Category: Uncategorized
Cheating markets in everything
- This phone shaker device can achieve your weekly fitness goal without efforts, unlocking rewards at distances in Pokemon Go.
- The phone walker is ideal for those people who are doing corporate steps challenges to get rewards with freebies for getting fit.
- The step counter device features three kinds of working modes, running mode(fast speed), jogging mode(medium speed) and walking mode(low speed).
- It can earn 9,500 steps(running mode) in an hour equivalent to 4 miles approx, cheating your way to 10,000 steps in a short time.
- It is compatible with any IOS and Android’s smart phones whose width is less than 3.6”. If you have any questions, just feel free to click the contact seller button
Here is the Amazon listing, via Ben M.
Tuesday assorted links
1. “There are about 465,000 open positions in cybersecurity nationwide as of May 2021, according to Cyber Seek — a tech job-tracking database from the U.S. Commerce Department — and the trade group CompTIA” Link here, though if you bring up skills mismatch you still get shouted down these days.
2. One-minute Covid breath test approved in Singapore (Bloomberg). And my early April Covid predictions.
3. Predicting high-impact science. And Ashlee Vance on Celine Halioua and her anti-aging start-up and work (Bloomberg).
4. The importance of immunocompromised individuals for Covid issues.
5. Ross Douthat on Foucault is completely correct (NYT).
6. Brain synchronization remains an underdiscussed topic (NYT).
The supply of motivation is elastic — Study Web
Study Web is the space students have constructed for themselves in response to the irl system that just isn’t working. Unable to find a place or person to turn to with their academic and career anxieties, they find internet strangers—strange kin—to speak to, or simply share the same space with, online. Lacking the intrinsic inspiration to study for hours each day, online advice and group accountability provide a solution. Feeling isolated, virtual study partners create a sense of fellowship. On Study Web, while stressed, students have accepted their lot—they’re not investigating the rightness or wrongness of the pressurized environment of the Gen Z student or asking whether college is worth it at all. 12-hour Study With Me videos are seen as something to aspire to rather than rebel from. Students accept the premise that school and studying are non-negotiables. Where they come from, where they live, their beliefs and value systems are not barriers to community-building; they suffer in common.
And Study Web is huge, and weird:
The Study Web is a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students. Videos under the #StudyTok hashtag have been viewed over half a billion times. One Discord server, Study Together, has over 120 thousand members. Study Web extends far past study groups composed of classmates, institution specific associations, or poorly designed retro forums discussing entrance requirements for professional programs. It includes but transcends Studyblrs on Tumblr that emerged in 2014 and eclipses various Reddit and Facebook study groups or inspirational images shared across Pinterest and Instagram. Populated mostly by Gen Z and the youngest of millennials, Study Web is the internet most of us don’t see, and it’s become a lifeline for students from junior high to college.
By Fadeke Adegbuyi, this is one of the best pieces I have read all year.
Further Monday assorted links
7. Yuan Longping, RIP (NYT).
8. Famous musicians pick their favorite Bob Dylan songs. Would mine be “Highway 61”? “Mr. Tambourine Man”? “Tangled Up in Blue”? “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”? Too many choices. Bob is today 80 years old. The most overrated is perhaps “Desolation Row”, with its pretentious lyrics?
9. Why the new Elon Musk rocket really will matter?
10. Why a new business surge in black communities during the pandemic? (NYT)
Monday assorted links
Facts about recessions and unemployment (and matching)
Not everyone is going to like this one:
During a recovery, unemployment seems little responsive to demand disturbances. Economic policy should focus on preventing recessions rather than trying to ameliorate their effects.
That is from the new slides/paper by Robert E. Hall and Marianna Kudlyak on the consistency of recovery from recessions, lots of evidence behind that claim, as employment recovery occurs at a remarkably consistent rate across recessions, regardless of policy response. Furthermore explanation of the micro-data mostly follows from the supply of employment, not the demand, and no that doesn’t require any kind of weird DSGE model, nor does it involve aggregate demand denialism about the initial cause of the problem. Links are here, including other papers by Kudlyak, many good papers in there, sadly these rooftops are nearly empty.
The British in 18th century India
The British were obliged to design a state structure in India virtually from scratch, because the one Warren Hastings lashed together between 1772 and 1784 was considered to have failed. He had tried to adapt traditional Indian practice while adding a British top layer to it, but this compromise never worked well. Absence of supervision, abundant temptation, scarcity of reliable information and poor communication between Calcutta and the mofussil (rural areas) created multiple problems. When placed in Indian shoes, Europeans often behaved worse than their native predecessors. Hastings’s system lacked discipline, so British politicians resolved in the early 1780s to supply standards and enforce them. Pitt’s India Act of 1784 and the Cornwallis Code of 1793 were the results.
Traditional ruling practices in India were replaced by specific rules, designed to reduce personal discretion. What the British most feared in their own rulers — arbitrary power — they were determined, at least initially, to deny to those placed in authority in India.
Just as the US Constitution was designed to thwart the central executive, so the objective of the Cornwallis system of 1793, its near contemporary, was to restrain the EIC’s [East India Company’s] servants in India. The collective self-regulation that it set up, by means of boards and committees, worked fairly well in enforcing honesty within government in India after 1784, but not in achieving efficiency. Day-to-day government was not facilitated, and judicial decisions slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile tax revenues, instead of sticking to British fingers, stayed somewhere out in the rural areas, hid behind an opaque wall of legal and customary technicalities.
That is from Roderick Matthews’s excellent Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India. Here is my previous post on the book.
Sunday assorted links
*New Order* (this movie review is full of spoilers)
I found this Mexican movie unpleasant to watch, quite a few reviews are negative, and very few of you ought to see it. Yet at least it is fundamentally interesting, and it does show off some skills of movie-making, such as good cinematography and creation of tension and communicating a sense of Mexico City.
Most gringos won’t understand it. Most of the time watching you think it is a racist movie about revolt from indigenous Mexicans who stick together from motives of racist solidarity. By the end of the movie, but only at the end, you realize the paler skinned elites of the Army engineered the whole thing. What seemed to be the racism of the movie is in fact implicit commentary on the racist paranoia of the Mexican elites. And then finally you realize that the outrages committed by the indigenous people in the movie are mirroring outrages committed under the Conquest (e.g., rape, kidnapping for ransom), and that in reality the Conquest is being re-committed each and every day by the elites, yet with these somewhat racist paranoid fantasies layered on top that the logic of the Conquest someday will be reversed by the indigenous. And yet always it will be the elites in charge, who at the same time make their paranoid racist dystopian nightmares the fundamental narrative of society, thereby screwing everybody over double. The faucets do not in fact produce green water, though kind of they do, as cadmium green is a national color of Mexico.
YMMV, but at least a day later I am still thinking about it.
Did humans evolve to be suited for large-scale cooperation as well?
Here is the new Boyd and Richardson paper:
We present evidence that people in small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts, constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, alliance, and trade. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution. This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small group interactions. Instead, large scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in the distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.
If true, this would revise a fair amount of social science, including Hayek on atavistic desires and also various “off the cuff” invocations of evolutionary biology and assumptions about the conditions of early human evolution.
Via Kevin Vallier, who has recently published Trust in a Polarized Age, a book of interest to anyone considering this topic.
What is holding back employment?
The White House and congressional Democrats have argued for weeks that the lack of child care services poses a major obstacle to the economic recovery, pressing for a massive and immediate investment to get parents back to work.
But a new economic analysis led by a prominent White House ally concludes that school and daycare closures are not driving low employment levels — blunting a key Biden administration argument in favor of its American Families Plan and undercutting the view of some Democrats that investing in child care is crucial for the country to climb out of the coronavirus recession.
“School closures and lack of child care are not holding back the recovery,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration and co-authored the analysis. “And conversely, we shouldn’t expect a short-term economic bump from reopening schools and making child care more available.”
The study — which found that the employment rate for parents of young children actually declined at a lower rate than for those without kids — adds fuel to an intense national debate about what is behind a suspected worker shortage and what policy changes are needed to accelerate Americans’ return to work as the pandemic subsides.
Here is the full Politico article by Megan Cassella and Eleanor Mueller.
Saturday assorted links
1. Have American movies lost their sense of place?
3. Ten positions chess computers have had trouble with.
4. Fear the fungi. Their computational powers may be stronger than you think.
5. “Icelandic designer Valdís Steinarsdóttir has created a range of translucent, gelatinous garments that are cast into moulds rather than cut from a pattern in a bid to eliminate waste.” Link here.
What I’ve been reading
1. Allen Lowe, “Turn Me Loose White Man”, two volumes and 30 accompanying compact discs. “Personally I accept the assumption that a great deal, if not all, of American music is rooted in forms that derive in some way from Minstrelsy.” Would you like to see that documented over the course of 30 CDs and almost 800 pp.? Would you like to know how early blues, country, gospel, jazz, bluegrass (and more) all fit together? Then this is the package for you. It is in fact of one of the greatest achievements of all time in cataloguing and presenting American culture. Here is a WSJ review.
2. Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. This book is the best introduction to this key Girardian concept.
3. Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography. I only read slivers and won’t finish it, because I just don’t need 800 pp. on Philip Roth. But…it’s really good. I like Picasso too, and Caravaggio (a murderer). I’ve heard, by the way, that this book will be picked up by Simon and Schuster and put back into print.
4. Martha C. Nussbaum, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation. There are so many recent books on these topics, you might feel a bit weary of them all, but this is one of the best. It is rationally and reasonably argued, from first principles, and focuses on the better arguments for its conclusions. It nicely situates the legal within the philosophical, it is wise on power vs. sex, rooted in the idea of objectification, and it has at least one page on alcohol.
5. Kenneth Whyte, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise. How the consumer and auto safety movement helped to bring down GM.
6. Fabrice Midal, Trungpa and Vision, a biography of Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist leader. I enjoyed this passage: “He never hesitated to tell the truth, even if this meant provoking the audience. At a talk in San Francisco in the fall of 1970, he began by saying: “It’s a pity you came here. You’re so aggressive.””
And this passage: “Chögyam Trungpa might have appeared, at first, sight, to be very modern and up-to-date in his approach to the teachings. He had abandoned the external signs of the Tibetan monastic tradition. He drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes, and wore Western clothes. He had a frank often provocative way with words and ignored the normal conventions of a guru.” In fact he died from complications resulting from heavy alcohol abuse.
Friday assorted links
1. Do employers discriminate against obese women?
2. Is bitcoin a good inflation hedge?
3. Five counties seek to leave Oregon for Idaho.
4. Will the Mormon moderation persist? Good piece.
5. New issue of Works in Progress, recommended.
6. How well is the lead hypothesis really doing? And the research is here.
7. “In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.” (Obituary, NYT)
Population predicts regulation — but why?
We found that across states, a doubling of population size is associated with a 22 to 33 percent increase in regulation.
The relationship between regulation and population is surprisingly robust- it also holds for Australian states and Canadian provinces, and based on the limited data we have seems to hold across countries too (for instance, the “free market” United States has 10 times as many regulations as Canada- just as it has 10 times the population).
What is less clear is why this relationship is so strong. Mulligan and Shleifer attribute it to a fixed cost of regulating; larger polities can spread this cost over more people, making the average cost of regulating cheaper, so they do it more. We note two other explanations: larger polities might have more externalities worth regulating, or if regulation produces concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, a larger population could make it harder for those harmed by regulation to organize collectively to oppose it.
That blog post is based on work from James Bailey, James Broughel and Patrick McLaughlin, the latter two my Mercatus colleagues, written by James Bailey.