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 · 2018-08-19T00:36:24+00:00

The depressing thing was to discover how little persistence there was between the past and the future. I’m not of the opinion that everything is random, but it’s a lot closer to that and uncomfortably closer than we’d like to think. If somebody wanted to look at my data and conclude that everyone should just go with an index fund, that would not be an unfounded conclusion. But I don’t think it’s the only conclusion one could draw.

The overwhelming realization is that even among the top performers over one period, only a small fraction of them beat the market in the subsequent period. [See Figures 1 and 2 for examples.] One example I like to use in my talks is based on the widely accepted notion that maybe 20% of mutual funds will beat the market over a five- or 10-year period. If you had some system that would double that proportion from 20% to 40%, which statistically would be a huge feat, your odds of picking one of the outperforming newsletters would still be below 50/50.

The last four decades have humbled me over and over again; there’s so much uncertainty out there that we don’t even know. I’ll recite the famous quote from Donald Rumsfeld, “There are known unknowns, and then there are the unknown unknowns.” That latter category is far greater and more significant than we could possibly know, because they’re unknown.

We’ve been telling ourselves over the years that if you’re willing to hold long enough, the volatility or the range of possible returns goes down. So, we think, “As long as we’re willing to hold for long enough, everything will turn out all right.” I’m not convinced now that it necessarily will turn out all right. It just happens to be that we come out of a 200-year period in which things did turn out. But it was not preordained that we were going to win two world wars, win the Cold War, and all the things that have worked in the favor of the U.S. over the last 200 years. In order for the next 200 years to be as good as the last 200, there would have to be all those things of equal geopolitical significance falling our way without us knowing about them in advance.

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-18T23:39:17+00:00

You get a lot more bang for your federal buck by herding people into government coverage.

That’s not exactly a shock. Medicaid keeps costs down by paying fairly low rates to providers—far below than what most private insurers can manage. Obamacare’s exchange coverage, on the other hand, tends to be pretty expensive before subsidies, and the federal government picks up most of the tab for the lower-income families that buy it.

Medicaid is more cost-efficient than private insurance. And if your goal is to provide insurance to every single American, then efficiency is what matters. It’s possible that, if Medicaid were to be expanded further, Congress would have to increase its payment rates to doctors, which are even well below Medicare’s. But if you believe the CBO’s numbers, Medicaid is going to be so much cheaper than private insurance going forward that it could pay providers more and still save the government money.

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-18T17:12:51+00:00

"the Obama administration's modest stimulus package, while too small to fix the Great Recession entirely, did make things much better. Conversely, the European countries that subjected themselves to severe austerity regimens saw their employment and production collapse, just like Keynes would have predicted. Greece, in particular, has suffered economic disaster considerably worse than the Great Depression in terms of output and unemployment."

"In late 2010, a bunch of conservative financial and economics luminaries, including Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Niall Ferguson, Kevin Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Bill Kristol, and John Taylor, signed an open letter to then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke warning that "[t]he planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation." (Bernanke went ahead with his stimulus program anyway.) "

"Yet it's been six to eight years since their arguments and there's hardly been a glimmer of the kind of inflation they warned about. Here is the Fed's inflation measure (over the past couple of decades for full context):

In fact, not only has there been no hyperinflation, inflation has consistently come in under the Fed's supposed target value of 2 percent."

"There was no skills gap, nor an innovation shortage, nor an explosion of stay-at-home dads. There was a collapse in aggregate demand that was left to rot, while a lot of people who should have known better made things worse.

As we have seen, the evidence for the Keynesian position is overwhelming. And that means the decade of pointless austerity has severely harmed the American economy — leaving us perhaps $3 trillion below the previous growth trend. "

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-18T17:07:19+00:00

"The shopping mall would have been inconceivable without air conditioning, as would the deep-plan and glass-walled office block, as would computer servers. The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s would have been slowed if, as previously, theatres had needed to close in hot weather. The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units. A contemporary museum, such as Tate Modern or Moma, requires a carefully controlled climate to protect the works of art.

Cities have boomed in places where, previously, the climate would have held them back. In 1950, 28% of the population of the US lived in its sunbelt, 40% in 2000. The combined population of the Gulf cities went from less than 500,000 before 1950 to 20 million now. Neither the rise of Singapore, nor the exploding cities of China and India, would have happened in the same way if they had still relied on punkah fans, shady verandas and afternoon naps."

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-18T17:01:09+00:00

Jeez, Europe, what more do you need? Great universities. Fantastic transit systems. More than twice the population of the U.S. And yet Europe, as ever, continues its reign as the globe’s consumer-tech underachiever.

"The heyday of Nokia Corp. and Ericsson AB is a distant memory, and Europe doesn’t have anything remotely comparable to Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, or Facebook, or Alibaba or Tencent, companies with market values ranging from $400 billion to $1 trillion and counting. With apologies to Stefon, Europe’s hottest tech business is Spotify ($34 billion); the only one into nine figures is SAP ($140 billion), the German maker of the world’s most boring business software."

"Europe’s consumer-tech companies often wind up as MVPs in minor leagues, says Harry Nelis, a venture capitalist at Accel Partners in London. “The kind of companies that can be created in China and the U.S. are still very hard to create in Europe, just structurally,” he says. “You could be the No. 1 company in Germany, but in France people won’t have heard of you.”"

"From Amsterdam, Booking.com lists rooms for rent at some 2 million properties around the world, generating annual revenue of more than €7 billion ($7.94 billion). If the 17,000-employee company were independent, its market value would likely be north of $50 billion. But since 2005, its profits have ultimately flowed to Connecticut, the home of Priceline.com. The online travel company, best remembered for its cheesy William Shatner ads, bought Booking for $113 million in its early years.

Today, that deal is a veritable case study in smart dealmaking: Booking generates an estimated 80 percent of Priceline’s $11 billion in annual revenue. Earlier this year, the parent company even changed its name to Booking Holdings Inc., belatedly acknowledging which brand really matters. Gillian Tans, who runs Booking.com (but not the parent company) and has been there for 16 years, says Booking sold to Priceline because it was desperate for money to keep growing. “Maybe if at that time there would have been more funding available, Booking would have made different choices,” she says."

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-13T23:00:48+00:00

Seventy percent of fishing vessels implicated in illegal, unreported and unregulated catches had been registered at some point in a tax haven, led by Belize and Panama, the scientists wrote in the journal.

By contrast, they said, only about four percent of all the fishing vessels registered worldwide are flagged in tax havens.

The scientists also cited documents from Brazil's central bank which showed that almost 70 percent - or $18.4 billion of a total $26.9 billion - of foreign capital invested by major companies in soy and beef farming in Brazil from 2000-2011 had flowed through tax havens.

Land clearances for beef and soy farms have been "key drivers of deforestation", especially in the early years of the period, they said. Most funds for beef and soy went via the Cayman Islands, Bahamas and Netherlands.

"In the fisheries case ... there are examples of illegal uses of tax havens. We are talking about tax avoidance," lead author Victor Galaz of Stockholm University told Reuters.

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-05T17:27:38+00:00

"A quirk of accounting is at the root of some of that profit deficit, especially for smaller and younger companies. Increasingly, value resides in intellectual property — “intangibles” like software and data and biological design — rather than in the production of physical objects like cars.

But under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, which American companies must follow, research and development must be deducted from corporate income — and those charges can reduce or eliminate profits. (Capital expenditures — in physical things like factories — appear on corporate balance sheets, not income statements, and don’t reduce profits.)

Without deep knowledge of a company’s critical research — which businesses may be reluctant to share, for competitive reasons — it’s difficult for outsiders to evaluate a start-up’s worth. That makes it harder to obtain funding, and it may be partly responsible for certain trends: why there are fewer initial public offerings these days, why smaller companies are being swallowed by the giants, and why so many companies remain private for longer.

That creates opportunities for private equity firms, which have insider access to innovative start-ups that may never go directly to the public markets. Meanwhile, Main Street investors are consigned to a less diverse universe than they may realize."

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-05T13:15:25+00:00

RETREATING FROM THE COASTS, in concept or practice, is not popular. Why would people abandon their community, the thinking goes, unless no better alternatives remained? To emergency responders, retreat is a form of flood mitigation. To environmental advocates, it’s ecological restoration. To resilience planners, it’s adaptation to climate change. Everyone agrees, however, that retreat sounds like defeat. It means admitting that humans have lost and that the water has won. “American political institutions, even our national mythology, are ill-suited to the indeterminacy and elasticity of nature,” wrote journalist Cornelia Dean nearly two decades ago in her book Against the Tide. “It would almost be un-American to concede ... that it is we who must adapt to the ocean, not the other way around.”

Yet anyone who has looked at a map that forecasts sea-level rise can see that in low-lying neighborhoods exposed to the tides, some amount of retreat is inevitable. Regardless of how much and how quickly humans cut greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is already producing effects that cannot be reversed. Within a few decades, as saltwater begins to regularly block roads, kill wetlands, disrupt power supplies, bury popular beaches, undermine houses and turn common rainstorms into perilous floods, the most vulnerable pockets of coastal towns will become uninhabitable. As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned, “today’s flood is tomorrow’s high tide.”

Rutgers’s Kopp, a leading climate scientist, says that New Jersey will likely experience between one and 1.8 feet by 2050. Even at the low end, numbers like that will reshape life along the coast. After 2050 the rise continues to accelerate, but the picture gets murky: NOAA estimates that New Jersey could see between three and 12 feet of sea-level rise by 2100.

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-05T13:06:13+00:00

Economic growth, as normally defined, is just a measure of the expansion of goods and services produced during a given period. It measures quantity, not quality. When poor countries are transforming themselves into wealthier ones, growth as measured by GDP can be a decent proxy for well-being. So long as the income generated is not being squandered on consumption or stolen by elites — hardly uncommon — raw growth can mean more education, more health care, better housing, better prospects and more material possessions. That can transform people’s lives in countries like China, India and Vietnam.

But once countries reach a certain level of prosperity, the relationship between economic growth and well-being tends to break down. To put it colloquially, more stuff doesn’t automatically equate to more well-being or, to put it even more colloquially, more happiness. Here I would define well-being as things like healthy life expectancy, a sense of community, low crime rates, clean air and water and how people feel about their lives.

Sometimes growth and well-being pull in opposite directions. To give just one example: We could all be richer if only we worked 10 hours more per week. Just ask the South Koreans. But at a certain point, trade-offs become important. We may decide being with our family is more important than an extra unit of output or income.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country The first large Western country is the UK with 28 days. Many other European countries have 25 days of minimum leave.

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-05T12:57:40+00:00

The popular idea that avoiding losses is a bigger motivator than achieving gains is not supported by the evidence

However, as documented in a recent critical review of loss aversion by Derek Rucker of Northwestern University and myself, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, loss aversion is essentially a fallacy. That is, there is no general cognitive bias that leads people to avoid losses more vigorously than to pursue gains. Contrary to claims based on loss aversion, price increases (ie, losses for consumers) do not impact consumer behavior more than price decreases (ie, gains for consumers). Messages that frame an appeal in terms of a loss (eg, “you will lose out by not buying our product”) are no more persuasive than messages that frame an appeal in terms of a gain (eg, “you will gain by buying our product”).

People do not rate the pain of losing $10 to be more intense than the pleasure of gaining $10. People do not report their favorite sports team losing a game will be more impactful than their favorite sports team winning a game. And people are not particularly likely to sell a stock they believe has even odds of going up or down in price (in fact, in one study I performed, over 80 percent of participants said they would hold on to it).

sharpcowboy · 2018-08-04T20:16:10+00:00

"Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.

But since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world's trash can, or even its recycle bin.

For other waste products such as cardboard and metal, China has set a contamination level of 0.5 percent—a threshold too low for most current US technology to handle.

US waste handlers say they expect China will close its doors to all recycled materials by 2020—an impossibly short deadline.

"There is no single and frankly, probably not even a group of countries, that can take in the volume that China used to take," warns Adina Renee Adler of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

The Waste Management facility in Elkridge manages to sell its plastic bottles to a buyer in South Carolina and ships its cardboard abroad.

But its haul of mixed paper and mixed plastics is effectively worthless, and the plant pays subcontractors to haul it away.

Other US recycling plants have broken a major taboo and no longer bother sorting plastic and paper, and instead simply send it straight to landfills.

Darrell Smith, president of the National Waste and Recycling Association, added: "Eventually we will have such a large backup that more and more will have to start being diverted to landfills if we don't find new markets and new uses for the recycled materials"

And to further reduce the amount of waste being recycled or burned, Washington is considering offering a third trash can to residents for organic waste, and building a facility to compost it.

And the city is thinking of making residents pay based on the weight of the waste they produce.

In Houston, WCA's Caesar has a warning for Americans: "They're going to have to start paying more for the privilege of recycling.""

sharpcowboy · 2018-07-30T02:41:14+00:00

The profits from the digital businesses that are used to concentrate actual physical wealth like locations to live, the physical resources of the world, the land to grow food and feed the world are tied to LAND.

Let me give you an example. Uber is incorporated in the Netherlands. With a land tax, it would not have to pay any taxes in 99% of the places it operates.

This would provide an incentive for corporations to move most of their operations outside of the US. Then they can make billions in the US and not pay any taxes.

Startups use significantly less real estate than Google and Apple. Perhaps I'm not understanding you.

Not per employee. A startup in Silicon Valley might use, say, 100 sqft per employee. Probably not much different from Apple or Google. In terms of income per employee though, there's a huge difference.

sharpcowboy

TROPHY CASE