"The problem with academics is they feel the need to be smarter than truth."--Thomas Larkin
Current law prevents the International Trade Commission from considering the overall economic effects of proposed tariffs. That means that tariff consideration, by default, values the benefits to specific companies or industries more than the costs imposed on the rest of the economy.
Caplan's solution to sexual harassment:
Firms should adopt the speed dating paradigm. Let everyone secretly record their feelings, if any, for their co-workers. If the feelings are unrequited, no one ever finds out. If the feelings are mutual, however, both parties receive official confirmation. And unless they edit their recorded preferences, they waive their right to complain about (or sue over) unwanted attention from whoever they explicitly approved.
How is this better than the status quo? Simple: It retains standard rules against unwanted attention, but gives people a safe way to take a chance on love. Indeed, my proposal even shields everyone from the knowledge that someone has unrequited feelings for them. Don't want to know how anyone feels about you? Then check zero boxes, and you're safe.
The most obvious objection is that people could change their minds. But I've already got that covered: If you decide you no longer welcome someone's attention, you edit your preferences - and they get a polite email informing them of your wishes. Worried that they won't listen? Then don't check them in the first place.
How is this better than the status quo? Simple: It retains standard rules against unwanted attention, but gives people a safe way to take a chance on love. Indeed, my proposal even shields everyone from the knowledge that someone has unrequited feelings for them. Don't want to know how anyone feels about you? Then check zero boxes, and you're safe.
The most obvious objection is that people could change their minds. But I've already got that covered: If you decide you no longer welcome someone's attention, you edit your preferences - and they get a polite email informing them of your wishes. Worried that they won't listen? Then don't check them in the first place.
An interesting evaluation of Iran:
"The external pressures on Iran come from various sources but meet in one location: Syria. President Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian ally, is facing new challenges in western Syria. Turkey has invaded the northwestern Afrin region. Given the size of the Turkish force, its technological superiority, and the relatively small number of Kurdish defenders, it seems likely that Turkey will take control of it. And with that, Turkey will have essentially surrounded Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, on three sides.
Surrounding most of Aleppo with Turkish forces would present a major threat to both Assad and Iran. Iran has to consider the risks that a resurgent Turkey would pose to it and will therefore be highly motivated to keep its proxies in Syria and Iraq."
Bitcoin’s anonymous inventor(s), Satoshi Nakamoto, designed the program to allow mining of only 21 million bitcoins by the year 2140. Miners have dug up about 17 million bitcoins in total so far.
A study last year by digital forensics firm Chainalysis estimated that somewhere between 2.78 million and 3.79 million bitcoins are lost.
Some info on the GDP I learned recently: The GDP was actually invented in the late 1930s when President Roosevelt needed some way to prove that his policies were working. And at 85 years old, the old formula may be nearing time for retirement. The only way for Roosevelt to show that his policies were working was to put government spending inside the GDP number. There was vicious fighting among economists over whether he should be allowed to do so. Many economists even argued that military spending should not be included in GDP because it didn’t produce anything.
This is amazing. According to a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the number of Americans who subscribe to cable TV is now on par with the number who subscribe to Netflix, and it’s only a matter of time before Reed Hastings and company pull ahead of the pack. Based on a survey of 2,000 consumers, PwC found that 73% subscribe to a traditional pay-TV service, down from 76% in 2016 and 79% in 2015. Meanwhile, the percentage who said they subscribe to Netflix is also at 73%–putting it dead even with cable.
McCloskey is really mad at this student's assessment of her trilogy:
"The trouble I have with your project, so far as it claims to test my writings, is that you greatly misunderstand what the three volumes say. It is not true, not remotely, that they say "In the three Volumes of the Bourgeois ethics you show that bourgeois virtues arose, which led to the Great Enrichment." I say nothing of the kind. (And by the way the three volumes are not called "the bourgeois ethics"; they are called "the Bourgeois Era," a very significant difference.)
You believe I suppose that the bourgeois became more virtuous. I doubt it, though it is true that with social support for its activities came a little better behavior. Probably not superior to what guildsmen in the Middle Ages showed. The clearest if not the most important example is the English Quakers, doing things like introducing fixed prices instead of bargaining, which ancient practice they viewed as violating the 9th commandment. Another and more important example is the rise of business schools internationally in the late 19th century, with their attempt, successful until corrupted in the 1980s by economists claiming that all that matters is the bottom line, to make business into a profession like law or priesthood or medicine.
But the main point of all three books is that the surrounding social approval for bourgeois activity is what mainly mattered. It transformed the world. Once only. I call it the Bourgeois Revaluation. The first volume is a defense of the ethical standing of business people in any age, in any society, against the widespread belief among the clerisy that business corrupts absolutely. I did it because if it was true, neither you nor I should defend businesspeople. Defend the Devil? It would make the apologetic side of The Bourgeois Era entirely pointless. Who cares how many autos or big houses we have if we are absolutely corrupt in soul?
Take down your copy of The Bourgeois Virtues and re-read (or read for the first time?) the second-to-the last page and the very last, "You ask me to preach." Note that the virtues there named in their commercial forms are not claimed to have improved. Bourgeoisies worldwide have exhibited them---or strikingly failed to exhibit them---in all ages from the caves to Enron. The change is not in psychology, as I say repeatedly (contradicting Max Weber by name, repeatedly). It is in the politics and sociology supporting, or strikingly not supporting (thus socialism), a commercially tested betterment that made the modern world, 1800 to the present. It happened only after 1800, stretching back to faint origins in Holland in the Gouden Eeuw and later in England with a Dutch king. It happened at first only in relatively liberal societies, in their relatively liberal eras, as it still does most greatly flourish, most of all after 1800."
China’s government has turned the northwestern region into a laboratory for high-tech social controls. Citizens and visitors must run a daily gantlet of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras and machines scanning their ID cards, faces, eyeballs and sometimes entire bodies. (wsj)
The central message of behavioral genetics is that modern human beings systematically overestimate the effects of upbringing and systematically underestimate the effects of heredity. Judith Harris famously called this bias "the nurture assumption."
The decision by the U.S. to recognize Jerusalem has been officially condemned by the U.N. by a vote of 128 to 9. Now I have some reservations about the U.S. decision but it takes a lot a nerve for the U.N.--which created this Middle East problem in the first place--to get pompous and try to take the high road. The only thing worse was Trump's belligerent response.
Who is... Rebecca Reid?
Just when you thought you were settling in with the new social rules comes this little stunner: Rebecca Reid wrote in Metro UK that she once participated in a threesome because she "didn't want to be rude."
She also claims that calling clothing “flattering” is actually “really offensive.” It comes with a fairly twisted explanation that I will not endeavor to clarify.
A summary of an analysis of different psychotherapudic approaches published in The Lancet: “Neither variability in competence nor adherence [to the principles of the therapy involved] was related to patient outcome…extent of training might also not be relevant to outcome.”
The city council in Philadelphia passed a controversial measure that would ban liquor stores and other small businesses from placing bulletproof glass inside their stores.
The “Stop and Go” bill, proposed by City Councilwoman Cindy Barr last year, will fight the “indignity” of customers having to talk to cashiers through bulletproof glass when they’re purchasing items or being served food.
The ceaseless and intense vigilance against non-problems.
Over the course of the 2016 election, Facebook estimates that roughly 140 million users may have seen Russian propaganda in their News Feeds or on Instagram. Much of that content sought to sow social and political unrest around divisive issues like race, religion and LGBT rights.
Imagine, as your life's work, disseminating unhappiness and discontent. Now, imagine that as a priority of national policy.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/09/ebola-and-profit-motive.html
Although only 5-10% of autistics have gender dysphoria, up to 25%-50% of transgender people may be autistic.
An unverified, unverifiable but nonetheless wonderful story of a Chinese immigrant in the gold rush days of California: John-John the Chinese laundry man was the laughingstock of Weaverville, California. For months he washed the Anglo miners’ clothes and never charged a penny for his services. But a year later one of the miners came across John wearing fine clothes in Sacramento. He had washed enough gold dust out of pants cuffs and shirttails to set himself up for life.
Mining the miners. Sort of a government concept, plus insight and imagination.
Comcast just can not stop themselves. Comcast has been embroiled in a legal battle since 2016 regarding potentially deceptive business practices surrounding its "Service Protection Plan" -- a $6 a month program which covered almost nothing. And it may have signed people up without their permission.
The city council in Philadelphia passed a controversial measure that would ban liquor stores and other small businesses from placing bulletproof glass inside their stores.
The “Stop and Go” bill, proposed by City Councilwoman Cindy Barr last year, will fight the “indignity” of customers having to talk to cashiers through bulletproof glass when they’re purchasing items or being served food.
The ceaseless and intense vigilance against non-problems.
In 1995 a landmark study found that children whose families were on welfare heard 1,500 fewer words every hour—or eight million fewer per year—than children from professional backgrounds. This was viewed as a very serious observation with influence through the educational system because those same children later scored poorly on intelligence tests. This is a remarkably stupid generalization--you could turn naming the flaws of a study like this into a parlor game--but it shows how we are molded--science included--by the assumption that we at birth are tabla rasa beings of equal potential whose eventual distinctions are really distortions.
A reused SpaceX rocket carried 10 satellites into orbit from California.
Just when I think I've got my hands around Musk as a fantasy promoter he does something like this.
Just when I think I've got my hands around Musk as a fantasy promoter he does something like this.
Over the course of the 2016 election, Facebook estimates that roughly 140 million users may have seen Russian propaganda in their News Feeds or on Instagram. Much of that content sought to sow social and political unrest around divisive issues like race, religion and LGBT rights.
Imagine, as your life's work, disseminating unhappiness and discontent. Now, imagine that as a priority of national policy.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/09/ebola-and-profit-motive.html
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
"Until this west African epidemic, Ebola was not a public health problem and (was) a really rare disease." So says Professor Peter Piot, d...
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Although only 5-10% of autistics have gender dysphoria, up to 25%-50% of transgender people may be autistic.
Confirming that Subway has indeed peaked in its 5 decades-long business cycle, even as management desperately attempts to engineer a soft landing, a Subway representative said that another 909 locations have been closed in 2017, representing more than 3% of the chain’s 2016 U.S. stores.
The world’s largest hotel is in Saudi Arabia and hosts 10,000 guests.
The world’s largest hotel is in Saudi Arabia and hosts 10,000 guests.
An unverified, unverifiable but nonetheless wonderful story of a Chinese immigrant in the gold rush days of California: John-John the Chinese laundry man was the laughingstock of Weaverville, California. For months he washed the Anglo miners’ clothes and never charged a penny for his services. But a year later one of the miners came across John wearing fine clothes in Sacramento. He had washed enough gold dust out of pants cuffs and shirttails to set himself up for life.
Mining the miners. Sort of a government concept, plus insight and imagination.
Comcast just can not stop themselves. Comcast has been embroiled in a legal battle since 2016 regarding potentially deceptive business practices surrounding its "Service Protection Plan" -- a $6 a month program which covered almost nothing. And it may have signed people up without their permission.
Federal debt remains a problem since gross government debt recently exceeded 106% of GDP. A debt level above 90% has been shown to diminish an economy’s trend rate of growth by one-third or more. When President Reagan cut taxes in 1981 growth ensued, but the government debt was only 31% of GDP at that time.
AAAAAaaaaaannnnnnddddddd.....the latest financial results of college endowment funds based on the most recent annual study by the National Association of College University Business Officers (NACUBO) through fiscal year 2017 (July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017) that included 800 U.S. higher education institutional endowments. So even smart schools do worse than average?
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