Millennial Polls

We human beings always seek happiness. Now there are two ways. You can make yourself happy by making other people unhappy--I call that the logic of robbery. The other way you can make yourself happy is by making other people happy--that's the logic of the market. Which do you prefer?--Zhang Weiying



In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 percent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, it’s estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the plow and the cow.

Land-sparing is the reason that forests are expanding, especially in rich countries. And big, dangerous animals are making a comeback.

Developing countries racked up a “towering” $55tn of debt by the end of last year, in a borrowing surge since the financial crisis that has been the fastest and widest in modern history, according to World Bank research.

China itself, whose debt-to-GDP ratio has risen 72 points to 255 percent since 2010, accounts for the bulk of the boom, but nominal debt levels have doubled in the rest of the developing world, the bank found.

For now, historically low-interest rates make a crisis less likely, according to the report, but the authors said that roughly half of the 521 national episodes of rapid debt growth since 1970 have resulted in crises that significantly hurt incomes.

An Iowa man was sentenced Wednesday to about 16 years in prison after he set fire to a church's LGBTQ flag in June. 

Eephus (from the OED, believe it or not):

 Baseball.

 1. slang. The quality of pitching exceptionally well. rare.

1935 Salt Lake Tribune  24 May 17/2 Lefty Gomez..has originated a term which is running through the league. It designates that certain something which marks out fine pitching from poor hurling, and Lefty calls it ‘Eephus’. Asked for a definition, the goofy one said: ‘Eephus is that little extry you have on your good days.’

 2. A slow pitch having a high arcing trajectory.

Particularly associated with Truett ‘Rip’ Sewell (1907–89), pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Etymology: Origin unknown.

It is often suggested that sense 2 originates from a comment said to have been made by Maurice Van Robays (1914–65), then outfielder of the Pittsburgh Pirates, when Sewell used this pitch in a 1942 exhibition game: ‘Eephus ain't nothing, and that's a nothing pitch’. Chiefly on the basis of this, an origin <  Hebrew 'ep̄es ‘end, extremity’, (usually) ‘nothingness, nothing, zero’, is often suggested. However, there appears to be no evidence that either Sewell or Van Robays was Jewish or knew any Hebrew; the English word would be expected to show /ɛ/ as the initial vowel if the Hebrew word was the etymon; and the earlier currency in sense 1 suggests that the original meaning was positive, not negative.

A Richard Nixon deepfake created by MIT Media Lab shows the former president giving a speech about the moon landings—and noting that all astronauts on board the Apollo 11 had died.
The video, released in Amsterdam in late November, illustrates how dangerous deepfake technology truly is in an era of internet-based misinformation.
MIT will make the video available online in spring 2020.

Despite complaining about a lack of money, King County leaders used Seattle taxpayer dollars to fund the performance of a transgender stripper at a recent conference on homelessness. The theme of the conference was “decolonizing our collective work,” yet another illustration of how obscure, radical, identity politics social engineering is infecting everything.

Wolff, in an NBER paper:The paper analyzes the fiscal effects of a Swiss-type tax on household wealth, with a $120,000 exemption and marginal tax rates running from 0.05 to 0.3 percent on $2,400,000 or more of wealth. It also considers a wealth tax proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren with a $50,000,000 exemption, a two percent tax on wealth above that and a one percent surcharge on wealth above $1,000,000,000. Based on the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, the Swiss tax would yield $189.3 billion and the Warren tax $303.4 billion. Only 0.07 percent of households would pay the Warren tax, compared to 44.3 percent for the Swiss tax. The Swiss tax would have a very small effect on income inequality, lowering the post-tax Gini coefficient by 0.004 Gini points. The effect of the Swiss tax and Warren tax on wealth inequality is minuscule, lowering the Gini coefficient by at most 0.0005 Gini points

Two doses a year of an antibiotic can sharply cut death rates among infants in poor countries, perhaps by as much as 25 percent among the very young, researchers reported on Wednesday.

In other words, the quality of the most important part of health care treatments bypassed the rest of the problems in poor economies and grew rapidly, even in countries with only so-so economic growth.

One of the graphs that emerged after Johnson's win:

Is the Left on the run?

A normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminum, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams.

Goldman Sachs has announced the strongest fossil-fuel finance restrictions of any major U.S. bank, a move conditionally embraced by advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club. Goldman, with its Sunday announcement, becomes the first of the large U.S. banks to establish explicit restrictions on financing for any part of the oil-and-gas sector. The policy change stressed protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in particular. So the vampire squid has gone Green; one is tempted to ask, what will be its reward? What will be the quo for the squid's quid?

                                         Millennial Polls

I'm never sure of these polls but they are sometimes fun and allow the rest of us a frisson of superiority. These are some results of a poll on the opinions of Millennials:

“70% of Millennials say they would be at least somewhat likely to vote for a socialist candidate.”

 Communism and Marxism are viewed favorably by about a third of Millennials.

"Around one-in-five Millennials think society would be better off if all private property were abolished.”

"Only 57% of Millennials believe the Declaration of Independence better 'guarantees freedom and equality' over the Communist Manifesto.”

Sixty-three percent of Americans believe “highest earners are not paying their fair share.” Meanwhile, 47 percent are ready for a “complete change of our economic system.”

The poll reveals that millennials believe that Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Stalin.