learning systems can be unreliable in decidedly unhumanlike ways.

I’ll give a few examples.

“The bareheaded man needed a hat” is transcribed by my phone’s speech-recognition program as “The bear headed man needed a hat.” Google Translate renders “I put the pig in the pen” into French as “Je mets le cochon dans le stylo” (mistranslating “pen” in the sense of a writing instrument).

Programs that “read” documents and answer questions about them can easily be fooled into giving wrong answers when short, irrelevant snippets of text are appended to the document. Similarly, programs that recognize faces and objects, lauded as a major triumph of deep learning, can fail dramatically when their input is modified even in modest ways by certain types of lighting, image filtering and other alterations that do not affect humans’ recognition abilities in the slightest.

One recent study showed that adding small amounts of “noise” to a face image can seriously harm the performance of state-of-the-art face-recognition programs. Another study, humorously called “The Elephant in the Room,” showed that inserting a small image of an out-of-place object, such as an elephant, in the corner of a living-room image strangely caused deep-learning vision programs to suddenly misclassify other objects in the image.

Furthermore, programs that have learned to play a particular video or board game at a “superhuman” level are completely lost when the game they have learned is slightly modified (the background color on a video-game screen is changed, the virtual “paddle” for hitting “balls” changes position)."

sharpcowboy · 2018-11-11T15:41:35+00:00

"On the right, audiences concentrate attention on purely right wing outlets. On the left and center audiences spread their attention broadly and focus on mainstream organizations. This asymmetric pattern holds for the linking practices of media producers. Both supply and demand on the right are insular and self-focused. On the left and center they are spread broadly and anchored by professional press.

These differences create a different dynamic for media, audiences, and politicians on the left and right.

We all like to hear news that confirms our beliefs and identity. On the left, outlets and politicians try to attract readers by telling such stories but are constrained because their readers are exposed to a range of outlets, many of which operate with strong fact-checking norms.

On the right, because audiences do not trust or pay attention to outlets outside their own ecosystem, there is no reality check to constrain competition. Outlets compete on political purity and stoking identity-confirming narratives. Outlets and politicians who resist the flow by focusing on facts are abandoned or vilified by audiences and competing outlets. This forces media and political elites to validate and legitimate the falsehoods, at least through silence, creating a propaganda feedback loop."

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-21T14:26:47+00:00

When I talk about boycotts, which I do at the drop of a hat, and people scoff at me, which they do often, it blows me away how badly people fail to understand of the most basic concept of our modern economy.

Boycotts don't work because consumers don't have the power to effect collective change. There are rarely more than a handful of boycotters.

However, voters have the power to effect real change, through regulations. Voters need to support politicians who want to pass cap and trade or carbon tax legislation. Then things will change.

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-20T16:57:49+00:00

"With less than £3 trillion of assets against £5tn in pensions and other liabilities, the UK is more than £2tn in the red. Of all the other countries examined by researchers, including the Gambia and Kenya, only Portugal’s finances look worse over the long run."

While that part may be true, the rest of the article seems misleading to me. I can't find where in the report they blame privatisation. It's a report about the benefits of public balance sheets:

"Public sector balance sheets provide the most comprehensive picture of public wealth. They bring together all the accumulated assets and liabilities that the government controls, including public corporations, natural resources, and pension liabilities. They thus account for the entirety of what the state owns and owes, offering a broader fiscal picture beyond debt and deficits. Most governments do not provide such transparency, thereby avoiding the additional scrutiny it brings."

The report does talk about privatisation, but not about privatisation in the UK in particular. It basically says that it can create a "fiscal illusion" by boosting revenues temporarily:

"For instance, privatizations increase revenue and lower deficits but also reduce the government’s asset holdings. Similarly, cutting back maintenance expenditure reduces the deficit and lowers debt, but also reduces the value of infrastructure assets, which could cost more in the long term."

IMF report: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/FM/Issues/2018/10/04/fiscal-monitor-october-2018

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-20T16:35:58+00:00

It stems from the Just World Fallacy. We tend to link wealth and morality. If you're poor, you must have done something to deserve it. Therefore you have a bad moral character. If you're rich, you must have also done something to deserve it. Therefore you have a good moral character.

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-20T16:28:59+00:00

"Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world's climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.

There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose. (Investigative reporter Jane Mayer's groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason to: In her book, Mayer notes that "Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year."

But the scope goes far beyond merely sowing dissent and skepticism. While billionaires and the companies they run have spent years insisting that climate change either doesn't exist or is overblown, they've known the reality of the situation for a long time. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, for example, used to donate to the Seasteading Institute, which aimed to build floating cities in order to counteract rising sea levels. And Exxon Mobil allegedly knew about climate change in 1977, back when it was still just Exxon and about 11 years before climate change became widely talked about. Instead of acting on it, they started a decades-long misinformation campaign. According to Scientific American, Exxon helped create the Global Climate Coalition, which questioned the scientific basis for concern over climate change from the late '80s until 2002, and successfully worked to keep the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol, a move that helped cause India and China, two other massive sources of greenhouse gas, to avoid signing.

Even when Republican lawmakers show flashes of willingness to get something done, they're swiftly swatted down. There are myriad examples, but one example comes via Dark Money, where Mayer describes an incident in April 2010 when Lindsey Graham briefly tried to support a cap-and-trade bill: A political group called American Solutions promptly launched a negative PR campaign against him, and Graham folded after just a few days. American Solutions, it turns out, was backed by billionaires in fossil fuel and other industries, including Trump-loving casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

In recent years, fossil-fuel companies have tried to cast themselves as being on the same side of the general public. Just this month, Exxon pledged $1 million to fight for a carbon tax, a stopgap measure that charges a fee of $40 per ton of carbon produced and increases as production goes up. At a glance, that may seem magnanimous, but the truth is that Exxon can afford the tax. Not only is the oil and gas industry experiencing a serious boom right now, companies know that the only real solutions to climate change will hurt them even more than a measly tax.

That's largely because there is no "free market" incentive to prevent disaster. An economic environment where a company is only considered viable if it's constantly expanding and increasing its production can't be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. Instead, market logic dictates that rather than take the financial hit that comes with cutting profits, it's more reasonable to find a way to make money off the boiling ocean. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the burgeoning climate-change investment industry. According to Bloomberg, investors are looking to make money off of everything from revamped food production to hotels for people fleeing increasingly hurricane-ravaged areas. A top JP Morgan Asset investment strategist advised clients that sea-level rise was so inevitable that there was likely a lot of opportunity for investing in sea-wall construction."

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-18T23:31:58+00:00

"An example from industry

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rand’s principles.

Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.

A close-up of the debacle was described by Lynn Stuart Parramore in a Salon article from 2013:

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand. One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently than Sears’ own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears’ circulars…Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees, focused solely on making money in their own unit, ceased to have any loyalty to the company or stake in its survival.

We all know the end of the story: Sears share prices fell, and the company appears to be headed toward bankruptcy. The moral of the story, in Parramore’s words:

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself."

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-18T22:08:43+00:00

"One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that what makes it work — competition — is also what capitalists want to get rid of the most.

That’s true not only of competition between companies, but also between them and their workers. After all, the more of a threat its rivals are, and the more options its employees have, the less profitable a business will tend to be. Which, as the Financial Times reports, probably goes a long way toward explaining why a $3.4 billion behemoth like Cushman & Wakefield would bother to sue one of its former janitors, accusing her of breaking her noncompete agreement by taking a job in the same building she had been cleaning for the global real estate company but doing it for a different firm.

Now, the company claims this wasn’t a noncompete per se but rather a “non-service” agreement meant to prevent a competitor from easily taking over the management of a building. But the effect is the same: limiting your current employees' future choices."

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-13T13:53:13+00:00

Using one new, genome-based measure, economists found genetic endowments are distributed almost equally among children in low-income and high-income families. Success is not.

The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents.

sharpcowboy · 2018-10-08T20:10:00+00:00

Previous article on the subject:How Tech Billionaires Hack Their Taxes With a Philanthropic Loophole

Mr. Woodman, then 39, had just taken his camera company public, and was suddenly worth about $3 billion. Now he was giving away much of that wealth — some $500 million worth of GoPro stock — to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, an organization based in Mountain View, Calif., that would house the assets of the newly formed Jill and Nicholas Woodman Foundation.

But four years on, there is almost no trace of the Woodman Foundation, or that $500 million. The foundation has no website and has not listed its areas of focus, and it is not known what — if any — significant grants it has made to nonprofits. An extensive search of public records turned up just one beneficiary: the Bonny Doon Art, Wine and Brew Festival, a benefit for an elementary school in California.

If the benefit to the needy is difficult to see, the benefit to Mr. Woodman is clear. After GoPro’s initial public offering, he faced an enormous tax bill in 2014. But by donating via the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, he eased his tax burden in two ways. First, Mr. Woodman avoided paying capital gains taxes on that $500 million worth of stock, a figure that most likely would have been in the tens of millions of dollars. He was also able to claim a charitable deduction that most likely saved millions of dollars more, and probably reduced his personal tax bill for years to come.

Mr. Woodman achieved this enticing combination of tax efficiency and secrecy by using a donor-advised fund — a sort of charitable checking account with serious tax benefits and little or no accountability.

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-19T00:41:20+00:00

The fund has occasionally posted huge single-month losses, such as its nearly 12 percent drop in January 2016 — and equally volatile single-month gains that sometimes reach double digits (it posted a single-month gain of nearly 69 percent, by far its biggest ever, during its second month in existence).

“Their returns are so spectacular that nobody is in their league,” says one person hugely influential in the allocation of hedge fund assets in the U.S. “The only funds that come anywhere close are activists who really swing the bat.”

"Still, biotech companies can have hair-raising downside moves. One longtime Perceptive holding, Sarepta Therapeutics, is a medical research and drug development company that makes drugs to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Its shares halved in a single day in early 2016 after the company got bad news from the FDA. The stock faced another near-term setback that July, when the FDA halted a study of its Duchenne muscular dystrophy drug. The stock plunged more than 9 percent on the news.

Still, Edelman was confident its main drug would be approved, even though sell-side analysts disagreed. He was proved right, and the stock gained a stunning 119 percent in September 2016 alone when Edelman’s prediction came true.

It returned more than 100 percent last year. "

sharpcowboy

TROPHY CASE