the global economic and financial crisis led central banks in advanced economies to adopt a variety of standard and non-standard measures to ease monetary conditions. in the us, the uk, and japan the centrepiece of these non-standard measures has been large-scale purchases of financial assets, also known as quantitative easing (qe). the bank of england began its programme of asset purchases financed through the creation of central bank reserves in march 2009. during the first wave of purchases from march 2009 to january 2010, the bank purchased a cumulative total of £200 billion of medium- to long-term uk government bonds (gilts). in a subsequent wave of purchases that began in november 2011, it bought a further £175 billion of gilts, an overall amount equivalent to nearly 25% of annual gdp.while the objectives of the bank’s qe purchases were clear in terms of meeting its price stability mandate, there has been some debate over how the policy would work, i.e., what is the transmission mechanism. policymakers in the uk and elsewhere have, however, consistently emphasised the role of the so-called portfolio balance channel as a key element in the expected transmission of asset purchases to the rest of the economy (see e.g., bean 2011 for the uk, and yellen 2011 for the us). according to this mechanism, purchases of financial assets financed by central bank money increase liquidity and push up asset prices, as those who have sold assets to the central bank rebalance their portfolios into riskier assets. this, then, stimulates expenditure by increasing wealth and lowering borrowing costs for households and companies. in the uk, policymakers were explicit in structuring their purchases with the aim of buying primarily from institutional investors, such as life insurance companies and pension funds (icpfs), who are the traditional holders of long-term gilts. the origins of the portfolio balance channel go back to the work of tobin and others in the 1960s. however, the role of portfolio balance effects in modern macroeconomic theory remains a subject of some controversy, as most models imply that policies such as qe can only work if they change the private sector’s expectations of future policy rates, while the transferring assets between the private and public sectors under qe has no effect on the behaviour of the private sector per se (woodford 2012). this neutrality result sits awkwardly with the large financial market reactions often observed after qe announcements, but other explanations may be possible and most of the empirical research on the topic has inferred the importance of this channel indirectly from the behaviour of government bond prices/yields and other asset prices (see joyce et al. 2011 and breedon et al. 2012 for evidence from the uk), rather than from direct evidence on the behaviour of investors.1 in this column, we address this gap in the literature by describing our recent research (joyce et al. 2014) on the behaviour of insurance companies and pension funds, using both sectoral and micro-level data on individual institutions.what is the sectoral evidence?figure 1 illustrates cumulative monthly changes in gilt holdings by different investor categories during 2009-2013, a period of strong gilt issuance. it can be seen that the bank of england was a significant purchaser of gilts. other monetary financial institutions were also net purchasers of gilts, as was the overseas sector. but, as figure 1 shows, during this period the non-bank private sector, which includes insurance companies and pension funds, purchased unusually small quantities of gilts, which would be consistent with them selling gilts to the bank of england. the same picture also emerges from ons financial accounts data on icpfs’ annual net investment flows. but the raw data can only tell us so much.if qe worked through a portfolio balance channel, then we would expect institutional investors to have reduced their holdings of uk government bonds (gilts) and to have increased their demand for riskier assets relative to what they would otherwise have done.for counterfactual analysis, we need to make some allowance for other factors that may have been relevant in driving investors’ portfolio allocations. at the same time, allowing for the influence of other factors that may have been influenced by qe (e.g. domestic financial conditions) may lead to understating the potential effects of the policy (a switch into riskier assets will be attributed to better financial conditions rather than qe, even though the policy may have been behind the improvement).  following the approach advocated by pesaran and smith (2012), we deal with this issue by allowing only for factors that influence portfolio allocations, but at the same time are unaffected by the bank’s purchases. more concretely, we run regressions explaining net investment by insurance companies and pension funds into different asset classes in terms of gilt issuance, various us financial control variables, and the amount of qe purchases. the size of the qe coefficient provides a metric of the impact of qe. for conciseness, rather than reporting the regressions results (see joyce et al. 2014 for more details), we report the associated ex-ante and ex-post measures of the impact of qe on insurance companies and pension funds investment behaviour (figure 2). figure 2 impact of qe on icpfs, ex-ante and ex-post qe effects, £ millionthe ex-ante impact is measured by taking the difference between the model predictions for net investment with and without qe and the ex-post measure is based on comparing the actual (i.e., ex-post) out-turn with what would have been expected by using the model estimated over the pre-crisis period to predict net investment over the qe period. so, in each case a positive impact implies qe led to net investment being higher, and a negative impact implies it led to a lower impact. from the figure, it seems clear that both measures suggest that net investment in gilts fell as a result of qe.moreover, there is evidence of rebalancing into corporate bonds, as net investment out-turns and predictions under qe were substantially greater than the model counterfactuals would suggest. for net investment into equities and cash the pattern is much less clear cut, with the results, if anything, suggesting that net investment in equities was even lower than expected.   what is the micro evidence?a similar approach can be applied to the micro-level data on individual life insurance companies (using annual data on life insurers provided by synthesys for 1985-2012) and pension funds (using annual data provided in anonymised form by the pension protection fund for 2005-2010). in this case, panel regressions are used to explain the annual portfolio share of each asset class in terms of a variety controls, including the characteristics of the respective insurance company or pension fund, and qe purchases.in each case, the results indicate that qe is associated with lower asset allocations to gilts and higher allocations to corporate bonds, while the results for equities tend to show lower allocations.  the main advantage of using the micro-data is that it enables us to examine how heterogeneous the responses to qe are across different types of institutions. to do this, we interact the qe purchase variable with a range of other individual variables to see whether this increases or reduces the effect. table 1 summarises some of the results for pension funds from running separate sets of regression, of which each included a different qe interaction term. we show five interactions for:pension fund size, measured by number of members in the scheme;maturity of pension scheme, measured by the ratio of pensioners to all members;whether the fund is in surplus or deficit, as measured by the funding ratio; andwhether the pension scheme was open or closed.the results in table 1 indicate that although there is some heterogeneity in the response to qe across different types of funds, there are also many similarities. the main heterogeneities are with respect to index-linked bonds, but reduced allocations to conventional gilts and increased allocations to corporate bonds seem to have been similar across most pension fund types. however, the relative size of the coefficients suggests that the switch out of gilts was more pronounced for those funds that were better funded and for those funds that were younger (with a lower ratio of pensioners).table 1 asset allocation regressions for pension funds: summary of interaction effects with fund characteristics (2005-2010)note: significance level: ***1%; **5%; *10%. models are estimated using data provided by the pension protection fund.the evidence seems consistent with the hypothesis that the bank of england’s qe policy resulted in some portfolio rebalancing behaviour by institutional investors. but it appears that portfolio rebalancing was limited to corporate bonds, with most of the findings suggesting that institutional investors moved out of equities during the period of qe purchases. this does not necessarily imply equity prices were not supported by portfolio reallocation behaviour, still less from qe, as the analysis only considers insurers and pension funds and does not consider the behaviour of other financial institutions such as mutual and hedge funds. the portfolio investment behaviour of these other financial institutions during the crisis would be worthy of additional research.bean, c (2011), “lessons on unconventional monetary policy from the united kingdom”, speech to the us monetary policy forum, new york,carpenter, s, demiralp, s, ihrig, j and klee, e (2013), “analyzing federal reserve asset purchases: from whom does the fed buy?” finance and economics discussion series 2013-32 federal reserve board, washington, d.c.breedon, f, chadha, j and meaning, j (2012), “the financial market impact of uk quantitative easing”, oxford review of economic policy, vol. 28 (4), 702-728.goodhart, c a e, and j p ashworth (2012), “qe: a successful start may be running into diminishing returns”, oxford review of economic policy, vol. 28 (4), 640-670.joyce, m, lasaosa, a, stevens, i and tong, m (2011), “the financial market impact of quantitative easing in the united kingdom”, international journal of central banking, vol. 7 (3), 113-61.joyce, m.a.s., z. liu, and i tonks (2014), “institutional investor portfolio allocation, quantitative easing and the global financial crisis”, bank of england working paper no. 510, september.pesaran, h and smith, r (2012), “counterfactual analysis in macroeconometrics: an empirical investigation into the effects of quantitative easing”, cesifo working paper series 3879woodford, m (2012), “methods of policy accommodation at the interest-rate lower bound”, federal reserve bank of kansas city jackson hole symposium conference volume, august.yellen, j (2011), “unconventional monetary policy and central bank communications”, remarks at the u.s. monetary policy forum new york, february 25.[1] there are some honourable exceptions. goodhart and ashworth (2012), for example, examine recent trends in the uk national accounts data on aggregate net investment behaviour by icpfs, but they do not attempt to model investor behaviour to form a counterfactual. for the us, carpenter et al. (2013) model sectoral flow of funds data for the us over the crisis, but they do not look beyond the aggregate data.  
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 zurich—switzerland’s central bank triggered  turmoil in the markets thursday when it unexpectedly scrapped its cap on the swiss franc’s exchange rate against the euro, a move that unleashed new volatility in credit and currency markets around the world and further underscored growing concerns about global economic prospects.against the cloudy backdrop of collapsing oil prices, a sharply rising dollar, fresh doubts about the stability of the euro and mounting global concerns over deflationary pressures, the move by the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 price gauges have hovered below the fed's 2 percent goal for much of the economic expansion that began in june 2009. closeprice gauges have hovered below the fed's 2 percent goal for much of the economic... read moreprice gauges have hovered below the fed's 2 percent goal for much of the economic expansion that began in june 2009.economists are slashing u.s. inflation forecasts for 2015 as oil prices tumble. what’s not changing are predictions that the federal reserve will raise its benchmark interest rate anyway, probably around mid-year.“we’re still saying june with risks to september,” said michael gapen, the new york-based chief u.s. economist for barclays plc. the fed “can push rates higher in the middle of the year, even though visually that may look awkward if headline inflation is around zero.”a stronger dollar , slowing global growth and cheaper oil are holding down costs for goods such as televisions and autos. fed policy makers will probably look past that and see an improving labor market that will force employers to offer higher wages. those costs will soon push up the price of such things as rent and restaurant meals, no matter what happens overseas, giving the central bank room to raise interest rates that have been stuck near zero for six years.the personal consumption expenditure, or pce, price index that’s the fed’s preferred measure will be up 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2015 from the same time this year, barclays economists projected on dec. 19. that’s down from a previous forecast of 1.2 percent. the consumer-price index, a separate gauge, is projected to show a small decline in the 12 months through june.fed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge as they pave the way for the central bank’s first interest-rate increase since 2006. closefed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge... read morefed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge as they pave the way for the central bank’s first interest-rate increase since 2006.the fed’s goal is for pce inflation to climb around 2 percent a year.core prices, which exclude food and fuel, will rise 1.7 percent over the same period, according to the analysis by barclays. that compares with a previously estimated 1.9 percent.“low pass-through into core from falling energy prices, and a gradually improving labor market leads to some wage and services inflation” in 2015 that will help assuage any concern the u.s. is catching a disinflation bug, said gapen, a former fed economist.too-low inflation hurts debtors by making it harder to pay off loans. also, the longer central banks undershoot their price targets, the more their ability to deliver stability will be questioned, undermining expectations further and putting even more downward pressure on prices.fed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge as they pave the way for the central bank’s first interest-rate increase since 2006. policy makers have said they believe the plunge in fuel prices will prove temporary, which will be more difficult to substantiate as inflation gauges keep sliding six months from now.energy “is going to be pushing down headline inflation and may even spill over to some extent to core inflation,” yellen said in a dec. 17 news conference after the central bank’s policy meeting. “but at this point, although we indicated we’re monitoring inflation developments carefully, we see these developments as transitory.”an improving economy and labor market will help “inflation to move gradually back toward its objective,” she said.the commerce department reported last week that the core pce price index climbed 1.4 in the year ended in november, which means barclays is still projecting it will move toward the fed’s goal, just take longer to get there.that’s probably enough from central bankers’ perspective to prompt a rate increase, said omair sharif , an economist with newedge usa llc, a new york-based brokerage firm.“it may take three years to get back to 2 percent, but as long as we’re not going back to 1 percent, they seem ok with it,” said sharif.regional fed bank gauges are signaling inflation will be slow to accelerate. the dallas fed’s “ trimmed mean ” index, which eliminates the components in the pce price gauge that show the biggest changes in any month, increased 1.6 percent in november from a year earlier, holding within the 1.6 percent to 1.7 percent range it’s been in since april.including food and fuel, the pce price index rose 1.2 percent in the 12 months ended in november, the smallest gain since march, according to commerce department figures issued last week. the rule of thumb is that it will converge toward the trimmed mean reading over the next 12 months, pointing to a gradual pickup, according to the dallas fed’s report.the dallas measure featured the biggest one-month drop in goods prices excluding food and fuel in data dating back to 1977, according to the report . it was “fairly broad-based” with clothing and footwear, furnishings and household durable equipment, and recreational goods and vehicles all showing price declines of about 10 percent at an annualized rate, senior economist jim dolmas wrote.meanwhile, core services climbed at an annualized 2.4 percent last month, exceeding the 2.2 percent gain over the past year. the increase was paced by gains in the costs of paramedical services, rent and dining out, the report showed.economists at goldman sachs group inc. are among those forecasting core inflation won’t show signs of moving toward the fed’s goal next year as the upward pressure on prices from an improving economy will be more than offset by the impact of the drop in oil and stronger dollar. an appreciating currency makes goods produced by the nation’s trading partners less expensive to u.s. shoppers.the goldman economists maintain that september will be the most likely month for the fed to begin raising rates even as they now project the core pce price index will rise 1.3 percent by next year’s second quarter, down from a prior estimate of 1.5 percent.if it’s lower than 1.5 percent by june, as they predict, and wages show only a modest pickup, then the central bank will probably hold off, jan hatzius , goldman’s new york-based chief economist, wrote in a dec. 26 note. should inflation undershoot even their below-consensus forecast, the fed could wait until 2016, he said.while barclays’s gapen acknowledges a rate liftoff could be delayed, the fed has to make decisions based on where policy makers think the economy and inflation will be in 12 to 18 months, he said. and by june, the jobless rate will already be close to the 5.2 percent to 5.5 percent that fed officials say is consistent with full employment, a sign bigger pay increases are in store.“if you can run the domestic economy hot enough, then you can have services inflation that offsets a weak global backdrop,” said gapen. “what we would be looking for is just broad-based services inflation related to wages.”to contact the reporter on this story: michelle jamrisko in washington at mjamrisko@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: carlos torres at ctorres2@bloomberg.net mark rohnerpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 another january, another ces.  the consumer electronics show, held annually in las vegas, nevada, has been a fixture of the technology calendar since 1967.  the first show was held in june in new york city.  since then, ces has showcased the debut of an array of world-changing technologies: the vcr (1970), the camcorder (1981), the cd player (1981), the minidisc (1993), the dvd (1996), the digital radio (2000), the xbox (2001), blu-ray (2003).and also, "booth babes" — originally called ces guides — have been present at the show since 1967.
 find out if (amzn) is in cramer's portfolio.updated from 12:18 p.m. to include commentary from outside source in the eighth paragraph.new york ( thestreet ) -- with instacart announcing that it had secured another $220 million in a series c round of funding, the grocery delivery company is actively trying to "bring the physical grocery store online." it appears for right now, investors are willing to believe."how do we bring the physical grocery store online?" nilam ganenthiran, head of business development and strategy at instacart explained to thestreet. "this new capital allows us to invest in technology and expand to new cities, all of which will allow us to bring more and more grocers and retailers online." the new infusion of capital will bolster instacart's efforts towards shifting the way consumers purchase groceries, digitizing an industry that has long lagged in technology.san francisco-based instacart has now raised funding to date of around $275 million, including this round. the round, which was led by kleiner perkins caufield & byers, also included comcast ventures, dragoneer investment group, thrive capital, valiant capital and previous investors andreessen horowitz, khosla ventures, and sequoia.instacart  charges either a yearly membership of $99 a year for unlimited deliveries or $3.99 for two-hour delivery and $5.99 for one-hour delivery. it currently operates in 15 markets, but ganenthiran predicts it will soon be serving customers in most of if not all major metros in america.the funding will aid in that expansion as well as in hiring new talent to improve the algorithms that pair personal shoppers with consumers in the most efficient and effective way.according to mashable , the funding values instacart at around $2 billion, a massive jump from its $400 million valuation in june. whether or not the valuation is warranted, instacart has definitely been seeing growth, with its revenue increasing more than tenfold in 2014 and doubling in the fourth quarter alone. it has also doubled its full-time employee base to more than 100 during those 12 months, as well as secured partnerships with retailers such as whole foods market ( wfm ) and fairway market ( fwm ) . instacart also recently partnered with recipe-centric platform yummly to deliver ingredients for a specific recipe in an hour.instacart seems to have tapped into a prime market at just the right time."people tried this many years ago with webvan and kozmo, so it's interesting to see a lot of activity around this," tom caporaso, ceo of clarus marketing group, said. "i think the difference now is that everyone has a computer in their pockets these days. the emergence of the smartphone makes this more interesting."despite these achievements, instacart still faces some challenges. two that caporaso raises are consumer demand and scalability. caporaso isn't sure that consumers will be willing to pay for convenience on a constant basis. sure, there are emergencies when it would be nice to have a product delivered within an hour, but this may only be an in-case-of-emergency luxury."our subscribers are more interested in saving money as opposed to speed," he said. "i still don't know if demand is there for consumers to need that urgent one hour delivery."in terms of scalability, caporaso doesn't see this service functioning as smoothly in the suburbs as it does in the cities, which poses an immediate challenge on expansion.another challenge comes in the form of competition. the grocery delivery space has been quickly growing in the past couple of years, with google ( goog ) and amazon ( amzn - get report ) taking a stab at it, as well as other startups besides for instacart, including wunwun and postmates. ganenthiran is not worried about the competition, however."we think that the other startups are great because they actually are helping consumers understand what ordering online and getting products delivered to their door does," he said. "once they are introduced, they will seek out the best experience."which ganenthiran obviously believes is instacart.one of the things that differentiates instacart from its competitors, ganenthiran claims, is that it is focused on providing the technology to connect grocers and customers as opposed to acting as a retailer or a courier service. wunwun and postmates, he says, act as courier services, while amazon is itself a retailer. instacart, on the other hand, works to build partnerships with grocers and serve as the digital middleman.as ganenthiran puts it, instacart is helping retailers battle amazon by empowering them with the digital tools to reach consumers."this is an industry that's a very large and important industry for the overall retail market and it is one that technology, especially e-commerce adoption, has lagged in," ganenthiran said. "we believe that we can be part of a bigger solution to help meet consumers' needs and help e-commerce adoption in grocery."
 the euro tumbled to a nine-year low against the highflying dollar monday, struck by nerves over greek politics and steadily building expectations that the european central bank will soon beef up its stimulus program.the euro sank as low as $1.1861 against the dollar in asian trading hours monday, below the nadir it struck in the early stages of the euro crisis in 2010. by late afternoon in the u.s., the single currency rebounded to...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 james hamilton , vp and distinguished engineer at amazon, and long time blogger of interesting stuff, gave an enthusiastic talk at  aws re:invent 2014 on aws innovation at scale . he’s clearly proud of the work they are doing and it shows.james shared a few eye popping stats about aws:102tbps network capacity into a datacenter.the major theme of the talk is the cloud is a different world. it’s a special environment that allows aws to do great things at scale, things you can’t do, which is why the transition from on premise x86 servers to the public cloud is happening at a blistering pace. with so many scale driven benefits to the public cloud, it's a transition that can't be stopped. the cloud will keep getting more reliable, more functional, and cheaper at a rate that you can't begin to match with your limited resources, generalist gear, bloated software stacks, slow supply chains, and outdated innovation paradigms.that's the pr message at least. but one thing you can say about amazon is they are living it. they are making it real. so a healthy doubt is healthy, but extrapolating out the lines of fate would also be wise.one of the fickle finger of fate advantages aws has is resources. at one million customers they have the scale to keep the engine of expansion and improvement going. profits aren't being taken out, money is being reinvested. this is perhaps the most important advantage of scale.but money without smarts is simply waste. amazon wants you to know they have the smarts. we've heard how google and facebook build their own gear, amazon does too. they build their own networking gear, networking software, racks, and they work with intel to get faster processor versions of processors than are available on the market. the key is they know everything and control everything about their environment, so they can build simpler gear that does exactly what they want, which turns out to be cheaper and more reliable in the end.complete control allows quality metrics to be built into everything. metrics drive a constant quality increase in all parts of the system, which is why against all odds aws is getting more reliable as the pace of innovation quickens. great pools of actionable data turned into knowledge is another huge advantage of scale.another thing aws can do that you can't is the availability zone architecture itself. each az is its own datacenter and azs within a region are located very close together. this reduces messaging latencies, which means state can be synchronously replicated between azs, which greatly improves availability compared to the typical approach where redundant datacenters are very far apart. it's a talk rich with information and...well, spunk. the real meta-theme of the talk is how amazon consciously uses scale to their competitive advantage. for amazon scale isn't just an expense to be dealt with, scale is a resource to exploit, if you know how.here's my gloss of james hamilton's incredible talk...365 days a year component manufacturers have to get gear to server and storage manufacturers, the server and storage manufacturers have to produce the gear and push it into the logistics channel, it has to get from the logistics channel over to the correct datacenter, it has to arrive at the loading dock, people have be there to wheel the racks to the right place in the dc, there has to be power, cooling, networking, the app stack has to be loaded up, it has to be tested, it has to be released to customers.  s3 usage: 132% year-over-year growth in data transfer; ec2 usage: 99% yoy usage growth; aws overall business: over 1 million active customers.with over a million customers it means you are in a rich ecosystem. you have your pick of software vendors, if you have a problem someone has likely had it before, it’s easier to get your job done fast.such high growth means amazon has the resources to keep reinvesting and innovating by increasing breadth and depth of services they offer.big transitions generally occur when the economics are far superior, like mainframes to unix servers and then unix servers to x86 servers. these transitions usually take 10+ years. what’s different about the x86 on premise transition to the cloud is the speed at which it is happening.  the speed of the cloud transition is a function of great economic value along with the low friction for adoption. you don’t need software, you don’t hardware, you can just do it.networking is a red alert situation across the industry. it’s the perfect storm.problem #1: the cost of networking is escalating relative the cost of all other equipment. it’s anti-moore’s law. all other gear is going down in cost, networking is getting relatively more expensive over time. relative monthly costs: servers: 57%; networking equipment: 8%; power distribution and cooling: 18%; power: 13%; other: 4%.problem #2: at the same time networking is getting more expensive, the ratio of networking to compute is going up. that’s partly because moore’s law is working (still) with servers and compute density is going up. partly it's because as the cost of compute falls the amount of advanced analytics performed goes up and analytics are network intensive. solving big problems using a large number of servers requires a lot of networking. network traffic has moved east-west rather than the traditional north-south direction .amazon’s solution 5 years ago was data driven and radical: they built to their own networking designs. special routers were built. a team was hired to build the protocol stack all the way to the top. and they deployed all this themselves in their network. all services worldwide run on this gear.this strategy turned out to be a lot cheaper. just the support contract for networking gear was running 10s of millions of dollars.availability went up. the source of the improvement was simplicity. the problem aws was trying to solve was simpler than the problem enterprise gear tries to solve. enterprise gear must adhere to a lot of complicated specs that go unused and only make the system more fragile. by implementing just the functionality that was required meant a much simpler system which lead to higher availability. any way to win is a good way to win.a cornucopia of metrics. they measure everything. the rule is if a customer has a bad experience using their system their metrics must show it. this means metrics are getting better all the time because customer problems drive better metrics. once you have metrics that accurately reflect customer experience then goals can be set on making the system better. every week improvements are made to make things better. if the code didn’t start off better, it gets better over time.testability. their gear was better because they tested it better. enterprise gear is hard to test at scale. they created a $40 million test bed of 8000 servers (3 megawatts). but since this was the cloud they effectively rented the servers for a few months, so it was relatively cheap.networking explained layer by layer, from the very top to the network interface card11 aws regions worldwide. choose which ones to use by nearness to customers or required jurisdictional boundaries.private fiber links interconnect most of the major regions. this avoids all the capacity planning problems (amazon can do better capacity planning), peering issues, and buffering problems that occur on public links. so it’s faster to run their own network, it’s more reliable, cheaper, and lower latency.all regions have at least two availability zones. us east has five azs.redundant paths run to transit centers.each region has redundant transit centers. a transit center connects private links to other aws regions, private links to aws direct connect customers, and to the internet through peering and paid transit.if one az fails all the other azs keep working.azs are less than 2ms apart and usually less than 1ms apart. from a latency perspective they are fairly close, within a few kilometers. far enough apart for safety, close enough for good latency.with a single hardened datacenter the best reliability you’ll get is around  99.9% over a mix of applications over a large period of time. high reliability requires running in two datacenters. traditionally datacenter diversity is from two datacenters that are very far apart because it’s not cost effective to keep datacenters close together. this means longer latencies. la to new is 74ms round trip. committing to an ssd is 1 to 2ms. you can’t wait 70+ milliseconds for a transaction to commit. which means applications commit locally and then replicate to the second datacenter. this design in a failure case loses data during the failover. while a true failure is rare, like a building burning down, transient failures are more common, like a load balancer problem for example. so would you failover your connection was down for 3 minutes? no, because data would be lost and it would take a long time to recover that data from other sources. so you lose availability for common events.azs are milliseconds apart so you can commit to both at the same time. that means if you failover a customer won’t be able to tell because the data replication was synchronous. it’s invisible. it’s hard to write code for this model so you won’t do it for everything. and for some apps a concern for multi-az failures might also prevent you from using multiple azs, but for the rest of apps this is a very powerful model. it’s more costly, but it gives aws certain advantages.an availability zone is always a datacenter in a completely independent building.amazon has 28+ datacenters. the plus means there are more datacenters in an az as a way of extending capacity for an az. more datacenters are added within an az to extend the capacity of an az. otherwise you would be forced to split your app across azs, even if you didn’t want to.some azs have size fairly substantial datacenters.dcs in an az are less than ¼ms apart.aws datacenters are purposely not gigantic. a single datacenter is 25 - 30 megawatts, with between 50,000 - 80,000 serversthe return on datacenter largeness diminishes. the advantage of datacenter scale as you build bigger and bigger goes down. early advantages are huge. later advantages are small. going from 2000 to 2500 racks is a little better. a tiny datacenter is too expensive. a really large datacenter is only marginally more expensive per rack than a medium datacenter.risk increases with larger datacenters. the blast radius if something goes wrong and the datacenter is destroyed, the loss is too big.102tbps network capacity into a datacenter.the only thing that matters for latency is the software latency at either end of a connection. latency between two servers when sending a message:sr-iov ( single root i/o virtualization ) allows a nic to provide virtualize in hardware network cards. each guest gets its own network card. the benefit is > 2x average latency reduction and > 10x latency jitter improvement. this means outliers a down to a 1/10th of what they were. sr-iov is being deployed now on newer instances types and will eventually be everywhere. the hard part wasn't adding sr-iov, it was adding isolation, metering, ddos protection, and the capacity limits that make sr-iov useful in a cloud environment.cost of a negative situation is not high so expensive unneeded protection can be removed. servers are designed for what they do, not a general population of users. amazon knows exactly in what environment the server will run in, they’ll know exactly when something goes wrong, so the servers can be designed with less engineering headroom. the cost of server failure is not that big for them. they are already on site and are very good at replacing harddisks, etc. so a lot of the carefulness in enterprise equipment is not necessary.processors can be pushed harder. they know the cooling requirements, they influence the mechanical design, they just design good servers, so they can get more performance out of a server. though a partnership with intel amazon has processors that run faster than can be bought on the open market.an example is the design for their own storage rack. it weighs over a ton, 19” wide, and holds 864 disk drives. for some workloads this a wonderful game changing design that helps them get better prices in some areas.amazon has designed and built their own power substations. it only saves a little money, but they can build them much faster. utility companies are not used to dealing with the rate aws is growing at, so they had to build their own.3 100% carbon neutral regions: us west (oregon), aws govcloud (us), eu (frankfurt)449 new services and major features released in 2014. 24 in 2008, 48 in 2009, 61 in 2010, 82 in 2011, 159 in 2012, 280 in 2013.aws is getting more reliable as the pace of innovation quickens. their goal is to make available to customers the same tools that use to achieve this rate of innovation and high quality.
 croupiers sit at card tables in the sands cotai central casino resort, owned by sands china ltd., in macau, china. the city's casino takings are seven times that of the las vegas strip and contributed more than 80 percent of the government’s annual revenue last year. closecroupiers sit at card tables in the sands cotai central casino resort, owned by sands... read morecroupiers sit at card tables in the sands cotai central casino resort, owned by sands china ltd., in macau, china. the city's casino takings are seven times that of the las vegas strip and contributed more than 80 percent of the government’s annual revenue last year.macau casino stocks to draw chinese investors, wan saysmacau’s casinos recorded their worst year, ending a decade of expansion that turned the former portuguese enclave into the world’s biggest gambling hub. more tough times are ahead.casino revenue in the city fell 2.6 percent to 351.5 billion patacas ($44 billion) in 2014, after a record 30.4 percent monthly drop in december, according to figures from macau’s gaming inspection and coordination bureau today. analysts projected a 2 percent annual decline, based on the median of nine estimates in a bloomberg news survey.chinese president xi jinping’s bid to catch “tigers and flies” in an anti-corruption drive and weaker economic growth means macau may face shrinking revenue until at least mid-2015, when new resorts open. the crackdown has deterred high rollers who account for two-thirds of macau’s casino receipts, and wiped out about $73 billion in market value of companies including wynn macau ltd. (1128) and sjm holdings ltd. last year.“the vip heyday is over,” said philip tulk , an analyst at standard chartered plc in hong kong. “the anti-corruption crackdown doesn’t look to be a short-term phenomenon,” with funds flows between the mainland and macau being much more closely scrutinized, he said.xi jinping, china's president, has urged macau to diversify its economy and transform into a global tourism and leisure center. closexi jinping, china's president, has urged macau to diversify its economy and transform... read morexi jinping, china's president, has urged macau to diversify its economy and transform into a global tourism and leisure center.xi has urged the city to diversify its economy and transform into a global tourism and leisure center. macau’s casino takings are seven times that of the las vegas strip and contributed more than 80 percent of the government’s annual revenue last year.sands china ltd. (1928) and galaxy entertainment group ltd. (27) were the second- and third-worst performers on hong kong’s hang seng index last year. wynn macau fell 3.7 percent at the close of trading in hong kong, while galaxy dropped 1.8 percent and sands china lost 1.2 percent. the hang seng index was up 1.1 percent.casino revenue fell to 23.3 billion patacas in december for a seventh straight month of decline and the biggest drop since macau began recording monthly figures in 2005. that compared with a median estimate of a 30 percent drop in a bloomberg news survey of 11 analysts.macau had posted its smallest annual casino revenue gain of 9.7 percent in 2009, after it began yearly records in 2002.as the only chinese city where casino gambling is legal, macau has seen the industry’s revenue expand 8.5 times since the 2004 opening of its first foreign casino owned by billionaire sheldon adelson , after the government ended local gambling mogul stanley ho’s 40-year monopoly.it will be difficult for macau’s casinos to see a “breakthrough improvement” in 2015 revenue as the industry experiences continued adjustments, according to a dec. 31 memo from ho’s sjm holdings ltd. obtained by bloomberg news. sjm would raise salaries by 5 percent, amid increasing protests by casino workers for better pay, according to the memo.slower and steadier growth should be expected as the market matures, leong man ion, deputy director of macau’s gaming regulator, told china’s state-run xinhua news agency last month. he predicted the revenue slump will continue until the middle of 2015.“2010 and 2011 had exceptionally high growth rates; macau will never see those growth rates again,” said aaron fischer, a hong kong-based analyst at clsa ltd., via telephone. the city’s gaming revenue jumped 58 percent and 42 percent respectively those two years, macau government data shows.headwinds will persist into the third quarter of this year at least, wells fargo & co. analysts led by cameron mcknight wrote in a note last month.“with revenue trends still decelerating sequentially, it is now unlikely that the overall macau market will grow in 2015,” mcknight wrote.wells fargo and union gaming group both estimate a 20 percent year-on-year decline in the first quarter, while clsa forecast a 29 percent drop.at the inauguration of macau’s newly re-elected chief executive fernando chui in december, chinese president xi called for the city’s leader to step up regulation and supervision of gambling.chui said his administration will conduct a review in spring this year and encourage more non-gambling elements to balance the industry.macau’s government has been curbing money flows to the territory over concern that illegal funds are being taken out of the mainland. it is restricting the use of china unionpay co.’s debit cards and its hand-held card swipers at casinos. further clampdowns are expected with the help of banks.the gambling regulator is also tightening scrutiny of agents used by junket operators, which arrange trips and provide credit for high-stakes gamblers known as vips.casino companies including sands china and galaxy are shifting resources from high rollers to lure more vacationing chinese and other mass-market gamblers by building malls, theaters, restaurants and hotels.new project openings starting in mid-2015 with galaxy’s second-phase expansion of its resort on the cotai strip may help underscore a market revival, by targeting tourists who’re seeking a broader holiday experience in addition to gambling, according to clsa’s fischer.“we will see stabilization in revenue in the second half of year, because the base becomes easier and also you’ve got new projects that will drive volume growth,” he said.tulk from standard chartered is less optimistic.what led to macau’s slowing revenue growth last year wasn’t casino supply and demand, but declining bets by high rollers, tulk said. “unless the top end recovers, the new capacity isn’t going to drive gross gaming revenue significantly positively.”to contact the reporters on this story: stephanie wong in hong kong at swong139@bloomberg.net ; billy chan in hong kong at bchan101@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: peter elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net lena lee, daryl loopress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 attorney general eric holder is barring local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proof that a crime occurred. the post's robert o'harrow jr. explains the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago.attorney general eric h. holder jr. on friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.the program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them “adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. it allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.“with this new policy, effective immediately, the justice department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons,” holder said in a statement.holder’s decision allows limited exceptions, including illegal firearms, ammunition, explosives and property associated with child pornography, a small fraction of the total. this would eliminate virtually all cash and vehicle seizures made by local and state police from the program.while police can continue to make seizures under their own state laws, equitable sharing was easy to use and required most of the proceeds from the seizures to go to local and state police agencies. some states have higher standards of proof for forfeitures and some require seized proceeds to go into the general fund.a justice department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the attorney general’s motivation, said holder “also believes that the new policy will eliminate any possibility that the adoption process might unintentionally incentivize unnecessary stops and seizures.”holder’s announcement drew praise from some groups who have denounced the seizures and criticism from some police organizations.the decision follows a washington post investigation published in september that found that police have made cash seizures worth almost $2.5 billion from motorists and others without search warrants or indictments since the terrorist attacks of sept. 11, 2001.the post found that local and state police routinely pulled over drivers for minor traffic infractions, pressed them to agree to warrantless searches and seized large amounts of cash without evidence of wrongdoing. the law allows such seizures and forces the owners to prove their property was legally acquired in order to get it back.police spent the seizure proceeds with little oversight, in some cases buying luxury cars, high-powered weapons and military-grade gear such as armored cars, according to an analysis of justice department data obtained through freedom of information act requests.in the wake of sept. 11, 2001, an aggressive brand of policing called “highway interdiction,” which involves authorities seizing money and property during traffic stops, has grown in popularity. thousands of people not charged with crimes are left fighting legal battles to regain their money. news of the policy change surprised advocates who have for a long time unsuccessfully sought to reverse civil asset forfeiture laws, arguing that they undermine core american values, such as property rights and due process.“it’s high time we put an end to this damaging practice,” said david harris, a constitutional law scholar at the university of pittsburgh. “it has been a civil-liberties debacle and a stain on american criminal justice.”holder’s action comes as members of both parties in congress are working together to craft legislation to overhaul civil asset forfeiture. on jan. 9, sens. charles e. grassley (r-iowa) and mike lee (r-utah), and reps. f. james sensenbrenner jr. (r-wis.) and john conyers jr. (d-mich.) signed a letter calling on holder to end equitable sharing .grassley praised holder’s decision on friday. “we’re going to have a fairer justice system because of it,” grassley said. “the rule of law ought to protect innocent people, and civil asset forfeiture hurt a lot of people.”he said he planned to continue pressing for legislative reforms.“i commend the department for this step and look forward to working with them on comprehensive forfeiture reform that protects americans’ property rights,” sensenbrenner said. “equitable sharing has become a tool too often used to bypass state law. ”the new policy could become one of the more notable pieces of holder’s legacy. holder has already announced that he is leaving the department , and it is clear that he is taking steps to burnish his place in history. on thursday, he pushed in a speech for better tracking of police use-of-force incidents.but friday’s action is sure to engender its share of controversy.the policy will touch police and local budgets in every state. since 2001, about 7,600 of the nation’s 18,000 police departments and task forces have participated in equitable sharing. for hundreds of police departments and sheriff’s offices, the seizure proceeds accounted for 20 percent or more of their annual budgets in recent years, according to a post analysis.the action comes at a time when police are already angry about remarks that holder and president obama made after the police killings of unarmed black men in ferguson, mo., and new york city. some have accused them of being “anti-cop.”“it seems like a continual barrage against police,” said john w. thompson, interim executive director of the national sheriffs’ association. “i’m not saying there’s no wrongdoing, but there is wrongdoing in everything.”critics of the decision say that depriving departments of the proceeds from civil asset forfeitures will hurt legitimate efforts to fight crime, drug smuggling and terrorism.bill johnson, executive director of the national association of police organizations, said, “there is some grave concern about the possible loss of significant funding while local police and state police are being asked to do more and more each year.”over the past decade, thousands of people have had to fight the government to get their cash and property back, often hiring lawyers and spending more than a year in the process, the post found. many of them were people of color and immigrants swept up in police dragnets on the nation’s highways aimed at stopping drug dealers, money launderers and terrorists.that includes people such as mandrel stuart , who was stopped in 2012 by fairfax county police, detained without charges, handcuffed and stripped of $17,550 in cash that was to be used for equipment and supplies for his barbecue restaurant in staunton, va. he eventually hired a lawyer, and a jury gave him his money back in 2013. but he lost his restaurant while fighting the government, because he had no working capital.“a lot of people won’t be harassed the way they are harassing them now,” stuart said friday after he heard about holder’s action. “it’s some justice at last on our side.”civil asset forfeiture is one of the most powerful — and unusual — law enforcement tools. police do not need to prove a crime to use it, because it is a civil action against an object, such as currency or a car, rather than a person.as a consequence, protections common in criminal law do not apply. in fact, owners who want to recover their cash or property generally must show it is theirs and demonstrate it is not tied to crime.forfeiture has its basis in british admiralty law, but it became a part of the fight against drugs in the united states beginning in 1970, when congress allowed police to seize aircraft, boats and other property used to transport narcotics or bought by drug lords with ill-gotten gains.in the 1980s, the law was expanded to include cash. about the same time, the justice department created its asset forfeiture program and began allowing federal agencies to adopt seizures made by state and local authorities. those changes led to a massive increase in money deposited into the federal forfeitures fund as seizures by local and state police surged. allegations of police ­abuses also increased.searing reports by the orlando sentinel and other newspapers about abuses spurred congress to pass the civil asset forfeiture reform act in 2000. but a key change — ending the sharing of seizure proceeds between local police and federal agencies — was cut from the bill after fierce opposition from police and prosecutors. some lawmakers called the sharing of money a “perverse incentive” for overly aggressive police tactics.after sept. 11, 2001, the use of the asset forfeiture law and the equitable sharing program rose to new heights as federal authorities called on local, county and state police to help keep watch on the nation’s highways, not only for drug smugglers but also for terrorists.the departments of justice and homeland security paid private firms millions to train local and state officers in the techniques of an aggressive brand of policing known as “highway interdiction.” that training, developed by the firms, included methods for ferreting out suspicious drivers and coaxing them into granting warrantless searches of vehicles, according to internal company training documents obtained by the post. the files emphasized the importance of targeting cash.the federal government also encouraged police to collect and share intelligence about drivers. one training firm started a private intelligence system called black asphalt that enabled thousands of police to share tips about drivers across state lines and funnel raw reports about drivers to federal authorities.civil asset forfeiture has become one of the few public policy and social issues that united activists and lawmakers across the political spectrum.after the post series, john yoder and brad cates, two directors of the justice department’s asset forfeiture office under president ronald reagan, said the program should end. in an opinion piece , they said the program began with good intentions. “over time, however, the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.”the institute for justice and other libertarian-leaning groups teamed up with the american civil liberties union and left-leaning groups to press for changes in the wake of the post’s investigation.“this is a profoundly important and path-breaking change in the ability of the government to take property of americans,” said scott bullock, a senior attorney at the institute for justice, which produced a study about civil asset forfeiture five years ago called “policing for profit: the abuse of civil asset forfeiture.”in recent months, grassley, the new chairman of the senate judiciary committee, and sen. patrick j. leahy (vt.), the panel’s ranking democrat, joined the effort, along with sensenbrenner and others.holder said seizure adoptions will continue to be employed by local and federal authorities, but only in limited circumstances when public safety is at risk and where local and federal authorities are collaborating in cases clearly involving criminal activity.most of the money and property taken under equitable sharing since 2008 — $3 billion out of $5.3 billon — was not seized in collaboration with federal authorities, the post’s analysis found.in announcing the new justice department policy friday, holder said there is also less need for federal seizure adoptions. in the 1980s, when the policies took effect, few states gave police the authority to make civil seizures and forfeit the assets of criminals in the way that federal law allowed.“today, however, every state has either criminal or civil forfeiture laws, making the federal adoption process less necessary,” holder’s statement said. “indeed, adoptions currently constitute a very small slice of the federal asset forfeiture program. ”some police departments have shown an apparent preference for federal law over state laws. equitable sharing allowed many departments to make or benefit from seizures in ways they could not have under state law. the program required the seizure proceeds to go back to the departments, while some state asset forfeiture programs mandate that the money go into general funds.the treasury department is also changing its asset forfeiture program to follow the same guideline included in holder’s order, the statement said.federal agencies make larger seizures of cash and property through avenues other than equitable sharing, typically in cases involving defendants ranging from drug cartel kingpins to bernard l. madoff, whose fraud case has resulted in more than $9 billion in forfeitures in recent years.those programs are not affected by the changes to equitable sharing, but holder also said the new policy is the first step in a “comprehensive review” of civil forfeiture in general.justice department officials noted that civil asset forfeiture has hurt criminals and their organizations. it also has enabled the government to refund money to crime victims — about $4 billion over the past 15 years.“asset forfeiture remains a critical law enforcement tool when used appropriately — providing unique means to go after criminal and even terrorist organizations,” holder said. “this new policy will ensure that these authorities can continue to be used to take the profit out of crime and return assets to victims, while safeguarding civil liberties.”robert o’harrow jr. is a reporter on the investigative unit of the washington post. he writes about law enforcement, national security, federal contracting and the financial world.sari horwitz covers the justice department and criminal justice issues nationwide for the washington post, where she has been a reporter for 30 years. follow her @sarihorwitz.steven rich is the database editor for investigations at the washington post. while at the post, he’s worked on investigations involving tax liens, civil forfeiture, cartels and government oversight. he was also a member of the reporting team awarded the pulitzer for nsa revelations. pgp fingerprint: 69fa 5730 addd 5488 24fe 6eb2 b727 d930
 millions of people watch netflix through vpns from countries where it hasn’t officially launched, new figures shownetflix’s headquarters in los gatos, california. photograph: paul sakuma/apmore than 30 million netflix users live in countries where the service is unavailable without the use of location-masking software, giving the company a hefty financial incentive not to crack down on members who use the technological loophole to watch content not authorised for their country.the figures, which come from market research firm globalwebindex, show that netflix has more than 20 million users in china alone, all of whom must connect through virtual private networks (vpns), as the streaming video provider has not yet launched in the country.not every netflix “user” is a subscriber to the service, however. globalwebindex surveyed almost 200,000 individuals across 32 markets, and asked how many of them had watched netflix in the previous month using a vpn. a significant proportion of those saying they had will have watched at a friend’s house, or been sharing a username with others – indeed, as of october 2014, the company had 16 million international members, significantly less than the total number of users of the service.“account sharing is pretty widespread,” says jason mander, head of trends at gwi. “our numbers are always going to be higher than the number of paying subscribers.”and it seems netflix agrees: the company’s chief product officer emphatically denied rumours that it had been cracking down on vpn users at this year’s consumer electronics show in las vegas.“the claims that we have changed our policy on vpn are false,” said neil hunt. “people who are using a vpn to access our service from outside of the area will find that it still works exactly as it has always done.”netflix can’t welcome vpn users too openly, however, since the company’s fraught relationship with content providers hinges on them enforcing international restrictions. “i think the tension here is that it’s not a problem for netflix per se,” says mander. “the actual studios might be much more concerned about it. but by the nature of how a vpn works … it’s very difficult to tell if someone’s using one.”one of the outcomes of the sony pictures hack has been evidence of just how much hollywood studios care about vpn usage, as emails from 2013 show a sony exec complaining that “netflix do not closely monitor where some of their subscribers are registering from and don’t take steps to counter circumvention websites that allow people… to subscribe illegally”. he specifically cited australia and south africa as countries without legal netflix services despite high penetration. gwi’s figures show that 5% of internet users in those nations accessed the service in the last month.mander says that accessing better entertainment content is “by far the most common” reason for using vpn services. “beyond that, accessing social networks is big in places like china. then there’s quite an important group of people who are using them to hide their identity, particularly in france, germany and the uk.”
 shoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern caracas on jan. 9. 2015. closeshoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern... read moreshoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern caracas on jan. 9. 2015.shoppers thronged grocery stores across caracas today as deepening shortages led the government to put venezuela ’s food distribution under military protection.long lines, some stretching for blocks, formed outside grocery stores in the south american country’s capital as residents search for scarce basic items such as detergent and chicken.“i’ve visited six stores already today looking for detergent -- i can’t find it anywhere,” said lisbeth elsa, a 27-year-old janitor, waiting in line outside a supermarket in eastern caracas. “we’re wearing our dirty clothes again because we can’t find it. at this point i’ll buy whatever i can find.”a dearth of foreign currency exacerbated by collapsing oil prices has led to shortages of imports from toilet paper to car batteries , and helped push annual inflation to 64 percent in november. the lines will persist as long as price controls remain in place, luis vicente leon, director of caracas-based polling firm datanalisis, said today in a telephone interview.government officials met with representatives from supermarket chains today to guarantee supplies, state news agency avn reported. interior minister carmen melendez said yesterday that security forces would be sent to food stores and distribution centers to protect shoppers.empty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015. closeempty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015.empty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015.“don’t fall into desperation -- we have the capacity and products for everyone, with calmness and patience. the stores are full,” she said on state television.president nicolas maduro last week vowed to implement an economic “counter-offensive” to steer the country out of recession, including an overhaul of the foreign exchange system. he has yet to provide details. while the main government-controlled exchange sets a rate of 6.3 bolivars per u.s. dollar , the black market rate is as much as 187 per dollar.inside a plan suarez grocery store yesterday in eastern caracas, shelves were mostly bare. customers struggled and fought for items at times, with many trying to skip lines. the most sought-after products included detergent, with customers waiting in line for two to three hours to buy a maximum of two bags. a security guard asked that photos of empty shelves not be taken.police inside a luvebras supermarket in eastern caracas intervened to help staff distribute toilet paper and other products.“you can’t find anything, i’ve spent 15 days looking for diapers,” jean paul mate, a meat vendor, said outside the luvebras store. “you have to take off work to look for products. i go to at least five stores a day.”venezuelan online news outlet vivoplay posted a video of government food security regulator carlos osorio being interrupted by throngs of shoppers searching for products as he broadcast on state television from a bicentenario government-run supermarket in central caracas.“what we’re seeing is worse than usual, it’s not only a seasonal problem,” datanalisis’s leon said. “companies are not sure how they will restock their inventories or find merchandise, with a looming fear of a devaluation.”the price for venezuela’s oil, which accounts for more than 95 percent of the country’s exports, has plunged by more than half from last year’s peak in june to $47 a barrel this month.“this is the worst it has ever been -- i’ve seen lines thousands of people long,” greisly jarpe, a 42-year-old data analyst, said as she waited for dish soap in eastern caracas. “people are so desperate they’re sleeping in the lines.”to contact the reporters on this story: andrew rosati in caracas at arosati3@bloomberg.net ; noris soto in caracas at nsoto9@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: andre soliani at asoliani@bloomberg.net ; philip sanders at psanders@bloomberg.net nathan crooks, randall woodspress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 people lined up at a currency-exchange office in geneva on thursday. agence france-presse/getty imagesmarkets in europe remained on edge friday, with swiss stocks tanking and safe-haven german debt in high demand as the swiss national bank ’s shock decision to scrap the cap on its currency continued to reverberate.investors piled into government bonds as they sought safety amid some choppy trading in currency markets. the yield on 10-year german debt sank to an all-time low of 0.385%.the swiss franc zigzagged and traded roughly unchanged on the day at just below parity, with traders saying there was little sign of a clear direction in the markets. the currency had spiked from 1.20 to the euro on thursday after the snb stunned markets by abandoning its ceiling on the franc.action in the markets on friday was “frenetic,” although liquidity remained poor, citigroup said.“sharp, random moves have materialized as crowded positions get chopped,” citi said.many investors had held short positions on the franc ahead of thursday’s snb announcement, exaggerating the scale of moves.“forecasts of the euro/franc path from here need to be treated with anything from caution to disdain, but the risk is that as the euro falls and the european central bank acts, we see a further downside test from here,” said kit juckes, a macro strategist at société générale.amid thursday’s swiss turmoil, expectations that the ecb will announce a bond-buying program next week reached fever pitch, fueling a stock and bond rally in europe.that, along with a recovery in oil prices, helped european stocks extend gains friday, carrying germany’s dax index to an all-time high, and pushed the euro down to $1.1460, its lowest level against the dollar since november 2003.“for markets this could be a dangerous game, with qe now looking more or less priced in to equities in europe. let’s hope that the ecb delivers,” said françois savary, who oversees about $10 billion of assets as chief investment officer at swiss bank reyl.swiss stocks continued to suffer. switzerland’s blue-chip smi benchmark extended thursday’s 8.7% drop, shedding a further 6%.julius baer led the fallers, with the snb decision wiping out almost a fifth of its value, while both ubs and credit suisse fell sharply.“the snb’s shocker is still being digested and there is a lot of uncertainty among investors,” said one zurich-based trader.according to ubs wealth management’s chief investment officer, mark haefele, banks carry a large share of their costs in francs while client assets are largely denominated in euros and dollars.also hard hit were watchmakers swatch and richemont who sell the lion’s share of their goods outside of switzerland. they will be hit because of their high cost base in switzerland, which has become even more expensive after the franc’s surge thursday, but “the competitiveness should not have materially changed and this industry enjoys above-average pricing power,” said                    mr. haefele.wider european equities picked up after a nervous start, with energy and mining stocks bouncing as the oil price climbed .the stoxx europe 600 was 1.1% higher, while germany’s dax rose 1.4% to a record close.
 every second, norse collects and analyzes live threat        intelligence from darknets in hundreds of locations in        over 40 countries. the attacks shown are based on a        small subset of live flows against the norse honeypot        infrastructure, representing actual worldwide cyber        attacks by bad actors. at a glance, one can see which        countries are aggressors or targets at the moment, using        which type of attacks (services-ports).hovering over the attack origins, attack targets, or attack types will        highlight just the attacks emanating from that country        or over that service-port respectively. hovering over        any bubble on the map, will highlight only the attacks        from that location and type. press s to toggle table sizes.norse exposes its threat intelligence via        high-performance, machine-readable apis in a variety of        forms.  norse also provides products and solutions that        assist organizations in protecting and mitigating cyber        attacks.
 tim worstall is, i think, 100% right here. the key difference is between “smithian” commodities–where it is a safe rule of thumb that the consumer surplus generated is about equal to the producer cost, so that gdp accounts that value goods and services at real producer cost will capture a more-or-less stable fraction equal to half of true standards of living–and… i might as well call them “andreesenian” commodities, where consumer surplus is a much larger proportion of monetized value because what is monetized is merely an ancillary good or service to what actually promotes societal welfare. what is the proportion? 5-1? 10-1? somewhere in that range, i think–at least.…and marc andreessen were disagreeing… over the effects of technology on the passing landscape…. take, for example, facebook. as far as the general economic statistics are concerned, gdp, labour productivity and all that, the output of facebook is the advertising it sells…. valuing facebook’s contribution to living standards as being the advertising it sells is near insane… but that advertising is the only part of the value which we do ascribe to facebook that is actually monetised. and given that gdp, labour productivity and all that are described only in monetised terms then we’re missing a very large part of what it’s all about.people (for some unknown reason to me) like facebook. their lives are made richer by facebook’s existence: they are in fact richer. we’re just not measuring that extra wealth that they derive from facebook’s existence…. brad delong once pointed out (or perhaps pointed to someone who pointed out) that one way of looking at rising living standards in the 20th century was a factor of about 8. rich world people in 2000 were 8 times better off than rich world people in 1900. roughly true by those standard measures of gdp and so on. but if we than added what people could do, the improvements in quality, all something analagous to that consumer surplus. it might be more true to say that people were 100 times better off. that’s how i would explain (some of) that productivity puzzle….andreessen is… talking to that facebook example above…. i do tend to think that the gap between “real living standards” and “recorded living standards” is growing simply because so much more of the value of the new technologies is not in fact monetised.
 i really like the analysis of finding versus maximizing product cycles. there are a few aspects of "moral authority" that i think have been left out.1. the rank and file know (or at least think) that a professional ceo is less likely than a founding ceo to be around in 5 years. so when a new professional ceo says "jump" it's much harder to get people to change their way of doing things, particularly if they suspect the next ceo will undo all the changes. when a founding ceo says "jump," you might as well get with the program because the change is likely to be permanent. (for the economists in the audience, this is a version of the lucas critique applied to organizations.)2. the "knowledge pyramid" isn't just about the ceo's epistemological state and decision-making apparatus; it's also about communicating the values and identity of the company back to the company. founding ceos are in a superior rhetorical position because they can say "i hired you all because each of you ________", and give everyone the warm fuzzies. the professional ceo on the other hand has to speculate or impute motivations to the previous ceos, which is less motivational. as a recent example, i think satya nadella has done a relatively poor job of communicating what makes microsoft employees different from other employees; instead of saying, "you guys understand the full stack better than anyone" (or something), he can't help but to talk about market opportunities and cloud-first productivity blah blah blah. (which is to say -- not only was he in an inevitably weakened rhetorical position with respect to billg, he squandered it when it came to articulating the company's identity.)3. founding ceos are in a better rhetorical position when it comes to navigating value conflicts between quarterly earnings and something else ("changing the world"). when communicating with immediate subordinates they can do a kind of good-cop bad-cop routine with the board of directors ("the board really wanted x, but i thought that'd be bad for customers, so we're doing y."), whereas a board-picked ceo will be assumed to act only in the interest of the stock price. for many companies (e.g. organizations that profess to be on some kind of higher mission) this sort of ceo will be rather uninspiring, and therefore the professional ceo will be less capable of effecting change throughout the organization.4. professional ceos have to navigate a more precarious political situation because there's a good chance that one or more subordinates want the ceo's job. (i would hazard to guess that insiders usually replace outsiders and outsiders usually replace insiders.)one thing this article leaves out is a deeper analysis of why the conventional wisdom is to replace a founder with a professional when there are so many famous counterexamples. it could be that at a certain stage in a company's growth investors prefer to be more risk-averse and will give up a potential grand slam in order to get a two-run double, or something. (and by extension the op is willing to take larger risks than the average vc.) or that there are hidden social dynamics at play.>one thing this article leaves out is a deeper analysis of why the conventional wisdom is to replace a founder with a professional when there are so many famous counterexamples. it could be that at a certain stage in a company's growth investors prefer to be more risk-averse and will give up a potential grand slam in order to get a two-run double, or something. (and by extension the op is willing to take larger risks than the average vc.) or that there are hidden social dynamics at play.i think one of the reasons that this conventional wisdom is becoming less common is that 'technology startup' is more likely to mean a company with a product and customers now than in the past when it frequently meant a company that had brought a new technology to the commercialisation stage.in companies of the latter type, it can make sense to move the founding ceo to a cto role because that has been their actual role in the development phase anyway. their skillset may not match well with running a company with marketing and sales departments and getting the product sold.companies of the former type, like facebook, are different because by the time they get real traction, they are already dealing with customers and are out there in the market. they have those skillsets by definition because they're already doing that.
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 this article analyses historical iea forecasts of global energy consumption.three major forecasting challenges are observed and briefly analysed:the international energy agency tackles a monumental task every year when compiling its world energy outlook report: forecasting global energy consumption over the next 2-3 decades.over the years, the iea has taken quite a lot of flak from critics with 20/20 hindsight about fairly large deviations between forecasted and actual numbers. for example, the iea failed to forecast the plateau in conventional oil production which started about one decade ago and generally underpredicted the expansion rate of modern renewables.but just how large are these deviations? this article will take a quantitative look at 15 years of iea world energy outlooks (available  here ) and compare the forecasts to actual data from the bp statistical review to get a clear picture. each major energy category will be discussed separately.iea oil forecasts for oil over the past 15 years are shown below. it is clear that the general trend is one of substantial demand overprediction due to the failure to foresee the conventional oil plateau which started in the previous decade.recently though, the us shale revolution has led to a slight uptick in the demand outlook. the large drop in oil prices over the past few months confirm this sunnier outlook. even though numerous commentators are now fearing another supply crunch due to insufficient exploration and instability in the middle east, the fundamental fact remains that the world still has tremendous oil reserves which can be extracted at fairly low prices (see  below ).the graph below shows that the iea has generally done a good job at forecasting gas consumption. fracking has recently further contributed to security of supply, thereby increasing the chances of a steady expansion over coming decades.despite receiving much less attention, the forecast error related to coal is substantially greater than that related to oil. as shown in the graph below, the iea completely missed the chinese coal explosion following china's inclusion into the world trade organization in 2001.the present outlook is for a marked slowdown in coal expansion, primarily due to developments in china related to pollution control, economic slowdown and a gradual shift away from energy intensive investment-driven growth. unfortunately the fact remains that the world still has many poor countries that would gladly follow china's rapid coal-fired investment-driven growth model. ironically, strong consumer demand increases from china's rapidly growing middle class will be one of the major drivers of coal consumption in poorer countries over coming decades.the iea nuclear forecasts shown below paint an interesting picture. even though recent data clearly points to a contraction, the current forecast is quite optimistic.the strong forecasted recovery in nuclear demand is again primarily attributed to china where nuclear is seen as an important wedge in the gradual reduction of coal's dominance ( below ). china's nuclear construction pipeline suggests that this should be a fairly accurate forecast.as shown below, the iea's hydropower forecasts have been reasonable, although the rapid expansion in china over recent years has also not been forecasted very accurately.this category consists primarily of wind, solar, geothermal and biofuels. as shown below, the iea has had to progressively increase its forecasts over time as favourable policy environments stimulated faster than expected deployment and subsequent cost declines.as more information became available on the topic of modern renewables over the years, the iea forecasts have gotten more consistent. for example, the forecasts for other renewables over the past three years are almost identical.it is clear from this analysis that iea is unable to foresee events that deviate strongly from the norm such as peak conventional oil, rapid shifts in global trade flows and unexpected energy policy developments. it would certainly be much more convenient if the world would stick to the norm more regularly, but, because it doesn't, iea forecasts should always be seen in the right perspective.to summarize the forecasting challenges over the past decade, the difference between the 2020 forecasts from 2014 and 2004 are shown below.oil, coal and renewables other then hydro have proven to be the most difficult to forecast. oil will likely continue to be a challenge as unconventional oil sources increase market share and the middle east remains unpredictable. coal underpredictions are likely to continue as environmental pledges and hopes meet the reality of billions of poor people striving to increase their quality of life. for other renewables, however, forecast accuracy will likely increase in the future as technical understanding grows and policy support mechanisms meet hard economic limits.in the meantime, the unpredictability of global energy trends will give plenty of room for discussion and debate. in fact, the only forecast i can make with a high degree of certainty is that the topic of energy will only become more interesting over coming decades.» login or register now to comment!i am a research scientist searching for the objective reality about the longer-term sustainability of industrialized human civilization on planet earth. issues surrounding energy and climate are of central importance in this sustainability picture and i therefore seek to learn more from the energy collective community. my current research focus is on second generation co2 capture processes ...would you like to contribute to this site? get started »
 if a historian were to draw a line connecting jean piaget’s work on developmental psychology to today’s trends in educational technology, the line would simply be labeled “papert.” and perhaps the most remarkable thing about that line would be the other points it intersects along its course of more than fifty years. seymour papert has been at the center of three revolutions: child development, artificial intelligence and computational technologies for education. his storied career could be likened to a series of seismic events that continue to be felt around the world, from fundamental basic research on human and machine cognition to applied research that has touched children around the world. can anyone envision a school robotics subculture without papert? can we imagine the entire field of computational literacy without him? or for that matter, most of technology-enabled project-based learning?papert, who was born on february 29, 1928 in pretoria, south africa, has written very little about his early years, although he noted in “mindstorms,” an early fascination with gears. papert was a philosophy student at south africa’s university of witwatersrand, where he received a doctorate in mathematics in 1952. as the recipient of a british commonwealth scholarship, he proceeded to st. john’s college at cambridge, where he earned a second doctorate in 1958. as part of his doctoral work, papert had spent time at the henri poincaré institute at the university of paris. it was in paris that he would meet jean piaget.papert would spend four years working under piaget at the international centre of genetic epistemology, at the university of geneva. the young mathematician was profoundly influenced by piaget’s work on how children make sense of their world – not as “miniature adults” or empty vessels, but as active agents interacting with the world and building ever-evolving theories. piaget’s constructivist principles in the nascent field of child development were the foundation for papert’s later development of constructionism in educational contexts. papert wrote in 1991:constructionism shares constructivism’s connotation of learning as ‘building knowledge structures’ irrespective of the circumstances of the learning. it then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.in later work papert would diverge or expand on the piagetian worldview, but piaget’s influence would still be overwhelmingly apparent through the rest of his career. during his time in geneva, papert had made another serendipitous connection that would have great repercussions: at a 1960 symposium on information theory in london, he met marvin minsky where they both coincidentally presented papers on a similar theorem. later in close partnership with minsky, papert became co-founder of mit’s artificial intelligence lab. he believed that piaget’s seminal work on learning processes would be a great boost to ai. “perceptrons,” the groundbreaking 1970 book by minsky and papert, was possibly the first look at ai to gain widespread notice beyond domain experts.if one were to, albeit unfairly, measure papert’s career by the sheer number of people a project touched, logo would eclipse all other achievements. in 1968, papert, cynthia solomon, daniel bobrow, and wally feurzeig crafted logo, a revolutionary programming language, the first designed expressly for use by children, at a time when computers used to fill entire rooms and were impossibly complicated. papert’s vision was that children should be programming the computer rather than being programmed by it. in 1970, papert convened a symposium at mit called “teaching children thinking” where he laid out his case for children teaching computers. this radical idea would float around for nearly two decades before digital tools would become commonplace in the classroom. and yet to this day, there is still a great gap between paradigms: is the machine driving the child or vice versa?before papert's vision could be fully realized, there was the question of programming behavior in physical objects, as opposed to control of what’s on the screen. papert’s research with students in brookline, mass. convinced him that children learned more efficiently if they could see a tangible result for their computing efforts. the first turtle was a physical robot (and later a virtual one) that could be programmed by logo commands and draw geometrical shapes. papert's work entered mainstream consciousness in 1980, with the publication of the seminal “mindstorms: children, computers and powerful ideas.” mit’s epistemology and learning group, which papert founded in 1981, attracted a legion of bright students and researchers who over the next two decades, would bring to millions of children advanced ideas and technologies such as robotics, multi-agent modeling, system dynamics, and digital fabrication. the lego company itself would eventually transform many of these ideas into products under the title “mindstorms,” in honor of papert.gary stager, the creator of the most comprehensive set of papert documents online, believes the “father of educational computing” rarely gets acknowledged today. stager writes:while papert’s innovation, scholarship and wisdom is widely recognized across the globe and among scientists, his half century of contributions is largely invisible. it is not that educators disagree with papert’s theories or recommendations, they just ignore him entirely. this ‘idea aversion’ (a term of papert’s) is manifest by papert’s absence from teacher education texts, educational technology publications and school reform literature.papert, for his part, has never seemed troubled by playing the provocateur to the educational establishment. in a 2002 mit speech he said:the essence of piaget was how much learning occurs without being planned or organized by teachers or schools. his whole point was that children develop intellectually without being taught!papert’s constructionism has, at its heart, a desire not to revise, but to invert the world of curriculum-driven instruction. if there is one keystone concept from papert that will forever set the teeth of educational administrators on edge, it is probably this, from “mindstorms”:many children are held back in their learning because they have a model of learning in which you have either ‘got it’ or ‘got it wrong.’ but when you program a computer you almost never get it right the first time. learning to be a master programmer is learning to become highly skilled at isolating and correcting bugs ... the question to ask about the program is not whether it is right or wrong, but if it is fixable. if this way of looking at intellectual products were generalized to how the larger culture thinks about knowledge and its acquisition we might all be less intimidated by our fears of ‘being wrong.’papert was perhaps the first interaction designer especially concerned with digital tools and children. his awareness that children effectively think differently than adults, and that their cognitive evolution requires designing rich toolkits and environments rather than force-feeding knowledge, has set the tone for decades of research. the combination of developmental psychology, ai, and technology proved to be powerful and generative, and created a new genre of educational technologies. papert was an inspirational force that motivated an entire generation of researchers and practitioners to bring his vision to the world. but the work is far from done. for example, why is it that half a century after these ideas were formulated, still we do not have robust forms of assessment by which to evaluate this vision?perhaps stager said it best, when speaking to a group of papert’s academic progeny:each of us and our work represents but a tiny fraction of papert’s legacy. it might take thousands of us to assemble the quilt that is the life and legacy of seymour papert.
 the nyc-based tech business, initially known as rap genius, was founded in 2009 by yale graduates mahbod moghadam, ilan zechory and tom lehman as a destination dedicated to analyzing hip-hop lyrics -- or, as they put it at the time, "critiquing rap as poetry." the site executed a $15 million funding round with silicon valley venture capital firms andreeson/horowitz in the fall of 2012 and, to date, boasts $55 million in venture capital funding (including $40 million in 2014 alone). the business, which changed its name to genius last summer, boasts more than 40 million unique users and counts rapper nas among its investors ( moghadam has since resigned from the company and board of directors).question marks lingered over the company's business model, and its leaders were initially targeted (along with 50 others) by the nmpa with takedown notices. those copyright concerns were seemingly shelved when the trade body in 2014 joined sony/atv and umpg in coming to an agreement, ahead of possible licensing deals, with the site.frere-jones' hire is another plank in the company's plans to broaden its business empire. already, genius has extended its activities from annotating rap llyrics to lines from shakespeare, to the bible and beyond. rap genius' founders have said they hoped their site and its users would eventually annotate the world, the times notes."my remit is going into the lyrics site and building a team," frere-jones commented, adding his duties would involve "going on the site and sort of writing some exemplary posts, or saying here's how you might think about annotating, or encouraging other posters."genius is said to have recruited another journalist, christopher glazek, to focus on politics and culture annotations, while the new yorker is on the hunt for a new critic.
 technology spending is on its way down. or it isn’t. or it doesn’t matter.by andrew mcafee on september 3, 2014my mit colleague david autor delivered a wonderful paper at the recent jackson hole economic policy symposium about american job and wage patterns in recent decades, and their link to the computerization of the economy. i’ll say more later about his paper, which was one of the highlights of the event for me (sighting this moose was another one). for now i just want to highlight one graph that he included, and draw a couple additional ones.autor included a chart very much like the one below, which tracks us corporate spending over time on digital stuff — hardware and software — as a percentage of gdp:the most striking pattern in this graph is the sharp increase in the late 1990s, and the steep falloff since then. we’re spending just about a full percentage point of gdp less on it than we were fifteen years ago. this seems like a compelling prima facie case for believing that it’s impact on the economy and the labor force should be less than it was before the turn of the century.and this is what autor believes. as he writesthe onset of the weak u.s. labor market of the 2000s coincided with a sharp deceleration in computer investment—a fact that appears first-order inconsistent with the onset of a new era of capital-­labor substitution.i completely agree with him (based largely on his very convincing work ) that other factors have strongly shaped the us economy and labor force since the 2000, particularly the emergence of china as an offshoring and manufacturing powerhouse. but i’m not so sure that the impact of digital technologies tapered off to the extent the graph above would have us believe.to see this, let’s break out the data on software. information processing equipment is simply a vehicle for software, in much the same way that a bottle of 5-hour energy is a delivery system for caffeine. hardware runs software, in other words, and it’s software that runs things.it’s easy to lose sight of that fact in an era of gorgeous devices like apple’s, but without the apps my iphone is just a… phone. it’s software that is ‘ eating the world ,’ to use marc andreessen’s memorable phrase.so how has software spending held up? pretty well:there was a slight dropoff after the dot-com bubble burst and the y2k fiasco passed, but we’re back near the all-time software spending peak. it’s true that this spending has been pretty flat for the past fifteen years, but we should keep in mind that this is also the time when open source software and the cloud and everything-as-a-service burst on the scene. all of these development have significantly lowered the bill for a given level of enterprise software capability, so i look at the graph above as pretty good evidence of constantly increasing demand for software, even though spending has remained constant for a while now.the ascendancy of software can be seen in a graph of its share of total it spending over time:software now accounts for over half of all it spending. as moore’s law, volume manufacturing, and the cloud continue to drive down the costs of hardware, i expect software’s share of total spend to continue to rise steadily.i don’t know what’s going to happen to total it investment as a percentage of gdp going forward. it does feel to me like a sea change is taking place — that it’s getting so much cheaper to acquire digital technologies that even if demand for them rises strongly in the future total spending on them might not (or as an economist would put it, the price effect might be greater than the quantity effect).so even if the first graph above doesn’t greatly change its shape in the years to come, i won’t take that as evidence that the digital revolution has run its course. will you?i think a huge on factor on it spending going down is the cloud.  you are not spending millions on data centers, servers, racks, etc…as more and more companies use the cloud, less spend on hardware.  i also think that most companies started these days are built in the cloud and require less people, thus no huge offices with network cables, servers, etc.  also the cost open source software has people using google docs versus office.  you see a swing up with iot and digital capable experiences in stores, but nothing like the 80s and 90s on hardware.virtualization and cloud have shifted the money to software and service spending which is giving organizations the ability to operationalize these expenses rather than capitalize and depreciate them.  their spends labeled as software/services but they are also paying for the physical assets in the background.  i question if they are capturing the costs of all the hardware and networks that run the cloud.  i understand moores law and the ability to buy more computing power for less but the demands software put on hardware are continuously growing, we don’t do more with less, we do more with more, for the same amount of money.a clearer picture of the economy as related to digital things would have to include the consumer market.  the digital world is not dominated by corporations and many of the biggest players are predominantly consumer focused.  imo this shift is one of the most disruptive to the overall industry and economy.  i would bet that annual spending on electronic equipment per household has increased over time even though the cost of features/capabilities has gone down.   if you include digital services and software at the household level i have a hard time imagining that spending on all things digital is doing anything but going up at a steady pace.iot is going to fill the void of hardware spending that you are seeing at the corporate level.  companies may not be buying as many servers but everything else you buy is going to have 100s, 1000s or even millions of sensors and transmitters that make it “smart” and “connected”.  ipv6 is evidence of this, we have a lot more houses on the streets but they don’t cost as much as they used to.virtualization really has changed the playing field, but big data still means big $$. the engineers have to be far superior, and the more the data grows, the more expenses will grow. we have a mid level setup here in dc seo expert http://dcseoexpert.comi agree with some of the other commenters about virtualization, big data, and iot.  it spending will need to continue apace of continued technology innovations, though as mentioned in the article as well, this may well be more skewed toward software rather than hardware investments.  in fact, according to the data from a 2015 survey here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcngox-ybnw ) security is going to be a top priority as well as business optimization, rather than new innovation technologies in the next year.ultrasonic crusher is a kind of new method which can be used to calculus breaking on clinic. more about it, please see here: http://www.toption-china.com/products/ultrasonic-cell-crusher-ordinary-type . the effect produced by this machinery wave can make the calculus has a cavitation and disintegration then naturally expelled out of human body.
 fighting for the "right to try" unapproved drugs: law as persuasionover the last several months, five states have passed “right to try” laws, 1 which are designed to allow terminally ill patients to obtain experimental drugs. 2 often popularly known as “dallas buyers club” laws, 3 right to try legislation appears to bypass the fda’s safety procedures—procedures that supporters of right to try legislation believe too often prevent the terminally ill from accessing drugs that might save their lives. 4the reality of right to try laws, however, is very different. media descriptions often do not even mention one of the most pressing questions surrounding these laws: do state laws on drug access meaningfully alter the legal regime governing experimental drugs? 5 regardless of the substantive merits of allowing terminally ill patients to use experimental drugs, fda regulations require drugs to be approved before they can be sold to consumers, and right to try laws do nothing to change that. so what is the purpose of these laws?i suggest that right to try laws do not themselves meaningfully alter substantive law but instead serve a different function. by advocating for these reforms, the movement’s leaders 6 are seeking to persuade policy makers at other levels of government. their aim is either to promote federal policy reform through the fda or congress, or to convince federal courts to recognize a right to try under the constitution. the laws’ supporters are using state legislatures as forums to draw attention to and legitimate their cause. the right to try saga therefore demonstrates an important feature of american federalism: even when federal law ensures that states lack legal power to alter substantive law meaningfully, state actors can still use their legislative processes to promote their desired policies and constitutional interpretations at the federal level.i proceed in three parts. part i describes the content of the right to try laws and the context surrounding their passage. part ii argues that state right to try laws are unlikely to lead directly to wider access to drugs. finally, part iii argues that right to try laws instead serve the purpose of persuading federal decision makers to reform federal law.existing right to try laws share several common characteristics. most generally, they codify a position that the state government will not interfere with a terminally ill patient’s attempt to save her life. 7 the laws enact this general policy in two ways. first, they permit doctors to prescribe and drug companies to provide any drug, biological product, or medical device that might save an otherwise terminal patient, as long as it has passed the fda’s phase 1 testing and some minimal procedures are followed. 8 under fda regulations, such drugs would not otherwise be available to the general public for several years (though they are sometimes made available to terminal patients through the administration’s “expanded access” program). 9 second, right to try laws shield, at least to some extent, doctors and drug companies from state tort liability for providing experimental drugs. 10 however, these laws do not create any requirement or incentive for drug companies to provide the drugs or for insurance companies to cover them.advocacy organizations dedicated to the right to try have supported these recent laws. we can trace the genesis of the right to try movement back to abigail burroughs, who died of cancer in 2001. 11 her doctors had advised her that an unapproved drug, erbitux, might save her life. 12 burroughs’s family launched a media campaign to get her the drug, pressuring both the producers and congress to allow her access. 13 she died without ever getting a chance to try it. 14burroughs’s father, frank, then established the abigail alliance for better access to developmental drugs with the mission of facilitating access for future patients in abigail’s situation. 15 the alliance’s first major effort was to sue the fda, claiming a constitutional due process right for terminally ill patients to access unapproved drugs. 16 in 2006, a divided three-judge panel of the d.c. circuit found that the constitution indeed provided this right. 17 the panel’s decision would have constitutionalized the putative substance of the current right to try laws had the decision stood (at least in the district of columbia). 18 however, in 2007, the d.c. circuit reheard the case en banc and reversed the panel. 19after a quiet interval of a few years, right to try backers turned their attention from federal courts to state legislatures. recently, five states have adopted right to try laws with bipartisan support. 20 while the alliance has long lobbied for right to try laws, 21 the goldwater institute, a libertarian think tank, has been the driving force behind this recent wave of legislation. the institute wrote and publicized model legislation, 22 which the recent bills have largely followed, and it engaged in a broad campaign to establish the right to try in state legislatures. 23right to try’s supporters have successfully framed the laws as both a boon to personal liberty and a remedy for bureaucratic failure. 24 they state that the laws enshrine “the fundamental right of people to try to save their own lives” 25 and describe them as “dallas buyers club laws”—that is, laws that might have prevented some of the horrors of the aids crisis as portrayed by the 2013 film. 26 the fact that laws have been passed in multiple states suggests that these efforts have been by and large successful; it may be unpopular to argue that terminal patients shouldn’t be allowed to try whatever drug their doctor thinks might work.beneath the rhetoric, however, the force of these laws is much less certain. it is not clear that the states have power to legislate on this matter in the first place. 27the fda requires patients seeking access to unapproved drugs to go through its expanded access program. 28 this process intends to ensure that the potential benefit to the patient from using a drug is not outweighed by the risks. 29 (experimental drugs have potential downsides even for terminal patients, such as excessive pain or reduced lifespans.) 30 absent approval through the expanded access program, fda regulations prevent access to drugs that have not completed all three stages of the fda’s approval process. 31numerous reports assert that right to try laws let patients “bypass” or “circumvent” the fda expanded access process. 32 however, the laws do not explicitly “bypass” federal law; it is more accurate to describe them as establishing a “right to try” under state law, irrespective of federal law. even if a law did attempt to “bypass” the expanded access process, that aspect of the law would be invalid, since it would contradict federal requirements. 33 either way, the result is the same: fda regulations still prevent drug companies from providing experimental drugs to terminal patients, and right to try laws do not protect companies or individuals from liability under federal law.a state right to try therefore does not meaningfully change the legal regime to which drug companies are subject and so is unlikely to bring unapproved drugs to more patients. 34that said, it is possible that some patients will obtain unapproved drugs as a direct result of these laws. the fda has not taken an official position on right to try laws, 35 and it is possible that political pressures would prevent the agency from actively opposing the laws. 36 as the cases of marijuana legalization in washington and colorado have shown, the federal government may choose not to enforce federal law where a state has legalized a practice under its own laws. 37access to experimental drugs, however, differs from marijuana legalization in at least one important respect. marijuana producers have an obvious financial incentive to sell the drug to consumers. 38 in contrast, for right to try laws to help anyone, the drug companies must risk fda enforcement and other issues for financial returns that are likely to be marginal. the number of patients seeking access to experimental drugs is necessarily small, 39 since participants must be terminally ill, unable to get into a nearby clinical trial, and unable to find a reasonable alternative—while also desiring to use a drug the fda has not yet deemed effective. this would limit the financial upside of providing unapproved drugs. given that it takes, on average, ten years and roughly $1 billion to complete the fda approval process, 40 the money a company might make from such experimental sales would likely be nominal compared to the costs of development. moreover, even without fear of fda enforcement, drug companies are often reluctant to provide access to experimental drugs, reasoning that a bad outcome might damage a drug’s chances of being approved, 41 or that a company should focus its resources on the approval process. 42 while right to try laws shield pharmaceutical companies from state tort liability, limiting their exposure significantly, a careful lawyer would still almost certainly advise her client to go through the fda process.so long as the right to try remains a creature solely of state law, it will be unlikely to get many more drugs to patients. the most likely short-term outcome is that few, and perhaps no, drugs will be provided to patients that would not have been available otherwise. 43if this analysis is correct, do right to try laws simply lack a purpose? some commentators have suggested this is the case, 44 but i don’t think so. as toothless as the current laws may be, their passage can support a campaign of persuasion that may ultimately lead to meaningful federal reform.if a law is passed, it is natural to assume that its primary effect consists in the legal rights it creates or removes. when a legislature passes a law outlawing a particular drug, its undoubted purpose is to deter and punish those who use the drug. under ordinary circumstances, it would be strange for a politician supporting a bill to say, “i believe this law will not meaningfully create or alter substantive law, but i think we should pass it anyway.”however, within our federal system, with its multiple sources of law and separate legislative bodies, a state law can also serve to persuade federal decision makers. this is one of the assumptions behind the famous “laboratories of democracy” theory of federalism, which celebrates the way in which state-level legal experiments can become models for nationwide reforms. 45 indeed, it is common for a policy movement to begin by seeking changes to state law on the road to its ultimate aim of changing federal law. 46 such a strategy can have two benefits from a movement’s perspective: first, it can bring the desired policy to a segment of the population before the whole country is prepared to accept it (though not in the case of right to try). second, and more relevant here, it draws greater national attention to the issue 47 and conveys the point that respectable public figures believe in the policy. in this sense, state laws can serve to legitimate a policy and help to develop its constituency, even if the laws themselves do not alter the current legal regime in a meaningful way.state right to try laws primarily leverage this second benefit. the movement seeks to influence federal policymakers, from congressmen 48 to fda regulators to federal judges. it increases the salience of the issue for the american public 49 and may help to achieve what jack balkin calls putting a constitutional argument “on the wall”—that is, convincing elites that the position is legitimate. 50 frank burroughs himself, founder of the abigail alliance, has gestured at some of these goals: “[a lawsuit challenging state right to try laws] wouldn’t be all bad news because it would further elevate this issue in the public arena and put pressure on congress and the fda to make this change.” 51therefore, while the current right to try laws do not create new rights, they are not necessarily futile. the movement behind them is leveraging a facet of american federalism: that state laws can be used to persuade federal actors. in the future, the right to try may become an entrenched legal right, and these laws, currently toothless, may very well have made the difference.sam adriance is a member of the yale law school class of 2015. he would like to thank mike labson for his helpful suggestions and zach arnold and editors of the yale law journal for their thoughtful feedback.preferred citation: sam adriance, fighting for the “right to try” unapproved drugs: law as persuasion, 124 yale l.j. f. 148 (2014), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/right-to-try-unapproved-drugs.
 autocrats can always cultivate prodigies. the question is what to do with the remaining 99%.imagine an economic historian in the year 2050 talking to her students about the most consequential innovations of the early 21st century—the model ts and wright flyers and penicillins of our time. what would make her list?surely fracking—shorthand for the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that is making the u.s. the world’s leading oil and gas producer—would be noted. surely social media—the bane of autocrats like turkey’s recep tayyip erdogan and of parents like me—would also get a mention....to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 from brazil to thailand, firms that sold bonds in dollars now face steep, even staggering coststhe soaring u.s. dollar is squeezing companies in emerging markets from brazil to thailand that now face higher costs on roughly $1 trillion in bonds sold to investors before the greenback’s surge.for 2014, the dollar is on track to gain more than 7% compared with a group of emerging-market currencies tracked by the federal reserve bank of st. louis as the rise ripples through economies around the world, it is causing particular...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 november 19, 2000 |michael a. hiltzik | times staff writer michael a. hiltzik, winner of a 1999 pulitzer prize, is author of the book "dealers of lightning: xerox parc and the dawn of the computer age" (harpercollins). he is working on his first novellate in 1998, a young researcher delving into the secret history of a 30-year-old supercomputer project at ibm published an appeal for help. as mark smotherman explained in an internet posting, he knew that the project had pioneered several supercomputing technologies. but beyond that, the trail was cold. ibm itself appeared to have lost all record of the work, as if having experienced a corporate lobotomy. published details were sketchy and its chronology full of holes. he had been unable to find anyone with full knowledge of what had once been called "project y."within a few days, a cryptic e-mail arrived at smotherman's clemson university office in south carolina. the sender was lynn conway, one of the most distinguished american women in computer science. she seemed not only to know the entire history of project y, but to possess reams of material about it.over the next few weeks, conway helped smotherman fill in many of the gaps, but her knowledge presented him with another mystery: how did she know? there was no mention of her name in any of the team rosters. nor was any association with ibm mentioned in her published resume or in the numerous articles about her in technical journals. when he probed, she would reply only that she had worked at the company under a different name--and her tone made it clear there was no point in asking further.what smotherman could not know was that his appeal for strictly technical information had presented lynn conway with a deeply personal dilemma. she was eager for the story of ibm's project to emerge and for her own role in the work to be celebrated, not suppressed. but she knew that could not happen without opening a door on her past she had kept locked for more than 30 years.only after agonizing for weeks did conway telephone smotherman and unburden herself of an extraordinary story."you see," she began, "when i was at ibm, i was a boy."nature directs living things into a vast maze of sexual diversity from which our culture provides only two acceptable exits: male and female. gender is the most fundamental component of our self-image, the foundation of the personality we present to everyone around us. think of the very first question one asks about a newborn: "is it a boy or a girl?"today the intricacies of gender have worked their way into cultural, scientific, even political debate. why shouldn't girls compete against boys in math, or on the playground? would little boys be less beastly if society discouraged rough play? where, in fact, does our gender identity reside: in our physique? our brain? or somewhere deeper, in our soul?that society has begun to grapple openly with these issues suggests how profoundly absorbing the subject is. "there's a little bit of each gender in each person, so there's something intriguing about what exists on the other side," says george brown, a psychiatrist at the veterans administration medical center in johnson city, tenn. "but there's also a threat that in exploring the subject i might find out something i feel is very dangerous." this implicit threat may explain why, over the past 30 years, science has learned less about the mysteries of gender than about the origins of the universe.transsexualism, the most extreme expression of gender discordance, may be our last taboo. at least 40,000 americans have undertaken the surgery and therapy to make the transition from male to female and as many as 20,000 more may have gone from female to male. but so strong is the stigma, so blatant the discrimination, that most keep the change a secret by shedding their old lives, jobs and friends along with their old gender. lynn conway, among the first americans to undergo a sex change, came to give the secret life into which it forced her a name: "stealth."today conway lives in a home outside ann arbor, where she is professor of computer science emerita at the university of michigan. slim and tall, with light brown hair, long, slender fingers and an engineer's unsentimental directness, she says she knew that the operation that changed her gender would consign her to a life of hardship. and she knew it would be worth it. peering out over the 24 acres of meadow, marsh and woodland she shares with her boyfriend of 13 years in a rural district of lower michigan, she recalls the risks she confronted three decades ago. "the prediction by everyone then was that what was happening to me would be a disaster," she says. "but sometimes in your gut, you know something is right."
 alright, this was when i was six, so the memory is a little fuzzy at this point but, as i recall, i was grounded for some reason, i don't know why, but i felt it was unjust, and i really wanted to go to my cousin's party, who was five - so it was a kid's party. at first i was going to take my bike, and i told my mum this, which was a mistake. she told me some story about how you needed a license for a bike and the police would stop me. i wasn't 100% sure if that was true or not, but i thought i better walk, just in case. i sort of thought i knew the way, but it was clear across town, so i was 10 or 12 miles away, it's really quite far. further than i realized actually. so i just started walking to my cousin's house. i think it took me about four hours. just as my mum was leaving that party with my brother and sister she saw me walking down the road and freaked out. i saw she saw me, so i then sprinted to my cousin's house and i was just about two blocks away and i climbed a tree and refused to come down.when i was about ten i walked into a computer store in south africa and saw an actual computer. i'd previously had some sort of early precursors to the atari system and then i got the atari system, which i'm sure a lot of people here have played, but then i saw actually having a computer where you could make your own games, and it was a commodore vic-20. so that was the first computer i bought, and i got some books on how to teach yourself programming, and this was like the coolest thing i'd ever seen. so i was just like, this is super awesome. so i started programming games and then selling games in order to actually buy more games - a bit of a circular thing - more games and better computers and that sort of thing. yeah. basically i'd spend money on better computers and dungeons and dragons modules and stuff like that. nerdmaster 3000 basically.i did like the comic ironman, yeah. [question about being inspiration for the movie version.] i did not. that was pretty - i would have said, 0% chance. [what kind of kid were you?] i wasn't that much of a loner, at least not willingly, but i certainly was quite - i was very bookish, i was reading all the time. i was either reading, working on my computer, reading comics, playing dungeons and dragons, that kind of thing. i guess when i was around 12 or 13, i came to an existential crisis and i was reading various books trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean? cause it all seemed quite meaningless. we happened to have some books by niche and schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at age 14, it's bad. it's really negative. but then i read hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which is quite positive i think and it sort of highlighted an important point which is that a lot times the question is harder than the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. so, to the degree that we can understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask and then whatever the question is that best approximates 'what's the meaning of life?', you know, that's the question that we could ultimately get closer to understanding, and so i thought well, to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and human knowledge, then that would be a good thing. [when were you having these deep thoughts?] puberty i guess - 13 through 15, probably the most traumatic years.[question about getting out of south africa.] i did hatch the plan earlier. actually, i tried to hatch several plans, which did not hatch. [why the usa?] whenever i'd read about cool technology it would tend to be in the united states, or more broadly, north america, including canada. so i kinda wanted to be where the cutting edge of technology was and, of course, within the united states, silicon valley is where the heart of things is, although, at the time, i didn't know where silicon valley was - it sounded like some mythical place. so i wanted to come to the us. i tried to convince my mother or father, who were divorced, if either one would move to the united states then i could get there. at one point i convinced my father and then he reneged, unfortunately. he did say yes, and then he changed his mind. [why?] i don't know. i guess he was fairly established, he was an engineer established in south africa and didn't want to have to go through that again in another country. so yeah, i actually got - my mother was born in canada and her father was american but unfortunately, she didn't get her american citizenship so that broke the link and i couldn't get my american citizenship but she was born in canada, so, i could get - i actually filled out the forms for her and got her canadian passport and me too, and within three weeks of getting my canadian passport i was in canada. i was in canada for a few years at queen's university and got a scholarship to go down to university of pennsylvanian because one of the downsides of coming to a university in north america was that my parents said they would not pay for college - or, my father said he would not pay for college unless it was in south africa. so, i could have free college in south africa or find someone to pay it here and fortunately i got a scholarship at u-penn and so i did a dual undergraduate in business and physics at u-penn.[question about three most important things for humanity.] i think i was thinking about it for a few years, during freshman and sophomore year at queen's and then also at u-penn and i was trying to think, what would most influence the future, what are the problems we have to solve, and i actually talked a lot to friends and my housemates and that sort of thing, and dates - which was probably not the best thing. i actually met a woman i dated briefly in college who now works at scientific american as a writer and she related the anecdote that when we went on a date, all i was talking about was electric cars. that was not a winning conversation. she said the first question i asked her was: do you ever think about electric cars? she said no, she never did. that wasn't great, but recently it's been more effective.[why silicon valley?] i was at penn and there was a professor who was chairman of a company in silicon valley who was working on advanced capacitors potentially for use in electric cars. as it turns out they're way too expensive. i thought, well, this is really awesome. i asked if i could get a summer job because it was in silicon valley and working on technology for electric cars. i thought, well, that's pretty much as good as it gets. so, i got a summer job here - it was in los gatos actually, at pinnacle research during electrolytic ultra-capacitors. the problem was that they use ruthenium tetroxide and there was, i think, only a few tons of ruthenium mined in the world, so not very scalable. you know, they'd sell it to you by the milligram. that's seen as a problem. but it had a pretty high energy density, roughly equivalent to lead-acid battery, which for a capacitor is huge.then i thought, well, stanford is in silicon valley, it's sort of the epicenter, so that's where i wanted to come. near stanford or berkley and stanford is sort of sunnier, so i liked it. this was the summer of '95 and i'd been working on some internet software because the three things that i thought would affect the world were internet, sustainable energy and space exploration - making like multi-planetary, but on the internet thing, i just couldn't figure out how to make enough money to feed myself. if i couldn't make money then i'd run out of food and die. that was not good. if i was a student then, i could be a teaching assistant and do various things and do research on electric vehicle technologies - that was my default plan - but i also thought that if i did a phd at stanford then i would spend several years watching the internet go through this incredibly rapid growth phase and that would be really difficult to handle - so i really wanted to be doing something. it really seemed like things were going to take off, although nobody had made any money in internet at the time. in '95, really, no-one was making any money in the internet. in fact, even on sand hill road people were like, what's the internet? amazingly, when we tried to get funding for a company in, i think it was, november of '95, more than half of the venture capitalists did not know what the internet was and had not used it. yeah, they'd literally ask, isn't that something that the government and universities use? and i'd be like, uhh, for now.but then, netscape went public in late 1995, i think it was, and then after that even a lot venture capitalists still didn't understand it, and still hadn't used it. somebody had made money on it, so the second time we went to get funding, everyone was interested. [this was zip2?] that's right. funny name. we were just incredibly stupid at the time, i think. that's the main reason for that name. we thought, we don't know anything about names, so we'll get some ad agencies to suggest a bunch of options and then zip2, seemed kind of speedy. i don't know why the hell we chose that stupid name, and it has a digit in it. why would you chose - it could be zipto, it could be ziptwo, it could be ziptoo, so people literally spelt the name every variation - which is bad if you've got a url and you don't have the other ones. zip2 started off as, basically, like i said, we're trying to figure out how to make enough money to exist as a company and so, as there wasn't really any advertising money being made, we thought we could help existing companies get online - bring their stuff online - so we developed software that helped bring a lot of the newspapers and media companies online. a lot of them just didn't know what the internet was and even the ones that were aware of the internet didn't have a software team, so they weren't very good at developing functionality. we had as investors and customers: the new york times company, nightrider, herst, and so we were able to get them to pay us to develop software for them to bring them online publishing stuff. we did maps and directions and yellow pages and white pages and various other things. we developed quite sophisticated technology, actually, but it wasn't actually being employed super well by the media companies. we would suggest ways to use it and then it would not be used as effectively as it could be. it was very frustrating.[zip2 was bought by compaq.] that's right. compaq had altavista, so their thought was to combine altavista and a bunch of other technology companies and see if that would work, which it did not. none the less, they were pretty nice guys and bought the company and that gave me the capital to do another company. i wanted to do another company with internet because i thought we hadn't really reached the potential that we could have with zip2. we had really sophisticated software.. our software was at least comparable to what yahoo or excite or others had. in fact, i thought in some ways it was better, but because it was all filtered through these partners it wasn't getting properly used. so i thought, i want to do something that can be a more significant contribution to the internet and so the initial thought was financial services because money is digital, it's low bandwidth, at the time there was - you know, most people were on slow modems, because this was late '98, early '99.[x.com became paypal.] yeah, it worked out better than we expected. initially, confinity and x.com started out from slightly different directions and converged to the same point. with x, the thought was to create an integrated set of financial services, so you could go to one place and do any financial thing and then, as a feature, we had the ability to transfer money or securities or anything, simply by entering a unique identifier - so, like, an email address or a phone number or something like that - but when we'd demo the system, the hard stuff - which was the integration of all the financial services - people would not be interested in, but they'd be real interested in being able to transfer money using an email address. that was actually quite easy, and so we focused our energy on that. although it's easy in principle, what gets really hard is adding security while still keeping it easy to use. it's like the willy loman quote, why do you rob banks, because that's where the money is. why do people rob paypal? same reason. you can dial up the security to a really high level but then you're going to make it very hard to use. that was one of the toughest things we wrestled with. then, confinity originally started as software for palm pilots and they had a demonstration application with the ability to beam money from one palm pilot to another using the infrared port. yeah, if people remember that one. that was big at one point. they had a website, sort of parallel to that, where - because, once you'd beamed the infrared tokens you had to still then synchronize your palm pilot and do the transfer via the website. then people weren't so interested in the palm pilot stuff, but they were interested in the website, so we kind of converged to the same point, and were quite close together so we decided to merge the companies and, in, i think, january or so 2000 - it was a very turbulent period. the growth in the company was pretty crazy. at the end of the first 4 or 5 weeks, we had 100,000 customers.[did you anticipate that?] we definitely did not, and it wasn't all good because we had some bugs in the software and, ya know, even if the bug only occurs 1 in 1000 times, it's still 100 very angry customers - where's my money? that would be a reasonable concern that people would have. we had customer service on university avenue in palo alto. there were five people. so, when something went wrong, customer service phones would basically explode. we had many challenges and then the various financial regulatory agencies were trying to shut us down. visa and mastercard were trying to shut us down. e-bay was trying to shut us down. ftc was trying to shut us down. there were a lot of battles there. it was a close call. we definitely became very close to dying there in 2000 and 2001. i think we had a really talented group of people at paypal and a lot of people have actually gone on to start many other companies - youtube, linked-in, yelp, yammer, it's quite a long list actually.[did you ever consider retiring?] no, not really. i did take a bit of time off. i did reasonably well from paypal. i was the largest shareholder in the company and we were acquired for about a billion and a half in stock and then the stock doubled. so yeah, i did reasonably well, but "the idea of lying on a beach as my main thing, just sounds like the worst - it sounds horrible to me. i would go bonkers. i would have to be on serious drugs." i'd be super-duper bored. i like high intensity - i mean, i like going to the beach for a short period of time, but not much longer than a few days or something like that.[how did spacex start?] when i was thinking about what would affect the world, as a student, it wasn't really from the standpoint of those are the things i'll get involved in - it was kinda more in the abstract, of these are the things that i think will happen that will affect the world, but not that i will be involved in them. as it turns out i have, but i always thought that we would make much more progress in space, and it just didn't happen. it's really disappointing. i was really quite bothered by it. when we went to the moon, we were supposed to have a base on the moon. we were supposed to send people to mars, and that stuff, it just didn't happen. it's as if we went backwards. we got the space shuttle but the space shuttle could only go to low earth orbit, whereas a saturn v could go to the moon. now the space shuttle's gone and so, that just seemed like a really bad thing. so i thought, well, maybe it was a question of there not being enough attention or will to do this, but this was a wrong assumption, but that's the reason for the greenhouse idea.. the thought was, if there could be a small philanthropic mission to mars.. so, i was expecting to lose all the money that i invested in that.. but if we could send a small greenhouse to the surface of mars will seeds in dehydrated nutrient gel to be hydrated upon landing, you'd have this great shot of a little greenhouse with little green plants on a red background. i thought that would get people excited. you've gotta sort of imagine the money shot, if you will. so yeah, i think green plants on red background would be not bad, and people tend to get interested and excited about precedents and superlatives. so this would be the furtherest that life's ever traveled, the first life on mars, as far as we know, and i thought, well, maybe that would result in a bigger budget for nasa and then we could resume the journey. that was the basic idea. i spent several months on this, actually, and went to russia, three times. i was able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft low and the communications and the greenhouse and all that, down to a reasonable number - reasonable meaning several million dollars.[did you do a drawing of the greenhouse?] yeah, i hope we've got that somewhere. i mean, i'm sure it looks pretty goofy in retrospect, but that's the idea that we had and i spent several hundred thousand dollars getting the design worked out and engaging some companies to come up with the design specifications for the subsystems. then it came to buying the rocket and the problem was that the cost of the rocket was really high. the lowest cost rocket in the us at the time was boeing's delta ii and that would have been about $50m and you'd still need to have an upper stage for mars, so probably like $60m all-in, and i wanted to do two of these missions because i thought if i did just one, and it didn't work, then that could have the opposite effect - look how dumb it is to try to send something to mars. what an idiot. so i wanted to do two and i just didn't have enough money to do two complete missions. [about $100m?] well, i was hoping it would be less than that, but not more than that - about roughly on that order would be the most that - i couldn't spend much more than that. i had three quite interesting trips to russia to try to negotiate purchase of two russian icbms. [did they think you were evil?] they just thought i was crazy, but that's not good either if you're buying icbms. minus the nuke, i think that would have been a lot more. i slightly got the feeling that that was on the table, which is very alarming, but yeah, those were very weird meetings with the russian military and what-not. i think they thought that i was a bit crazy but then they read about paypal so they thought, okay, he's crazy but he's got money, so importantly i could pay on-time. remarkably capitalist, was my impression.[when did you decide to start spacex instead?] i came to the conclusion that my initial premise was wrong. in fact, there's a great deal of will, there's not such a shortage, but people don't think there's a way. if people thought there was a way, or at least something that wouldn't break the federal budget, then people would support it. which, in retrospect, i think is actually kind of obvious because the united states is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. people came here from other places. there's no nation which is more a nation of explorers than the united states, but people need to believe that it's possible and they're not going to have to give up something like healthcare or something that's important. that's important. so, i thought, well then, it's not a question of will, it's a question of showing that there's a way and i started reading quite a bit about rockets to try to understand why they're so friggin' expensive. where does the $60m go for the delta ii and now i think a delta ii is now $100m or something even, some crazy number, and that's a relatively small rocket. so if you go to one of the bigger rockets it's nearer from $200m to $400m. anyway, i came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive, and they could be a lot less. even in expendable format they could be less and if one could make them reusable, like airplanes, then the cost of rocketry would drop dramatically - cost of space travel would drop dramatically. the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2% to 0.5% of the cost of the rocket. it's kind of like a plane. how much is the cost of the fuel in the plane vs the cost of the plane itself? it's at least a two order of magnitude difference. but nobody had really been able to make a reusable rocket work. so i thought that, okay, if we can do that, then that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel. so far we have not succeeded, i should point out.[why is failure so important?] i think failure is bad. i don't think it's good, but if something is important enough then you do it even though the risk of failure is high. my advice, if someone wants to start a company, is they should bare in mind that the most likely outcome is that it's not going to work and they should reconcile themselves to that strong possibility. they should only do it if they feel that they are really compelled to do it. the way starting a company works is, usually at the very beginning it's kind of fun and then it's really hellish for a number of years. yeah, there's a friend of mine who's a successful entrepreneur and started his career around the same time as i did and he has a good phrase - his name's billy - he said, yeah, starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. that's generally true, and if you don't eat the glass, you're not going to be successful.[why did you get involved with tesla?] like i said, my interest in electric vehicles goes back a long time - goes back 20 plus years. in fact, the original reason i came to silicon valley was work on electric vehicle energy storage technology. i thought that big car companies would develop electric cars because obviously it's the right move, and i thought that was vindicated when general motors was doing their ev-1 and toyota did the electric rav-4, the original one, and they made those announcements and then brought those to market. i thought, okay, this is great, we're going to have electric cars. gm is obviously going to do the ev-2 and 3 and they'll just keep getting better and everything will be cool. when california relaxed its regulations on electric cars, gm recalled all the of the ev-1s and crushed them into little cubes, which seemed kind of nutty. in fact, the people didn't want their ev-1s recalled. they tried court orders to stop the cars from being recalled. they held a candle lit vigil, okay, at the yard where the cars were crushed. i did not attend, but i was moved by it. it's crazy - i mean, when was the last time you heard about any company's customers holding a candle lit vigil for the demise of that product. particularly a gm product. i mean, what bigger wake-up call do you need? it's like, hello, the customers are really upset about this. they'd really prefer it if it didn't get recalled. that kind of blew my mind. so i was like wow, okay. then we had the advent of lithium-ion batteries which really - that's one of the key things to making electric cars work - and still nothing.so, in 2003, i had lunch with one of the other co-founders of the company, jeffrey straubel who was actually working on, i think, a hydrogen airplane or something, and he mentioned to me the t-zero car that was done by ac propulsion. they had some of the guys, i think, who had been on the ev-1 program and they took a gasoline sports car, kind of a kit car, and outfitted it with lithium-ion batteries, sort of consumer grade cells, and they created a car which was essentially the precursor of the roadster. in fact, it had very similar specifications: sub-four second 0 to 60 miles per hour, 250 mile range, and also two seater sports car, but it was quite primitive. it didn't have a roof, for one thing, at all. in fact, i don't know if it had doors. it didn't have any safety systems, no airbags, it wasn't homologated - so you couldn't sell it. so, in order to create a commercial version of the car, something we could actually produce and sell to people, there was a fair bit of work that was required. i kept trying to get ac propulsion to commercialize the t-zero and i said, look, i'll fund the whole effort, you really need to do this, and they just sort of refused to do it. they didn't want to do it. they wanted to make like an electric scion. which, in principle sounds good, but it would have cost $75,000 and no-one wants to buy a $75,000 scion. the technology was just not ready - there was just no way to make a good value-for-money proposition with something like a scion.[why did you have to be ceo of tesla?] well, i really didn't want to be ceo of two companies. i tried really hard not to be, actually. ac propulsion finally said okay. i actually told ac propulsion, look, if you're not going to do this, i'm going to create a company to do this and they said, well, there's some other guys who are also interested in doing that, and you guys should combine efforts and create a company and that's basically how tesla came together. then we had a lot of drama. since i provided, like, 95% of the money i could have been the ceo from day one, but the idea of being ceo of two startups at the same time was not appealing and shouldn't be appealing, btw, if anyone is thinking that's a good idea. it's a really terrible idea.[and solar city?] if you're going to have an epiphany to start a company, it'll probably be a burning man. solar city is part of the whole sustainable energy thing. you have to have sustainable means of producing and consuming energy. so, even if you have electric cars, you have to have the other side of the equation. so, how do you produce energy in a sustainable way and i think solar is the primary means of sustainable energy generation. in fact, the earth is almost entirely solar powered today. the only reason we're not a frozen ice ball at 3 degrees kelvin is because of the sun. the sun is responsible for all precipitation. it's responsible for the vast majority of the ecosystem, apart from chemotrobes at the bottom of the ocean. so, there's just a tiny amount of energy that people consume to power civilization. it's actually a very tiny amount of energy relative to the amount of energy that the sun sends in our general direction. to deal with that, we could, in fact, power the entire world with solar power. quite easily.[was the that epiphany you had a burning man?] oh no, i knew that long ago. i knew that in college. i wouldn't say it was a particular epiphany, it was more that i was at burning man with two of my cousins, lyndon and peter rive who are awesome guys, and they were trying to think what should they do after their first startup. they did a company called everydream which did large scale management of computers. if you're got like 60,000 computers it's kind of hard to manage them, so they created software that allows companies to do that. that company actually got sold to dell. i wouldn't say they were looking for new ideas. i was actually trying to convince them that they should do solar because i just thought it was an area that needed people like them - really good entrepreneurs - and since i was somewhat over-committed, i thought, well look, if you guys will do a solar company, i'll provide all the funding and whatever guidance or help i can provide. i'd do that. i thought it was really important that there'd be good entrepreneurs like them in solar because it just wasn't doing very well as an industry. i thought people weren't focusing on the right problem. everybody thought that the panel was the problem but actually - it's a problem, but it's not the most important problem. the panel is somewhat commoditized at this point. "making standard efficiency solar panels is about as hard as making dry wall. it's really easy. in fact, i'd say dry wall's probably harder." what is a thorny problem is trying to figure out how to get solar on tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, of rooftops. it's kind of like you've got to re-roof millions of buildings and then figure out how the grid interconnects work and then manage all those systems. if you've got hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of systems, eventually, you've got to manage all these distributed systems. you've got this really complex distributed utility, essentially. which i think actually plays to their prior strength in creating really scalable software for managing hundreds of thousands of computers in a distributed fashion. that's kinda what they did and an awesome job. i'd basically show up at the board meetings to hear, what's the good news this time? we had, like, maybe a few bad board meetings - well, late 2008 there was some bad board meetings but, for the most part, apart from a few times when the macroeconomic conditions were really terrible, they just did an amazing job with almost no help from me. yeah, they deserve the vast majority of the credit for the success of that company.[question about the pace of innovation decreasing.] no, i don't agree with that. i don't think that's true. i think we've seen - and i'm not sure over what time period this is, exactly - but we've seen huge improvements in the internet and new things. in recent years, twitter and facebook being pretty huge when people kinda thought the internet was done. i think some of the things that we're doing, like electric cars, are a new thing. i do think there's some pretty significant breakthroughs. in genomics we're getting better and better at decoding genomes and being able to write generics. that's going to be a huge huge area. i think there's likely to be some breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. i suspect we will even see the flying car. [you're going to let someone else do that?] yeah. i think someone else is doing that.[is the government standing in the way of innovation?] well sometimes the government - "i don't think the government intends to stand in the way of innovation but sometimes it can over-regulate industries to the point where innovation becomes very difficult." i mean, the car industry used to be a great hotbed of innovation, at the beginning of the 20th century, but now there's so many regulations that are meant to protect consumers. the body of regulations for cars could fill this room, it's just crazy how much regulation there is. down to what the headlamps are supposed to be like. they even specify the elements of the user interface on the dashboard, and some of these are completely anachronistic because they're relating back to the days when you had like a little light that would illuminate an image. we have to reserve space on the instrument panel on the model-s for where all the indicators that a car would have - like, you have these little lights, all these little things, there's a whole bunch of them, and we can't have anything else in that space. well, how about if we have one space and render a different graphic? oh no, because people are expecting to see it in that space. i'm like, nobody is expecting to see it in that space. [you can't argue with regulations.] well, you can argue with them, but not with great success. you can actually get these things changed but it takes ages. one of the things we're trying to get is - like, why should you have side mirrors if you can have say, little tiny video cameras and have them display an image inside the car? but there are all these regulations saying that you have to have side mirrors. i went and met with the secretary of transport, like, can you change this regulation? still nothing has happened. that was like two years ago. it's not easy to get these regulations changed.[what one thing would you request from president obama?] well, i think, actually, i think the reality of being president is that you're actually the captain of a very huge ship and have a very small rudder. obviously, if there was a button that a president could press that said economic prosperity, he'd be hitting that button real fast. you could measure the speed of light by how fast they press that button, because that's called the reelection button. so i'm not sure how much the president can really do, but you know, i'm generally a fan of minimal government interference in the economy. the government should be like, the referee but not like, the player, and there shouldn't be too many referees. there is an exception which is when there's an unpriced externality, such as the co2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere. when you have an unpriced externality then the normal market mechanisms do not work and then it's government role to intervene in a way that's sensible, and the best way to intervene is to assign a proper price to whatever the common good is that's being consumed. there should be a tax on carbon. you know, if the bad thing is carbon accumulation in the atmosphere then there needs to be a tax on that. then you can get rid of all subsidies and everything else. "it seems logical that you should tax things that are most likely to be bad rather than - like, that's why we tax cigarettes and alcohol, because those are probably bad for you." certainly cigarettes are. so, you want to err on the side of taxing things that are probably bad and not tax things that are good. so i think, given that there is a need to gather tax to pay for the federal government, we should shift the tax burden to bad things and then adjust that tax on the bad things according to whatever is going to result in the behavior that we think is beneficial for the future. i think currently, what we're doing right now, which is mining and burning trillions of tons of hydrocarbons, that used to be buried very deep underground and now we're sinking them into the atmosphere and running this chemical experiment on the atmosphere and then you've got the oil and gas companies which have ungodly amounts of money and you can't expect them to just roll over and die. like, they don't do that. actually, what they'd much prefer to do is spend enormous amounts of money lobbying and running bogus ad campaigns and that sort of thing, to preserve their situation. it's a lot like tobacco companies in the old days. i mean, they used to run these ads with doctors, or like a guy pretending he's a doctor, essentially implying that smoking is good for you and like, having pregnant mothers on ads smoking.[question about climate change skeptics.] as far as climate change skeptics, i believe in the scientific method and one should have a healthy skepticism of things in general and first thing from a scientific standpoint is that you always look at things probabilistically, not definitively, and so, a lot of times, if someone is a skeptic in the scientific community what they're really saying is that they're not sure that it's 100% certain that this is the case, but that's not the point. the point is to look at it from the other side. what do you think the percentage chance is of this being catastrophic for some meaningful percentage of the earth's population? is it greater than 1%? is it even 1%? if it is even 1%, why are we running this experiment? we're playing russian roulette and as each year goes by we're loading more rounds in the chamber. it's not wise. what makes it super insane is that we're going to run out of oil anyway. it's not like there's some infinite oil supply. we're going to run out it. so we know, we have to get to a sustainable means of transportation, no matter what, so why even run the experiment? it's the world's dumbest experiment.[question about steve jobs.] well, he's certainly someone i've admired. although i did try to talk to him once at a party and he was super rude to me, but i don't think it was me. i think it was, sort of, you know i'm not the first. i was actually there - ya know, larry page is an old friend of mine. i've known larry since before he got venture funding for google, and larry was the guy that introduced me to steve jobs. so it's not as like i'm going tugging on his coat like, ya know, please talk to me. being introduced by larry page is not bad. obviously he was an incredible guy and made fantastic products that, ya know, i don't know. there was a certain - the guy had a certain magic about him. that was really inspiring. i think that's really great. i think steve jobs was way cooler than i am.[question about coming up with new ideas.] it's somewhat cliche, but it happens a lot in the shower. i don't know what it is about showers or - get the camera. no, i do, i just sort of stand there in the shower and - [do you have long showers?] i do actually. sounds wrong but yeah, i do. not to mention the burning man epiphanies. those are huge. there are sometimes, like, late at night, if i've been thinking about something and i can't sleep, i'll be up for several hours pacing around the house thinking about things. occasionally i'll sketch something or send myself an email or something like that.[who inspires you?] i don't have a mentor per se but i try to get feedback from as many people as possible. i have, like, friends and i ask them what they think about this, that, or the other. larry page a good friend of mine. i value his advice a lot. i have many other good friends and so i think it's good to solicit feedback and particularly negative feedback, actually. obviously, people don't love the idea of giving you negative feedback unless it's on blogs, they do that. [like neil armstrong.] yeah, that was weird. that was kind of troubling because growing up neil armstrong was kind of a hero. like, it kind of sucks. that's a bit of a blow, but i think in his case he was somewhat manipulated by other interests. i don't think he quite new what he was saying in those congressional hearings.[question about building good teams.] well, if you think about a company, a company is a group of people that are organized to create a product or service. that's what a company is. so, in order to create such a thing, you have to convince others to join you in your effort and so they have to be convinced that it's a sensible thing, that there's at least some reasonable chance of success, and that if there is success the reward will be commensurate with the effort involved. i think getting people to believe in what you're doing, and you, is important. in the beginning, there will be few people who believe in you, or what you're doing, but then over time, as you make progress, the evidence will build and more and more people will believe in what you're doing. i think it's a good idea, when creating a company, to have a demonstration or, if it's a product, to have like a good mockup, or even if it's software to have good demoware or to be able to sketch something, so people can really envision what it's about. try to get to that point as soon as possible and then iterate to make it as real as possible as fast as possible, if that makes sense.[with everything you're doing, do you get any sleep?] sometimes not enough. sleep is really great because i find if i don't get enough sleep then i'm quite grumpy. i mean, obviously, i think most people are that way. i try to figure out what's the right amount of sleep, because i found i could drop below a certain threshold of sleep and although i could be awake more hours, and i could sustain it, i would get less done because my mental acuity would be affected. so, i found, generally, the right number for me is around six to six and half hours, on average, per night. that is an average though. [question about spacex/tesla split.] having a smartphone is incredibly helpful because that means you can do email during inter-social periods - you're in a car, in the bathroom, walking everywhere. you can do email, practically, whenever you're awake. that's really helpful, to have email for spacex and tesla integrated on my phone. then you have to apply a lot of hours to actual working. the way i generally do it is i'll be working at spacex on monday and then monday night fly to the bay area. then tuesday and wednesday at the bay area, at tesla and then fly back on wednesday night and then thursday and friday at spacex. in the last several months i would fly back here on saturday and either spend saturday and sunday at tesla or spend saturday at tesla and sunday at spacex.[where do your son's fit in?] i do drag them along on a lot of things, actually. they're remarkably unimpressed - i wish they were sort of more interested. the twins are 8 and the triplets are 6, so maybe they'll get more interested later. [are they going to take over your companies?] well, i think if they're inclined to.. i mean, if they're really interested in working at tesla or spacex then i'd help them do that. i'm not sure i'd want to, necessarily, try to insert them into the ceo role at some point, ya know. it's sort of like, if the rest of the team and the board felt that they were the right person then that would be fine but i wouldn't like people to fell like i'd installed my kid there. i don't think that'd be good for either the companies or the kid, really. i was, at one point, of the school of thought that it's best to give away 99% of one's assets - kind of like the buffet school of thought - i'm still mostly inclined in that direction, but after seeing what happened with ford and gm and chrysler where gm and chrysler went bankrupt but ford did not, and ford seemed to make better long term choices than the other two companies, and that's in-part because of the influence of the ford family, and i thought, well, maybe there is some merit in having some longer term family ownership. at least a portion of it, so it acts as a positive influence. i mean, this is something i'm still thinking about, but acting as a positive influence in the long term, so the company does proper long term things. look at what happened, also, in silicon valley with hp and i think it's quite sad, and that is to some degree because there was much diminished influence by the hewett and packard families. i think they should have prevailed when they were opposed to the merger that took place at one point and i think they were right, actually.[is there a ipo for spacex planned for this year?] no, there's no ipo planned. running a public company does have it's drawbacks. in the case of tesla and solar city, we had to raise capital and we had kind of a complex equity structure that needed to be resolved by going public and i thought we kinda needed to do that in those two cases. we don't have to do that at spacex. i think there's a good chance that we will at some point in the future, but spacex's objectives are super long term and the market is not. so, i'm a bit worried that if we did go public too soon that market pressure would force us to do short term things and abandon long term projects. going to mars is very long term.[question about hyperloop and electric supersonic aircraft.] i did promise that i'd do some paper on the hyperloop idea and things got a little hectic towards the end of last year because i committed to make these milestones at tesla to the public markets and i had to stay true to the obligation which required just an insane level of work and attention, and we also had the solar city ipo which was a very difficult ipo to get done and that ipo occurred just by the skin of it's teeth. it was such a tough one. if it wasn't in december, it would mean pushing it out quite a bit, and the problem was that we'd already pushed it out quite a bit already. if we didn't go public we'd have to go a private round and then the whole thing just wouldn't feel right. it's like you're sitting at the altar and you don't do the wedding - it's a bit awkward, ya know. so, we really needed to do it and i think if we hadn't done it, people would have looked at it as a failure and it wouldn't have been good because there's just been too many failures in the solar - or not enough successes today in the solar arena. we need to chalk up a success. [a rare piece of sunshine.] yes, ironically, the solar industry does not have a lot of that.[you're 42 now. where do you see yourself in the future?] actually, i was asked by a journalist, 'do you want to die on mars?' and i said 'yes!' and i was like, but wait, not on impact, just to be clear. that's one of the possibilities. i guess i'd like to be able to go to mars while i'm still able to manage the journey reasonably well. so i think i don't want to be like 75 and go to mars. at least in the beginning, it could be mildly arduous, so i'd like to get there ideally in my 50s, that would be kind of cool. i aspire to make that happen, and i can see the potential for that happening and i'm not saying it will happen but i think it can happen. i'll try to make it happen.
 right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. is this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?by david dagan and steven m. telesamerican streets are much safer today than they were thirty years ago, and until recently most conservatives had a simple explanation: more prison beds equal less crime. this argument was a fulcrum of republican politics for decades, boosting candidates from richard nixon to george h. w. bush and scores more in the states. once elected, these republicans (and their democratic imitators) built prisons on a scale that now exceeds such formidable police states as russia and iran, with 3 percent of the american population behind bars or on parole and probation.now that crime and the fear of victimization are down, we might expect republicans to take a victory lap, casting safer streets as a vindication of their hard line. instead, more and more conservatives are clambering down from the prison ramparts. take newt gingrich, who made a promise of more incarceration an item of his 1994 contract with america. seventeen years later, he had changed his tune. “there is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” gingrich wrote in 2011. “the criminal-justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.”none of gingrich’s rivals in the vicious republican presidential primary exploited these statements. if anything, his position is approaching party orthodoxy. the 2012 republican platform declares, “prisons should do more than punish; they should attempt to rehabilitate and institute proven prisoner reentry systems to reduce recidivism and future victimization.” what’s more, a rogue’s gallery of conservative crime warriors have joined gingrich’s call for americans to rethink their incarceration reflex. they include ed meese, asa hutchinson, william bennett—even the now-infamous american legislative exchange council. most importantly, more than a dozen states have launched serious criminal justice reform efforts in recent years, with conservatives often in the lead.skeptics might conclude that conservatives are only rethinking criminal justice because lockups have become too expensive. but whether prison costs too much depends on what you think of incarceration’s benefits. change is coming to criminal justice because an alliance of evangelicals and libertarians have put those benefits on trial. discovering that the nation’s prison growth is morally objectionable by their own, conservative standards, they are beginning to attack it—and may succeed where liberals, working the issue on their own, have, so far, failed.this will do more than simply put the nation on a path to a more rational and humane correctional system. it will also provide an example of how bipartisan policy breakthroughs are still possible in our polarized age. the expert-driven, center-out model of policy change that think-tank moderates and foundation check-writers hold dear is on the brink of extinction. if it is to be replaced by anything, it will be through efforts to persuade strong partisans to rethink the meaning of their ideological commitments, and thus to become open to information they would otherwise ignore. bipartisan agreement will result from the intersection of separate ideological tracks—not an appeal to cross them. this approach will not work for all issues. but in an environment in which the center has almost completely evaporated, and in which voters seem unwilling to grant either party a decisive political majority, it may be the only way in which our policy gridlock can be broken.republicans’ rhetorical campaign against lawlessness took off in earnest during the 1960s, when richard nixon artfully conflated black rioting, student protest, and common crime to warn that the “criminal forces” were gaining the upper hand in america. as an electoral strategy, it was a brilliant success. but as an ideological claim, the argument that america needed more police and prisons was in deep tension with the conservative cause of rolling back state power. the paradox flared up occasionally, as during the national rifle association’s long-running feud with the bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms during the 1990s. but for the most part, conservatives lived with the contradiction for forty years. why?for one, it worked political magic by tapping into a key liberal weakness. urban violent crime was rising sharply during the 1960s and liberals had no persuasive response beyond vague promises that economic uplift and social programs would curb delinquency. the conservatives’ strategy also provided an outlet for racial anxieties that could not be voiced explicitly in the wake of the civil rights movement. sometimes, the racial appeals were impossible to miss, as when ronald reagan warned that “city streets are jungle paths after dark” in his 1966 california gubernatorial campaign. more often, anti-criminal chest-thumping played into the division of society between the earners and the moochers, with subtle racial cues making clear who belonged on which side.meanwhile, the more threatened ordinary americans came to feel, the angrier they became at elites who appeared to side with the criminals, and the more they revered the people designated as society’s protectors. as a result, conservatives came to view law enforcement the same way they had long seen the military: as a distinctive institution whose mission somehow exempted it from the bureaucratic failures and overreach that beset school districts, environmental agencies, and the welfare office. yet the two surging wings of the conservative movement—libertarians and religious conservatives—have since each found their own reasons to challenge long-standing orthodoxy about crime.antitax activist grover norquist appeared last year at a washington confab on criminal justice billed as the “last sacred cow” briefing. for years, norquist said, conservatives were too busy rolling back government extravagances to worry about the workings of essential operations like crime control. but conservatives can no longer afford to direct their critique of government only at their traditional targets, he told his audience. “spending more on education doesn’t necessarily get you more education. we know that—that’s obvious. well, that’s also true about national defense. that’s also true about criminal justice and fighting crime.”once you believe that prisons are like any other agency, then it is natural to suspect that wardens and prison guards, like other suppliers of government services, might submit to the temptations of monopoly, inflating costs and providing shoddy service. and, of course, conservatives have long made such arguments to justify their pet project of bidding out incarceration to for-profit businesses. but the prisons-as-government critique has acquired a new force that makes the privatization debate almost irrelevant. far from shilling for corporate jailers, conservatives now want to shrink the market. “we certainly don’t need to be building new prisons, whether they’re public or private,” said marc levin, an analyst at the conservative texas public policy foundation. the american legislative exchange council, long a proponent of privatizing prisons, no longer has an official position on that issue (nor does it have any prison corporations left as members). instead, it is pushing bills that would reduce prison populations. for fiscal hawks, the point now is not to incarcerate more efficiently or profitably, but to incarcerate less. they are making that leap with a boost from two other camps: evangelicals and experts.over the last two decades, religious conservatives have increasingly come to see prisoners as people worthy of compassion and capable of redemption. “these people have committed crimes, but they’re still human beings, created in the image of god. can we help them restore what’s left of their lives?” asks tony perkins, president of the washington, d.c.-based family research council. perkins has doubted the efficacy of incarceration since serving as a guard in a louisiana lockup as a young man. though that experience also made him skeptical of jailhouse conversions, perkins said, religious outreach behind bars has the benefit of making prisoners seem like real people— much as the pro-life movement has done with unborn children. “as more and more churches are involved in prison ministries, they begin the process of rehumanizing the criminal.”meanwhile, the tide of professional opinion is turning away from what had been a depressing consensus that warehousing prisoners was the best society could do. for many years, the hope that “rehabilitation” could change people’s behavior was dismissed as a liberal fantasy. the role of prisons was much simpler: to incapacitate reprobates and deter opportunists. the dean of this school of thought, former harvard and university of california, los angeles, professor james q. wilson (who died this year), put it like this: “many people, neither wicked nor innocent, but watchful, dissembling, and calculating of their chances, ponder our reaction to wickedness as a clue to what they might profitably do.” social service approaches to criminal “wickedness” not only did not work, but they symbolized a society unwilling to stand up against violations of the law. increase incarceration, conservatives argued, and potential criminals will get the message.but in recent years, experts in criminal justice have become more optimistic about alternatives to prison. a promising example is hawaii’s opportunity probation with enforcement (the hope program, now hopscotching to other states; see mark a. r. kleiman, “jail break,” washington monthly, july/august 2009). hope has been shown to significantly cut drug offending by hitting users who are on parole or probation with swift, certain, and moderated sanctions, such as a few days of jail time, rather than arbitrary and draconian parole revocations. new technologies from rapid-result drug tests to gps monitoring have also bred optimism, and professionals are even beginning to feel better about their ability to predict an offender’s risk of recidivism. because these approaches emphasize control more than therapy, they don’t seem squishy or soft on crime, even as they make it easier to let criminals out of prison.the world has also changed in ways that favor fresh thinking. in the 1990s, democrats diluted the republican electoral advantage on crime by pushing their own set of tough measures. then arkansas governor bill clinton oversaw the execution of a brain-damaged convict during his 1992 presidential campaign, and once elected president he pushed through a cast-iron crime bill that combined longer sentences, restrictions on gun purchases, and more cops on the street. while the subsequent drop in crime gave the gop fodder to argue that punitive policies work, it has also drawn the venom out of the issue. and since the 1990s, terrorism has displaced crime as the nation’s top security preoccupation and honeypot for law-and-order zealots. if you consider all these issues together, it makes sense that conservatives have more space to rethink their positions on crime. and so, with jailers newly suspect, inmates ripe for redemption, and alternative discipline ascendant, conservatives have decided prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform.such second thoughts are creating the first significant opening in years for a criminal justice overhaul. neither republicans nor democrats can reform the system alone given the continuing fear of being tarred with the “soft on crime” label, said gene guerrero, a policy analyst at the washington office of george soros’s open society foundations. it can only happen, he said, “if there is real leadership from both sides and if the reforms are developed and move forward on a bipartisan basis.”still, it’s conservatives who bring the most muscle to the job. a handful of liberal organizations have valiantly kept alive the argument for reform even through the dark days of the 1980s and ’90s—places like the american civil liberties union, open society foundations, and the public welfare foundation. by and large, however, it is conservative institutions who now pay the most attention to criminal justice, guerrero said. in rare cases, democratic politicians have proved willing to take up the cause, as when michigan governor jennifer granholm directed an overhaul of that state’s parole system during her first term— though her second-term push for broader reform legislation fizzled (see luke mogelson, “prison break,” washington monthly, november/december 2010). but most democrats are still terrified of appearing timid before voters and are therefore loath to lead the way. at best, they can be persuaded to go along if the right gives them cover.the right’s belated awakening to america’s incarceration crisis may seem little more than an obvious extension of libertarian and socially conservative philosophies. but logic rarely determines how movements put together their various ideological commitments. making and changing positions is tough, entrepreneurial political work, especially when long-held, electorally successful ideas are being called into question.few people have done as much to subvert the conservative orthodoxy on crime as pat nolan, a former california state legislator who now works at the jailhouse ministry prison fellowship. called “the most important person to make any of this happen” by julie stewart of families against mandatory minimums, nolan has been so effective as a revisionist precisely because he was weaned on the traditional politics of law and order.nolan grew up in la’s crenshaw boulevard neighborhood during the 1950s. “everyone in my family and all of our neighbors had been victims of crime,” says nolan. “i came from a family that was pretty pro-police, feeling as [though] they were kind of beleaguered.” when his family moved to nearby burbank, nolan signed up for the police explorers, a group for kids interested in law enforcement careers. he also joined young americans for freedom, the conservative activist group that rallied behind barry goldwater in 1964. as a republican california state assemblyman in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, nolan helped push through some of the nation’s most draconian sentencing laws. while he did visit prisons to investigate conditions there, he recalls, “i was very much the ‘we need more prisons’ type.”that changed after nolan got to see prison from the other side of the bars. in 1993, nolan was indicted on seven counts of corruption—including accusations that he took campaign money to help a phony shrimp-processing business the fbi dreamed up as part of a sting. he ultimately accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to thirty-three months in prison for racketeering. nolan maintained his innocence, but said he would take the plea to avoid the risk of longer separation from his family. before he left, nolan recalls, a friend told him, “view this time as your monastic experience”—a chance to follow generations of christians who have retreated from daily life to work on their faith. nolan, who is catholic, resolved to follow that advice.while nolan was locked up, a mutual acquaintance put him in touch with chuck colson, the biggest name in prison ministry. colson, a former nixon aide, had gone to the clink for watergate-related crimes and experienced what he described as a religious transformation behind bars. after his release in 1975, colson founded prison fellowship, which provides religious services and counseling to inmates and their families. by the time colson died this past april, he had become a star in the evangelical community, rubbing shoulders with the likes of billy graham, rick warren, and james dobson.nolan enrolled his kids in a prison fellowship program for children of inmates and began corresponding with colson. even before nolan got out, he had an offer to run the group’s policy arm, which had been languishing.“i’d really been praying about, ‘okay, lord, what’s the next chapter in my life?’” nolan recalls. “i’d seen so much injustice while i was inside that i felt i really wanted to address that. my eyes had been opened.” nolan is devoting the rest of his life to opening the eyes of his fellow conservatives, getting them to see the tragic cost of putting so many americans under lock and key.when nolan first arrived in washington, the only real foothold reformers had in the conservative movement was with a small band of libertarians at places like the cato institute and reason magazine, who objected to the prohibitionist overreach of the drug war but were treated as wildly eccentric by mainstream conservatives. to find allies with unquestioned right-wing credentials, nolan prospected among two groups with whom he had credibility: evangelicals who admired prison fellowship, and his old friends from young americans for freedom, some of them longtime crime warriors themselves.colson had already persuaded evangelicals that prisoners were appropriate objects of personal compassion, but had yet to find an angle that would convince the faithful that the criminal justice system was fundamentally flawed. nolan hit upon two perfect issues in short order.the supreme court opened the first window in 1997 by striking down most of a federal law intended to expand the religious freedoms of prisoners. the specter of wardens putting bars between inmates and god energized social conservatives. prison fellowship threw itself into the fight, and a revised law was passed in 2000.around the same time, reagan administration veteran michael horowitz was casting about for a cause to show that conservatives have a heart. previously known for his advocacy on issues like human trafficking and peace in sudan, horowitz decided to make protecting the victims of prison rape the next step in what he called his “wilberforce agenda,” after the famous british evangelical abolitionist.prison rape was a natural issue to express conservatives’ humanitarian impulses. evangelicals who think homosexuality is immoral can easily be persuaded that homosexual rape under the eyes of the state is an official abomination. more importantly, horowitz had put his finger on a nightmare of massive proportions. human rights watch had gathered evidence suggesting an epidemic of torture to which many wardens were turning a blind eye. last may, the u.s. justice department estimated that more than 209,000 prisoners suffered sexual abuse in 2008 alone.horowitz proposed a bill designed to have cross-partisan appeal, with provisions for penalizing lagging states and shaming recalcitrant wardens. evangelicals were sold right away. “everyone has basic human rights, even if they are being dealt with and sanctioned for inappropriate social behavior, and prison should not take those away,” the southern baptist ethics and religious liberty commission’s shannon royce would explain to the washington post.horowitz focused on negotiations with a skeptical justice department and state corrections officials, while nolan worked the corridors of the capitol. the prison rape elimination act passed both houses of congress unanimously in 2003.nolan then used this big win as a springboard to an issue where the moral lines were more blurred: helping released prisoners adjust to life back home and stay out of trouble by pumping money into “reentry” programs. republican congressman (and now senator) rob portman agreed to champion legislation that would become known as the second chance act. president george w. bush endorsed the idea in his 2004 state of the union address, after lobbying by prison fellowship and portman’s office, according to nolan. hammering out the bill took several more years, but the second chance act was finally passed with solid conservative backing in 2007.these measures all had bipartisan support, but they were not the product of centrists: the top senate backers of the prison rape elimination act were ted kennedy and alabama’s jeff sessions, who spent a dozen years as a tough-as-nails u.s. attorney and is ranked the senate’s twelfth most conservative member by the national journal. liberal reformers did bargain with conservatives behind the scenes—the biggest example was an agreement that the second chance act remain silent on funding faith-based reentry programs. but nolan’s conservative allies were confident that bipartisan reform efforts brokered by prison fellowship would remain consistent with conservative principles, thanks to groundwork laid by the previous religious freedom and prison rape efforts.even as the second chance act edged forward, nolan was tapping old friendships to pull together more conservative dissenters. david keene—then head of the american conservative union, now president of the national rifle association—was tracking post-9/11 encroachments on civil liberties and turning a wary eye to criminal justice. richard viguerie, a direct mail pioneer in the conservative movement, was a longtime death penalty opponent. nolan began calling them for advice. soon, antitax activist norquist was being looped into the conversations, as was brian walsh, a heritage foundation analyst who studied the rapid expansion of federal criminal law. the group started holding regular meetings to brainstorm ideas. they toyed with proposing a federal criminal law retrenchment commission similar to the base-closure commission of the 1990s, or pushing congressional judiciary committees to demand jurisdiction over any bills that created new crimes.despite all of nolan’s progress, it soon became obvious that the juice on criminal justice reform would not come from washington. the real potential lay in the states, where a combination of fiscal conservatism and budget pressure was beginning to crack the status quo. the opportunity to turn those tremors into a full-blown earthquake would come from a very unlikely place.“don’t mess with texas” bumper stickers have long found their most extreme confirmation in the state’s criminal justice system. over the last two decades, texas has been one of the most avid jailers in the nation. it was home to the largest prison-conditions lawsuit in american history, a thirty-year ordeal that infuriated conservatives and led them to plaster the state with posters calling for the impeachment of judge william wayne justice. and of course, no prison cooks have taken as many last-meal orders as those in the lone star state—until officials recently did away with that perk for the condemned. but even as texas continues to buff its toughest-on-crime reputation, it is also becoming, unexpectedly, a poster child for criminal justice reform.a handful of liberal organizations have valiantly kept alive the argument for prison reform even through the dark days of the 1980s and ’90s. but most democrats are still terrified of appearing timid before voters and can be persuaded to go along if the right gives them cover.it started in 2005, when tom craddick, the first republican speaker of the state legislature in more than a century, appointed jerry madden, a conservative from plano, to run the house committee on corrections. as madden recalls, the speaker’s charge to him was clear: “don’t build new prisons. they cost too much.”madden was a corrections novice with a disarming, aw-shucks manner; his senate counterpart, democrat john whitmire, was an old hand whose resume included being robbed at gunpoint in his garage. the greenhorn and the veteran soon agreed on what ailed the texas criminal justice system: it was feeding on itself. too many people flunked probation and went into prison. and too many prisoners committed new offenses shortly after being released, landing them back behind bars. to tackle the first problem, madden and whitmire suggested cutting loose veteran probationers who had proved reliable, thus allowing officers to focus their time on people at higher risk of screwing up. the legislature signed off, but governor rick perry vetoed the bill.at the start of the 2007 legislative session, legislative analysts predicted that texas was on track to be short 17,700 prison beds by 2012 because of its growing inmate population. the texas department of criminal justice’s response was to ask legislators to build three new prisons, but madden and whitmire had other ideas. not only did they bring back a revamped version of their probation proposal—they also took aim at the revolving-door problem by cranking up funding for programs such as in-prison addiction treatment and halfway houses. this time, perry relented (persuaded at least in part, the duo contends, by a high-stakes meeting they held with him shortly before the opening of the legislative session). since then, the prison population has not increased, and last year, the tdcj closed a prison for the first time in decades.budget shortfalls do not explain this shift. in 2007 texas was basking in a huge projected surplus, and the great recession was still a year away. instead, madden and whitmire had different winds at their backs. for one thing, the policy context favored reform. one legacy of the state’s prison litigation trauma is that texas has strict restrictions on overcrowding (unlike, say, california). under texas law, when the system approaches capacity, corrections staff must seek certification from the attorney general and the governor to incarcerate more prisoners. the approval process forces state leaders to confront the choice between more prisons and more diversion programming. the political environment had also changed since the gop completed its takeover of state politics in 2003. as a longtime observer of the state’s criminal justice notes, “now … all the tough guys are republicans. they don’t want to be outdoing each other on this stuff.”texas was not the first state to experiment with common sense. several others had begun tinkering with their criminal justice systems in the wake of the 2001 recession. when the fiscal belt tightened on a swelling inmate population in new york, for example, corrections officials prevailed upon then governor george pataki to take steps leading to earlier releases. but none of these initiatives reverberated like the texas reforms.the texas turnaround created a golden opportunity to rebrand prison reform nationally. “people think if texas does something, by definition it’s not going to be soft,” said adam gelb, director of a criminal justice initiative at the pew charitable trusts. “there’s just this instant, deep credibility on the crime issue for texas.” in 2005, the texas public policy foundation (tppf)—the state’s premier conservative think tank—hired marc levin to become its first-ever crime wonk. the position was financed by tim dunn—a deeply conservative oilman, republican donor, and colson-inspired critic of the criminal justice system. levin promptly threw himself into the texas debates of 2005 and 2007, but his biggest contribution came later in building momentum for prison reform among conservatives across the country.the tppf is one of the most prominent members of the state policy network, which connects free-market think tanks in every state. founded in 1992, the arlington-based spn zaps ideas—like wisconsin-style restrictions on public employee pensions—from one member organization to another. levin was and remains the only full-time crime analyst at any spn member organization. as a result, he quickly became the go-to guy on the issue among state-level conservatives, fielding calls from curious colleagues, cowriting editorials and policy briefs, and making presentations at conservative conferences. eventually, he decided to convert the effort into a formal campaign he called right on crime.when nolan heard about right on crime, he contacted levin to offer his support—and his rolodex. nolan rounded up the members of his informal working group and other conservative luminaries to endorse a revised approach to crime control. among the signatories: keene, viguerie, gingrich, former attorney general ed meese, and former drug czars asa hutchinson and bill bennett. political scientist and long-time prison proponent john diiulio is there, too, as is grover norquist. the family research council’s tony perkins and other social conservatives also signed on. right on crime backers say explicitly that their goal was to lend their reputations to the effort and give conservatives political cover to launch reforms. “we wanted to create an atmosphere in which, amongst conservatives, there would be total legitimacy,” nolan said.perhaps the surest sign that conservatives were embracing the new model came from the american legislative exchange council—the conservative network of state legislators. in the 1990s, alec had peddled mandatory minimums, prison privatization, and the like to its members in statehouses across the country. but in 2007, alec hired nolan’s friend michael hough to run its criminal justice task force, and nolan soon persuaded alec to endorse the second chance act. within a few years, the trio of hough, nolan, and madden had brought alec to the point of pushing out model bills based on propoals borrowed from gelb’s criminal justice project at pew, which has been dispatching teams of sentencing wonks to state capitals around the country to help reformers develop specific plans. all this work was done through the same alec committee whose advocacy for “stand-your-ground” laws prompted a backlash in the wake of the trayvon martin killing. alec announced in april that it would disband the committee, but, in fact, it ended up giving the panel a new mandate. the committee now focuses exclusively on sentencing reform and has dropped all of its unrelated model bills, from mandatory minimums to prison privatization, hough said.with conservatives less willing to defend the lock-’em-up status quo, prison reform now seems to have the momentum of an issue whose time has come. states from kentucky to pennsylvania to north carolina have passed bipartisan criminal justice overhauls, preventing thousands of prison commitments. and the wave continues. in may, georgia governor nathan deal was on the verge of tears at a signing ceremony for legislation designed to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison. when his ohio counterpart, john kasich, signed a similar bill in june, he said it would “result in the saving of many, many lives.”to be sure, the new conservative critique has so far largely overlooked the most glaring problem in american criminal justice—its profound racial skew. african americans account for some 40 percent of the u.s. prison population, three times their proportion of the general population. the liberal legal scholar michelle alexander, whose 2010 book compares mass incarceration with jim crow, argues that the system will only be dismantled with a return to 1960s-style movement politics.but it is also important not to underestimate how much the emerging conservative reform movement can do. for starters, conservatives did step into the terrain of racial justice when they took the lead in 2010 to reduce the disparity in federal sentences for crack and cocaine offenses. and reframing criminal justice in terms of efficacy and cost has already prevented many thousands of unnecessary prison terms.moreover, this line of argument can also open the door to more radical critiques. just listen to tim dunn. the conservative texas oilman declaims that the “purpose of the criminal justice system should be to secure liberty and promote justice between people rather than to enforce the power of the state over the lives of its citizens.” or take mark meckler, co-founder of the tea party patriots. “we’re destroying a significant portion of our own population, especially in the inner cities,” meckler has written. meckler and dunn have appeared on msnbc to endorse the work of david kennedy, a liberal criminologist who has criticized the failure of the drug war in inner-city communities. and meckler vows on his blog, “i’m all in on the fight for criminal justice reform here in the u.s.”the story of how conservatives began to change their positions on incarceration holds lessons far from the world of prisons. advocates of policy change, their funders, and well-meaning pundits regularly bemoan the ideological stiffening that bedevils efforts at bipartisan cooperation. the usual answer to hyper-polarization is to somehow rebuild the center. but the power of party activists (especially on the right) to control primary elections and discipline politicians who step out of line is not going to go away anytime soon. the center, it seems, will not hold—in fact, it barely even exists anymore.the lesson of the slowly changing politics of crime on the right is that policy breakthroughs in our current environment will happen not through “middle-path” coalitions of moderates, but as a result of changes in what strong, ideologically defined partisan activists and politicians come to believe is their own, authentically conservative or liberal position. conservatives over the last few years haven’t gone “soft.” they’ve changed their minds about what prisons mean. prisons increasingly stand for big-government waste, and prison guards look more and more like public school teachers.this shift in meaning on the right happened mainly because of creative, persuasive, long-term work by conservatives themselves. only advocates with unquestioned ideological bona fides, embedded in organizations known to be core parts of conservative infrastructure, could perform this kind of ideological alchemy. as yale law professor dan kahan has argued, studies and randomized trials are useless in persuading the ideologically committed until such people are convinced that new information is not a threat to their identity. until then, it goes in one ear and out the other. only rock-ribbed partisans, not squishy moderates, can successfully engage in this sort of “identity vouching” for previously disregarded facts. of course, there are limits to how far ideological reinvention can go. as political scientist david karol has argued, it is unlikely to work when it requires crossing a major, organized member of a party coalition. that’s something environmentalists learned when they tried to encourage evangelicals to break ranks on global warming through the idea of “creation care.” they got their heads handed to them by the main conservative evangelical leaders, who saw the split this would create with energy-producing businesses upon whom republican depend for support.but that still leaves plenty of issues on which bipartisanship will be possible—as long as it doesn’t feel like compromise for its own sake. defense spending, for example, is already being slowly transformed by the newly energized libertarian spirit in the republican party. on these matters, liberals are in a bind—while they may dearly long for partners on the right, they can’t call them into being, and getting too close to conservative mavericks may tarnish their vital ideological credentials. in this confusing world where those on the extremes can make change that those in the center cannot, liberals will have to learn that they sometimes gain more when they say less.
 the national discussion about same-sex marriage is heating up. just last week, north carolina voted to prohibit the practice, and, for the first time, president barack obama clearly came out in favor of it.the debate, which has focused on our evolving views on sexuality, also mirrors a deeper generational shift in how we view and experience marriage.for our grandparents’ generation, marriage was about separate roles, separate spheres and specialization. gary becker , an economist at the university of chicago, won the nobel prize partly for describing the family as an economic institution -- a bit like a small firm that employs people with different skills to produce both income and a well-run household.in becker’s view, the joining of husband and wife yields a more productive firm, because it allows one spouse to specialize in earning income from working in the market, while the other specializes in the domestic sphere. the division of labor allows for greater productivity, just as it does in the workplace. the different skills required for these separate roles provide an economic rationale for the advice your grandmother may have offered, that “opposites attract.”naturally, couples who have bought into the traditional notion of marriage -- with women taking care of the home and men financially supporting them -- find the concept of same-sex marriage foreign. same-sex relationships are less likely to involve traditional roles and separate spheres, as evidenced by the fact that the partners are more likely to both work outside the home.but heterosexual couples in more recent generations are also less likely to aspire to separate-sphere marriages. economists describe a “second industrial revolution” in which washing machines, dishwashers and microwave ovens have reduced the value to the family “firm” of employing a domestic specialist. cheap clothes can be imported from china, rather than sewn at home. healthy meals can be purchased from the freezer at trader joe’s.what’s more, legal and social changes have broken down many of the barriers keeping women out of the labor market. explicit discrimination has declined. women have gained more control over their fertility.all these developments have increased the opportunity cost of having a spouse stay home, because that spouse now has greater value in the marketplace. as a result, our grandparents’ marriages, in which husband and wife have separate roles and spheres, are no longer so popular. two-earner couples have become the norm, and families spend less time on housework.one might have expected marriage to disappear as its traditional benefits faded. instead, it has evolved.modern marriage offers different benefits. today, we search for a soul mate rather than a good homemaker or provider. we are more likely to regard marriage as a forum for shared experiences and passions.viewed through an economic frame, modern partnerships are based upon “consumption complementarities” -- the joy of sharing things and experiences -- rather than the production-based gains that motivated traditional marriage. consistent with this, co-parenting has replaced the separate roles of nurturer and disciplinarian.we have called this new model of sharing lives “hedonic marriage.” these are marriages of equality in which the rule “opposites attract” no longer applies in the same way, because couples with more similar interests and values can derive greater benefits. so likes are now more likely to marry each other.the changing nature of heterosexual marriage has made the rite more attractive to same-sex couples. in turn, the gay and lesbian community has chosen to spend political capital advocating for greater access to marriage.for heterosexuals who have embraced the modern notion of marriage, the idea of same-sex marriage seems natural. these couples aren’t any different from them. they love and support each other, raise kids together and are committed to each other. they share values, desires and interests. not allowing them to marry is as arbitrary as not allowing couples of different races, ethnicities or religions to marry.it is no coincidence that many of the opponents of same-sex marriage are also opponents of the ongoing shift to marriages of equality. theirs is a futile battle. the reach of markets will keep expanding, allowing individuals and families to reap greater returns by selling their specialized skills and services outside the home. technological change will further undermine the benefits of specialization within the family. improvements in women’s education will continue to raise the opportunity cost of staying at home.the implication is that ultimately, traditional marriages are doomed. and indeed, countries in which gender and social norms have been the slowest to evolve have seen the biggest declines in fertility and marriage.the best way to let marriage thrive in the 21st century is to embrace the new model of equality and to welcome all couples, regardless of sexual orientation.( betsey stevenson and justin wolfers , both professors at the university of pennsylvania’s wharton school, are bloomberg view columnists. the opinions expressed are their own.)today’s highlights: the view editors on french-turkish relations and the lessons of jpmorgan ; william pesek on online banking in asia; jeffrey goldberg on obama and iran ; ramesh ponnuru on driving while distracted ; tim judah on serbia’s elections ; edward conard on what drives the u.s. economy ; and rachelle bergstein on women’s shoes and war.to contact the writers of this article: justin wolfers at jwolfers@wharton.upenn.edu betsey stevenson at betseys@wharton.upenn.eduto contact the editor responsible for this article: mark whitehouse at mwhitehouse1@bloomberg.netbetsey stevenson is an associate professor of public policy at the university of michigan's ford school of public policy. stevenson served as chief economist at the u.s. department of labor from 2010 to 2011.  she is currently an advisor at the brookings institution and serves on the editorial board of the international journal of happiness and development. read more.justin wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the university of michigan, and a non-resident fellow of the brookings institution. read more.
rt @blam: here's @wirecutter's one and only post from ces. team, time to drink champagne, eat buffet, and nap. cc @ejacqui 

 we took a team of experienced editors and writers to the biggest electronics show of the year: ces 2015. and instead of writing up hundreds or thousands of posts on what’s in las vegas, we wrote a single list of the things that we might recommend in the coming year.the items we picked are a mixture of things: those that we feel people will find useful or need in their daily lives, a few whimsical picks that we think will make life more enjoyable, and the things we suspect—but can’t definitely know until we test—might be our new favorites in their given categories. that’s it.to come up with the list, we researched, interviewed, walked the show floor, and parsed the best news sites. we collected enough data to do as much blogging as other sites of our size. but we prefer to avoid writing up the superfluous, so we haven’t included the weird, quirky, useless, or nonsensical gadgets that most people don’t need or shouldn’t waste money on. like a wi-fi router that is theoretically the fastest available, but that no existing laptop can take advantage of. or a high-end music player from sony that costs $1,200.so don’t expect this list to overwhelm you with hype. there’s a lot of bs at this show, and we try to avoid being a part of that problem as much as possible by staying as quiet as we can. -bl & jcexercise headphones with training feedback: parrot zik sportas always, the folks at parrot have amazingly innovative ideas for headphones. the folks who brought us the zik have introduced the zik sport: sweatproof, wireless in-ear headphones with active noise cancelling that do way more than play music—they also offer training feedback. not only do they have customization for the active noise cancellation that allows you to hear external sounds (like the zik 2.0), but they also have a heart-rate monitor and an accelerometer that counts your steps, tracks the amount of bounce in your stride, and tracks how long each foot is in contact with the ground.all of this data is tracked through an app and is available for review after your run. parrot claims the battery life is 8 hours when fully charged and every feature is being used, closer to 15 if you’re just playing music. the design is definitely unique and decidedly space-age looking.here’s the catch: the models we saw at ces were prototypes, and parrot said these are a work in progress. we don’t know how much they’ll cost, when they’ll be released, how well they actually stay put during a workout, how good they’ll sound, or how well the heart-rate and accelerometer functionalities work.there’s a lot that needs to be worked out before the zik sport are released. but if they deliver on their promises, the zik sport will be, hands down, the most unique and advanced sport headphones we’ve ever seen. so as soon as they become available to test, you can be sure they’ll be on our heads and out for a run. -ldthe dell xps 13 might just be our next pick for best ultrabook . it has a 13-inch ips screen in a 12-inch chassis, which means the ultrabook has a delightfully small 5.2-mm bezel that i wish all laptops had. the xps 13 can be configured with a 3200×1800 screen or a 1920×1080 one, and it contains intel’s new broadwell processor. our ideal configuration has a 1080p screen, an intel core i5-5200u processor, 8 gb of ram, and a 256gb ssd for $1,100. for $300 more, you can get a 3200×1800 screen and identical specs.the xps 13 weighs 2.6 to 2.8 pounds (for non-touch and touch screen models, respectively), and measures 0.33 to 0.6 inches thick, 11.98 inches wide, and 7.88 inches deep. dell also claims about 11 hours of battery life on the qhd model and more than 15 hours on the 1080p model. we’ll have to wait for other reviews and our own extensive testing to judge performance and battery life, but on the surface the dell xps 13 is a refreshing and promising machine that could be our new pick for best ultrabook.i spent a little time with the xps 13 on the show floor, and was impressed with the ultrabook’s immersive screen, comfortable keyboard, responsive trackpad, and overall build quality. it has a better screen and keyboard than our current recommendation, the acer aspire s7, and intel’s new broadwell processors should be more power-efficient, providing more battery life than last year’s ultrabooks. dell launched the xps 13 here at ces, so it’s available now and we expect to see reviews in the coming weeks. -kscharge your laptop from a usb port: zoltevents like ces make it clear that carrying around most laptop chargers can be a pain, but unlike phones and tablets, which have a huge number of charging options, laptops are pretty much stuck with what comes in the box. this is especially true with macbooks due to apple’s tight control over the magsafe standard. with this in mind, zolt’s namesake product caught our attention. it’s designed to replace your laptop charger with a much smaller device while adding on a few usb ports as well. it’s available for pre-order for $80 and will retail for $100.the 3-inch-long, 1.3-inch-diameter charger is about the size of a roll of quarters and only weighs 3 ounces; the size is definitely attractive. the plug’s prongs rotate to fit whatever outlet configuration you’re working with and fold up for travel. zolt says the charger will come with adaptable tips that make it compatible with 90 percent of laptops out of the box.what’s interesting is the company’s claim: “apple mac laptop solution coming soon.” when we spoke to representatives from the company, they told us they’re in discussions with apple to use an official solution, but wouldn’t go into more detail than that.knowing apple and its notoriously tight control over magsafe , we’re skeptical. while zolt was insistent that this solution is, in fact, coming, and they won’t just be ripping parts out of off-the-shelf chargers, it just doesn’t seem like something apple would do. especially not for the $20ish price point we heard quoted. if it does end up to be true, this accessory will definitely be worth considering. for the time being, we recommend waiting for the product to ship rather than saving $20 on the pre-order. -ngclever new washing machine concepts: lg twin wash system and samsung activewashtwo decent laundry ideas debuted at ces (and they have nothing to do with home automation). the lg twin wash system features a mini washing machine that takes the place of a standard pedestal mount underneath any standard lg front-load washer. so you can run two loads of laundry at once—delicates is the obvious choice for the little guy, but it has the usual six-cycle spread.meanwhile, samsung introduced activewash , which is essentially a ribbed sink built into a top-load washer. it’s for pre-soaking and pre-scrubbing stains, which can make all the difference when you’re cleaning something stubborn like chocolate, blood, or red wine. and what could be more convenient than being able to do it right in the washer?should you run out and buy these when they’re ready? maybe not. if you’re getting an lg washer plus a pedestal anyway, then sure, there are worse ways to spend your money than a mini-washer-pedestal add-on, especially if you have a few kids or more cash than time. it’s a helpful accessory if you can afford it, not a game-changing innovation. pricing has not been announced.samsung’s built-in sink seems like it would be convenient for just about anyone who gets stains on their clothes, although if your laundry room already has a sink of its own, it’s probably overkill. no word yet on which washing machine activewash be attached to (though it will definitely be a high-efficiency top-loader), how much it’ll cost, or when it’ll be available.but, unlike all sorts of the silly home automation stuff to come out of the show, at least these new features will help maximize space and time. that’s what appliances are really supposed to do, right? -lmdish network’s sling tv is their attempt to attract cord cutters who don’t want to pay for tv service by offering a number of popular, live cable tv channels for a fraction of what cable (or dish for that matter) costs. sling tv attempts to change this with their new streaming service. for $20 a month, with no contracts or credit checks, you get espn, espn2 (which is a big deal ), cnn, tbs, tnt, food network, travel channel, and a few more. all live, and many with the ability to view content up to 3 days old.even better, you don’t need a cable box as these stream to a device you probably already own: roku (our current recommendation for tv streaming boxes ), amazon fire tv, lg and samsung tvs, xbox one, nexus player, ios, android, and computers. no extra cable boxes to rent for $8-10 a month as well.like other streaming services you can start and stop whenever you want without a contract. additional packages of more sports, family, or news channels will be available for $5 per package. for someone who has wanted to cut the cord but been unable to do it because of espn, now you can. if you’re a football fan like me that wants espn for 4 months a year and then doesn’t need cable, you can sign up for those months and then cancel.the important thing is going to be how well the streaming works. does it have to buffer a lot, or is it seamless? at ces it looked to take around 3 seconds to change channels. does the picture quality compare to cable, or is it going to come up a bit short? there is visible compression in their demos, but no worse than what comcast does. they also didn’t provide a clear answer to how many people can watch at once. if you are watching espn on the tv, can someone else stream food network to their tablet?with a promised free trial when it comes out before the end of january, it won’t hurt you to find out. i know i will be one of the first to sign up. -chultra-fast-charging battery pack for your smartphone: ibattz’s asapit’s not the first fast-charging battery we’ve seen, but ibattz’s asap charger caught our attention with its slim design and promise to get enough juice in 15 minutes to completely recharge an iphone 6. available in 5,600-mah and 12,000-mah editions, the 2.4-amp pack is similar to the unu ultrapak series released last year.other publications are reporting that the battery will recharge the phone itself in 15 minutes, which would be impressive if true, but that’s not the case. phones, tablets, and other electronics can only draw so much power. no matter how much the source is capable of putting out, they’ll limit the current at a certain level. that’s why we were skeptical of the initial reports and got the answer from the company.much like unu’s batteries, the asap charger relies on a specialty wall plug—it looks a lot like a laptop charger with a huge power brick—to draw power from the wall at a faster rate than standard batteries that use micro-usb. there’s also a numerical display showing how much battery life is left.so the true story is you’ll get enough power into the battery in 15 minutes to juice up an iphone 6, which is pretty convenient. most packs take hours to get this much power. but, of course, the handset’s charging speed is still limited. ibattz generally offers aggressive pricing, but with no cost or date information announced yet, we’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see if it lives up to the hype. -nga line of new battery cases for the iphone 6: incipio offgrid expresswe had a feeling there would be a number of iphone 6 battery cases at the show. a number of companies announced their contenders, with incipio actually shipping its offgrid express ($80). in pre-show testing, the 3,000-mah pack provided a total charge of 116 percent to an iphone 6; put simply, it’ll give you a full extra charge and change. this is a much higher capacity than our current iphone 5 pick, the lenmar meridian , which has a 2,300-mah cell. it’s a good price for the performance and is aggressive compared to most of the competition we saw at the show. most ~3,000-mah batteries are going for about $100. the design of this one is very similar to previous offgrids: all plastic with a battery sled and a snap-on frame.if you’d prefer something a little more premium, incipio has those bases covered as well. the standard offgrid ($90) is made of layers of plastic and rubber, offering better protection from drops and additional color options. instead of having to separate the components of the case for installation, you simply push the phone into place. the offgrid shine is pretty much the same, but with a brushed metal finish and $100 price tag. the more rugged offgrid exo ($100) promises to meet mil-810g military drop test standards. all four packs house the same 3,000-mah battery as the express, meaning you should get the same full-charge-plus, and it can fit into an optional $40 dock, something the cheaper option can’t. now where are those iphone 6 plus battery packs? -nga gps watch is great for running, but for the other 22 or 23 hours a day, it sits in a drawer or stuffed into a bag with workout gear. while i appreciate the fact that gps running watches are no longer the size of hockey pucks, i wish there were a compelling feature or essential daily function that would allow me get more out of my $200-300 investment. the slim garmin vívoactive aims stay on your wrist for the remainder of the day, well after your daily run is over. garmin’s new smartwatch combines the abilities of fitness tracker, gps sports watch, and smartwatch.for the same price ($250) as their mid-range gps running watch, the garmin forerunner 220 (our current recommendation for gps running watches ), the vívoactive can track daily steps, record cycling and swimming workouts, and deliver smartphone notifications. these are features the run-centric fr 220 does not offer.the vívoactive does lack a few of the fr 220’s higher-end running-specific features, like the ability to create custom workouts. while most people won’t miss them, there is potential for these features and more to be implemented later by garmin or by third-party developers through garmin’s software development program called connect iq .it’s not hard to imagine a single device that combines the abilities of a fitness tracker, gps running watch, and smartwatch. the garmin vívoactive probably won’t become our new pick for gps running watches, but it does feel like the first gps-enabled smartwatch that will accurately record your daily run and that you’ll want to keep on your wrist all day. -jmthe minimalist watch that happens to be a fitness tracker: withings activité popthe withings activité pop is different. while most fitness trackers are constructed with plastic or rubber materials and feature difficult-to-read digital displays, the pop’s simple watch design and useful fitness tracking features are welcome changes.like the original withings activité , the pop’s design more closely resembles a traditional analog watch than a fitness tracker. along with the standard short and long hands to tell time, a secondary interior dial is present on the pop’s display to show progress towards a daily step goal. working closely with the pop, the withings health mate app (ios-only for now) backs up activity data and automatically resets the pop to your correct time zone.it’s not perfect: future updates are needed to implement background data syncing and the tracking of swim workouts. with no backlight, you can’t see the time in the dark with the pop and reflections caused by the protective glass covering can make it difficult to read in certain lighting.the $150 pop is a bit stripped-down, compared to other trackers in the price range, but as felix salmon argues convincingly over at fusion , there’s a lot of potential in its simplicity. for those who are looking for an attractive, minimalist watch and would like the addition of basic fitness tracking, it’s hard to deny the appeal of the withings activité pop . -jmintel finally announced its fifth-generation broadwell-u core i3, i5, and i7 cpus. they’re based on intel’s new broadwell architecture and should start showing up in laptops as early as this month. unlike the broadwell core m processors that are showing up in tablets and convertibles like the lenovo yoga 3 pro, these should be faster and last longer than the haswell cpus in current-gen laptops.according to anandtech, they’ll only be about 4 percent faster than the haswell cpus they replace, but they’ll have up to 22 percent better graphics and last up to an hour and a half longer (although laptop makers have told us that an hour and a half is pretty ambitious). that’s cool because cpu power isn’t a limiting factor in laptops these days (for the most part); battery life and integrated graphics are. if you’re in the market for a laptop and can wait a few months, it makes sense to do so, since the new chips will be an all-around improvement on last year’s. -nesamsung announced its first portable ssd, the t1 , and it’s surprisingly light and compact. the t1 isn’t quite affordable for most people right now, but it may be the harbinger of doom for portable spinny drives in the years to come. (we can dream, anyway.) hard drives are an inherently flawed technology, destined to fail sooner or later because of their reliance on moving parts. ssds don’t have that flaw; instead they have much higher speeds than traditional hard drives.samsung says the t1 has speeds of up to 450 mb/s. for comparison, our current recommendation for best portable hard drive reads and writes at about 87 mb/s. the t1 weighs up to 30 grams depending on capacity and measures 2 mm thick, 71 mm long, and 53 mm wide. the 250gb, 500gb, and 1tb models will retail at $180, $300, and $600 when they’re released on january 20, but storage rarely sells for the msrp, so we expect the street price to be somewhat lower.even though the t1 isn’t a good buy for most people right now, hopefully it’s a sign that portable hdds will be replaced by reasonably priced ssds in the coming years.(it’s worth noting that samsung was showing a mockup of the t1 at ces rather than a working model, but samsung has a solid track record and has already set a hard release date of january 20.) -ksnew and improved business laptop: lenovo thinkpad x1 carbonlenovo showed us dozens of new laptops this year: thinner flex laptops with hinges that go all the way back, new yogas, an ultralight collaboration with nec, and updates to their thinkpad business laptops. the coolest one i saw was the latest version of the thinkpad x1 carbon , their flagship business ultrabook.the first-gen x1 carbon was one of our favorite windows ultrabooks, but last year’s model took away the function key row and trackpad buttons. thinkpad users didn’t appreciate those changes, and this year’s x1 carbon fixes all the things people didn’t like about last year’s x1 carbon. it has dedicated function keys and physical mouse keys again, plus the latest haswell-u processor and a bigger battery than the previous model.the new thinkpad x1 carbon brings back the dedicated function keys that were missing from last year’s model.the x1 carbon weighs just a bit more than 3 pounds (or just under, if you skip the touchscreen) and has a 14-inch, 2560×1600 ips screen, haswell-u processor, the option of a 256gb or 512gb ssd, and  usual thinkpad features like a navigation touchpoint.the x1 carbon could be our pick for people who need a rugged, business-class ultrabook, though since it starts at $1,250, it probably won’t be our main pick for most people. still, there are lots of people out there who love thinkpads and ultrabooks—boy howdy does this tick those boxes.lenovo brought more new and updated laptops to ces than most laptop makers. the new yoga convertibles look promising for non-thinkpad ultrabook fans and the new flex 3 laptops are thinner and more powerful than the chunky flex 2 that is our current budget laptop pick. -nehome automation that’s actually automatic: works with nestmaking the best smart thermostat was never nest’s endgame. with its recent additions to the works with nest program , everyone’s favorite hal 9000 impersonator continues its evolution into a conveniently omnipotent (and hopefully benevolent) automated controller for all your smart home pieces. smartlocks, hue light bulbs, dishwashers, laundry appliances, sleep sensors, electric car-charging stations, and even ceiling fans can now talk to, and be controlled by, your nest thermostat. and that’s on top of the devices and services that it already works with.i can’t blame you if your eyes glazed over after reading that paragraph, but here’s the thing: true smart home automation shouldn’t be exciting. it just needs to work. the benefit of the nest approach is that it takes care of all the settings for you and does them in the background to improve your life in minor but noticeable ways.for example, the car-charging station can use nest’s knowledge of electrical price surges to choose the optimal times for charging your car. and your lg smartfridge will automatically switch into energy-saving mode when nest knows you’re out of the house. how will it know? the smartlock tells it when you’ve locked up. of course, you can still experiment with individual tweaks using ifttt and other supported services, but you can do that with many other smart home systems as well. -mza growing ecosystem of connected-home devices: belkin wemo(re)i’ve been using a number of belkin wemo connected-home devices, and they’re great for letting me remotely control which lights or switches are on or off and setting up particular devices to do particular things. (my kids love that every holiday season, our christmas tree lights automatically turn on whenever someone enters the family room; i love that to save energy, the tree and room lights turn off 10 minutes after the room empties.)but the wemo platform has largely been limited to light bulbs , wall switches , and wall outlets . sure, there’s a motion sensor , you can integrate ifttt into your rules, and a few wemo-capable appliances and gadgets have hit the market. but overall, i’ve wanted my wemo system to do more. and because few of the current home automation platforms play well together, you’re generally limited to the products of a particular company—no mixing and matching of gear.the many new wemo devices belkin has announced at ces will significantly extend what the platform can do, and they make the platform one of the more versatile on the market. there are door and window sensors that monitor openings and closings; a leeo-like alarm sensor that monitors your existing smoke, co, and security alarms; a new motion sensor that detects heat signatures; a keychain fob sensor that can be used for proximity-based rules and actions; and even a water-usage meter . belkin has also announced a number of new wemo-enabled lights from partners osram sylvania and tcp, including outdoor, strip, recess, and flood lighting.all of these devices can work in tandem with the others—for example, if your smoke alarm goes off, the motion sensor detects something in the family room when you’re in bed, or water usage suddenly goes up at 3 a.m., a rule can, say, immediately turn on any wemo-controlled lights and send your phone a notification. in addition, belkin is one of the vendors signed on to support apple’s upcoming homekit home automation coordination platform, which (we hope) will allow wemo gear to integrate with other home-automation and internet-of-things devices. the result is that wemo is starting to feel like a real platform that’s worth adopting—and, more important in this still-emerging market, a system that’s not a gamble. -dfan action camera to challenge gopro: sony fdr-x1000vamidst a pretty poor showing from most of the world of cameras at ces 2015, one of the few things that really stood out was the sony fdr-x1000v action camera . sony is one of the companies really nipping at gopro’s heels, and the x1000v might just be the camera that does it. sony uses full pixel readout technology, which should allow for higher quality video, and a 100-mbps video bitrate. and taking into account the increased popularity of drone cameras, the fdr-x1000v’s stabilization system is designed to work better with the low-level vibrations from being strapped to a flying machine with multiple buzzing motors. it also has a gps that gopro lacks.otherwise, it’s very much on par with the current high-end gopro hero 4 black. it’s $500, plus an extra $100 if you want a remote control. it’ll record high-speed footage at 120 fps in 1080 and 240 fps at 800×480.honestly, there’s a lot more to actually making a pick than that. there’s going to be video quality, accessories, handling, and a bunch of other stuff to consider. but seeing someone really give gopro a run for its money is an awesome thing, and we’re really looking forward to seeing how this thing handles. -tbbiolite is known for its campstove , a cooking system that provides usb power—to charge your phone or other gear—generated by the heat from the stove. but with the $100 nanogrid , the company now makes something of its own that can take advantage of that power.designed to let you consolidate several off-grid gadgets, the nanogrid starts with a handheld package that includes a 200-lumen, edge-lit, hangable lantern; a 250-lumen torch (flashlight to us laypeople); and a 4,400-mah battery for charging your phone or other gear. but you also get two separate, packable, daisy-chain camp lights that you can string across 10 feet of cable. the nanogrid itself charges via usb at home, in the car, or—of course—using the campstove.biolite hasn’t yet released full details about the product, so we don’t know how heavy it will be or how long each of the three lighting systems will last on a full charge, but we’re looking forward to testing the nanogrid. it might be a nice addition to our guide to helpful gear for any emergency . -mz & dfa possible rival to sonos home audio systems: google cast for speakersit’s obvious that streaming is the new black (or whatever), and google is hoping to piggyback on the success of chromecast with google cast for audio , baking in google-flavored music streaming into a variety of audio hardware. there will be no shortage of content to stream—google has already announced compatibility with google play music, npr one, pandora, rdio, tunein, and iheartradio, with plenty more to come as the technology rolls out.there’s no telling yet if google will be able to rival either stand-alone music systems like sonos ( which is our favorite whole home audio system ) or solutions like apple’s airplay, but they’re starting with a slate of hardware partners including sony, lg, and heos by denon.cast for audio also has support from marvell, broadcom, and others, so it’s sure to be compatible with an increasing range of devices over time. while it probably won’t be as seamless and instantaneous as the promo video tries to suggest , we’re interested to see how (or if) google can innovate in the streaming audio space, which is becoming increasingly how we consume our audio. we’re not convinced yet, but we’ll definitely stay tuned. -raa 5k monitor for a killer price: hp z27qshould you get a 5k monitor right now? we wouldn’t just yet. will you be tempted to ignore our advice and go after hp’s z27q 5k display anyway? yes. hp’s recently announced z27q monitor is a 27-inch ips display with an eye-opening resolution of 5120×2880. but it’s not the resolution that makes hp’s monitor so special—dell’s ultrasharp 27 ultra hd 5k monitor matches it, as does apple’s imac (with retina 5k display). it’s the price.hp is planning to launch its 5k monitor in march for a mere $1,300. that sounds like a lot on paper, but it’s actually a steal for a 5k ips monitor that rotates, pivots, and swivels; supports picture-in-picture capabilities; comes pre-calibrated out of the box; and has an integrated four-port usb 3.0 hub. both dell’s monitor and apple’s imac cost $2,500—almost twice as much as hp’s display. (at least you’re getting a full computer with apple, too.)you’ll need to connect hp’s display to your computer using two displayport 1.2 connections, because that’s how much bandwidth this monitor needs just to work. it’s likely that hp’s monitor creates its giant image by seamlessly stitching two panels together—each generated by one of these connections. this workaround for ultra-high resolutions, known as multi-stream transport, isn’t as good when your system treats a monitor as one giant panel (single-stream transport).  you’ll need displayport 1.3 for that, however, and you might still need to run two cables anyway.with hp’s 5k display, you’re also going to have to stomach what may or may not be an amazing experience with windows and third-party app scaling. but, as anandtech’s brett howse writes , it might be time to just chin up and deal with it. -dma g-sync ips monitor for gamers: acer xb270huwe’ve been waiting for this one for awhile—not specifically acer’s 27-inch monitor , but for someone to finally make an ips monitor that incorporates nvidia’s g-sync technology. if you’re not a gamer, you can go ahead and pass this one up, since the entire point of g-sync is to reduce visual deformities in games by synchronizing your monitor’s refresh rate with your video card’s output.a number of monitors already support g-sync, but they all use inferior tn panels —they can run super-high refresh rates compared to ips monitors, but they have worse viewing angles and color quality. acer’s 2560×1440 monitor can run at a 144-hz refresh rate (in simple terms, the maximum number of times it can update each second). we’ve never seen this on an ips panel before (if the panel in acer’s monitor is even ips to begin with ).acer’s monitor will arrive in march, but the company hasn’t indicated a price. we’re thinking “very high” for this “world-first gaming monitor,” as acer describes it. however, it probably won’t be as expensive as the monitor that rival asus debuted shortly after acer’s big announcement: a 27-inch ips g-sync monitor running a 4k resolution of 3840×2160. them’s fightin’ words. -dmmonitor and play with your pets remotely: petcubethe petcube is almost exactly what it looks like: a cube with a wi-fi-enabled camera built in that allows you to monitor your pets remotely via your smartphone. but it’s really much more than that—the petcube also comes with a (pretty loud) speaker that allows you to call or talk to your pets. most importantly, however, it also comes with a built-in laser pointer, which you can control via the mobile app, allowing you to play with your pets from wherever you are.the $200 device is a small metal cube that’s easy to set up on your home wi-fi. you can sit it on any surface (i have mine sitting on a table facing the cat food bowl) or mount it on a tripod if you’d like. the audio stream goes two ways, so you can talk to your pets and they can talk to you, and the laser is a “5mw 3r class laser,” which mostly translates to its being about the same as any other red laser pointer you could buy at the store, functionally speaking.this whole thing may sound gimmicky to some, but as an early kickstarter backer, i’ve already been living the petcube life for some time now and can vouch for its fun(ctionality). i have two cats who respond well to being called via the two-way audio stream, and when they show up, i can play laser pointer with them pretty much until my smartphone battery dies or i get bored—whichever comes first. and kids seriously love it. when visiting family recently, the kids demanded to play with my cats via the petcube more than they wanted to play with their own two cats with a real-life laser pointer.maybe that’s a bad thing for humanity, but it’s a good thing for us adults who travel and want to stay in touch with our pets. there are some downsides, though. while similar-ish to a dropcam pro ( our pick for wireless ip camera , which also costs $200 and streams video via wi-fi from your home to a smartphone), it is not a competitor.the dropcam’s camera appears significantly higher-res (despite them both being 720p) and has night vision capabilities, not to mention a wider viewing angle than the petcube. the petcube cannot see details in your home if it’s even remotely dark, so if there’s no natural daylight available and you’re not home to turn on the light (and why would you be if you’re trying to watch the petcube camera?), you won’t be able to see much even if you are trying to move the laser around. i would not recommend using the petcube to monitor your home for intruders or much else—get a dropcam for that. but if you want to play with your pets in realtime from the other side of the country (or world), the petcube is where it’s at.petcube made a showing at ces this year and said their “next batch” of shipments will begin going out in february. -jca larger version of a beloved bluetooth speaker: ue megaboomultimate ears makes our favorite portable and rugged bluetooth speakers, and its latest entry rounds out its lineup with a bigger, louder, longer-lasting speaker. the new $300 megaboom is a super-sized version of our ruggedized bluetooth speaker pick , the ue boom, and is ipx7-certified with rubber seals for the usb and 3.5-mm ports and thus fully waterproof for use outdoors, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, or anywhere else water poses a risk.the nfc-enabled megaboom supports up to eight bluetooth-paired devices, with up to two devices connected simultaneously at a range of up to 100 feet. as with the boom, the megaboom can pair with another boom or megaboom to play the same audio or act as a two-channel-stereo system. ue’s smartphone app for the device also provides an equalizer, an alarm that works even if your smartphone is off or dead, and the ability to turn the speaker on or off remotely. (these features will also be added to the boom via a firmware update.)we’ve been testing the megaboom for a few weeks, and while it’s portable like our portable bluetooth speaker pick, the ue mini boom , it’s louder and better-sounding than a boom. but the megaboom is also quite a bit girthier—the thickness of a bottle of wine to the boom’s tallboy, as wired puts it—suited to carrying in a tote or backpack, but not in a purse. the speaker measures 8.5 inches tall and 3.25 inches wide, weighs two pounds, and gets 20 hours of battery life on a 2.5-hour charge, according to ue—8 hours more than the boom. given its price bracket and quality, it may even be eligible to contend in our home bluetooth speaker category. -staffa much-needed upgrade for usb wall chargers: chargeall’s chargetechwe’re currently working on a guide to the best usb chargers, and if the chargetech —currently an indiegogo project—lives up to its hype, it just might jump to the top of the list of contenders for compact models.only slightly larger than apple’s bundled iphone charger, the chargetech charges an iphone 6 twice as fast as apple’s accessory—while charging an ipad at the same time, thanks to dual usb-power ports. in fact, with a total power output of 24 watts at 4.8 amps, the chargetech can simultaneously charge two ipads—or two large tablets from other vendors, of course—at the fastest speed. and with a promised price of $19, it’s the same price as apple’s single-port, slower-charging model, and only slightly more expensive than google’s single-device nexus charger.we’ve found some great chargers that can handle more devices, but the chargetech is the smallest multi-device, fast-charge model we’ve yet seen. -dfan x-series lens worth the price tag: fujifilm xf 16-55mm f2.8 r lm wr lensfujifilm x-series lenses have a reputation. they’re excellent, but expensive. even their most affordable options are pricier than the competition, but worth it. the new xf 16-55mm lens is no exception. it’s going to cost you $1,200—more than many cameras in its own right, and barely less than fujifilm’s flagship x-t1 —but for that price, you get a lens that performs exceptionally sharply across its entire zoom range.it has a fixed maximum aperture of f/2.8 across the entire zoom range (typically this reduces as you increase zoom), which means more light and better blur, even when at 55 mm. it also features a new lens coating, which should do even more to prevent flares and ghosting , it’s water-, dust-, and cold-resistant, and it has two focus motors for faster and quieter performance. indeed, if it’s as good as the the sample images we’ve seen would suggest, it could replace the need for several lenses with just the one.one really interesting move fujifilm has made is totally removing the stabilization system from the 16-55mm f/2.8. they said that their research showed that stabilization systems lead to a slight image quality loss, especially towards the corners. since the lens maxes out at 55mm, it’s not long enough to really need stabilization, and with the maximum aperture of f/2.8, you should just be able to crank up the shutter speed to make sure things keep stable.make no mistake, this lens is definitely aimed at the pro market. this zoom range and aperture setting are commonly found with other manufacturers and are often widely loved by users. but if the demo images are anything to go by, this thing is going to take straight-up beautiful photos. -tban affordable drone with high-end features: zanowe already have an inexpensive/small drone pick in our drone guide , but the kickstarted zano drone debuting at ces this year looks like competition in the category. while our small drone pick gets you a basic, palm-sized, safe-stabilized drone to fly with a controller for $100, the zano adds many features found in higher-end drones for more than twice the price ($250). still, it’s a smarter quad that’s still pretty affordable compared to our main drone pick at $1,100, so we’re looking forward to testing it out.the zano’s flagship feature is a 5-mp hd video camera, and it’s designed in part as a tool for capturing both video and pictures of the user, like a higher-tech selfie stick. the drone can be controlled using an ios or android device with either motion-control or on-screen joysticks, and thanks to a “virtual tether” it can be set to maintain a certain distance from the pilot for a “follow” mode.ir detectors are built into the zano for “obstacle avoidance” to keep it from getting knocked out of the air. when the drone detects itself low on battery, it is meant to automatically guide itself to a safe landing. its batteries, which last for 10-15 minutes of flight, are also removable, so users can purchase extra ones to switch out for longer flight sessions. by contrast, the nano’s rated flight time is 8 minutes, and the ranges of the two drones are about the same: about 25 meters max for the nano and 30 meters for the zano.the petite zano is more than twice the price of the nano: the earliest kickstarter reward editions were priced around $250, and the cost for kickstarted products tends go up once they launch. zano anticipates entering production in may 2015 and plans to deliver its reward drones to kickstarter backers around june. -staffin terms of headphone releases this year, everyone seemed to add either bluetooth, active noise cancelling, or sports offerings to their lineup, and i’m pretty sure i saw/heard them all. the problem with trying headphones at ces (if you’ve never been) is that the show floor is possibly the worst place to try out headphones. seriously. imagine a packed subway station with several bands playing at the same time. that’s ces. you also can’t always control what music you listen to, and often the models of headphones that you are trying at the show are prototypes, which means that the final version that’s released may or may not sound the same.as a result, we can only get a good idea of what’s to come and assure you that we’ll get everything that looks amazing in to test as soon as each headphone is made available. all those caveats aside, here’s a few things that i saw that i think may just have a shot at our top spots in their categories in the future.sennheiser had some sport headphones ( sennheiser ocx685i ) in the past that we  adored the sound and fit of , but many people had breakage issues. well, sennheiser apparently heard the concerns and has released four all-new versions of their sport line with kevlar-like reinforced cables, a sweat-resistant rating that enables you to rinse the headphones under water, and anti-microbial plastic that will help keep bacteria off sweaty headphones tossed in a bag. two are sealed, two are non-sealed, and they will range in price from $69 to $109 for the 686g s. each has a three-button iphone remote. so if they work well (and hold up well), we may have a new option for sport headphones to recommend.in the cool-sounding-if-it-works category of sport are the sms biosport , which will track your heart rate through the headphones themselves. the things that gave me pause are:the heart-rate monitoring is tracked through runkeeper, which you receive a free month of when you purchase the biosport. sms was unclear what happens after that, should you not want to pay for runkeeper. the rep said there are other fitness apps that will work with the biosport in the future.i have a telemetry-strap-based heart-rate monitor, and any loss of contact with my body will cause me to lose the heart rate. so i’m curious how easy it is to establish and keep a connection with a pair of headphones. either way, we’ve got to try them to see how they work. they’re $150 and are out now (unlike the crazy bio-monitoring parrot zik sport, which are still in development), so we will let you know asap.speaking of sennheiser, they also make our favorite wireless home theater headphones . this ces they announced new versions for that category, all of which no longer use kleer technology. instead, they use a sennheiser proprietary 2.4-ghz signal that sennheiser claims can adjust automatically if there is interference from another wireless source in the area. the new signal also (according to sennheiser) allows for a larger broadcast range and better functionality through walls. there are four models. two have sealed earcups ($219 for the base model and $279 for more inputs and a “surround sound” setting), one is an audiophile-centric open-backed earcup ($399), and one is made for folks who need assisted listening and features special eq to help with dialog and also can adjust for hearing differences between ears ($499).it all sounds pretty great, so we’re curious to see how these sound at home. the only downside is that instead of having the capability to pair four pairs of headphones to one tower like in previous models, the new versions only allow you to pair two. this is a bummer for larger families. that said, once we have a chance to test them out, we’ll give you a full report.a more streamlined version of some bulky but unique over-on-ear headphones: beyerdynamic custom streetin our $300 headphone article we had a runner-up spot dedicated to the beyerdynamic custom pro one. they’re really unique, with a toggle that enables you to customize the sound profile of the headphone as well as interchangeable face plates. the biggest issue we had with them was their immense size. well, coming in march, beyerdynamic will release the custom street , a more streamlined version of the custom pro one. you still get the toggle and 16 included face plates to make your headphones look and sound like you want. but the earcups are way way smaller. compared to the pro one, they’re on-ears, but on me, they fit like closely-cropped over-ears. and, with a more affordable msrp of $150, we’re pretty stoked to try them out. the prototypes we heard sounded fantastic, but as i said above, the proof is in the final version. so watch in march for more details.a great sounding possible step-up pick for in-ear bluetooth: phiaton bt 330 ncalso coming in march will be the phiaton bt 330 nc: on-ear, bluetooth 4.0 anc headphones. with all that functionality, the $230 price tag isn’t surprising. but the models we heard sounded amazing, so they may be a step-up i-want-it-all option down the line. (and of course, insert prototype warning here.) check back in a few months!other bluetooth headphones we have our eye on: the polk hinge bt, the sennheiser momentum bt (with bluetooth 4.0), and the urbanears plattan adv wireless. -ldbrighter brights, more colors on your tv: high dynamic range + dolby visioncompanies provided a preview of dolby vision and high dynamic range (hdr) content last year at ces. traditionally on a tv, the brightest highlights are around 40 foot-lamberts in brightness, but with dolby vision, you can have highlights closer to 100 foot-lamberts so they really stand out. this increase creates a larger dynamic range, which improves contrast ratios and provides a viewing experience that is closer to real life—such as the sun blinding you by reflecting off the water.this year we are seeing a combination of technologies and products that are going to bring this to market. samsung and others are showing tvs that can produce brighter highlights. most of the tvs are expected around may, though some tvs from ces last year didn’t make it out until almost christmas.netflix has promised to start sending out hdr content this year in addition to their 4k streaming. we were told the netflix content should be available close to the time the displays actually go on sale. at the same time, panasonic is showing a prototype blu-ray player that adds both 4k support and hdr and expanded color gamut support. dolby has announced the first titles to come out with support for hdr at home, including the lego movie and edge of tomorrow, for “early 2015.”while the merits of 4k can be debated, if you can’t afford a larger display or sit too far away, the benefits decrease. hdr and expanded color gamuts do not have this problem, and you can see them from anywhere in the room. films in the theater already use a larger color gamut than at home, so the content for this already exists. these technologies offer what might be the biggest increase in home picture quality since the transition from sd to hd. -chwhile there were a bunch of tv announcements, as you’d expect, it’s hard to say which might be possible contenders for our best tv pick just yet—we need more time to review and evaluate them before making some early picks. but this is, actually, quite a good thing. it’s better to talk about the overall trends, all of which are promising.the first major trend is hdr, which we just discussed above. on the tv side, this means better contrast ratios for all content. on the content side, this means richer, more lifelike image on tvs that can support it. we’re really in the early days of this, so we’ll see how it pans out. since it’s not as elaborate (or annoying) as 3d or other recent tech, i’m hopeful. especially since it’s easy to demo how awesome it looks.the next major trend is color, specifically, quantum dots . quantum dots are microscopic particles that glow a certain wavelength (color) when hit with light or other energy. the benefit of this is purer, more realistic colors.so for the near future, tvs will look a little more realistic and potentially be a little more energy-efficient. in the less-near future, qd (and a few other technologies) will allow a wider range of colors: redder reds, greener greens, bluer blues. colors that aren’t possible with current tv technology. these colors, too, will need to be in the content (otherwise it’s just the tv making stuff up). which brings us to the last tv trend…the most promising tv “tech” to come out of ces is the uhd alliance , a never-before-seen collaboration across the tv universe. from sony, sharp, and samsung (and others) on the manufacturing side, to disney, fox, and warner on the content side, to technicolor, dolby, and netflix on the various-other-stuff side, all pieces of the 4k uhd chain are accounted for.these companies want to create a universal front to “set the bar for next-generation video entertainment by establishing new standards to support innovation in video technologies including 4k and higher resolutions, high dynamic range, wider color gamut and immersive 3d audio.” getting such diverse companies to come together is pretty remarkable, and the fact that it’s not just for marketing purposes is even more so. the hdr, color, and audio aspects are all really interesting. we’ll see what the alliance comes to, but again, it seems promising for the future of tv picture quality. -gmoppo, makers of high-end open-backed planar magnetic headphones, generally have retail prices around $700-$1000. this spring, oppo will be releasing the pm3, which will be oppo’s first ever closed-backed planar-magnetic headphones headphones. this is a big deal, because the pm3 will also cost around $400, which is really inexpensive for headphones that use planar magnetic drivers. (planar magnetic drivers are very sensitive and are known for their ability to have incredible detail and sense of space when playing music)i got to hear the pm3 at a private suite at ces. yes, $400 headphones are somewhat pricy, but when you’re talking about very high quality drivers, that price range is really pretty great. plus, having a closed back option is unique. generally, when you want to listen to audio-enthusiast type headphones, they’re all open backed. this is great for at home, but don’t really work on the go.also consider that most planar magnetic headphones are huge. the pm3 are made to be around the same size as the over-headphones most folks are familiar with, so they will go from home to the office or on your commute easily. and finally, they sound fantastic.the retail version of the pm3 won’t be available until the spring, so i have to withhold judgement until we get to give them a proper testing. but based on what i heard, they have a serious chance to take over as my favorite closed-backed headphones, and could be a step up from our $300 over-ear picks , the psb m4u1. -ldthe two technologies everyone will use: usb 3.1 and type-cthe faster usb 3.1 standard and the reversible type-c connector are not new this year at ces—we’ve been hearing about them for quite some time. what’s new is that consumer devices using both have finally been announced: the nokia’s n1 android tablet has a type-c connector, the  msi gt72 dominator gaming laptop will be updated with usb 3.1 later this year, and there are rumors that the next macbook air will only have a single usb type-c port for charging, data transfer, and connecting external displays.usb 3.1 is theoretically twice as fast as usb 3.0, increasing data transfer speeds from 5 gbps to 10 gbps. the usb type-c connector is reversible and can be used independently of the usb 3.1 standard (as in the case of the nokia n1 tablet). type-c can also be used to replace multiple kinds of connections, such as charging and displayport, in addition to faster data transfer speeds. freeing up those ports could allow manufacturers to make lighter, more-streamlined devices, or use the space for other necessary hardware.it’ll still be some time before all of our gadgets use the new standard–and, as ars technica’s andrew cunningham points out, it’ll be a messy transition because of the new connector–but real, shipping products with usb 3.1 and type-c mean that it isn’t far off. -ksthis years ces has produced some of the worst tech reporting i’ve ever seen. glad to see the wirecutter is setting the bar. great stuff guys.fyi there’s a small error.  you have “256 gb or 512 gb of ram” for the x1 carbon, while i’m sure you mean of ssd storage space.  of course, that’s unless lenovo has found a way to cram an absurdly large ramdisk into a laptop for $1250 :peditorial note: last sentence has a glitch. “we’ll what the alliance comes to…” should probably be, “we’ll see what the alliance comes to…”thanks for helping reduce the blog-clutter. kudos to wirecutter for getting to the point.i don’t share the enthusiasm for dish’s sling tv. asking me to pay $20/month for a relatively small and fixed bundle of ad-supported tv channels sure sounds like another “cable” company to me. as a cord-cutter, that’s exactly not what i want. what i want is for “cable” companies (and dish tv) to get the heck out of the way and let the ad-supported broadcasters stream directly to me — for $0/month.i work here, but on a personal note, i couldn’t be happier. those are literally the only channels i want. i’d love for cable companies to step aside too, but until then this is a nice compromise.that will never happen for $0/month, sorry, not everything in life can be free.who said “free”? i just said $0/month as the consumer of the ad-supported content. just like tv where advertisers pay for the content and consumers pay for their receiving “antenna” (internet connection) and receiving set (pc, tablet, etc.). in a broadband world, i don’t see what value the “cable company” adds to that formula[.right now the cable company is paying almost $5/month to espn for every subscriber, not just ones that watch it, and $1/month for tnt. and as a viewer, you’re still watching ads on those channels. this is a welcome disruption to the usual model and we’ll see how it does.my point is it isn’t an actual disruption in the model, just a change in pricing.it actually is a disruption in pricing. you aren’t tied to the local cable company, or locked into a contract with a satellite company. dish/sling might have gotten this first, but i imagine they won’t be the last. it was never said that espn was exclusive to slingtv, just that they have them. if multiple companies start to compete in this area, then we can start to be free to pick the tv provider we want.unfortunately, most of us are still stuck with a single viable isp at this point.having a third type of company do the same thing as the others isn’t a disruption in the model. as for price, since dish sling is offering only a handful of channels, it stands to reason it should be cheaper. the history of all tv bundlers (they are not really tv providers) is the price keeps going up as more and more less interesting content is added; why would dish be different?as for isps, i.e. the people that give you your ip address and bandwidth, should be barred from controlling or having any vested interest in the content delivered over that ip address (i.e. tv programs, movies, websites, etc.). unfortunately, the problem today is the cable tv companies are also the major isps, and the telcos who are isps and network operators also want to control the content. that’s a very bad set up.there are bandwidth requirements on both sides. server bandwidth isn’t cheap when serving video.i’m sure it isn’t, not unlike the cost of tv broadcast studios, microwave distribution, transmitters and antennas–all of which has been paid for by advertisers’ dollars, not viewers’ dollars. the same principle should hold regardless of how the program “gets on the air”. now that the internet has eliminated the distance issues, the need for a “tv cable” company is gone–i just wish we could get them to actually go away.true, and bandwidth i’m happy to pay for. dish sling tv (and other cable tv companies) are not charging for bandwidth, they’re charging for bundling, and i don’t see paying $20/month for that.the whole concept of channels is a dinosaur.i want a flat rate service that lets me stream any show or movie ever made. i don’t care about a channel or a network. i care about watching a specific show or movie.or: an account on nbc.com for nbc content, espn.com for espn content, etc. each one can run its own website, distribute its own apps, make its own pitches to consumers regarding commercials or no commercials, free streaming or paid streaming, etc etc etc. let the people vote with their eyeballs and their wallets.agreed, the channel concept is obsolete and was never a consumer- or market-mandated concept in the first place; it was just how the engineers designed it in the time before broadband data.the concept of bundling together channels and selling them for a high price is also obsolete in a broadband packet data world, one in which the consumer is already paying a high price for an ip address and bandwidth. yet, we still cling to that model. as far as i can tell, dish sling tv is the same model plus i still have to pay for my ip address and bandwidth (at least with cable tv, the “cable” is included with every channel package).the model i want to see for tv stations is the model we already have for radio stations. virtually every radio station on the planet has a streaming service and i don’t have to pay to consume it (other than the cost of my connection and receiving equipment). i’m happy to pay for my ip address and bandwidth–i just don’t want to have to pay for ad-sponsored content or for a third party to bundle up channels for me.you’re describing netflix and hulu plus. both of which are great for people that want to get rid of cable (i use them both). they just don’t offer as much content as you wish they did. they also don’t address live sports. since football is the single most popular tv show in the country, giving that up is a major reason people don’t get rid of cable and a reason this is such a big deal.i’m not impressed with uhd or 3d but better dynamic range and color are exciting to me  — as long as we’re not going audiophile (photophile?) and pushing the range envelope so slightly you’d need a meter to detect it.trust us, you don’t need something crazy to tell the difference. put the content side-by-side and you’ll know in a second.showing movie shot in 24 fps and not 240 hz with artificial algorithms to fill in the blank.first because that is within the bandwidth capacity especially with h265.  but too bad they would want to charge double the hd cable prices.that’s incorrect. current hdmi transmitter chips can either do 4k60hz with 4:2:0 and hdcp 2.2 or 4:4:4 without hdcp. however, the receiver chips can do both, so the displays can do 60hz with full bandwidth color, which will be needed as hdr will take 10-bits per pixel it seems. transmitter chips that can do both are becoming available, so by mid-year i don’t expect this to really be an issue anymore.it wouldn’t be easier to upgrade 1080p content because there isn’t a current standard that could use 10-bits per pixel for it, or panels that can do 10-bits per pixel right now. the uhd standard includes specifications for 10-bit content and will have panels that can display it.can someone explain how the chargetech performs better than previous chargers? i always thought the limits of standard wall chargers were due to physics and/or the batteries of most devices themselves. what have these guys figured out that no one else has?the main thing the chargetech has going for it is that it can fast-charge two tablets in a package the size of apple’s (single-device, slower-charging) phone charger. usually you need to sacrifice size to get fast charging of multiple devices.right, so my question is…what did these guys figure out to allow them to do that? i mean, are we still seeing breakthroughs in wall charger technology? are they just the first to shrink it?that’s the impression i get. it’s not like super innovative or anything, but it’s convenient (assuming it works).i think the tech is just getting smaller — we’ve definitely seen multi-device chargers getting smaller over the past couple years.any comments on the new fitbit charge hr and surge? i’m mostly curious about the accuracy of the hr monitor, especially in a lower-end model like the charge hr.where are the smart charging bricks?  i admit to being out of the flow somewhat but do i really have to unplug everything manually in 2015?i’m also interested in the headnotes (earbuds) and polaroid zip printer. unfortunately i own a windows phone (and am happy with it) the zip won’t work for me, but the technology itself is pretty cool.speaking from experience, you should probably avoid anything that uses “zink” tech. the quality is pretty atrocious, and not in a campy, film is fun kind of way. think early 2000s web cam quality.great article and perfect introduction. there’s been a lot of useless and gimmicky products and therefore coverage from ces this year, but these are exciting products and deserve a look. i’m especially interested in all of these new bluetooth, anc, headphones being announced.there were tons of very cool battery cases for the iphone 6 i saw mophie’s, incipio’s too. i love the color of this one.  it’s from unu.maria: we saw a number of them, too. we mentioned the incipio because it’s actually shipping, but we’ve updated our iphone battery case guide with mentions of a bunch of the ones we saw: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-iphone-5-battery-case/thanks for the update. i was there checking other things out but i have always been a unu fan my kids and i buy tons of their stuff. i love their new dx6 for the iphone 6. am a big fan of wirecutter (even though i am a chef!) that’s why i wondered why you guys didn’t see the unu for the iphone 6 at ces at all… oh i have the red dx5! i have anew iphone 6 so i will get the red one! thanks again!we did see dx-6 and will certainly be including it in our upcoming iphone 6 battery case article!good write up, thanks for putting things into clear no-hype chunks of info.i have a sonos (largely based upon the review at wirecutter combined with in store demos) and have to say that while i am very happy with it, i feel more competition is a good thing – will keep sonos at the edge for offering more value.this was great, but what i really wanted was the realest guide to ces.
 for release at 11:00  a.m. estthe federal reserve board on friday announced preliminary unaudited results indicating that the reserve banks provided for payments of approximately $98.7 billion of their estimated 2014 net income to the u.s. treasury.  under the board's policy, the residual earnings of each federal reserve bank are distributed to the u.s. treasury, after providing for the costs of operations, payment of dividends, and the amount necessary to equate surplus with capital paid-in.the federal reserve banks' 2014 estimated net income of $101.5 billion was derived primarily from $115.9 billion in interest income on securities acquired through open market operations (u.s. treasury securities, federal agency and government-sponsored enterprise (gse) mortgage-backed securities (mbs), and gse debt securities).  operating expenses of the reserve banks, net of amounts reimbursed by the u.s. treasury and other entities for services the reserve banks provided as fiscal agents, totaled $3.6 billion in 2014.  in addition, the reserve banks were assessed $711 million for the costs related to producing, issuing, and retiring currency, $590 million for board expenditures, and $563 million to fund the operations of the consumer financial protection bureau.  the reserve banks had interest expense of $6.9 billion associated with reserve balances and term deposits held by depository institutions, and recorded foreign currency translation losses of $2.9 billion that result from the daily revaluation of foreign currency denominated asset holdings at current exchange rates.  additional earnings were derived from income from services of $435 million, and net income of $101 million attributable to the consolidated limited liability companies that were created in response to the financial crisis.   in 2014, statutory dividends totaled $1.7 billion and $1.1 billion of net income was used to equate surplus to capital paid-in.the attached chart illustrates the amount of federal reserve banks' residual earnings distributed to the u.s. treasury from 2005 through 2014 (estimated).
rt @sub8u: (over) ambitious?
smartphones, wearables, tvs, air/water purifiers, drones, bulbs - xiaomi existing/planned products.
 xiaomi corp. is working on a water purifier as it expands a range of home products that can be controlled through the internet, according to an early investor in the company.the company has shown some backers a prototype of the new purifier, said jenny lee, managing partner at ggv capital, an early investor in china ’s largest smartphone vendor. xiaomi spokeswoman joy han declined to comment on products that haven’t been announced.xiaomi said yesterday that its valuation rose to $45 billion, following a $1.1 billion funding round that included investors such as billionaire yuri milner’s dst, singapore’s gic pte and all-stars investment ltd. belief in chief executive officer lei jun’s ability to push from smartphones into home electronics was one reason investors valued the beijing-based company so highly, lee said.“they have a product pipeline,” lee said in a phone interview today. “going forward it’s not just going to be the xiaomi phone or the tv. the upside and the investment around xiaomi is the hope they can get into the smart home.”xiaomi will unveil a new “flagship product” next month, lei said in a statement yesterday, without supplying further details. ggv’s lee didn’t say if the water purifier would be that product.lei this month unveiled an air purifier for homes that sends pollution readings to mobile phones and alerts users when its filter is dirty. the purifier was designed by zhimi, which lei said was one of 25 startups in which xiaomi has invested.the company on dec. 18 also began selling a light bulb designed by another startup called yeelight that can change colors by remote control.xiaomi, which means millet in chinese, was founded in 2010 to make software for mobile devices running google inc.’s android system. the company subsequently released products including a tablet computer, a television set-top box and tvs that connect to the web.the light bulb, and air and water purifiers show how xiaomi can invest in startups to expand its product line and push further into the home, ggv’s lee said.the market for internet-connected appliances will grow to $7.1 trillion by 2020, from $1.9 trillion last year, estimates market researcher idc.“the smart home is a much bigger market,” lee said. “homes are getting connected with phones, tablets and tvs in ways that are highly synergistic. xiaomi definitely wants to be part of that. that is their key strategy.”xiaomi and ggv have invested in startups together, including in the $40 million series c financing for u.s.-based wearable-device maker misfit earlier this month, lee said. xiaomi and ggv will continue to look for co-investment opportunities, she said.ggv today announced it led a $10 million series a funding round for drone maker ehang , which is based in san francisco and beijing. xiaomi wasn’t part of the investment.ehang’s ghost drone, which is available to preorder online for $375, can be controlled by a smartphone application and has a feature to auto follow the user.“there’s no need to master the art of joystick remote controls,” lee said. “ehang is bringing this technology to target a mass audience.”to contact bloomberg news staff for this story: edmond lococo in beijing at elococo@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: michael tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net robert fenner, brendan scottpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
rt @infrainsight: drones for power line inspections. test team est. 50% reduction in aerial inspections costs.
 unmanned aircraft jr gsr260z equipped with laser scanner and high resolution camera.mission planner. main tasks of the study were to: 1. design and construction of the study system 2. plan the test cases and required flight operation types 3. getting several aviation and other authority permission for the b-vlos flight 4. detailed planning of the public pilot flight 5. hundreds hours of test flights with the uav and equipment to ensure the airworthiness according to the test flight plan 6. perform a public pilot flight on 13th of november 2014 in north carelian district in finland 7. analyze of the test results  8. report the study (in finnish)finnish energy industries and sharper shape demonstrated drones with advanced sensors in public test flights as part of a research project conducted with the electricity research pool.the robotic copter is equipped with a laser scanner, cameras and aviation safety systems and has the capability for long distance bvlos (beyond visual line of sight) inspection flights. the laser scanner maps the terrain and forms an accurate 3d model of the components of the power network, as well as of the surrounding buildings, forest and vegetation.the purpose of the study was to demonstrate the technical viability and cost-efficiency of drone based inspections to the electric industry. drones enable collecting the needed data for identifying and mitigating risks in power distribution in advance.the public test flights were conducted with the presence of independent energy sector analyst jouko tervo (reneco consulting ltd) and several utilities as observers. according to the results of the study, drones can be an efficient and economic method to make inspection flights for power network maintenances. the test team has estimated 50% reductions in aerial inspection costs are achievable using drones. some further technical and regulatory development is still needed to enable fast and easy regular operations.
 the dollar is on track to close 2014 with its strongest year against rival currencies in more than a decade after investors piled into u.s. assets in anticipation of higher interest rates.the wsj dollar index, which compares the greenback against a basket of widely traded currencies, rose more than 12% in 2014, reaching 83.04 wednesday, the...
 on its face, the  political crisis in greece  seems relatively likely to lead to greece exiting the eurozone. and why not? europe’s leading politicians pretty clearly regret having let greece in back in 1999 (particularly in off-the-record conversations), and greek voters are clearly fed up with being told what to do by brussels and frankfurt. journalistically, a “grexit” is certainly the most interesting outcome, so people talk a lot about it, and at this point there are a lot of plausible theories about how it could go. but i think it’s not going to happen. the forces of the status quo will rally, and another grand coalition will lead greece through several more dreary years of austerity and slow growth.nonetheless i think germany wants them out.  first, i think germany regards greece as a kind of cultural and economic cancer for the eurozone, and they don’t want to enshrine the principle that eighty percent default is ok.  second, germany sees a fair amount of eurozone stability right now (nb: i’m not saying stability is always good in every way) and has noticed that the contagion effects from the recent greek troubles have been small.  this is not a bad time to get them out.  third, germany is smart and knows that the real problems are podemos in spain and just about everyone in italy and maybe even a few people (or more) in france.  now is a good time to send splinter parties a message that they had better not mess around with the troika, and what could do that better than an economic disaster in a recalcitrant greece?so i think germany will play brinksmanship with syriza and, when the time comes, simply pull the plug and leave them high and dry.
 how would you describe your day today? has it been a typical day, a particularly good day, or a particularly bad day?as part of the pew research center’s annual global attitudes survey, this question is usually the first we pose to respondents in all the countries we survey. one reason we ask such a milquetoast question first is to help the respondents become more comfortable with the interviewer. the vast majority of the polls we conduct are done with face-to-face interviews in the respondent’s home, and asking about their day is one way to kick off the conversation.having said that, the question is not necessarily a throwaway. looking at the responses we received this year from 48,643 people we surveyed in 44 countries provides a glimpse of the mood of individual nations and even regions of the world.a median of nearly two-thirds (65%) across the countries surveyed in spring 2014 responded that they were having a typical day. only around a quarter (27%) said their day was going particularly well, and not even one-in-ten (7%) admitted their day was going poorly.africans and latin americans were more likely to say it was a good day (47% and 43%, respectively) and certain countries stand out for their more positive responses. for example, around half or more in nigeria (58%), colombia (57%), nicaragua (53%), kenya (52%) and brazil (51%) said their day was particularly good. (for full results by country, see here ).the u.s. is also one of the more upbeat countries when it comes to describing the day. overall, 41% of americans said the day was a good one, with nearly half (49%) saying the day was typical. only 8% of americans professed to having a bad day.meanwhile, bad days were more common in egypt (32% said it was a particularly bad day) and jordan (27%) than in any other country, and the middle east had slightly more bad day responses compared to other regions.it may sound surprising, but many of those in the poorer countries surveyed were more likely than those in richer nations to say the day was a good one. when looking at this question by national income, there is a slightly negative correlation between saying the day is a good one and per capita gdp. the u.s. is a major outlier on this measure. it has the highest gdp per capita among the countries surveyed and americans were more likely to rate a day as particularly good than people in other rich nations. still, in almost all these countries, the most common response to this question is that the day was just “typical.”interestingly, europeans stood out for being more likely to say the day was typical (a median of 76% across seven eu nations), with only 17% who said the day was good. less than three-in-ten in every european country surveyed said the day was going well. and in asia, a median of 68% said the day was typical, although 30% said the day was a good one. in japan, almost nine-in-ten (89%) said the day was a normal one.as a matter of survey continuity, almost every global attitudes survey going back to 2007 has had this inquiry as the first. and generally, there is little variation in the responses over time. across the 29 countries surveyed in both 2007 and 2014, a median of 67% said it was a typical day in 2014, while 68% in the same set of countries said this in 2007.
 is care in design exclusionary and elitist?the monograph last week generated much conversation.and some observations that caring in design and craftsmanship was all about expensive pieces made for the few, not for the masses. seeing the examples that i cited, it is not entirely inconceivable to think of caring and craftsmanship as the preserve of the few.but that couldn’t be further from the truth.because to think of care as something that only the few, the elite deserve is to believe that the relatively poor, the everyman does not deserve the respect that such care implies.but isn’t such care expensive? i’d posit it is not.is it feasible to create an organisation whose fabric has caring woven into it? yes, it is.muji — founded in 197 9 — on the principles of minimalism in design and in wastage in production and packaging, recycling and no branding is a beautiful example. the philosophy is summed up as “no brand quality goods” .muji makes and sells a range of products from stationery, to utilitarian goods such as ear-buds and portable mirrors, basic clothing such as cotton dresses and t-shirts, storage such as bottles and boxes, kitchen articles and electronics. the products use very little, just sufficient packaging. the stores themselves are marked by a simple layout, minimalist shelving with goods on display, the absence of colourful or loud banners and “offers” or any other point-of-sale tools.and the goods last, delivering the promise of low wastage (wrought often by the need for frequent replacement of often-used goods) and caring and respect in design.a portable, foldable mirror in aluminium i bought from muji 8 years ago, and the loyal companion in my handbag on all my travels every day, is still intact and looks good as new. an average muji cotton t-shirt has last me 5 years. i feel a twinge of sadness when i have to retire a muji t-shirt from active duty.the mirror, if bought today, would cost me a princely sum of £3.95. two plain t-shirts can be bought for under £10.of basic goods that anyone — you, me, anyone — can afford and be confident that it won’t unravel or break within days of our buying them, leading to further expense and material wastage.the philosophy scales beyond small household goods too. while muji keeps private the names of its designers and manufacturers, in line with its no-brand policy, it has collaborated to produce a fuel-efficient, low-emission car with nissan .can anyone create products with care and respect, for anyone, not just the few, to use and enjoy?it does take commitment though.commitment to asking “what if this were me?” at every step of the organisation’s design.commitment to treating the other human, as well as materials we derive from the planet and through manufacture, with respect and consideration.commitment to engaging mindfully with what we do, create and deliver.is that too much to ask?
 once you register for dropbox, the photos and videos in this album will be instantly saved to your dropbox and downloaded to all the computers linked to your account.once you register for dropbox, this folder will be instantly saved to your dropbox and downloaded to all the computers linked to your account.once you register for dropbox, this file will be instantly saved to your dropbox and downloaded to all the computers linked to your account.good passwords are hard to guess. use uncommon words or inside jokes, non-standard uppercasing, creative spelllling, and non-obvious numbers and symbols
 though the current accepted theory of oil  formation involves the slow transformation of animal and plant matter into  hydrocarbon (the biotic or biogenic theory), it is not the only theory that has  been put forth. as early as the 16th century, one theory of the  origin of oil claimed that it resulted from deep carbon deposits that have been  around far longer than life on this planet. the theory, which came to be known  as the abiotic oil formation (aof) theory, was largely forgotten until rather  recently when a few people (some of them scientists) revived it.the newest version of the aof theory states  that oil arises from inorganic processes that occur deep within the core or  lower mantle of the earth. here, they say, oil is formed and then percolates up  through cracks and porous rock to fill the reservoirs that humans tap to get  oil. if this claim is true, then oil may not be nearly as limited in quantity  as proponents of the biotic theory claim. this would mean oil is more “renewable” than we have been led to believe.the aof theory has been championed for a  number of reasons, but many current proponents point to the presence of methane  on comets, meteors, and other lifeless planets as evidence that organic  material is not needed to produce petroleum. other supporters point to other  clues about the origins of oil such as the distribution of metals in oil, the  association of hydrocarbons with helium, and the presence of oil deposits in  large-scale structures rather than patchy sedimentary deposits. these,  proponents claim, are all reasons to believe that oil does not come from plant  and animal matter, but rather from some natural chemical process involving  inorganic materials.the theory persists for a number of  reasons, but one of the biggest is that no one has actually ever witnessed the  formation of oil. because it takes millions of years for a fossil fuel to form,  any theories we have about the process of formation is based on observations of  current material. it is possible to speculate, make predictions and test those  predictions to gain evidence to support or reject a given theory, but it is not  possible to be as certain about the formation of oil as we are about something  like the formation ice, which we can directly observe. so, which theory has  more supporting evidence?most scientists believe the evidence comes  down decidedly on the side of oil forming from deceased organic matter. they point  to very strong chemical evidence (so called “biomarkers”) that show  hydrocarbons have an organic origin and not an inorganic origin. they also  point out that various stages of hydrocarbon development have been uncovered,  showing the progression from say peat all the way to anthracite coal or from  algae to oil. they also argue that small quantities of hydrocarbon can be  produced in laboratories, thus strong supporting their stance.proponents of the abiotic theory are not without  their evidence, however. these scientists point to the fact that oil reservoirs  have been shown to refill when left alone for periods of time, something that  does not fit with the biotic theory. they also point to the presence of oil on  meteors and other bodies that do not and never have supported life. they also  suggest that claims about the chemical nature of oil are spurious because we do  not know what processes occur deep in the earth that may cause oil to look as  though it came from an organic source when it did not. it is also true that oil  can be produced from inorganic material, lending support to this theory.most scientists support the biotic theory  of oil production for a number of reasons. in response to the evidence for the  abiotic theory, they say the following.first, refilling of wells can be explained  by two phenomena. one, our ability to extract oil from more difficult  environments is constantly increasing. as a result, wells that were once “tapped out” can now be reopened and produce again using new technology. two,  because oil moves and is of different densities, it is true that pumping oil  from a well may relieve pressure, which then allows oil trapped in cracks,  faults, and other pockets to enter the well over time.the second reason many scientists doubt the  abiotic theory is that its basic tenets don’t seem to be viable. namely, the  idea that rocks at great depth are porous is the opposite of what research  shows. of course, proponents of the theory point to the fact that magma manages  to escape, so why not petroleum.the third and most substantial reason for  discounting the abiotic theory is that the chemistry doesn’t add up. first,  there doesn’t seem to be enough co2 below the surface of the earth  to make the formation of oil possible. in scientific terms, the mass balance of  the equation is errant. more importantly, however, is the distinct isotopic and  biochemical structure of oil, which strongly support and organic origin. for  example, helium that is trapped with hydrocarbon deposits (and is an inert gas  so it does not react with anything), is of a specific character that means it  almost certainly came from the surface of the earth and not anywhere else.what is clear is that these issues require  more research and, given the importance of oil to our energy needs, many  prestigious institutions are working to solve the dilemma. in the united  states, scientists from the woods hole oceanographic institute are attempting  to determine just how deep oil deposits can be found. the deeper they are, the  less likely it is that they came from biotic origin.the other possibility here is the both  groups are right. oil may form through both processes. if so, then oil may not  be as limited a resource as we currently surmise.like many issues, politics play a major  role in the abiotic versus biotic oil formation argument. until recent decades,  the main argument propelling each was the supposedly limited supply of fossil fuel  available. for those pumping it from the ground, limiting supply has financial  gain. for politicians, a limited supply can be used to control people and as  justification for actions like war. an unlimited supply, on the other hand,  means that we need not worry about running out, that we ought to be able to drill  for more oil and increase the daily supply so as to decrease price, and so  forth.the arguments above, however, have been  pushed aside in recent years by fears that global warming is directly attributable  to carbon dioxide produced by burning hydrocarbons. if this is true, it doesn’t  matter if oil is limited or not because using it is causing immense damage.in the end, science will settle the debate,  but what science gets funded is directly related to which politicians are in  power and who is footing the bill. at some point we will know the definitive  answers to questions about the origin of oil and to questions about the impact  of co2 on the environment.
 this post is all about the only thing that matters for a new startup.if you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you.first obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success — some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup — team, product, and market. at any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose.and so you start to wonder — what correlates the most to success — team, product, or market? or, more bluntly, what causes success? and, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what's most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?let's start by defining terms.the caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the ceo, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them. you look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? i focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full of highly successful startups that were staffed primarily by people who had never "done it before".the quality of a startup's product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: how easy is the product to use? how feature rich is it? how fast is it? how extensible is it? how polished is it? how many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?the size of a startup's market is the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product. (let's assume for this discussion that you can make money at scale — that the cost of acquiring a customer isn't higher than the revenue that customer will generate.)some people have been objecting to my classification as follows: "how great can a product be if nobody wants it?" in other words, isn't the quality of a product defined by how appealing it is to lots of customers?no. product quality and market size are completely different.here's the classic scenario: the world's best software application for an operating system nobody runs. just ask any software developer targeting the market for beos, amiga, os/2, or next applications what the difference is between great product and big market.if you ask entrepreneurs or vcs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. this is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn't been built yet, or the market, which hasn't been explored yet.plus, we've all been raised on slogans like "people are our most important asset" — at least in the us, pro-people sentiments permeate our culture, ranging from high school self-esteem programs to the declaration of independence's inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — so the answer that team is the most important feels right.and who wants to take the position that people don't matter?on the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. this is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products. apple and google are the best companies in the industry today because they build the best products. without the product there is no company. just try having a great team and no product, or a great market and no product. what's wrong with you? now let me get back to work on the product.personally, i'll take the third position — i'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.in a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.the market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.the product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. and, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.in short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy.and when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.this is the story of search keyword advertising, and internet auctions, and tcp/ip routers.conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter — you're going to fail.you'll break your pick for years trying to find customers who don't exist for your marvelous product, and your wonderful team will eventually get demoralized and quit, and your startup will die.this is the story of videoconferencing, and workflow software, and micropayments.in honor of andy rachleff , formerly of benchmark capital, who crystallized this formulation for me, let me present rachleff's law of startup success:the #1 company-killer is lack of market.andy puts it this way:when a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.when a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.when a great team meets a great market, something special happens.you can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. market matters most.and neither a stellar team nor a fantastic product will redeem a bad market.well, first question: since team is the thing you have the most control over at the start, and everyone wants to have a great team, what does a great team actually get you?hopefully a great team gets you at least an ok product, and ideally a great product.however, i can name you a bunch of examples of great teams that totally screwed up their products. great products are really, really hard to build.hopefully a great team also gets you a great market — but i can also name you lots of examples of great teams that executed brilliantly against terrible markets and failed. markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are.in my experience, the most frequent case of great team paired with bad product and/or terrible market is the second- or third-time entrepreneur whose first company was a huge success. people get cocky, and slip up. there is one high-profile, highly successful software entrepreneur right now who is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers — because there is virtually no market for what he is building.conversely, i can name you any number of weak teams whose startups were highly successful due to explosively large markets for what they were doing.finally, to quote tim shephard: "a great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product."second question: can't great products sometimes create huge new markets?absolutely. this is a best-case scenario, though.vmware is the most recent company to have done it — vmware's product was so profoundly transformative out of the gate that it catalyzed a whole new movement toward operating system virtualization, which turns out to be a monster market.and of course, in this scenario, it also doesn't really matter how good your team is, as long as the team is good enough to develop the product to the baseline level of quality the market requires and get it fundamentally to market.understand i'm not saying that you should shoot low in terms of quality of team, or that vmware's team was not incredibly strong — it was, and is. i'm saying, bring a product as transformative as vmware's to market and you're going to succeed, full stop. short of that, i wouldn't count on your product creating a new market from scratch.third question: as a startup founder, what should i do about all this?let's introduce rachleff's corollary of startup success:the only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.you can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. the customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.and you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. the customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. you're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. you start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from harvard business school. investment bankers are staking out your house. you could eat free for a year at buck's.lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens.my contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit.carried a step further, i believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this "bpmf") and after product/market fit ("apmf").when you are bpmf, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit.do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.when you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. i'm not suggesting that you do ignore everything else — just that judging from what i've seen in successful startups, you can. whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit — and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the ceo sleeping with the venture capitalist. and the startup is still successful.conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, hr policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier vcs on the board — heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit. ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. people are terrible at understanding causation. but in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit.because, really, what else could it possibly be?[this post obviously raises way more questions than it answers. how exactly do you go about getting to product/market fit if you don't hit it right out of the gate? how do you evaluate markets for size and quality, especially before they're fully formed? what actually makes a product "fit" a market? what role does timing play? how do you know when to change strategy and go after a different market or build a different product? when do you need to change out some or all of your team? and why can't you count on on a great team to build the right product and find the right market? all these topics will be discussed…]this post was published over 7 years ago, in june 2007. there’s now an ebook available of the pmarca blog archives if you would like to read more and download it here .
 the dismal condition of the nation’s infrastructure and potential remedies has become something of a hot topic recently. pieces like this are de rigueur on news sites:earlier this year, one of our crews, working within view of manhattan’s skyline, unearthed a section of water main stamped with the date when it was originally laid. it reads 1897. that was the year in which prospectors rushed to the klondike and when china was still ruled by emperors. for almost 120 years, that pipe carried clean, fresh water to people’s homes. the problem is it was probably designed to last about 60.these pieces are effective at preventing problems with infrastructure from escaping the public consciousness. if we are being intellectually honest, however, this is not a subject matter that will ever be adequately addressed in the opinion pages of newspapers or on sunday morning public affairs roundtables. such forums do not offer sufficient space to flesh out the philosophical differences involved, let alone the technical details.i am writing this series of posts to:(1) provide an overview of us infrastructure investment;(2) discuss traditional approaches to infrastructure investment, relevant tax policies, and the potential impact of tax reform measures;(3) evaluate alternative approaches to infrastructure investment, including public-private partnerships and infrastructure banks.i will conclude with my own ideas for how infrastructure investment in the united states could be improved.the opinions expressed here are mine only and are not the opinions of my employer.please expect an aggressively nonpartisan, mechanical exploration of these issues. i take it as a given that my readers, on both the right and the left, acknowledge that infrastructure investment has a positive impact on our economy. if you do not, i would refer you to beyond shovel-ready: the extent and impact of us infrastructure jobs . (actually, this paper is worth reading even if you believe infrastructure investment contributes to the economy — the magnitude will likely surprise you.)also expect a lot of background information on arcane tax and policy matters at points. this may seem tedious at first, but it is impossible to comprehend where infrastructure policy succeeds and where it fails without a grasp of the larger framework.i hope readers will walk away from these posts with an appreciation for several politically inconvenient truths. some of these points have been made in papers from brookings and other organizations. some i rarely see articulated.first, the united states has a problem funding infrastructure, not a problem financing infrastructure.this is an important point because a lot of infrastructure-related policy proposals involve tweaking how projects are financed. and these tweaks often will do more harm than good.the ability to borrow funds at the federal, state, and local levels of government is not and never has been in jeopardy (some brief spasms during the financial crisis notwithstanding). this country benefits from a municipal bond market that is unique in the world in terms of its size and participation.it is imperative that policymakers internalize the distinction between funding and financing. no innovative financing structure will cure a funding problem. what policymakers need to do, as soon as possible, is identify new revenue sources to offset the cost of expanding existing infrastructure and replacing systems that are beyond their useful lives. this can be in the form of taxes or user fees — but no matter how you cut it, new construction will not be free. the longer policymakers take to identify new revenue sources, the more expensive projects will become.the debate over whether infrastructure should be publicly or privately funded is similarly unproductive. if the united states is going to make meaningful progress in replacing and expanding its infrastructure, the country needs all resources available — both public and private. a more appropriate direction would involve determining what kinds of projects would benefit from private investment and what kinds of covenants are necessary to protect the public good.second, the largest expense associated with infrastructure is operations and maintenance, not new construction.this is a major consideration in undertaking projects at the state and local level. it is almost completely ignored at the federal level, however, and in populist cheerleading for infrastructure investment. most federal infrastructure funding is for new capital projects. once the project is operational, state and local governments are largely responsible for carrying the project. the on-going expenditures associated with new construction are partially responsible for delays in vital projects and how problems with the quality of infrastructure arise in the out years.third, the exemption of interest on municipal bonds from the federal income tax is more than a federal subsidy and should be preserved.the tax exemption for municipal bonds is a vehicle through which the federal government participates in funding infrastructure projects (and the federal government usually accounts for less than a quarter of total infrastructure investment as it is). but the exemption accomplishes much more than that.the tax advantaged nature of municipal bonds gives investors a reason to lend money to smaller governmental entities (townships, school districts, etc.) for their construction projects. this allows members of those communities to make decisions about what infrastructure they need. likewise, this structure allows residents to make decisions about the tax burdens they are willing to accept in exchange for the benefits of these projects. in this sense, local access to capital is essential to federalism.fourth, existing methods for allocating infrastructure funding are generally not based on cost-benefit analysis.much infrastructure spending is allocated irrespective of actual need. one could look at this as a fairness issue in terms of distributing funds across jurisdictions and populations or a consequence of political influence, but unnecessary spending has the effect of crowding out necessary spending. when a government has limited resources or has to justify increasing taxes or user fees, this is a very big deal.this situation is further complicated by the fact that current funding — inadequate as it is — makes an easy hostage in congress, which is a constraint on long-term capital planning at every level of government.in my next installment, i will discuss who pays for infrastructure under the current system.
 for nearly 50 years, professor charles fried has been teaching the intricacies of the law to hls students.starting this month, the masterful teacher and renowned scholar is expanding his student body dramatically with the start of his online contractsx course – a seven-week study of contracts for nonlawyers. the class is part of the harvardx online learning platform, which offers free classes – known as moocs (massive open online courses) – to students across the world. as of the first week of january, more than 13,200 students had enrolled in the course, which begins january 8.“it seemed to me a really good candidate for a mooc, because it’s a subject that is very pervasive in people’s lives,” said fried, the beneficial professor of law at hls. “it’s not like criminal law, because most people don’t encounter criminal law. but contracts are all around you. you’re always engaging in them.”in addition, fried said contracts have the virtue of having a structure, not just a miscellaneous set of rules. “it’s possible to make people see the way in which it hangs together,” he said. “and the points i want to make can so often be illustrated by wonderfully interesting stories.”each lesson is presented as a video of fried speaking in his accessible style, combined with animations of hypothetical and historical stories about contracts. in addition, four hls students will lead regular online discussion groups.fried began teaching at harvard law school in 1961. he served as solicitor general of the united states from 1985-89. and he was an associate justice of the supreme judicial court of massachusetts from 1995-99.fried’s contractsx class is the second harvardx taught by an hls professor. it follows on the heels of the highly successful copyrightx class, first taught by professor william fisher in the spring of 2013.
 global daily – who is afraid of lower oil?…but we think that the impact will generally positive, while lower inflation will be transitorynot everyone is happy with a huge tax cut apparently. the more than halving of oil prices over recent months has received mixed reviews in some quarters. the negative tilt is that the fall in oil prices may be reflecting a weakness in global demand, while also encouraging deflationary tendencies. there is no pleasing some people. presumably if oil prices had doubled, they would be throwing a party.one of the remarkable features of recent financial market moves is the strong correlation (close to 1 for bunds, 0.84 for treasuries) between oil prices and government bond yields, which have fallen in unison. this may reflect worries about demand, lower inflation expectations, and expectations of ecb sovereign bond purchases.in our view, the decline in oil prices will provide a significant boost to economic growth over time, with net importers benefiting from a large windfall (see chart). this includes the us, eurozone member states and asia’s largest economies. in addition, although inflation has further to fall, it will likely bounce back towards the end of the year, as the oil price effect dissipates. we do expect the ecb to announce large scale asset purchases, likely this month, which should also be supportive for the economy. the us experience suggests bond yields mainly fall in the run-up to qe, and we think much of the effect is already priced in.meanwhile, data out of the us was generally positive. the small business optimism survey crossed the 100 mark in december, reaching 100.4, the highest level in nearly 14 years. even more encouraging, one of the components of the survey showed that a quarter of the small businesses had increased wages in the past few months and that 17% of them had plans to increase it further. this is in contrast to another wage measure released last friday, which was weak, but often subject to revisions.meanwhile, another report which is closely watched by fed policymakers for signs of labour market improvement, showed job openings increased to 5.0 million in november  compared to 4.8 million the previous month, now up 20% relative to a-year-ago levels. job openings increased across the board. other details of the report showed that the hire rate edged down to 3.3% compared to 3.7%  the previous month. the number of quitters, which includes workers that are willing to leave their jobs for better opportunities was unchanged from the previous month, at 1.9%.  most evidence suggests that slack in the labour market is diminishing.
 these are not the best of times to be one of china's massive, state-owned steel mills. the domestic economy is slowing, competition is increasing, and there's widespread disgust and impatience with the smog pouring out of their stacks. in short, their lucrative business model for the past three decades is slowly dying. so what’s a manager of a chinese steel mill to do?one surprisingly popular option is to bid china goodbye. in november, hebei iron & steel co ltd , a provincial-owned company and china’s largest steelmaker by production, announced  that it was moving 5 million tons of its annual production -- roughly 11 percent of the 45 million tons of steel it makes every year -- to south africa. according to press reports, it won’t be going abroad alone. by 2023, hebei province -- china’s most polluted province -- plans to export 20 million tons of steel, 30 million tons of cement and 10 million weight boxes of glass capacity (a weight box equals roughly 50 kilograms) to points still not named.at first glance, the export of excess industrial capacity wouldn’t appear to make much business sense. as bloomberg news noted  two weeks ago, hebei iron & steel’s south african mill will be “equivalent to two-thirds of that nation’s output last year, and a third of continental africa’s.” in other words, it's not clear there's much demand in these new locales for the chinese steel giant's plentiful wares. why, then, are they doing it?the officials in hebei province who oversee the company may have felt they had no choice. first, they undoubtedly faced political pressure to reduce their environmental impact in china: reducing production of steel, cement and glass -- all highly polluting industries, especially in developing countries -- will have a direct impact on xi jinping’s pollution goals. (starting in hebei will have the added benefit of cleaning up polluted, neighboring beijing.)second, hebei may simply be at a loss as to how to scale back businesses that they recognize have become massively bloated. officials in china’s construction-related industries clearly have too much capacity and too little demand. back in september, i attended a speech in beijing where a vice-president of the china iron & steel association announced that chinese steel production capacity had grown by 200 million tons since the end of 2012, to reach 1.1 billion tons total. much of that capacity isn’t used -- china is projected to manufacture around 750 million tons of steel this year.the effect on domestic chinese steel prices has been devastating. consider the price in shanghai for steel reinforcing bar (rebar), a key component to building everything from subways to residential high-rises: it's fallen twenty-nine percent this year. that drop was largely precipitated by china’s economic slowdown (and the slowest growth rate since 1990).so where is the steel going in the absence of a strong domestic market? during the first 11 months of 2014, china exported 86 million tons of steel (almost equal to total u.s. production in 2013), up 47 percent over the same period in 2013. but the export market is hardly a sustainable bet in the long-term, especially at a time when the united states and other importing countries are erecting anti-dumping duties on chinese steel.for a company looking for growth over the long-term, and significant capital to invest, that really only leaves one choice: go global. in fact, the chinese government has had a “go global” policy since the 1990s , whereby companies are encouraged to set up subsidiaries abroad, for the purpose of extracting raw materials and energy and -- to a lesser extent -- manufacture. but unlike in the past, when going global had served as a nice long-term goal, today's “going global” strategy has taken on urgency.indeed, on wednesday, china’s ruling state council announced that china will further promote “going global” by chinese firms, including with financial assistance . as described by the state council, the goals are two-fold. first, china is keen to see its flagship firms become internationally competitive -- so much so, that it's obviously willing to encourage even quixotic forays abroad. second, bankrolling such overseas expansions is a signal that china wants better returns -- in the form of profit and political influence -- on its considerable foreign exchange reserves. though hebei iron & steel announced its south african plans two months before the state council's announcement, it’s all but certain that it's benefiting from the promised subsidies.will it work? in the short-term, just by virtue of adding so much unneeded capacity to south africa’s steel trade, hebei iron & steel will likely create a smaller version of the saturated market that’s hurting it in hebei. but just as china’s domestic steelmakers turned to exports when local markets weren’t generating sufficient demand, hebei iron & steel will likely count on using its newly-built modern south african mill to meet demand in emerging africa. to be sure, it’s hardly a safe bet. but so long as china appears incapable of fostering a climate in which companies want to invest, it might just be the best one available -- and one that other chinese companies are also likely to soon embrace.to contact the author on this story:to contact the editor on this story:adam minter is an american writer based in asia, where he covers politics, culture, business and junk. he is the author of "junkyard planet: travels in the billion dollar trash trade." read more.
 the author chose to make this story unlisted, which means only people with a link can see it. are you sure you want to share it?in two weeks, president obama will deliver his 7th state of the union address (technically, it’s his sixth, because the first one isn’t considered a state of the union for whatever reason, but avert your eyes politifact).this year, president obama is doing something he’s never done before: he’s laying out some of his state of the union message and policies ahead of his address to congress on january 20th.typically, we try to hold all the news until the day of the speech. and there will still be plenty of moments on the big night. but this year, we figured there’s no time like the present. (for those who closely follow the president’s executive actions, there is a “ we can’t wait ” joke in there somewhere.) building on the momentum of the last several weeks, the president didn’t want to wait until the state of the union to take new steps to help the middle class and lay out his ideas to keep strengthening the economy.so today, the president is getting out of washington and taking his message on the road — straight to the people his policies will affect most.as president obama travels the country, he’ll be putting forward next steps, too. call them “sotu spoilers.” some of his announcements will be executive actions, and others will be legislative proposals. and despite what you might hear from the beltway pundits, this president looks forward to working with the new republican congress on ways we can move america forward.that means working with the 114th congress to make sure that more middle class families feel the benefits of our recovery. but it also means making sure that the new congress doesn’t roll back the progress and protections that americans have fought so hard for over the last six years.today, president obama will be at ford’s assembly plant in wayne, michigan to talk about the comeback of american manufacturing and the american auto industry. the year before he took office, the auto industry was in collapse, shedding 400,000 jobs. sales were down 40 percent. two of the big three auto companies — icons of american ingenuity — were on the brink of failure.some were ready to let the entire auto industry fail. you might have even seen headlines proclaiming that was the smart move, politically. but president obama refused to let more jobs and communities suffer. he made the hard choice to restructure and rebuild, helping those businesses get back on their feet while demanding real change and accountability in return.six years later — as the president will note today — the american auto industry has roared back to life. since mid-2009, they’ve added more than 500,000 jobs. last year, american autoworkers built cars faster than any year since 2005. not to mention they’ve repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what the obama administration committed to them.thursday in phoenix, the president will take stock of how far our housing market has come. in 2009, the housing market was in freefall. thanks in part to president obama’s swift intervention when he took office, our housing market is on much firmer footing. rising home values have helped millions of families who were underwater on their mortgages, and new foreclosures are at their lowest levels since 2006.still, homeownership is out of reach for too many americans — families who can afford to buy a home, but find themselves shut out because the lending market is too tight. that’s why the president will announce a new executive action that will help more responsible americans own a home, building on efforts already underway to cut red tape that holds them back.this friday, president obama will travel to tennessee with the vice president to propose ways to help more young americans go to college and get ahead. in today’s economy, access to a college education is the surest ticket to the middle class — and the president’s proposals will help more young people punch that ticket.in tennessee, he’ll also launch a new manufacturing innovation hub — a private sector partnership that will attract more good-paying middle-class jobs in high-tech manufacturing to tennessee.we have come a long way since that first state of the union address six years ago.we’ve created nearly 11 million jobs over the past 57 months — the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record. 2014 was our strongest year of job growth since the ‘90s. in the last year alone, about 10 million americans have gained health insurance thanks to the affordable care act. drivers are saving more than a dollar a gallon at the pump relative to this time last year. we’ve seen the wars in iraq and afghanistan come to a responsible end, and more of our troops are coming home to their families.there’s a lot more to do. and i can promise you that in the eight years i have worked for president obama, i have never seen him more fired up about the road ahead.so stay tuned. because as the president said about the next two years:“my presidency is entering the fourth quarter. interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter.”
 by brian stelter   @brianstelter january 6, 2015: 1:54 pm etcnbc will use cogent reports for ratings instead.think about it: where were you the last time you watched cnbc?the business news channel believes you probably weren't at home.that's why the channel says it is going to stop relying on nielsen for daytime ratings later this year. cnbc has been frustrated by nielsen's incomplete measurements for years -- citing the fact that the ratings company doesn't normally count out of home viewership.that means businesses aren't counted; gyms and bars and restaurants aren't counted; and, importantly for cnbc, trading floors aren't counted.the channel has contracted with a firm called cogent reports for what it calls "alternative audience metrics." it'll use that data to sell advertising on its daytime programming, starting in the fourth quarter of the year.cnbc is making the announcement at the consumer electronics show in las vegas on tuesday. it's not alone in being dissatisfied with nielsen -- but it is the first significant network, according to the wall street journal , to actually "opt out of its ratings."in the television industry, some see this as a logical step by cnbc — after all, many of the viewers it covets are not at home during the day."we are excited to begin to provide our marketing partners with a more complete understanding of the power and quality of our prestigious audience," cnbc's president mark hoffman said in a statement.others see a more cynical calculation. cnbc's already-relatively-low ratings have been slipping for years, resulting in "worst year ever" headlines and contributing to low morale among some employees.yes, these are the at-home ratings that cnbc says are incomplete — but they're the same ratings that other channels use, the same rules that others play by.so cnbc's decision to reject the daytime nielsen ratings could be interpreted as a dodge of its programming difficulties.however, the channel will continue to subscribe to nielsen ratings for its prime time programming like "shark tank" repeats that are much higher-rated. (of course, cnbc's desired audience tends to be at home in the evening, not during the daytime.)for the daytime, cogent reports says it will collect information from hundreds of "investment professionals" each month and cnbc says it will use the findings to guarantee certain audience levels to advertisers.
 faa approves the use of agricultural drones; could be a 'game changer' for wine industrysunday, january 11, 2015, 5:25 pm - it's a big step forward for technology in agriculture. the faa has issued an exception to the current ban on the commercial use of unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles, or drones.the agency has approved the use of drones to monitor crops and survey farm fields. this means, growers can hire outside companies to use drones as a commercial service for crop monitoring and surveying purposes. by doing so, it will take hours, instead of days to conduct certain studies. "we train our pesticide control advisors, we train our irrigators. we can go out with this and search the whole block and then we can go back and find some trouble areas send that scout to those areas identify it and maybe we find out only 5% of the block is infected and we only have to spray 5% of the block," greg gonzalez, from scheid vineyard technologies, said. farmers say, the benefit is that they can catch any vineyard farmers say, the benefit is that they can catch any vineyard disease or threats to prevent loss of production. this could save them billions of dollars.searching places that aren't safe for humans, such as looking for survivors in collapsed buildings after an earthquake or inspecting nuclear power plants following a meltdown.helping firefighters battling forest blazes by watching where flames are popping up without risking lives. helicopters often can't be used because their powerful rotors threaten to spread the fire. helping scientists conduct research inside volcanic ash clouds, hurricanes, tornadoes or other spots that are not safe for humans.inspecting icy, wind-swept chairlift towers at ski resorts, reducing employee risk and worker-compensation insurance costs. visually inspecting oil refinery flare stacks, tall towers used to burn off gas when pressure builds too much. the flares give off so much heat that people often can't stand on the ground below, let alone climb the tower unless there is a lengthy and costly production shut down.
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 the american public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. the result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure america into endless wars it can’t win.in mid-september, while president obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in iraq and syria, he traveled to central command headquarters, at macdill air force base in florida. there he addressed some of the men and women who would implement whatever the u.s. military strategy turned out to be.the part of the speech intended to get coverage was obama’s rationale for reengaging the united states in iraq, more than a decade after it first invaded and following the long and painful effort to extricate itself. this was big enough news that many cable channels covered the speech live. i watched it on an overhead tv while i sat waiting for a flight at chicago’s o’hare airport. when obama got to the section of his speech announcing whether he planned to commit u.s. troops in iraq (at the time, he didn’t), i noticed that many people in the terminal shifted their attention briefly to the tv. as soon as that was over, they went back to their smartphones and their laptops and their cinnabons as the president droned on.usually i would have stopped watching too, since so many aspects of public figures’ appearances before the troops have become so formulaic and routine. but i decided to see the whole show. obama gave his still-not-quite-natural-sounding callouts to the different military services represented in the crowd. (“i know we’ve got some air force in the house!” and so on, receiving cheers rendered as “hooyah!” and “oorah!” in the official white house transcript.) he told members of the military that the nation was grateful for their nonstop deployments and for the unique losses and burdens placed on them through the past dozen years of open-ended war. he noted that they were often the face of american influence in the world, being dispatched to liberia in 2014 to cope with the then-dawning ebola epidemic as they had been sent to indonesia 10 years earlier to rescue victims of the catastrophic tsunami there. he said that the “9/11 generation of heroes” represented the very best in its country, and that its members constituted a military that was not only superior to all current adversaries but no less than “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.”if any of my fellow travelers at o’hare were still listening to the speech, none of them showed any reaction to it. and why would they? this has become the way we assume the american military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other american institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. a somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.the public attitude evident in the airport was reflected by the public’s representatives in washington. that same afternoon, september 17, the house of representatives voted after brief debate to authorize arms and supplies for rebel forces in syria, in hopes that more of them would fight against the islamic state, or isis, than for it. the senate did the same the next day—and then both houses adjourned early, after an unusually short and historically unproductive term of congress, to spend the next six and a half weeks fund-raising and campaigning full-time. i’m not aware of any midterm race for the house or senate in which matters of war and peace—as opposed to immigration, obamacare, voting rights, tax rates, the ebola scare—were first-tier campaign issues on either side, except for the metaphorical “war on women” and “war on coal.”why does civilian technology grow ever cheaper and more reliable while military technology does the opposite? an animated explainer narrated by james fallows.this reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the american norm. but it is not. when dwight d. eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. on the eve of the d-day invasion, he warned his troops, “your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” as president, eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.at the end of world war ii, nearly 10 percent of the entire u.s. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). through the decade after world war ii, when so many american families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. most americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.now the american military is exotic territory to most of the american public. as a comparison: a handful of americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. the u.s. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) the other 310 million–plus americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. so too with the military. many more young americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. as a country, america has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. as a public, it has not. a total of about 2.5 million americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in iraq or afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.the difference between the earlier america that knew its military and the modern america that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply in changes in popular and media culture. while world war ii was under way, its best-known chroniclers were the scripps howard reporter ernie pyle, who described the daily braveries and travails of the troops (until he was killed near the war’s end by japanese machine-gun fire on the island of iejima), and the stars and stripes cartoonist bill mauldin, who mocked the obtuseness of generals and their distance from the foxhole realities faced by his wisecracking gi characters, willie and joe.from mister roberts to south pacific to catch-22, from the caine mutiny to the naked and the dead to from here to eternity, american popular and high culture treated our last mass-mobilization war as an effort deserving deep respect and pride, but not above criticism and lampooning. the collective achievement of the military was heroic, but its members and leaders were still real people, with all the foibles of real life. a decade after that war ended, the most popular military-themed tv program was the phil silvers show, about a con man in uniform named sgt. bilko. as bilko, phil silvers was that stock american sitcom figure, the lovable blowhard—a role familiar from the time of jackie gleason in the honeymooners to homer simpson in the simpsons today. gomer pyle, usmc; hogan’s heroes; mchale’s navy; and even the anachronistic frontier show f troop were sitcoms whose settings were u.s. military units and whose villains—and schemers, and stooges, and occasional idealists—were people in uniform. american culture was sufficiently at ease with the military to make fun of it, a stance now hard to imagine outside the military itself.“full-victory—nothing else”: general dwight d. eisenhower gives the order to paratroopers in england the night before they board planes to join the first assault in the d-day invasion of europe. (u.s. army signal corps/ap)robert altman’s 1970 movie m*a*s*h was clearly “about” the vietnam war, then well into its bloodiest and most bitterly divisive period. (as i point out whenever discussing this topic, i was eligible for the draft at the time, was one of those protesting the war, and at age 20 legally but intentionally failed my draft medical exam. i told this story in a 1975 washington monthly article, “what did you do in the class war, daddy?” ) but m*a*s*h’s ostensible placement in the korean war of the early 1950s somewhat distanced its darkly mocking attitude about military competence and authority from fierce disagreements about vietnam. (the one big vietnam movie to precede it was john wayne’s doughily prowar the green berets, in 1968. what we think of as the classic run of vietnam films did not begin until the end of the 1970s, with the deer hunter and apocalypse now.) the tv spin-off of altman’s film, which ran from 1972 through 1983, was a simpler and more straightforward sitcom on the sgt. bilko model, again suggesting a culture close enough to its military to put up with, and enjoy, jokes about it.let’s skip to today’s iraq-afghanistan era, in which everyone “supports” the troops but few know very much about them. the pop-culture references to the people fighting our ongoing wars emphasize their suffering and stoicism, or the long-term personal damage they may endure. the hurt locker is the clearest example, but also lone survivor; restrepo; the short-lived 2005 fx series set in iraq, over there; and showtime’s current series homeland. some emphasize high-stakes action, from the fictionalized 24 to the meant-to-be-true zero dark thirty. often they portray military and intelligence officials as brave and daring. but while cumulatively these dramas highlight the damage that open-ended warfare has done—on the battlefield and elsewhere, to warriors and civilians alike, in the short term but also through long-term blowback—they lack the comfortable closeness with the military that would allow them to question its competence as they would any other institution’s.the battlefield is of course a separate realm, as the literature of warfare from homer’s time onward has emphasized. but the distance between today’s stateside america and its always-at-war expeditionary troops is extraordinary. last year, the writer rebecca frankel published war dogs , a study of the dog-and-handler teams that had played a large part in the u.s. efforts in iraq and afghanistan. part of the reason she chose the topic, she told me, was that dogs were one of the few common points of reference between the military and the larger public. “when we cannot make that human connection over war, when we cannot empathize or imagine the far-off world of a combat zone … these military working dogs are a bridge over the divide,” frankel wrote in the introduction to her book.it’s a wonderful book, and dogs are a better connection than nothing. but … dogs! when the country fought its previous wars, its common points of reference were human rather than canine: fathers and sons in harm’s way, mothers and daughters working in defense plants and in uniform as well. for two decades after world war ii, the standing force remained so large, and the depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most americans had a direct military connection. among older baby boomers, those born before 1955, at least three-quarters have had an immediate family member—sibling, parent, spouse, child—who served in uniform. of americans born since 1980, the millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience.interactive graphic: the first map above (in green) shows per-capita military enlistments from 2000 to 2010, grouped by 3-digit zip code. the second (in red) shows the home towns of deceased soldiers from the iraq and afghanistan wars. enlistment rates vary widely—in 2010, only 0.04 percent of the upper east side of manhattan (zip code prefix 101) enlisted, while the u.s. virgin islands (prefix 008) had an enlistment rate of 0.98 percent. when it comes to lives lost, u.s. territories (particularly guam) shoulder an outsized burden. (map design and development: frankie dintino. sources: department of defense, us census bureau)the most biting satirical novel to come from the iraq-afghanistan era, billy lynn’s long halftime walk, by ben fountain, is a takedown of our empty modern “thank you for your service” rituals. it is the story of an army squad that is badly shot up in iraq; is brought back to be honored at halftime during a nationally televised dallas cowboys thanksgiving day game; while there, is slapped on the back and toasted by owner’s-box moguls and flirted with by cheerleaders, “passed around like everyone’s favorite bong,” as platoon member billy lynn thinks of it; and is then shipped right back to the front.the people at the stadium feel good about what they’ve done to show their support for the troops. from the troops’ point of view, the spectacle looks different. “there’s something harsh in his fellow americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need,” the narrator says of billy lynn’s thoughts. “that’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate vps, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year.” fountain’s novel won the national book critics circle award for fiction in 2012, but it did not dent mainstream awareness enough to make anyone self-conscious about continuing the “salute to the heroes” gestures that do more for the civilian public’s self-esteem than for the troops’. as i listened to obama that day in the airport, and remembered ben fountain’s book, and observed the hum of preoccupied america around me, i thought that the parts of the presidential speech few americans were listening to were the ones historians might someday seize upon to explain the temper of our times.always supportive of the troops: crowds in macon welcome back 200 members of the georgia national guard's 48th infantry brigade combat team returning from afghanistan, september 2014. (david goldman/ap)if i were writing such a history now, i would call it chickenhawk nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. it would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. as a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. the tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. but for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. a chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.americans admire the military as they do no other institution. through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, congress, organized religion, big business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. the one exception is the military. confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed very high. in a gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. about one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in congress.too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “did we have the sense that america cared how we were doing? we did not,” seth moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the iraq war. moulton became a marine corps officer after graduating from harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to wall street it was useful to set an example of public service. he opposed the decision to invade iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “america was very disconnected. we were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.”moulton told me, as did many others with iraq-era military experience, that if more members of congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the united states would probably not have gone to war in iraq at all. because he felt strongly enough about that failure of elite accountability, moulton decided while in iraq to get involved in politics after he left the military. “i actually remember the moment,” moulton told me. “it was after a difficult day in najaf in 2004. a young marine in my platoon said, ‘sir, you should run for congress someday. so this shit doesn’t happen again.’ ” in january, moulton takes office as a freshman democratic representative from massachusetts’s sixth district, north of boston.what moulton described was desire for a kind of accountability. it is striking how rare accountability has been for our modern wars. hillary clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the iraq war, since that is what gave the barely known barack obama an opening to run against her in 2008. george w. bush, who, like most ex-presidents, has grown more popular the longer he’s been out of office, would perhaps be playing a more visible role in public and political life if not for the overhang of iraq. but those two are the exceptions. most other public figures, from dick cheney and colin powell on down, have put iraq behind them. in part this is because of the obama administration’s decision from the start to “look forward, not back” about why things had gone so badly wrong with america’s wars in iraq and afghanistan. but such willed amnesia would have been harder if more americans had felt affected by the wars’ outcome. for our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure. this is a dangerous development—and one whose dangers multiply the longer it persists.ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. by all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. no decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in iraq, afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; linda j. bilmes, of the harvard kennedy school, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. recall that while congress was considering whether to authorize the iraq war, the head of the white house economic council, lawrence b. lindsey, was forced to resign for telling the wall street journal that the all-in costs might be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the u.s. has spent on iraq and afghanistan in many individual years.yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “at this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the u.s. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named jim gourley wrote recently for thomas e. ricks’s blog, best defense. “evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” in 13 years of continuous combat under the authorization for the use of military force, the longest stretch of warfare in american history, u.s. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed osama bin laden. their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing saddam hussein to allying with sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. but they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of u.s. interests in, that part of the world. when isis troops overran much of iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same iraqi national army that u.s. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years.“did we have the sense that america cared how we were doing? we did not,” seth moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the iraq war.“we are vulnerable,” the author william greider wrote during the debate last summer on how to fight isis, “because our presumption of unconquerable superiority leads us deeper and deeper into unwinnable military conflicts.” and the separation of the military from the public disrupts the process of learning from these defeats. the last war that ended up in circumstances remotely resembling what prewar planning would have considered a victory was the brief gulf war of 1991.after the vietnam war, the press and the public went too far in blaming the military for what was a top-to-bottom failure of strategy and execution. but the military itself recognized its own failings, and a whole generation of reformers looked to understand and change the culture. in 1978, a military-intelligence veteran named richard a. gabriel published, with paul l. savage, crisis in command: mismanagement in the army, which traced many of the failures in vietnam to the military’s having adopted a bureaucratized management style. three years later, a broadside called self-destruction: the disintegration and decay of the united states army during the vietnam era, by a military officer writing under the pen name cincinnatus (later revealed to be a lieutenant colonel serving in the reserves as a military chaplain, cecil b. currey), linked problems in vietnam to the ethical and intellectual shortcomings of the career military. the book was hotly debated—but not dismissed. an article about the book for the air force’s air university review said that “the author’s case is airtight” and that the military’s career structure “corrupts those who serve it; it is the system that forces out the best and rewards only the sycophants.”today, you hear judgments like that frequently from within the military and occasionally from politicians—but only in private. it’s not the way we talk in public about our heroes anymore, with the result that accountability for the career military has been much sketchier than during our previous wars. william s. lind is a military historian who in the 1990s helped develop the concept of “fourth generation war,” or struggles against the insurgents, terrorists, or other “nonstate” groups that refuse to form ranks and fight like conventional armies. he wrote recently:the most curious thing about our four defeats in fourth generation war—lebanon, somalia, iraq, and afghanistan—is the utter silence in the american officer corps. defeat in vietnam bred a generation of military reformers … today, the landscape is barren. not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. just more money, please.during and after even successful american wars, and certainly after the standoff in korea and the defeat in vietnam, the professional military’s leadership and judgment were considered fair game for criticism. grant saved the union; mcclellan seemed almost to sabotage it—and he was only one of the union generals lincoln had to move out of the way. something similar was true in wars through vietnam. some leaders were good; others were bad. now, for purposes of public discussion, they’re all heroes. in our past decade’s wars, as thomas ricks wrote in this magazine in 2012, “hundreds of army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness.” this, he said, was not only a radical break from american tradition but also “an important factor in the failure” of our recent wars.partly this change has come because the public, at its safe remove, doesn’t insist on accountability. partly it is because legislators and even presidents recognize the sizable risks and limited payoffs of taking on the career military. when recent presidents have relieved officers of command, they have usually done so over allegations of sexual or financial misconduct, or other issues of personal discipline. these include the cases of the two famous four-star generals who resigned rather than waiting for president obama to dismiss them: stanley a. mcchrystal, as the commander in afghanistan, and david petraeus in his post-centcom role as the head of the cia. the exception proving the rule occurred a dozen years ago, when a senior civilian official directly challenged a four-star general on his military competence. in congressional testimony just before the iraq war, general eric shinseki, then the army’s chief of staff, said that many more troops might be necessary to successfully occupy iraq than plans were allowing for—only to be ridiculed in public by paul wolfowitz, then shinseki’s superior as the deputy secretary of defense, who said views like shinseki’s were “outlandish” and “wildly off the mark.” wolfowitz and his superior, defense secretary donald rumsfeld, ostentatiously marginalized shinseki from that point on.in that case, the general was right and the politicians were wrong. but more often and more skillfully than the public usually appreciates, today’s military has managed to distance itself from the lengthening string of modern military failures—even when wrong. some of this pr shift is anthropological. most reporters who cover politics are fascinated by the process and enjoy practitioners who love it too, which is one reason most were (like the rest of the country) more forgiving of the happy warrior bill clinton than they have been of the “cold” and “aloof” barack obama. but political reporters are always hunting for the gaffe or scandal that could bring a target down, and feel they’re acting in the public interest in doing so.most reporters who cover the military are also fascinated by its processes and cannot help liking or at least respecting their subjects: physically fit, trained to say “sir” and “ma’am,” often tested in a way most civilians will never be, part of a disciplined and selfless-seeming culture that naturally draws respect. and whether or not this was a conscious plan, the military gets a substantial pr boost from the modern practice of placing officers in mid-career assignments at think tanks, on congressional staffs, and in graduate programs across the country. for universities, military students are (as a dean at a public-policy school put it to me) “a better version of foreign students.” that is, they work hard, pay full tuition, and unlike many international students face no language barrier or difficulty adjusting to the american style of give-and-take classroom exchanges. most cultures esteem the scholar-warrior, and these programs expose usually skeptical american elites to people like the young colin powell, who as a lieutenant colonel in his mid-30s was a white house fellow after serving in vietnam, and david petraeus, who got his ph.d. at princeton as a major 13 years after graduating from west point.and yet however much americans “support” and “respect” their troops, they are not involved with them, and that disengagement inevitably leads to dangerous decisions the public barely notices. “my concern is this growing disconnect between the american people and our military,” retired admiral mike mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under george w. bush and barack obama (and whose mid-career academic stint was at harvard business school), told me recently. the military is “professional and capable,” he said, “but i would sacrifice some of that excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the american people. fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. it’s become just too easy to go to war.”citizens notice when crime is going up, or school quality is going down, or the water is unsafe to drink, or when other public functions are not working as they should. not enough citizens are made to notice when things go wrong, or right, with the military. the country thinks too rarely, and too highly, of the 1 percent under fire in our name.a new f-35, part of the first delivery of an anticipated 144 planes, in a hanger at luke air force base, in glendale, arizona, before an unveiling ceremony, march 2014 (ross d. franklin/ap)"if citizens are willing to countenance a decision that means that someone's child may die, they may contemplate more deeply if there is the possibility that the child will be theirs."america’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. this distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. we buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. this leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops (see “gun trouble,” by robert h. scales, in this issue).we know that technology is our military’s main advantage. yet the story of the post-9/11 “long wars” is of america’s higher-tech advantages yielding transitory victories that melt away before the older, messier realities of improvised weapons, sectarian resentments, and mounting hostility to occupiers from afar, however well-intentioned. many of the pentagon’s most audacious high-tech ventures have been costly and spectacular failures, including (as we will see) the major air-power project of recent years, the f-35. in an america connected to its military, such questions of strategy and implementation would be at least as familiar as, say, the problems with the common core education standards.those technological breakthroughs that do make their way to the battlefield may prove to be strategic liabilities in the long run. during the years in which the united states has enjoyed a near-monopoly on weaponized drones, for example, they have killed individuals or small groups at the price of antagonizing whole societies. when the monopoly ends, which is inevitable, the very openness of the united states will make it uniquely vulnerable to the cheap, swarming weapons others will deploy.the cost of defense, meanwhile, goes up and up and up, with little political resistance and barely any public discussion. by the fullest accounting, which is different from usual budget figures, the united states will spend more than $1 trillion on national security this year. that includes about $580 billion for the pentagon’s baseline budget plus “overseas contingency” funds, $20 billion in the department of energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and department of veterans affairs costs, and other expenses. but it doesn’t count more than $80 billion a year of interest on the military-related share of the national debt. after adjustments for inflation, the united states will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the cold war and vietnam war. it will spend about as much as the next 10 nations combined—three to five times as much as china, depending on how you count, and seven to nine times as much as russia. the world as a whole spends about 2 percent of its total income on its militaries; the united states, about 4 percent.yet such is the dysfunction and corruption of the budgeting process that even as spending levels rise, the pentagon faces simultaneous crises in funding for maintenance, training, pensions, and veterans’ care. “we’re buying the wrong things, and paying too much for them,” charles a. stevenson, a onetime staffer on the senate armed services committee and a former professor at the national war college, told me. “we’re spending so much on people that we don’t have the hardware, which is becoming more expensive anyway. we are flatlining r&d.”here is just one newsworthy example that illustrates the broad and depressingly intractable tendencies of weapons development and spending: the failed hopes for a new airplane called the f-35 “lightning.”today’s weapons can be decades in gestation, and the history of the f-35 traces back long before most of today’s troops were born. two early-1970s-era planes, the f-16 “fighting falcon” jet and the a-10 “thunderbolt ii” attack plane, departed from the trend of military design in much the same way the compact japanese cars of that era departed from the tail-fin american look. these planes were relatively cheap, pared to their essentials, easy to maintain, and designed to do a specific thing very well. for the f-16, that was to be fast, highly maneuverable, and deadly in air-to-air combat. for the a-10, it was to serve as a kind of flying tank that could provide what the military calls “close air support” to troops in combat by blasting enemy formations. the a-10 needed to be heavily armored, so it could absorb opposing fire; designed to fly as slowly as possible over the battlefield, rather than as rapidly, so that it could stay in range to do damage rather than roaring through; and built around one very powerful gun.there are physical devices that seem the pure expression of a function. the eames chair, a classic no. 2 pencil, the original ford mustang or vw beetle, the macbook air—take your pick. the a-10, generally known not as the thunderbolt but as the warthog, fills that role in the modern military. it is rugged; it is inexpensive; it can shred enemy tanks and convoys by firing up to 70 rounds a second of armor-piercing, 11-inch-long depleted-uranium shells.the tragedy of the f-35 is that a project meant to correct problems in designing and paying for weapons has come to exemplify them.and the main effort of military leaders through the past decade, under the republican leadership of the bush administration and the democratic leadership of obama, has been to get rid of the a-10 so as to free up money for a more expensive, less reliable, technically failing airplane that has little going for it except insider dealing, and the fact that the general public doesn’t care.the weapon in whose name the a-10 is being phased out is its opposite in almost every way. in automotive terms, it would be a lamborghini rather than a pickup truck (or a flying tank). in air-travel terms, the first-class sleeper compartment on singapore airlines rather than advance-purchase economy plus (or even business class) on united. these comparisons seem ridiculous, but they are fair. that is, a lamborghini is demonstrably “better” than a pickup truck in certain ways—speed, handling, comfort—but only in very special circumstances is it a better overall choice. same for the first-class sleeper, which would be anyone’s choice if someone else were footing the bill but is simply not worth the trade-off for most people most of the time.each new generation of weapons tends to be “better” in much the way a lamborghini is, and “worth it” in the same sense as a first-class airline seat. the a-10 shows the pattern. according to figures from the aircraft analyst richard l. aboulafia, of the teal group, the “unit recurring flyaway” costs in 2014 dollars—the fairest apples-to-apples comparison—stack up like this. each warthog now costs about $19 million, less than any other manned combat aircraft. a predator drone costs about two-thirds as much. other fighter, bomber, and multipurpose planes cost much more: about $72 million for the v-22 osprey, about $144 million for the f-22 fighter, about $810 million for the b-2 bomber, and about $101 million (or five a‑10s) for the f-35. there’s a similar difference in operating costs. the operating expenses are low for the a-10 and much higher for the others largely because the a-10’s design is simpler, with fewer things that could go wrong. the simplicity of design allows it to spend more of its time flying instead of being in the shop.in clear contrast to the a-10, the f-35 is an ill-starred undertaking that would have been on the front pages as often as other botched federal projects, from the obamacare rollout to the fema response after hurricane katrina, if, like those others, it either seemed to affect a broad class of people or could easily be shown on tv—or if so many politicians didn’t have a stake in protecting it. one measure of the gap in coverage: total taxpayer losses in the failed solyndra solar-energy program might come, at their most dire estimate, to some $800 million. total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the f-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the f-35. here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire iraq war.the condensed version of this plane’s tragedy is that a project meant to correct some of the pentagon’s deepest problems in designing and paying for weapons has in fact worsened and come to exemplify them. an aircraft that was intended to be inexpensive, adaptable, and reliable has become the most expensive in history, and among the hardest to keep out of the shop. the federal official who made the project a symbol of a new, transparent, rigorously data-dependent approach to awarding contracts ended up serving time in federal prison for corruption involving projects with boeing. (boeing’s chief financial officer also did time in prison.) for the record, the pentagon and the lead contractors stoutly defend the plane and say that its teething problems will be over soon—and that anyway, it is the plane of the future, and the a-10 is an aging relic of the past. (we have posted reports here on the a-10, pro and con, so you can see whether you are convinced.)in theory, the f-35 would show common purpose among the military services, since the air force, the navy, and the marine corps would all get their own custom-tailored versions of the plane. in fact, a plane designed to do many contradictory things—to be strong enough to survive navy aircraft-carrier landings, yet light and maneuverable enough to excel as an air force dogfighter, and meanwhile able to take off and land straight up and down, like a helicopter, to reach marines in tight combat circumstances—has unsurprisingly done none of them as well as promised. in theory, the f-35 was meant to knit u.s. allies together, since other countries would buy it as their mainstay airplane and in turn would get part of the contracting business. in fact, the delays, cost overruns, and mechanical problems of the airplane have made it a contentious political issue in customer countries from canada and holland to italy and australia.interactive map: parts from the f-35 are sourced from over 250 locations around the globe, spanning 11 countries and, in the u.s., more than 90 congressional districts. hover over any red dot to see a list of contractors. (map design and development: frankie dintino. source: center for international policy.)the country where the airplane has least been a public issue is the united states. in their 2012 debates, mitt romney criticized barack obama for supporting “green energy” projects, including solyndra. neither man mentioned the f-35, and i am still looking for evidence that president obama has talked about it in any of his speeches. in other countries, the f-35 can be cast as another annoying american intrusion. here, it is protected by supplier contracts that have been spread as broadly as possible.“political engineering,” a term popularized by a young pentagon analyst named chuck spinney in the 1970s, is pork-barrel politics on the grandest scale. cost overruns sound bad if someone else is getting the extra money. they can be good if they are creating business for your company or jobs in your congressional district. political engineering is the art of spreading a military project to as many congressional districts as possible, and thus maximizing the number of members of congress who feel that if they cut off funding, they’d be hurting themselves.a $10 million parts contract in one congressional district builds one representative’s support. two $5 million contracts in two districts are twice as good, and better all around would be three contracts at $3 million apiece. every participant in the military-contracting process understands this logic: the prime contractors who parcel out supply deals around the country, the military’s procurement officers who divide work among contractors, the politicians who vote up or down on the results. in the late 1980s, a coalition of so-called cheap hawks in congress tried to cut funding for the b-2 bomber. they got nowhere after it became clear that work for the project was being carried out in 46 states and no fewer than 383 congressional districts (of 435 total). the difference between then and now is that in 1989, northrop, the main contractor for the plane, had to release previously classified data to demonstrate how broadly the dollars were being spread.whatever its technical challenges, the f-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. for a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of bernie sanders—former socialist mayor of burlington, current independent senator from vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. in principle, he thinks the f-35 is a bad choice. after one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in florida, sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” yet sanders, with the rest of vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an f-35 unit assigned to the vermont air national guard in burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “for better or worse, [the f-35] is the plane of record right now,” sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. that’s the reality.” it’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? as vermont goes, so goes the nation.the next big project the air force is considering is the long range strike bomber, a successor to the b-1 and b-2 whose specifications include an ability to do bombing runs deep into china. (a step so wildly reckless that the u.s. didn’t consider it even when fighting chinese troops during the korean war.) by the time the plane’s full costs and capabilities become apparent, chuck spinney wrote last summer, the airplane, “like the f-35 today, will be unstoppable.” that is because even now its supporters are building the plane’s “social safety net by spreading the subcontracts around the country, or perhaps like the f-35, around the world.”admiral mike mullen, the then-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at a press conference in baghdad in august 2011. (joseph epstein)politicians say that national security is their first and most sacred duty, but they do not act as if this is so. the most recent defense budget passed the house armed services committee by a vote of 61 to zero, with similarly one-sided debate before the vote. this is the same house of representatives that cannot pass a long-term highway trust fund bill that both parties support. “the lionization of military officials by politicians is remarkable and dangerous,” a retired air force colonel named tom ruby, who now writes on organizational culture, told me. he and others said that this deference was one reason so little serious oversight of the military took place.t. x. hammes, a retired marine corps colonel who has a doctorate in modern history from oxford, told me that instead of applying critical judgment to military programs, or even regarding national defense as any kind of sacred duty, politicians have come to view it simply as a teat. “many on capitol hill see the pentagon with admirable simplicity,” he said: “it is a way of directing tax money to selected districts. it’s part of what they were elected to do.”in the spring of 2011, barack obama asked gary hart, the democratic party’s most experienced and best-connected figure on defense reform, to form a small bipartisan task force that would draft recommendations on how obama might try to recast the pentagon and its practices if he won a second term. hart did so (i was part of the group, along with andrew j. bacevich of boston university, john arquilla of the naval postgraduate school, and norman r. augustine, the former ceo of lockheed martin), and sent a report to obama that fall. [here is that memo.] he never heard back. every white house is swamped with recommendations and requests, and it responds only to those it considers most urgent—which defense reform obviously was not.soon thereafter, during the 2012 presidential race, neither barack obama nor mitt romney said much about how they would spend the billion and a half dollars a day that go to military programs, except for when romney said that if elected, he would spend a total of $1 trillion more. in their only direct exchange about military policy, during their final campaign debate, obama said that romney’s plans would give the services more money than they were asking for. romney pointed out that the navy had fewer ships than it did before world war i. obama shot back, “well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. we have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. we have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.” it was obama’s most sarcastic and aggressive moment of any of the debates, and was also the entirety of the discussion about where those trillions would go.jim webb is a decorated vietnam veteran, an author, a former democratic senator, and a likely presidential candidate. seven years ago in his book a time to fight, he wrote that the career military was turning into a “don’t break my rice bowl” culture, referring to an asian phrase roughly comparable to making sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. webb meant that ambitious officers notice how many of their mentors and predecessors move after retirement into board positions, consultancies, or operational roles with defense contractors. (pensions now exceed preretirement pay for some very senior officers; for instance, a four-star general or admiral with 40 years of service can receive a pension of more than $237,000 a year, even if his maximum salary on active duty was $180,000.)webb says it would defy human nature if knowledge of the post-service prospects did not affect the way some high-ranking officers behave while in uniform, including “protecting the rice bowl” of military budgets and cultivating connections with their predecessors and their postretirement businesses. “there have always been some officers who went on to contracting jobs,” webb, who grew up in an air force family, told me recently. “what’s new is the scale of the phenomenon, and its impact on the highest ranks of the military.”of course, the modern military advertises itself as a place where young people who have lacked the chance or money for higher education can develop valuable skills, plus earn gi bill benefits for post-service studies. that’s good all around, and is part of the military’s perhaps unintended but certainly important role as an opportunity creator for undercredentialed americans. webb is talking about a different, potentially corrupting “prepare for your future” effect on the military’s best-trained, most influential careerists.if more members of congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the united states would probably not have gone to war in iraq.“it is no secret that in subtle ways, many of these top leaders begin positioning themselves for their second-career employment during their final military assignments,” webb wrote in a time to fight. the result, he said, is a “seamless interplay” of corporate and military interests “that threatens the integrity of defense procurement, of controversial personnel issues such as the huge ‘quasi-military’ structure [of contractors, like blackwater and halliburton] that has evolved in iraq and afghanistan, and inevitably of the balance within our national security process itself.” i heard assessments like this from many of the men and women i spoke with. the harshest ones came not from people who mistrusted the military but from those who, like webb, had devoted much of their lives to it.a man who worked for decades overseeing pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “the system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” what kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.”of course it was the most revered american warrior of the 20th century, dwight d. eisenhower, who warned most urgently that business and politics would corrupt the military, and vice versa. everyone has heard of this speech. not enough people have actually read it and been exposed to what would now be considered its dangerously antimilitary views. which mainstream politician could say today, as eisenhower said in 1961, that the military-industrial complex has a “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—[that] is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government”?seth moulton, a few days after his victory in last fall’s congressional race, said that the overall quality and morale of people in the military has dramatically improved since the days of a conscript force. “but it’s become populated, especially at the highest ranks, by careerists, people who have gotten where they are by checking all the boxes and not taking risks,” he told me. “some of the finest officers i knew were lieutenants who knew they were getting out, so weren’t afraid to make the right decision. i know an awful lot of senior officers who are very afraid to make a tough choice because they’re worried how it will look on their fitness report.” this may sound like a complaint about life in any big organization, but it’s something more. there’s no rival army or marine corps you can switch to for a new start. there’s almost no surmounting an error or a black mark on the fitness or evaluation reports that are the basis for promotions.every institution has problems, and at every stage of u.s. history, some critics have considered the u.s. military overfunded, underprepared, too insular and self-regarding, or flawed in some other way. the difference now, i contend, is that these modern distortions all flow in one way or another from the chickenhawk basis of today’s defense strategy.at enormous cost, both financial and human, the nation supports the world’s most powerful armed force. but because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action, the normal democratic feedbacks do not work.i have met serious people who claim that the military’s set-apart existence is best for its own interests, and for the nation’s. “since the time of the romans there have been people, mostly men but increasingly women, who have volunteered to be the praetorian guard,” john a. nagl told me. nagl is a west point graduate and rhodes scholar who was a combat commander in iraq and has written two influential books about the modern military. he left the army as a lieutenant colonel and now, in his late 40s, is the head of the haverford prep school, near philadelphia.“they know what they are signing up for,” nagl said of today’s troops. “they are proud to do it, and in exchange they expect a reasonable living, and pensions and health care if they are hurt or fall sick. the american public is completely willing to let this professional class of volunteers serve where they should, for wise purpose. this gives the president much greater freedom of action to make decisions in the national interest, with troops who will salute sharply and do what needs to be done.”i like and respect nagl, but i completely disagree. as we’ve seen, public inattention to the military, born of having no direct interest in what happens to it, has allowed both strategic and institutional problems to fester.“a people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it,” andrew bacevich wrote in 2012. bacevich himself fought in vietnam; his son was killed in iraq. “persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do.”“our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect,” gary hart’s working group told the president.mike mullen thinks that one way to reengage americans with the military is to shrink the active-duty force, a process already under way. “the next time we go to war,” he said, “the american people should have to say yes. and that would mean that half a million people who weren’t planning to do this would have to be involved in some way. they would have to be inconvenienced. that would bring america in. america hasn’t been in these previous wars. and we are paying dearly for that.”with their distance from the military, politicians don’t talk seriously about whether the united states is directly threatened by chaos in the middle east and elsewhere, or is in fact safer than ever (as christopher preble and john mueller, of the cato institute, have argued in a new book, a dangerous world?). the vast majority of americans outside the military can be triply cynical in their attitude toward it. triply? one: “honoring” the troops but not thinking about them. two: “caring” about defense spending but really viewing it as a bipartisan stimulus program. three: supporting a “strong” defense but assuming that the united states is so much stronger than any rival that it’s pointless to worry whether strategy, weaponry, and leadership are right.the cultural problems arising from an arm’s-length military could be even worse. charles j. dunlap jr., a retired air force major general who now teaches at duke law school, has thought about civic-military relations through much of his professional life. when he was studying at the national defense university as a young air force officer in the early 1990s, just after the first gulf war, he was a co-winner of the prize for best student essay with an imagined-future work called “the origins of the american military coup of 2012.”his essay’s premise was cautionary, and was based on the tension between rising adulation for the military and declining trust in most other aspects of government. the more exasperated americans grew about economic and social problems, the more relieved they were when competent men in uniform, led by general thomas e. t. brutus, finally stepped in to take control. part of the reason for the takeover, dunlap explained, was that the military had grown so separate from mainstream culture and currents that it viewed the rest of society as a foreign territory to occupy and administer.recently i asked dunlap how the real world of post-2012 america matched his imagined version.“i think we’re on the cusp of seeing a resurgence of a phenomenon that has always been embedded in the american psyche,” he said. “that is benign antimilitarism,” which would be the other side of the reflexive pro-militarism of recent years. “people don’t appreciate how unprecedented our situation is,” he told me. what is that situation? for the first time in the nation’s history, america has a permanent military establishment large enough to shape our dealings in the world and seriously influence our economy. yet the americans in that military, during what dunlap calls the “maturing years of the volunteer force,” are few enough in number not to seem representative of the country they defend.“it’s becoming increasingly tribal,” dunlap says of the at-war force in our chickenhawk nation, “in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. it’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.”people within that military tribe can feel both above and below the messy civilian reality of america. below, in the burdens placed upon them, and the inattention to the lives, limbs, and opportunities they have lost. above, in being able to withstand hardships that would break their hipster or slacker contemporaries.“it’s become just too easy to go to war,” says admiral mike mullen, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.“i think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves,” dunlap said. “and there is some rationality for that.” anyone who has spent time with troops and their families knows what he means. physical fitness, standards of promptness and dress, all the aspects of self-discipline that have traditionally made the military a place where misdirected youth could “straighten out,” plus the spirit of love and loyalty for comrades that is found in civilian life mainly on sports teams. the best resolution of this tension between military and mainstream values would of course come as those who understand the military’s tribal identity apply their strengths outside the tribe. “the generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts,” dunlap said of the young veterans of the recent long wars. “they were literally making life-or-death decisions. you can’t take that generation and say, ‘you can be seen and not heard.’ ”in addition to seth moulton, this year’s congress will have more than 20 veterans of iraq and afghanistan, including new republican senators tom cotton of arkansas and joni ernst of iowa. the 17 who are already there, including democratic representatives tulsi gabbard and tammy duckworth and republican representatives duncan d. hunter and adam kinzinger, have played an active role in veterans’ policies and in the 2013 debates about intervening in syria. gabbard was strongly against it; some of the republican veterans were for it—but all of them made arguments based on firsthand observation of what had worked and failed. moulton told me that the main lesson he’ll apply from his four tours in iraq is the importance of service, of whatever kind. he said that harvard’s famed chaplain during moulton’s years as an undergraduate physics student, the late peter j. gomes, had convinced him that “it’s not enough to ‘believe’ in service. you should find a way, yourself, to serve.” barring unimaginable changes, “service” in america will not mean a draft. but moulton says he will look for ways “to promote a culture where more people want to serve.”for all the differences in their emphases and conclusions, these young veterans are alike in all taking the military seriously, rather than just revering it. the vast majority of americans will never share their experiences. but we can learn from that seriousness, and view military policy as deserving at least the attention we give to taxes or schools.what might that mean, in specific? here is a start. in the private report prepared for president obama more than three years ago, gary hart’s working group laid out prescriptions on a range of operational practices, from the need for smaller, more agile combat units to a shift in the national command structure to a different approach toward preventing nuclear proliferation. three of the recommendations were about the way the country as a whole should engage with its armed forces. they were:appoint a commission to assess the long wars. this commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from afghanistan and iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. such a commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions.clarify the decision-making process for use of force. such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities.restore the civil-military relationship. the president, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. the traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.barack obama, busy on other fronts, had no time for this. the rest of us should make time, if we hope to choose our wars more wisely, and win them.
 chances are that you’ve heard of bitcoin, the digital currency that many predict will revolutionize payments – or prove to be a massive fraud – depending on what you read. bitcoin is an application that runs on the blockchain, which is ultimately a more interesting and profound innovation.the blockchain is a secure transaction ledger database that is shared by all parties participating in an established, distributed network of computers. it records and stores every transaction that occurs in the network, essentially eliminating the need for “trusted” third parties such as payment processors. blockchain proponents often describe the innovation as a “transfer of trust in a trustless world,” referring to the fact that the entities participating in a transaction are not necessarily known to each other yet they exchange value with surety and no third-party validation. for this reason, the blockchain is a potential game changer.in 2008, satoshi nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or group of people credited with developing bitcoin, released a whitepaper describing the software protocol. since then, the network has grown and bitcoinhas become a recognized unit of value around the globe. bitcoin is extremely important because it provides a mechanism for accessing the blockchain - but it’s not the only application that can leverage the platform.bitcoin has also been on the receiving end of some bad press, such as around the collapse of the mt. gox bitcoin exchange earlier last year. the mt. gox story is not necessarily an indictment of bitcoin. for the purposes of this post, simply remember this: bitcoin is just a mechanism for transacting on the blockchain and the blockchain is the key innovation.the blockchain enables the anonymous exchange of digital assets, such as bitcoin, but it is not technically dependent on bitcoin. the elegance of the blockchain is that it obviates the need for a central authority to verify trust and the transfer of value. it transfers power and control from large entities to the many, enabling safe, fast, cheaper transactions despite the fact that we may not know the entities we are dealing with.the mechanics of the blockchain are novel and highly disruptive. as people transact in a blockchain ecosystem, a public record of all transactions is automatically created. computers verify each transaction with sophisticated algorithms to confirm the transfer of value and create a historical ledger of all activity. the computers that form the network that are processing the transactions are located throughout the world and importantly are not owned or controlled by any single entity. the process is real-time, and much more secure than relying on a central authority to verify a transaction.there are many analogous concepts both ancient and modern. technology has and will continue to transfer power and control from central authorities and distribute them to the masses. for example, time used to be determined and communicated by large clock towers that were expensive to build and maintain. engineering innovations ultimately decentralized the quantification of time to the individual. likewise, whatsapp, a popular cross platform messaging app, cut the transaction cost of sending messages globally – and cut profits for the carriers. the central authority (phone carriers) lost to the application (whatsapp) built on a decentralized network (i.e. the internet).similarly, third parties that currently verify transactions (the central authority) stand to lose against the blockchain (the decentralized network). as such, the blockchain essentially disintermediates these third-party transaction verifiers: auditors, legal services, payment processors, brokerages and other similar organizations.while you may not be convinced that exchanging bitcoin is an invaluable service, there are many other examples of value transfer that are critical – and currently very slow and expensive. consider the exchange of property: numerous intermediaries are currently involved in this process, such as a third-party escrow service that works for both parties to ensure a smooth transfer. the escrow service, like other services built solely on trust and verification, collect fees that would be mitigated by performing the transaction on the blockchain – as would wire transfer fees, third party financial auditing, contract execution, etc.the use case of the blockchain enabling a decentralized currency exchange – such as bitcoin – is well defined and will likely be the dominant use case near term, however there are a multitude of innovative and disruptive use cases. companies are already building their own blockchains for various applications such as gridcoin that leverages the blockchain to crowdsource scientific computing projects. gridcoin uses its own protocols that require much less computing power and electricity to manage than traditional bitcoin networks.the blockchain is a foundational technology, like tcp/ip, which enables the internet. and much like the internet in the late 1990s, we don’t know exactly how the blockchain will evolve, but evolve it will.similar to the internet, the blockchain must also be allowed to grow unencumbered. this will require careful handling that recognizes the difference between the platform and the applications that run on it. tcp/ip empowers numerous financial applications that are regulated, but tcp/ip is not regulated as a financial instrument. the blockchain should receive similar consideration. while the predominant use case for the blockchain today is bitcoin currency exchange that may require regulation, this will change over time.had we over-regulated the internet early on, we would have missed out on many innovations that we can’t imagine living without today. the same is true for the blockchain. disruptive technologies rarely fit neatly into existing regulatory considerations, but rigid regulatory frameworks have repeatedly stifled innovation. it’s likely that innovations in the blockchain will outpace policy, let’s not slow it down.
 ratings have been disabled for this video.rating is available when the video has been rented.this feature is not available right now. please try again later.updated version can be found here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sj-zv...peter thiel and marc andreessen are silicon valley luminaries, epic entrepreneurs and prominent financiers. both have something to say about where high-tech is taking the world economy, and what is being left behind. andreessen, co-developer of the first web browser and now a top venture capitalist, expects software to automate and ultimately dominate most other industries. thiel, a co-founder of paypal and an early investor in facebook, has written in depth about what he considers the stagnation of innovation in fields that others see as emblems of progress: energy, pharmaceuticals, space exploration, nanotech and much more. in fact, thiel links the austerity gripping the western world to productivity gains that never happened. join these acute observers for a unique exchange on science, business and innovation, or the lack thereof.
 a compilation of relevant tweets by @pmarca (& others) about secular stagnation: is capital getting commoditized?are you sure you want to delete your account?are you sure you want to change your username?changing your username will break existing story embeds, meaning older stories embedded on other web sites will no longer appear
 buenos aires (reuters) - an argentine prosecutor who accused president cristina fernandez of orchestrating a cover-up in the investigation of iran over the 1994 bombing of a jewish community center was found dead in his apartment, authorities said on monday.alberto nisman, who had been delving into the blast at the amia jewish community center in buenos aires that killed 85 people, said wednesday that fernandez opened secretive discussions with iran and at least one of the men suspected of planting the bomb.he said the scheme was intended to clear the suspects so that argentina could start swapping grains for much-needed oil from iran, which denies any connection with the bombing.nisman was found dead on sunday night in his apartment in the posh buenos aires neighborhood of puerto madero, argentina's security ministry said. a 22-calibre handgun and a single bullet casing were found next to his body, the ministry said."everything indicates it was a suicide," national security secretary sergio berni told local television. "we have to see if gunpowder is found on his hands."preliminary autopsy results from the morgue suggested "there was no third-person intervention in nisman's death," the office of state prosecutor viviana fein said in a statement.fein told reporters she "could not rule out a provoked suicide" whereby someone forced or blackmailed nisman to kill himself.nisman, who had seemed combative in recent interviews rather than frightened, had been due to take part in what promised to be a tough closed-door hearing in congress on monday to explain his accusations. lawmakers allied with fernandez said they were ready to grill nisman about the charges.on monday those lawmakers told reporters they were shocked by the news and also suspected more than a straightforward suicide. "we want to know which mafiosi sector pushed the prosecutor to take this decision," said julian dominguez, who leads the ruling coalition in the lower house of congress.the prosecutor's security guards alerted his mother on sunday afternoon that he was not answering his front door or phone. she found the door to his apartment locked from the inside and got a locksmith to open it. she found her son's body on the floor of the bathroom and called the police."he was alone in the apartment," prosecutor fein told reporters. "there are no witnesses."officials said the cause of nisman's death would be announced in the days ahead.thousands of argentines signed up on social media to join  marches set to take place throughout the country on monday night to protest nisman's death and call for justice.the clarin daily newspaper reported that nisman told the newspaper just a few days earlier, "i could end up dead because of this."nisman, who had been receiving death threats for years, said in a separate tv interview he had also been considering increasing his security detail.    israel issued a statement mourning nisman's death and urging argentine authorities to carry on his work. argentina's main jewish organizations, amia and daia, praised his "inalterable impulse to get to the truth."but the judge handling the case of the 1994 bombing criticized nisman late last week for taking it upon himself to "initiate an investigation without judicial control" and said the evidence he put forth was flawed.argentine courts have accused iran of sponsoring the 1994 bombing, a charge tehran denies. in 2007, argentine authorities secured interpol arrest warrants for five iranians and a lebanese over the bombing.in 2013, fernandez tried to form a "truth commission" with iran to investigate jointly. she said it would reactivate the inquiry, but israel and jewish groups said the move threatened to derail criminal prosecution of the case.the truth commission pact was struck down by an argentine court and never ratified by iran.nisman had said the commission was intended to help get the arrest warrants dropped as a step toward normalizing bilateral relations and opening the door to obtaining iranian oil needed to help close argentina's $7 billion per year energy deficit.(additional reporting by walter bianchi and hugh bronstein in buenos aires and dan williams in jerusalem; editing by kieran murray and cynthia osterman)
 the department of transportation's federal highway commission has released the latest report on traffic volume trends , data through november."travel on all roads and streets changed by 1.1% (2.5 billion vehicle miles) for november 2014 as compared  with november  2013." ( see report ). the less volatile 12-month moving average is up 0.08% month-over-month and 1.35% year-over-year. if we factor in population growth, the 12-month ma of the civilian population-adjusted data (age 16-and-over) is essentially unchanged, up 0.01% month-over-month and up only 0.42% year-over-year.here is a chart that illustrates this data series from its inception in 1970. i'm plotting the "moving 12-month total on all roads," as the dot terms it. my start date is 1971 because i'm incorporating all the available data from earlier dot spreadsheets. the fred repository has the series from 1987 to the latest update. as we can readily see, the post-recession pattern suggests a structural change in our driving habits.the rolling 12-month miles traveled contracted from its all-time high for 39 months during the stagflation of the late 1970s to early 1980s, a double-dip recession era. the most recent decline has lasted for 84 months and counting — a new record, but the trough to date was in november 2011, 48 months from the all-time high.total miles traveled, however, is one of those metrics that should be adjusted for population growth to provide the most meaningful analysis, especially if we want to understand the historical context. we can do a quick adjustment of the data using an appropriate population group as the deflator. i use the bureau of labor statistics' civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over (fred series cnp16ov ). the next chart incorporates that adjustment with the growth shown on the vertical axis as the percent change from 1971.clearly, when we adjust for population growth, the miles-traveled metric takes on a much darker look. the nominal 39-month dip that began in may 1979 grows to 61 months, slightly more than five years. the trough was a 6% decline from the previous peak.the population-adjusted all-time high dates from june 2005. that's well over nine years ago. the latest data is 8.68% below the 2005 peak, fractionally off the -9.22% post-financial crisis low in march of 2014. our adjusted miles traveled based on the 16-and-older age cohort is about where we were as a nation in march of 1995.here is a closer look at the series since 2000. we can see that the decline leveled off in 2010, rolled over in 2011, leveled off in the first half of 2012 and then rolled over again.i've often been asked why i use the cnp16ov data for the population adjustment, often with the suggestion that it would make more sense to limit the population to licensed drivers. for openers, i don't know of a valid source for the driver-licensed population. but more importantly, the correlation between license holders and actual drivers is far from reliable. many license holders in households do not drive, especially in their older years. according to census bureau data on gasoline sales (courtesy of harry dent's research on demand curves ), dollars spent on gasoline peaks for people in their late 40s and falls off rather quickly after that.in fact, i think there's a good case for using the census bureau's mid-month estimates of total population ( popthm ) rather than civilians age 16 and over for the population adjustment. the reason is that a portion of total miles traveled is specifically to support children's needs (day care, schools, children's activities, etc.) and the needs of elders who might have licenses but no longer drive. ultimately the division of miles traveled by either population group (cnp16ov or popthm), while not a perfect match with drivers, is a consistent and relevant metric for evaluating economic growth.here is the same population-adjusted chart, this time with the total population for the adjustment. in the total-population adjusted version the latest data point of -6.9%, a bit off the -7.7% post-recession low seven months earlier.what about the impact of volatile gasoline prices? how much of a factor has that been in the trend? i'll close with an overlay of the population-adjusted miles traveled and real (inflation-adjusted) regular gasoline prices (all formulations) since the early 1990s.
 septima: my good friend omar, whom i love so dearly! you just ran into that tree!axiothea: and why are you walking about muttering to yourself with your eyes glued not to the beautiful mountain afternoon but to your smartphone?omar khayyam: thar she blows! three points off the larboard bow!! it’s the berne whale!!!sokrates: 48 hours ago it was generally expected that the swiss national bank would continue its large quantitative easing program for the foreseeable future, in order to hold the swiss frank at its peg of 1.2 to the euro. thursday morning it abandoned that policy, with results that were pretty exciting. people thought it might be a hoax. the swiss franc immediately rose in value from 1.2 to 0.87/€–with somebody very unwisely liquidating a short-chf position in a hurry–before settling in a trading range of 1.00-1.05/€. it is right now at 1.01. this is a tightening of monetary policy in europe–some fraction of the anticipated quantitative easing program of the ecb will now simply soak up the eurozone government bonds that the snb will not be buying. this is an instantaneous mark-to-market portfolio loss of about 100b chf for the snb. others outside switzerland who were short chf-denominated assets have probably lost 150b chf. people outside switzerland who were long chf-denominated assets have gained 250b chf. swiss exports will fall for the next two years. and switzerland is now highly likely to fall into a recession.sokrates: “confoederatio helvetica franc”–the formal name of switzerland’s currency.sokrates: just because you only put my–overwhelmingly rich, athenian-citizen, hellenic, male–friends in your dialogues does not mean that everyone has to follow your example.aristokles: but isn’t he a tentmaker, and a drunken poet?silenos: you have a problem with wine?erato: you have a problem with his–and my–type of poetry?el shaddai: you have a problem with people who live in tents, or who make them?septima: actually omar is not a tentmaker. his day job in bokhara is as a mathematician and a physicist–his treatise on demonstration of problems of algebra was absolutely groundbreaking…aristokles: but this is about finance!septima: and what else do underemployed physicists do in this degenerate age to pay the rent?glaukon: and “the berne whale”: what’s with that?. back in 2012 a number of traders noted that it was cheaper to buy credit default protection on the 125 companies that made up the cdx ig 9 index by buying the index than by buying protection on the 125 companies one by one. so they bought the index, sold its components short, and waited for the index to rise or the components to fall so they could close out their positions at a large profit. as of april, however, the gap between the price of cdx ig 9 and what the traders thought it should be and grown, and their bosses were asking them questions like: ‘what have you missed here?’it turned out that the london whale, jpmc’s bruno iksil, had gone long cdx ig 9, gotten underwater, and started rolling double-or-nothing. bruno’s bosses ina drew and jamie dimon then found they had a choice: they could go all-in, hold the portfolio until maturity, and either make a fortune if a fewer-than-expected number or lose jpmc if a greater-than-expected number of the cdx ig 9 125 companies went bankrupt. or they could eat their $6 billion loss and go home. and so the traders had their happy ending.‘similarly’–or so traders said–from late 2008 to today the us treasury bond has, from traders’ perspective, gone similarly haywire. the interest rate on the nominal 10-year treasury note was pushed down to 2.1%/year in the panic as the federal reserve opened the liquidity floodgates. as of now the note yields 1.84%/year as the federal reserve has continued to push and keep treasury bond prices way below ‘fundamentals’, and in the process expanded its balance sheet to $4 trillion.axiothea: i can hear the scare-quotes when you say ‘similarly’ and ‘fundamentals’. would you care to elucidate right now? or is elucidation the project of this dialogue?sokrates: elucidation is the project of this dialogue.sokrates: traders concluded that sooner or later the federal reserve would have to allow interest rates to return to fundamentals–that the policy of trying to keep interest rates away from fundamentals indefinitely was ‘unsustainable’–because unsustainable policies cannot be sustained indefinitely. and so traders sold us treasury bonds short, banked their positions, and sat back to wait to take their profits when the correction came…sokrates: exactly. they ran into the widowmaker. and they were puzzled. bruno iksil, after all, had been pulled up short by his boss ina drew and her boss jamie dimon’s unwillingness to risk betting jpmc on a single roll of the dice. ben bernanke, they thought, ought to have similarly been pulled up short by the risks entailed by permanent ‘disequilibrium’ easy-money policy. but ben bernanke and after him janet yellen have not been pulled up short by rising inflation and the fear it will rise further. they have no supervising ceo to tell them that they are running risks too-large to manage. they dominate the federal open market committee. and, the traders think, they are engaged in behavior as unprofessional as it would have been for jamie dimon and ina drew to tell bruno iksil: ‘you turn out to have made a large directional bet that we can sell unhedged protection and profit? let’s see if you are right: let it ride!’ and so they went public with their concerns about bernanke the washington super-whale just as the london whale’s counterparties and gone public, in search of someone who could tell first bernanke and then yellen that it was time to unwind the federal reserve’s balance sheet.sokrates: like ben bernanke and janet yellen at the federal reserve, the snb embarked on a super-easy-money policy–in switzerland’s case to minimize the damage to switzerland’s export sector it feared would result from a value of chf greater than 1.2/€. and up until thursday morning that super-easy-money policy was the cornerstone of snb plans, commitments, and forward-guidance communications. the snb said that it could and would sustain it indefinitely. now it is gone…omar khayyam: and in the process of its going switzerland now faces a near-term likelihood of recession, switzerland’s taxpayers will now get $100b/€ less of seigniorage from the snb…omar khayyam: central-bank commitments all across the north atlantic are now viewed with grave suspicion. those outside switzerland long chf are now 250 billion € richer. those outside switzerland short chf–polish homeowners with what they thought were cheap swiss mortgages and others–are now 150 b € poorer…aristokles: what could make the snb assign a positive benefit-cost value to this sudden action?sokrates: aristotles of stagira gives answers. i only ask questions. apollo’s oracle at delphi would not have said that i was wisest among the athenians were i so great a fool as to offer answers…omar khayyam: one perspective is provided by the very sharp matthew of alphaville, who writes that this is indeed a return to fundamentals:the whinging of swiss exporters… does not mean the policy change was an error….. ridiculously large current account balance…. export[ing] economic weakness… clearly engaged in currency manipulation…. the snb… argued… switzerland… a victim… just trying to shield itself from outside forces…. we’re skeptical…. [the] exchange rate that balances the flows of money in and out… [is] just might be a lot different than… swiss exporters [wish]…. swiss consumers won’t need to save as much…. imports should… rise… a boost to neighbor[s]…. exporters will be forced to become more competitive…. switzerland… has monetary sovereignty [that]… it used… for ill. the recent move by the snb could be the first step in switzerland’s long-awaited transition towards less savings and more consumption. swiss households should be pleased…hypatia: or we could say boosting its domestic employment while recompensing eurozone residents by providing them with the opportunity to buy well-made swiss stuff cheap. i never know what to do with these arguments that give only the costs while ignoring the benefits or give only the benefits while ignoring the costs…sokrates: perhaps the authors of such arguments should be put on trial for teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and making the worse appear the better cause, and so corrupting the youth of athens?barry: the snb’s quantitative easing program does have a zero-sum expenditure-switching aspect–boosting swiss at the expense of outsiders’ employment–and a zero-sum terms-of-trade aspect–boosting the well-being of outsiders who buy cheap swiss goods at the expense of swiss who sell their goods cheaply. but it also has a positive-sum component: by raising present and expected future world money stocks and by taking risk off of private-sector balance sheets, it is a global monetary stimulus.barry: there is indeed. but you can resolve disequilibria by balancing global demand up or balancing global demand down. this policy move balances down, a bad mistake in a world in which we have not an excess inflationary-gap level but a deficient deflationary-gap level of north atlantic demand.omar khayyam: another perspective is provided by the learned markus and harold of princetown, who see this as the triumph of destructive politics over central-bank credibility economics:the snb was not forced to act by a speculative run…. but domestic criticism of the snb’s large buildup of exchange-rate reserves (euro assets) was mounting…. swiss conservatives… fearing… eurozone government bonds were unsafe… agitated to… acquire gold…. the prospect of large-scale quantitative easing by the european central bank… intensified the political pressure…. economists have… little stud[ied]… when political pressure becomes unbearable…. politics… prevailed over central-bank commitments…. the uncoupling from the euro came as a huge shock…. the risks created… have a fat tail. the negative effects for the swiss economy… may already be showing that abandoning the euro peg was not a good idea…axiothea: i do not think that that is quite accurate. there is an economic argument–that a very large balance sheet is risky because of currency mismatch. if the value of the euro collapses for some reason, swiss taxpayers will be left holding the bag–and so it is better to hold a stable store of value like gold than euros on your central bank’s balance sheet, and not let your central bank’s balance sheet grow too large.charlie: guarding against the danger that the euro will collapse–that there will be a large outburst of inflation in the eurozone that will turn euros into waste paper that buy little or nothing in the way of useful commodities–seems to me to be like buying fire extinguishers instead of wood for your ark when it has been raining for forty days and forty nights. do not expect me to approve of what old ralph used to call: ‘crying: “fire! fire!” in noah’s flood’.glaukon: but the political argument? if politics will place a limit on monetary expansion, it is better not to push those limits and so generate additional uncertainty, confusion, and risk?axiothea: i am still having a difficult time understanding why there should be political pressure to exit the euro on the side of appreciation. the value of the euro is not going to be inflated away. having the swiss price level move in the long run in step with the price levels of its neighbors seems not a bad thing. and as long as there is excess demand for chf-denominated assets at a parity of 1.2/€, satisfying that demand is a source of resources for switzerland: print chf, buy interest-paying bonds with it, and pocket the interest. a central bank that can print the currency people want to hold can and should be the ultimate patient investor. print money, buy bonds with it, and hold them to maturity is not usually thought of as a risky activity.axiothea: so the one economic risk–that the swiss economy will be prevented from undergoing deflation driven by a steadily-appreciating exchange rate–is not a risk at all given that eurozone inflation is simply not in the cards. and the other economic risk–that the swiss will be forced to unwind their position at an inopportune time at which eurozone bond yields are low rather than hold the bonds to maturity–is a risk only if goldbug politicians rile up voters and eliminate central bank independence. that second is a risk, i agree. but why are there goldbug politicians to rile up voters and eliminate the independence of a central bank that seems to be doing a good job of managing the swiss economy in the interest of maximum employment and price stability?omar khayyam: perhaps a full-fledged red-meat believer like jim rogers can add some insight. as quoted by hayley hudson:‘i explained carefully and at length that it was coming and why,’ he said in an email to business insider.i am still astonished they would ever have done something so foolish, but politicians throughout history have always done some amazingly foolish things…. switzerland has… long provided monetary refuge from the wealthy evading the consequences of political turmoil in europe, from french nobility fleeing the guillotine to the jews escaping germany…. banks are supposed to keep your affairs quiet…. in america… that is no longer the case. the government can look… anywhere it wants…. [even] in switzerland [it] is not as sacrosanct as it once was…. [people] want stability… a sound currency… [what] the swiss franc has always offered. the question, now, is whether that is going to last…. every citizen of switzerland benefits from a stronger currency. our dental technician down in geneva is… happy…. but the big exporters get on the phone and the government takes their call….the bank’s currency manipulation will turn out to be disastrous. one of two things is going to happen. in the first scenario… the snb will just have to keep printing and printing and printing…. if you debase the franc, eventually nobody will want it. you will have eroded its value…. the money will move to singapore or hong kong, and the swiss finance industry will wither up and disappear. the alternative scenario is… [in 2010] the swiss central bank, after quadrupling its foreign currency holdings, abandoned the effort…. the country lost $21 billion…. the economist has described the swiss currency as:an innocent bystander in a world where the eurozone’s politicians have failed to sort out their sovereign-debt crisis, america’s economic policy seems intent on spooking investors and the japanese have intervened to hold down the value of the yen.’all of which is true, but i think the problem runs deeper than that. the swiss for decades had a semi monopoly on finance. and as a result they have become less and less competent. the entire economy has been overprotected…. i still have those original swiss francs that i bought in 1970…. had i kept the money in an american savings account, it would have gone down 80 percent against the franc.axiothea: so jim rogers says that either the swiss government will print so many chf that it will lose its value, and finance will leave switzerland because of the debasement of the currency; or the swiss government will print too few chf and so its value will keep rising and it will lose money on its interventions. is that correct?axiothea: but can’t it print the golden mean? not so much that the swiss franc loses value vis-a-vis other competing potential safe nominal assets, but not so few as to require a painful grinding unemployment-generating deflation of the swiss export sector?walter: it should print the ‘natural’ amount to meet the needs of trade, clearly. the problem is that rogers provides no guidance as to what the ‘natural’ amount is…milton: i used to think a steady k% growth rate for broad monetary aggregates would provide the best attainable feedback rule for approximating the ‘natural’ stock of high-powered money. but that position seems less and less defensible with each passing day…charlie: the best way to understand this, i think, is as an exaggerated version of the rubin doctrine that “a strong dollar is in america’s interest”. for jim rogers, a stronger chf than currently exists is always in switzerland’s interest–in the interest of everyone in switzerland, of the dental technician in geneva, with the exception of a few big exporters who want chf depreciated below its “natural” leve…barry: and what is the “natural” level of the chf, in jim rogers’s view?sokrates: if unemployment afflicts only the non-enterprising who deserve it, then for anyone long chf–as jim rogers is–there is no “natural” level of the chf. stronger is always better…glaukon: but surely very few people think like jim rogers?walter: very few people think like jim rogers, but a lot of people have elements in their thought that partake of the rogers-nature. we saw this in the views of the very sharp matthew c. klein, who thinks that switzerland’s export surplus is a signal that the swiss franc is in disequilibrium, rather than a signal that the supply of safe assets in the world economy is in disequilibrium–too low, needs to be boosted, and because it has not been boosted to its equilibrium level there is this knock-on effect on the value of chf.omar khayyam: indeed, walter, you seem considerably wiser than your successors at your little weekly magazine:some analysts speculated that political pressure may have caused the swiss to abandon the policy…. others felt that the snb may be expecting the european central bank to announce quantitative easing… weaken the euro and require even more intervention to cap the franc. already in a hole, the snb may have decided to stop digging…. 60% of swiss exports go to the euro zone and the united states…. the [swiss] equity market has plunged in response…. the whole episode is a useful reminder that currencies are a zero sum game; if some countries pursue policies (such as quantitative easing) likely to weaken their exchange rate, other currencies must gain. the ripple effect can be significant…barry: am i allowed to point out that the chf strengthened not because anticipated ecb qe is zero-sum, but because the snf abandoned its exchange rate-feedback qe program itself? repeat after me: relative policies determine exchange rates; the absolute north atlantic-wide total values of interest rate and qe policies determine the monetary stance of the north atlantic as a whole. and there is a distinct positive-sum aspect to qe: few now are unhappy with the consequences of japan’s current qe policy, for example…sokrates: not “the end of the snb’s qe policy reduces an intra-european distortion at the price of increasing the disequilibrium safe-asset shortage, and so carries the world economy away from its best self”?a distortion has been removed from international markets…. a recurrent puzzle of the eurozone sovereign crisis was that the euro never weakened much, despite the fears for its existence. we can now see that the snb at least deserved part of the blame…. eurozone competitiveness should rise, while the us grows less competitive. this would be healthy…. the snb… had every reason to fight the ‘currency war’… with greater fervour than others. abandoning that fight, with inflation heading towards zero and growth low, tacitly accepts that switzerland will have a recession…. the most lasting lesson… investors… have been shown there are limits to how large a central bank’s balance sheet should grow–and hence… how much they should trust central banks…axiothea: it is as though switzerland has bravely sacrificed itself–accepted a recession, and thrown away 100 billion €–for the sake of helping the adjustment of the eurozone…sokrates: accepted a recession and thrown away 100 billion € i get. helping the adjustment of the eurozone?axiothea: a higher value for chf against the dollar, a lower value of the € against the dollar, more exports from the eurozone to the us and switzerland, fewer exports from switzerland to the eurozone and the us, fewer exports from the us to the eurozone…barry: but fewer safe assets in the north atlantic economy as a whole–hence a greater north atlantic-wide deflationary safe asset-shortage gap–less trust in the ecb’s willingness and power to keep its qe commitments, and a world seen to be a more dangerous place and hence one in which the demand for safe assets is greater. i do not see how this makes the ecb’s task easier. a lower € is a plus for the merchants of hamburg and amsterdam and the manufacturers of the rhineland. but europe as a whole–including switzerland–is surely a loser. and i don’t see how the export benefits outweigh the monetary-credibility minuses even for the eurozone considered in isolation.omar khayyam: and then there are those who believe that the policy of pegging to the euro at 1.2/€ was a reasonable one, that if the snb has abandoned that policy for economic reasons it has made a big mistake, and if it has abandoned it for political reasons that shows a major failure of democratic governance.did the snb score an own goal? francly, yes: “1. the removal of the 1.20 floor on the chf-euro exchange rate was a mistake. 2. superior policy alternatives existed. 3. the old regime was indefinitely sustainable. 4. removing the lower bound on nominal interest rates would have been the best choice. this can be done one of three ways. 5. the economic damage can be limited by restoring the exchange rate floor at a level not below the old one, and/or by eliminating the lower bound on nominal interest rates. 6. the rest of the world can learn from the snb’s experience with a -0.75% deposit rate.”what does the end of the swiss peg tell us about central banks?: the interesting question is why the central bank ended the cap…. as a result of ending the peg, the swiss franc has appreciated substantially, from 1.2 chf per euro to around 1 chf per euro, even though the central bank has lowered the interest rate on sight deposit account balances that exceed a threshold to −0.75%. there seem to be two alternative interpretations. the first is that the central bank simply made a serious mistake. for some, the mistake was to impose the cap in the first place. if you do not take that view, and assuming the market’s immediate move is not a very temporary overreaction, the large appreciation partly undoes the benefits of the original peg. either way, a major mistake has been made at some point…. the second interpretation is that the open ended money creation that the policy implied just became too much for the central bank. in theory the central bank could go on creating money and buying euros forever…. if it ever decided… there was too much swiss money around, the policy could be reversed by selling euros. the central bank might make a loss… but economists generally dismiss this as a non-problem…. but perhaps central banks do not see things this way (ht mt), because they worry about the political consequences of such losses. if this is the case, then this is something that economists need to respond to in one way or another…and we have paul krugman::  these days it’s fairly widely accepted that it’s very hard for central banks to get traction at the zero lower bound unless they can convince investors that there has been a regime change…. on thursday, however, the swiss national bank managed a credible regime change. unfortunately, it was a regime change in the wrong direction. by throwing in the towel on the peg to the euro, the snb immediately convinced markets that its previous apparent commitment to do whatever it takes to avoid deflation is null and void. and this expectations effect trumped the concrete, immediate policy of drastically negative interest rates on reserves…. having in effect thrown away its credibility… it’s hard to see how the snb can get it back…. there will be spillovers: the snb’s wimp-out will make life harder for monetary policy in other countries…. all in all, quite a day’s work.: switzerland’s monetary travails illustrate in miniature just how hard it is to fight the deflationary vortex now dragging down much of the world economy…. in 2008 we entered a looking-glass world…. in many cases, economic virtues became vices: willingness to save became a drag on investment, fiscal probity a route to stagnation… having a reputation for safe banks and sound money… a major liability…. in 2011, the swiss national bank tried a psychological tactic… announced that it would set a minimum value for the euro…. and for three years it worked. but on thursday the swiss suddenly gave up. we don’t know exactly why; nobody i know believes the official explanation, that it’s a response to a weakening euro. but it seems likely that a fresh wave of safe-haven money was making the effort to keep the franc down too expensive. if you ask me, the swiss just made a big mistake. but… switzerland isn’t the important issue. what’s important, instead, is the demonstration of just how hard it is to fight the deflationary forces that are now afflicting much of the world…omar khayyam: and perhaps the learned edward harrison sums it up best:the swiss franc, traditionally a safe-haven… rose some 30 percent over the course of the the european sovereign debt crisis… a huge blow to near-term growth in switzerland…. the snb’s balance sheet is now about 500 billion francs,  80 percent of [annual] gross domestic product…. this expansion has become too much for the snb to bear politically. the swiss pride themselves on sound monetary policy–and a balance sheet of this size due to currency intervention just isn’t the quintessential hallmark of sound money…. in a perfect world, a central bank could have a balance sheet that is equivalent to… even 200 percent… [of annual] gdp… take mark-to-market losses on those assets… the easy monetary policy of a currency war could be like a coordinated devaluation. but in the real world, it’s not. central banks move unilaterally, due to their own narrow political and economic exigencies…. the world is addicted to monetary stimulus. and central banks are doing their best to meet that addiction…. monetary policy is in an abnormal state. and this has created serious macro imbalances…. the swiss franc move is just the scary canary.hyman: i don’t like the “addiction” metaphor. the world’s central banks are not pushers. they are, instead, shoring up the foundations of a building that is sinking due to improper banking and fiscal foundations. no, stop-gap shoring-up timbers are not meant to be permanent. but you do not want to take them away until the proper concrete has been poured for the banking and fiscal foundations so that full employment, balanced growth, and price stability are consistent with monetary-policy normalization…aristokles: did the snb expect this? did they possibly expect their move to negative interest rates on deposits to weaken the chf by as much as the removal of expected future qe to maintain the peg would strengthen it?glaukon: that is my guess. but we really do not know, do we?sokrates: perhaps the best note on which to end! but i cannot help but direct all of you to one more passage:“one trade structure i have always liked is the peg break…. if i had had the confidence to put it on in eurchf…. sell 1.2000 eur puts chf calls and buy twice as many 1.1750 or there about euro puts choosing the period to make this 2×1 put spread at zero premium. the payoff being zero if no break, but if there is to be a break i lose between 1.15 and 1.20, but make on everything below. the theory being that when pegs break they don’t mess around….i had complete faith in what i was told by the snb with respect to their attitude towards the everlasting floor…. why did i have faith in what the snb said? because removing the prop of central bank credence in the midst of a market that is completely controlled by central banks and the expectations of what they will do to save the world leaves a financial world orphaned…. we have to question the worth of analysing fed dots or every word from draghi…. i feel betrayed and i feel confused. how could they do this to me?….the snb have stepped back from an impending wall of euro about to hit the market through [ecb] qe and they are avoiding future costs in continuing the policy…. the [ecb] qe… is going to provide a massive bid for european bonds into which, should they chose, the snb can hand their holdings painlessly…. how ironic if market positioning looking for the ecb qe to support their long bund positions is usurped by the snb has filling their bid….to summarise the potential reasoning for the snb removing the floor and in the process undermining all faith in their future commitments:to get out of the way of up to eur 1trillion of eu qe.yields are so low on their reserve holdings there is no cost benefit.eu qe will provide a bid into which to exit their existing holdings.sokrates: i cannot but feel that (5) was the most important reason in the snb’s mind for it to do this now–but do remember why apollo claims that i am the wisest of the athenians: i do not think that i know things that i do not know…
 the first truly wireless earbuds are here, and they're awesomeevery few months i boot up my google machine and search for "wireless earbuds." i have great over-the-ear headphones that i love, but there are just too many times when i need something more portable. that forces me to deal with problems like durability and fit, and the fact that the wires on every pair of earbuds seem to fail, like clockwork, every six months. my search always yields results, but never the ones i'm looking for.i want the wires gone.i'm sick of them, and i don't want a pair of "wireless" ones that wrap around the back of my head. i want really, truly wireless earbuds. basically, i want these:ryan reynolds knows what's up.that is the gif that david pierce and i passed back and forth to each other after he got our moto hint review unit in. (it's also become the reference point for nearly the entire internet when it comes to the concept of wireless earbuds.)  the hint wasn't our favorite device , but it fit in my ear so well that my desire for a pair of wireless in-ears skyrocketed over the last few months.  it's taken a long time to get here, but a few companies showed up at ces with some production models that are nearly ready to hit the market in 2015. i set out around las vegas to give them a listen.the best headphones i tried — and the ones i'll be tempted to buy as soon as they are available — were the touch-enabled bragi dash headphones. they are exactly what i've wanted. the seal and the friction from the rubber keep the buds in place and are surprisingly comfortable, and they're light enough that they don't feel like they would pull themselves out.that's no surprise, because the company is run by the former head of design at harman kardon, and the coo was a senior vp at jabra. in the two years they spent building the dash, the bragi team used ear molds acquired from hearing aid companies. they also 3d-printed prototypes specifically to fit those molds, opting not to use the less-precise method of injection molding. there's even a cool charging case that can charge them up to five extra times.the music i listened to sounded great, even though i was surrounded by the din of the sands convention center. the noise canceling was a little too noticeable, but otherwise i was impressed by the depth and clarity.the dash is meant to be more than just an earbud, a trend i found was common with these early-to-market companies. as ceo nikolaj hviid told me, the dash is also supposed to be an assistant. not only does it have fitness sensors, but the built-in accelerometer can allow for gestures — or "macros" as bragi calls them. by tilting your head up, for example, you could have a voice read you the weather forecast. if a call comes in, you could nod to answer or reject it. those macros can be swapped, disabled, and programmed to other functions, too. eventually bragi wants them to be able to work independently instead of with your phone over bluetooth.bragi is aiming to ship in april, and the dash headphones will cost $299 in europe and through online retailers.i've never really wanted more functionality from my headphones, but it was hard to find any devices here at ces that didn't have some sort of fitness tracking. freewavz has totally embraced it: its earbuds are like the sport headphones we've seen for years, with plastic curving over the top and around the back of the ear to keep them snug during workouts.like dash, freewavz uses a mix of sensors to track and analyze your activity. they will sample things like your heart rate up to 500 times per second, which would be way past the rate of many fitness bracelets. outside of that, the finished product will have a bunch of other features like noise canceling, adjustable frequency levels, and text-to-speech.what i tried from freewavz was even more of a prototype than what bragi had on hand — the working unit was 3d-printed and felt a little frail. but ceo mike kahn told me that the production version should weigh about the same, which would be wild: these headphones were very light. when i listened to music through them they sounded good enough, but could fare better away from the noise in the hall. the company had a more finished design in the innovation awards section, and i have to admit the renders of the version they want to ship in april look really beautiful. they'll cost $249.99 then, but are available for preorder now for $30 less. kahn said they hope to get them to retailers and sporting goods stores as well.the last wireless headphones i saw this week were from a company called hearnotes. while they had the most polished-looking setup compared to bragi and freewavz, it was the one company that wouldn't let me try the headphones on. still, should the product make it to market for its estimated $349 price, there are some interesting ideas behind it: the headphones are supposed to work over kleer wireless, which is supposed to allow for lossless transmission. they're also supposed to wirelessly charge within four feet of the carrying case. there's no fitness tracking here; the focus is strictly on audio.the good thing is that what i saw at ces is only the beginning. just this week, another company popped up on my google machine called earin, and it too looks like what i had originally set out to find — simple, wireless earbuds. its model is in pre-production now but is aimed for an early 2015 release, similar to the time frame for the companies here at ces.until then, bragi has my attention, and freewavz looks like it could be a great option for more fitness-minded people. if these devices can actually make it to market, there's no doubt 2015 will finally be the year of wireless earbuds.
 editor’s note: the following is an excerpt of an article written exactly twenty years ago on 8 october 1992 by the late wynne godley , a british economist, who predicted disaster for europe ’s planned single currency. this is the earliest and single most cogent warning of the exact flaws the single currency has indeed exhibited.a lot of people throughout europe have suddenly realised that they know hardly anything about the maastricht treaty while rightly sensing that it could make a huge difference to their lives. their legitimate anxiety has provoked jacques delors to make a statement to the effect that the views of ordinary people should in future be more sensitively consulted. he might have thought of that before.although i support the move towards political integration in europe, i think that the maastricht proposals as they stand are seriously defective, and also that public discussion of them has been curiously impoverished. with a danish rejection, a near-miss in france , and the very existence of the erm in question after the depredations by currency markets, it is a good moment to take stock.the central idea of the maastricht treaty is that the ec countries should move towards an economic and monetary union, with a single currency managed by an independent central bank. but how is the rest of economic policy to be run? as the treaty proposes no new institutions other than a european bank, its sponsors must suppose that nothing more is needed. but this could only be correct if modern economies were self-adjusting systems that didn’t need any management at all.i am driven to the conclusion that such a view – that economies are self-righting organisms which never under any circumstances need management at all – did indeed determine the way in which the maastricht treaty was framed. it is a crude and extreme version of the view which for some time now has constituted europe’s conventional wisdom (though not that of the us or japan) that governments are unable, and therefore should not try, to achieve any of the traditional goals of economic policy, such as growth and full employment. all that can legitimately be done, according to this view, is to control the money supply and balance the budget. it took a group largely composed of bankers (the delors committee) to reach the conclusion that an independent central bank was the only supra-national institution necessary to run an integrated, supra-national europe.but there is much more to it all. it needs to be emphasised at the start that the establishment of a single currency in the ec would indeed bring to an end the sovereignty of its component nations and their power to take independent action on major issues. as mr tim congdon has argued very cogently, the power to issue its own money, to make drafts on its own central bank, is the main thing which defines national independence. if a country gives up or loses this power, it acquires the status of a local authority or colony. local authorities and regions obviously cannot devalue. but they also lose the power to finance deficits through money creation while other methods of raising finance are subject to central regulation. nor can they change interest rates. as local authorities possess none of the instruments of macro-economic policy, their political choice is confined to relatively minor matters of emphasis – a bit more education here, a bit less infrastructure there……the incredible lacuna in the maastricht programme is that, while it contains a blueprint for the establishment and modus operandi of an independent central bank, there is no blueprint whatever of the analogue, in community terms, of a central government. yet there would simply have to be a system of institutions which fulfils all those functions at a community level which are at present exercised by the central governments of individual member countries.…it should be frankly recognised that if the depression really were to take a serious turn for the worse – for instance, if the unemployment rate went back permanently to the 20-25 per cent characteristic of the thirties – individual countries would sooner or later exercise their sovereign right to declare the entire movement towards integration a disaster and resort to exchange controls and protection – a siege economy if you will. this would amount to a re-run of the inter-war period.if there were an economic and monetary union, in which the power to act independently had actually been abolished, ‘co-ordinated’ reflation of the kind which is so urgently needed now could only be undertaken by a federal european government. without such an institution, emu would prevent effective action by individual countries and put nothing in its place.…if a country or region has no power to devalue, and if it is not the beneficiary of a system of fiscal equalisation, then there is nothing to stop it suffering a process of cumulative and terminal decline leading, in the end, to emigration as the only alternative to poverty or starvation. i sympathise with the position of those (like margaret thatcher) who, faced with the loss of sovereignty, wish to get off the emu train altogether. i also sympathise with those who seek integration under the jurisdiction of some kind of federal constitution with a federal budget very much larger than that of the community budget. what i find totally baffling is the position of those who are aiming for economic and monetary union without the creation of new political institutions (apart from a new central bank), and who raise their hands in horror at the words ‘federal’ or ‘federalism’. this is the position currently adopted by the government and by most of those who take part in the public discussion.
 why are oil prices rising?by mark thompson   @markthompsoncnn june 15, 2014: 9:29 pm etthe islamist advance this week across northern iraq has yet to have a major effect on the country's oil exports, so why are world prices rising?oil experts say the 4% price spike since june 6 -- which has taken a barrel of crude to $107 for the first time since september 2013 -- is being driven by fear that exports could be hit later this year, just as world demand peaks.an al qaeda splinter group occupied iraq's second biggest city -- mosul -- earlier this week and has pushed on towards the capital, baghdad. the group is trying to establish an islamic state straddling the iraq-syria border.attacks by insurgents had already shut off exports from iraq's northern oil fields in early march, but it's the threat they could post to exports from the south -- the heart of the country's oil industry -- that's worrying traders."the driver [of prices] has been, what if they get to the south, which is where the bulk of iraq's production and exports are, and what if we see disruptions there?" said amrita sen, chief oil analyst at energy aspects."seasonally we are coming to the peak demand period. we know that libya is already off line and this is why there is such impetus for an upward movement in oil prices now," she told cnn.demand tends to peak as u.s. and european drivers guzzle gas on their summer vacations, and then as refineries ramp up heating oil output before winter.libyan supplies have collapsed to about 100,000 barrels per day, from 1.4 million a year ago, as rebels occupied oil fields and major export terminals.iraq, which has the world's fourth largest reserves of oil, produces about 3.3 million barrels a day, making it the second biggest producer in opec after saudi arabia. exports were running at about 2.5 million barrels per day in april.a surge in production by non-opec nations, including the united states, and increased output by saudi arabia -- the oil market's "central banker" -- has made up for the shortfall from libya and northern iraq, helping markets cope with a modest acceleration in demand growth in 2014.still, the dependence on opec oil will rise later this year, according to the international energy agency.the paris-based oil market monitor said friday it expected global demand in the second half of 2014 to average 2 million barrels per day more than in the first half. demand would peak at about 94 million barrels per day in the fourth quarter.opec will need to supply nearly 31 million barrels per day, one million more than the cartel's production target for 2014, which oil ministers reiterated as recently as wednesday."given that libya is pretty much offline ... the only country that has spare capacity to meet any rise in demand is saudi arabia, which would have to increase production in any case in q3," said sen."if you get any supply disruption in iraq, that is going to be the challenge for the market --- how does it counteract that?"the iea says 60% of the growth in opec crude production capacity for the next five years will come from iraq, underscoring the risks to oil supplies in the medium term if the insurgency spreads to other parts of the country and deters foreign investors.sen said production was likely to fall back slightly this year as international oil companies begin to pull some of their staff out of the country because of the rising threats to their security.
 the share of people under age 30 who own private businesses has reached a 24-year-low, according to new data, underscoring financial challenges and a low tolerance for risk among young americans.roughly 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned stakes in private companies, according to an analysis by the wall street journal of recently released federal reserve data from 2013. that compares with 10.6% in 1989—when the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 yep we are foolish! no wonder not many people ever help jews!!!lets correct our mistakes! lets hunt down the killers who kill jews anywhere including france….lets give medal and trip to israel and nice reward (hundred thousand dollars at least) to this hero……but we won't…cause we are foolish!
 sign up to receive silicon valley business journal's morning edition and afternoon edition newsletters and breaking news alerts.thank you for sharing. your email has been sent.privateer holdings, a seattle public equity firm that specializes in the marijuana industry, said it's received a "multi-million dollar investment" from venture capitalist peter thiel 's firm, founders fund .the seattle firm said san francisco-based founders fund invested in its series b financing round and is "the first time a major institutional player has placed capital in the cannabis industry, and is a significant next step as the industry moves out of the shadows and into the light.""founders fund is known for making some of the most lucrative and radically transformational investments of the past decade. with this investment they are signaling that they, like us, believe that the end of prohibition and the social harms it causes is inevitable," said privateer holdings ceo brendan kennedy , in a statement.privateer holdings raised $22 million in its initial round of funding, mainly from "ultra-high net worth individuals and family offices."founders fund, which was one of the earlier investors in facebook inc. , said "legal cannabis ... we believe will become a massive industry within the next decade."
rt @maxcroser: falling since 1921: motor vehicle fatalities per million miles driven in the us

 i don't understand why you chose the metrics you chose.why did you choose to compare seat belt usage to automotive deaths per 100k inhabitants? wouldn't fatalities/miles driven been a better comparison? if you do that, the plot looks like this.immediately apparent this way is that deaths per mile driven have consistently been falling as far back as the records go. in fact, it's nearly a logarithmic, and it doesn't seem like itchanges from that drop when seatbelts are introduced.maybe if you wanted to see if there was a change, you could look at the year-on-year fatality change and compare that to seatbelt usage. here, then is the same, plot as the first with the fatality change percentage per 100m miles driven. (the plot looks essentially the same if you replace year-on-year change per 100m miles driven with per 100k inhabitants.)anyway, these don't seem to reach the same conclusion – seatbelts don't seem to clearly prevent fatalities. this isn't necessarily false, but it's surprising. am i somehow looking at the numbers wrong?*edit: realized the first few plots neglected the 100m indication. all mile plots are based on the 100m miles driven data.
 habitat destruction is a consequence of increasing population and consumption rates – falling birth-rates – need to start from year zero – look at the african and middle-eastern cultures that value numbers – the more the merrier and useful to dominate the world. regards governance, not many have heard the word and even if they did don’t know what that means. even in britain – the more information that is spewn out the less people are interested in understanding and making considered choices. the world is numbed by the information explosion and have shut their eyes and ears. most people on earth have no control over their future.yes, but who’s going to pay for it? the working class, i suppose. by working class i mean me: small business owner, in the office, christmas day, boxing day, today, trying to make up for staff on maternity leave, administering the mpf, checking company accounts, writing cheques for business registration certificates. and on monday, we start work again . . .how exactly is squeezing more people on this overly populated planet a recipe for happiness. given the population explosion isn’t happening in the ‘developed’ societies, you would expect the scientific output per head to have dropped. again, not a recipe for happiness.i can understand many of the people living in ‘developing countries’ are measurably happier being subsidized by our tax money.to me, it looks like they are just developing into countries with more people. they are not developing the social infrastructure to maintain these people either with are ‘aid’. so we will be paying them welfare cheques for the foreseeable future, so will our children and our children’s children etc.i find your enthusiasm for the situation very, very depressing…………the “average human” is purely statistical, actuarial. john gray reckoned the only unqualified good, that’s to say progressive measure, in human history was modern dentistry, anaesthesia. all these millions who aren’t dying. . . but  until quite recently there were fewer people in the entire uk than now reside in london alone. the most apparently contented people i’ve ever witnessed have been in africa, without a pot to p*ss in, who are statistically in dire poverty. whereas people here living in luxury spend thousands on camping holidays emulating the nomadic way of life, looking to escape the woes that are the counterpart to their material wealth. i’d guess that the relative proportions of joy and suffering remain more or less constant throughout time. my father used to say his generation got more joy out of getting a few sweets at christmas than we did with all our toys. . .he forgot to mention freedom. legal, actual, practical freedom. i’d kill myself without it.also: joy is overrated. contentment — and more than that — lack of heightened self-consciousness — is what it’s about. the fact that your father got joy from a few sweets says a lot about the privation they normally lived with: not always a good thing. i know what it’s like to hike, canoe, and portage all day in wilderness and savour a milk-less tea, but all the same, i like my life better when i am not wearing an insect-veil over my face and i can  enjoy a real tea, with milk.yeah i believe you swanky. but those freedoms you rightly value come at a cost, are not unqualified.all freedom comes at a cost. happily paid! all things considered, america is probably the best country to live in in the world in this era (unless you are so rich and privileged that you can have the best, anywhere).best, rich, privileged, etc, all relative terms; there are many in the us that don’t think us is the greatest – it all depends on the hand you have been dealt.well where would they be happier — botswana? cuba? indonesia? i doubt it.botswana and cuba many happy people there. cuba – their community health services superior that in the us/uk for the average cuban. botswana lovely country, small population and most are well looked after. look around the poorer parts of us cities – not many happy people there.the cuba claim is a) not true and b) not relevant, since the cubans pay with their freedom, their human rights and often their lives.  the fact that there are some dismal places in the us (and the uk) and an underclass mainly fed by atrocious vicious-cycle leftist policies says nothing about the justice of our nation overall or the rights that we all enjoy here!you don’t miss what you didn’t have. much of today’s wants are man-made creation.perhaps, but that in itself ought to tell you something: man keeps creating more. man needs to create: it’s what he does. and, of course, she.anyway, i must be different because i certainly do miss what i don’t have, and i hope this year to make progress in getting it. mind you, the american founders wanted the citizens freedom in the pursuit of happiness — they said nothing about what happiness actually is or whether one can achieve it. on the other hand, the clue is in their emphasis on freedom.the founding fathers wanted all to have food, shelter, good neighbours, family life and able to worship in peace – nothing about xbox or holidays in hawaii.ah, but they didn’t impose limits, either. they knew that there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns. happiness for future people might reside in unknown unknowns, as well as the goods you mention. frankly i’ve got far more out of the invention of the internet than i’ve had from ‘family life’. i’m feeling distinctly anti-family — and, given the crew i’m stuck with, fortunately at a distance so i can get on with my life — that’s not going to change.we have much in common – like challenge, change and argument. i suppose each generation can only see so far ahead and major changes and events hit once in a while that alters the whole perspective. then again if you don’t expect too much – will never be disappointed.mmm, and if you don’t ever ask for more, chances are you won’t get it, either. i’m prepared to take my lumps in that department. as you suggest, some people are more venturesome and speculative than others.sorry swanky, but i really do appreciate a bit of joy every now and then.lucky if you can get it!my favorite american singer, lucinda williams, wrote a song about a guy who stole her joy, and she wanted it back. good for her. demand yours back.hmm, i’ll have to look her up. lovely name. i find that joy is not for the demanding. anyway, it depends what you mean by ‘joy’. some of my best times have been the triumph of creation and the discussion of a point of philosophy, and a really wonderful transporting book. not necessarily ‘joy’ as most people think of it, but something less visible to the naked eye and possibly more rewarding.i might have been using the term a little ambiguously.  but i trusted that you would just be amused.i’ll dig up some lucinda for you, though she might be a man thing.can’t someone invent a graph showing the decline in value/influence of an englishman/woman’s?value of their vote is proportional to the interest they take and the intellectual content of the discussion taking place both in the country and in parliament.strange that the first chart shows almost no change in deaths related to nutrition yet another chart shows hunger falling. has mcdonalds started feeding the starving millions? as far as i can see there are only several causes of death that have seen significant improvement, the rest staying almost unchanged. i suppose we should be grateful for any improvements no matter how small, but i don’t agree with the assertion that the press focus on things going wrong, at least not the things going most wrong. i’ve seen dozens of reviews of events in 2014, as is usual for the end of the year, but nowhere have i seen any comment on the thousands of children who have been abandoned by our authorities and social services to be preyed upon by groups of vicious paedophiles. some things it seems are only fit to be swept under the carpet.well done fraser. when i made a similar point in my gresham lectures, the poverty industry ignored it!copies need to be provided to every food bank so they can give thanks.well, you tell your wife once a year how wonderful she is and for the other 364 days a year, whinge and whine interminably.see what she says to you!trust me, if you want the authority to criticise and be respected for it, you have to be equally fulsome with praise where it’s due.if you can’t do that, then you are contributing considerably to emotional dysfunction in uk society. pandering to prejudice is nothing to admire – it’s the emotional equivalent  of drug dealing, encouraging alcoholics to continue boozing etc etc.and what exactly is going so well or the british population?more draconian laws and the removal of our liberties? more ethnics to dilute the european race?in spite of significant advances in the diagnosis and treatment of most chronic diseases, there is evidence that racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower quality of care than nonminorities and that, patients of minority ethnicity experience greater morbidity and mortality from various chronic diseases than nonminorities. the institute of medicine (iom) report on unequal treatment concluded “racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare exist and, because they are associated with worse outcomes in many cases, are unacceptable.” the iom report defined disparities in health care as “racial or ethnic differences in the quality of health care that are not due to access-related factors or clinical needs, preferences, and appropriateness of intervention.” since the publication of the iom report there has been renewed interest in understanding the sources of disparities, identifying contributing factors, and designing and evaluating effective interventions to reduce or eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care.their own fault – genetic diseases, inbred, over breeding, poverty inducing cultural traits and coming from disease-ridden parts of the world..particularly the grooming and rape of children. still what does that matter to man of your honesty and integrity eh telemachus?generation after generation of in-breeding in certain communities makes them more susceptible to disability and genetic weakness.it’s not just high levels of illiteracy coupled with indoctrination of non-science, non-education and non-development, but since iq points are hereditary, ‘certain’ (cough cough) communities in the world, drop iq points nearly every generation, due to extreme inbreeding, which is also cause for genetic mutations.if you draw a certain cartoon, you will clearly see all these phenomena coming out all at once.the more skilled ‘ethnics’ who leave their homeland to take advantage of the developments that have occurred in the uk the worse off the ethnic homelands will be.believe me children in syria need treatment far more than he does.as for the ‘skilled’ immigrants like alibhai-brown the sooner the decide to return to the homeland utopias the better.go back to private eye, dave spart…how can you possibly ask that question when you have no rational conception of what constitutes progress in human affairs?  i mean you’ve asked it in the context of an article that shows a slow, steady increase in “human well-being”.old scriptures no one but me can see any meaning in says that britain and germany is hold outside… any reason? search for yourself i will not comment more on itnot human well being but increase in population arising from reduction in deaths from starvation, disease and wars. numbers do not equate to well being.i mean you’ve asked it in the context of an article that shows a slow, steady increase in “human well-being”.no what it shows is fewer people are dying in certain categories. it says nothing of their actual ‘well-being’ unless of course you adhere to the imbecilic idea that well-being equates to survival?he british are not european – they are unique and international.i’m not really sure how to interpret that years of life lost statistic. it’s calculated by the average difference between somebody’s age when they’re killed by the disease and their life expectancy at that age, multiplied by the number of people it’s killed.but that means it’s a function of life expectancy, which is itself a function of these various causes of death. so it seems like the overall slope downwards says more about which causes of death are and aren’t included in the list than anything else.happiness is not just about whether you are are going to die young or not.  for me, happiness is about the quality of life i have.  this is something that has been deteriorating year by year. partially because i am getting old, but mainly because the roads get more clogged up every year, prices are rising far faster than the official statistics state, my cultural heritage is being trashed in front of my eyes, house prices are out of reach of even a reasonably well paid person, and i have to watch everything i say to any sort of official in case the thought police deem me guilty of a ‘hate crime’.and then i have to read this sort of risible panglossian inane propaganda.fraser nelson: are you some sort of wazzock or what?be fair. the speccie kid is just here doing his job. the nwo knows what we need, even if we’re too thick to know it, and he’s helping make sure that need  is rammed down our throat . and meanwhile, even if the children of rotherham   are brutally abused over the   holidays, repeatedly, they’ll at least have  his splendid blogpost to cheer them up, and remind them of how wonderful this year has been for them, with hopes that the new year will be just as wonderful.why has chris morriss’s completely innocuous, but not on-message, post been deleted?i didn’t see it, d., but i take your word for it. and chris is a good chap.hi g. he said that happiness isn’t just about longevity but about quality of life which for him has been going down – clogged roads, property prices, cultural heritage being trashed, having to watch what he says due to pc. he was dismissive of fraser’s article but not rude given the general cut & thrust of political debate. he also used a yorkshire dialect term for the author which is used in light banter & isn’t obscene.sounds like these prissy kids at the speccie can’t cope with yorkshire dialect.a month or two back the telegraph removed a very popular contribution that was highly critical of an article but contained nothing obscene or libelous. several people, me included, had a copy on disqus and we re-posted it, and when that was removed, re-posted it again, and again. finally the telegraph shut down the whole thread. moral victory for the good guys i thought as more people read it than if the moderator had just left it be.nothing wrong with longevity, by the way. i wholeheartedly approve of it. i think it was woody allen who said”i’m not frightened of death, i just don’t want to be there when it happens.”yes, so warning to all speccie commentators: don’t use the w .z …k word even though 99.9% of readers won’t have heard of it! happy new year to you & all here. let’s keep our sense humour even though the ed seems to have lost his!
 twitter was born in san francisco, and from the start, our employees have cared about being a force for good here. with more than 2,000 employees based in our hq office, we’re deeply ingrained in the life of the city.building on ceo dick costolo ’s vision of creating enduring relationships with our neighborhood partners and employees, we’re pleased to announce our plan to greatly increase our support for central market street and the tenderloin neighborhood. we’ve outlined our plans in our  community benefit agreement (cba), including the  twitter neighbornest , grants to nonprofits, volunteering and in-kind contributions.in crafting this plan, we set out foremost to understand the issues that matter most to our neighbors. when our community liaison  caroline barlerin  arrived in late march, she conducted a listening tour around the area to hear about the needs of the community and inform our approach.over the next four years, we will commit at least $3 million in financial grants to nonprofits serving residents of the central market street and tenderloin community.this doubles our 2014 cba investment of $300,000 in 2015, and triples it to more than $900,000 by 2018. these funds will continue to support nonprofits focusing on education and digital literacy, women in technology and homelessness, and include the  bay area women’s and children’s center , black girls code , boys & girls club tenderloin clubhouse , city impact , compass family services , drawbridge , glide , hamilton family center , larkin street youth services , oasis for girls , tenderloin community school , tenderloin neighborhood development corporation , tenderloin technology lab and united playaz , among others.we continue to make our market street office available as an event space for local group gatherings and fundraisers. just last year, for example, we hosted mural music & arts project , curry senior center , glide , drawbridge for its 25th anniversary, oasis for girls for its 15th anniversary, and asianweek foundation and tedp ’s asian heritage street celebration. we also convened gatherings to raise awareness and tackle local issues, such as  friends of the urban forest ’s #techplantssf launch event, market street for the masses , ymca ’s #iamastartup , safe bikes workshop ,  taproot foundation ’s workshop on nonprofit capacity building, and a workshop for tenderloin organizations on how to use twitter effectively.ymca ’s #iamastartup panel at twitter. photo courtesy of eugene yi for twitter, inc.moreover, we’re making a major commitment to build the neighbornest right across market street from our office. staffed by twitter volunteers, it will provide clients of our community-based partners with access to computer technology, education and training. access to, and understanding of, technology is no longer a luxury – it’s now a necessity for many – and we’re excited about developing a physical space where people can gain the skills they need to unlock new opportunities. in addition to the financial grants we’re committing to local organizations, we estimate that twitter’s contribution to the neighbornest will be at least $3 million over the next four years.our employees also recognize the value of working directly with local nonprofits and are enriched by the experience. we’re committed to tradition of a biannual company-wide day of service, #fridayforgood , when hundreds of us spend the day helping community organizations serve their clients, as well as engaging with these groups on an ongoing basis. our support can include reading with kids through reading partners at tenderloin community school , tutoring computer skills at the tenderloin technology lab , teaching math at bessie carmichael , volunteering with st. anthony foundation , mentoring at the boys & girls club tenderloin clubhouse , and providing pro bono legal assistance for residents of central market street and the tenderloin, just to name a few.most importantly (and why all of this matters) is that we believe these commitments have a positive impact on the community and build strong, enduring bonds between our employees and our neighbors. we will continue to develop long-term partnerships in our neighborhood to raise awareness and address many of the social needs surrounding us.here’s what some of our partners say about how our contributions have made a difference:
 "it's not that we have to oppose further innovation - there are likely all sorts of quality of life improvements waiting. yet it's important to understand that the more automation we have, the harder it is for those without substantial capital or skills to make a living."
 the senators touted the legislation as a smarter use of taxpayer funds. | gettyby seung min kim | 7/8/14 12:03 am edt updated: 7/8/14 12:47 pm edtmeet the senate’s newest odd couple: sens. cory booker and rand paul.the duo of high-profile, first-term senators — one a new jersey democrat who came to capitol hill on twitter-fueled national fame, the other a kentucky republican mulling a presidential bid in 2016 — will roll out legislation that comprehensively overhauls the u.s. criminal justice system.the measure, called the redeem act, has several pillars: it encourages states to change policies so children are directed away from the adult criminal justice system; automatically expunges or seals — depending on their age — criminal records of juveniles who committed nonviolent crimes; and limits solitary confinement of children, except in rare circumstances.the legislation also creates a path for adults with nonviolent offenses to seal their criminal records and restores food stamp and welfare benefits for low-level drug offenders who have served their sentences.the senators touted the legislation as a smarter use of taxpayer funds while more effectively focusing rehabilitation efforts for young individuals to help them avoid committing future crimes.“i will work with anyone, from any party, to make a difference for the people of new jersey and this bipartisan legislation does just that,” booker said in a statement to be released tuesday.“many of these young people could escape this trap if criminal justice were reformed, if records were expunged after time served, and if nonviolent crimes did not become a permanent blot preventing employment,” paul said.paul, in particular, has made reforms to the criminal justice system one of his signature issues. most recently, he introduced legislation that would restore voting rights for nonviolent felons in federal elections — a move that was praised by senate majority leader harry reid (d-nev.).he is also working on reforms to drug sentencing laws and ways to aid nonviolent criminals seeking employment.
 see euro at 115 or 112 by end of 2015: nomurathe percentage of global reserve holdings of the euro fell to the least in more than a decade in the third quarter, according to international monetary fund figures.the 18-nation shared currency’s portion of global holdings fell to 22.6 percent, according to the data, the least since 2002. the $1.4 trillion in euros held by central banks worldwide were down from $1.5 trillion in the second quarter. the u.s. dollar , with $3.9 trillion in holdings, up from $3.8 trillion, represented the largest percentage of the $6.2 trillion total of known reserves at 62.3 percent, the most since december 2011.“this is really big news” that reflects “emergency selling” of the euro, sebastien galy , a senior currency strategist at societe generale sa in new york, said by phone. “the loss of status as a foreign reserve in the short term is very good for risky assets in the euro zone , because it means euro-dollar is actually going to drop more. and that’s very good, of course, for the euro zone in terms of the inflation expectations and equities.”ismaila dieng, an imf spokesman in washington , said no one was available to discuss the data.the euro has dropped 12 percent to $1.2102 per dollar this year as the european central bank furthers its monetary stimulus efforts to boost growth. the federal reserve in contrast is heading toward raising interest rates next year for the first time since 2006.the yen was the third most held currency in the third quarter, at 4 percent, followed by the pound, at 3.8 percent.the holdings of the canadian and australian dollars both dropped, to 1.92 percent and 1.89 percent. the two currencies were broken out from the imf’s “other currencies” category starting in 2012.the greenback’s share peaked at 72.7 percent in 2001 and dipped as low as 60.5 percent in 2011.central-bank reserve managers have diversified away from the dollar, the yen and euro after policy makers in the u.s., japan and the euro area lowered benchmark borrowing costs to almost zero. the ecb in june was the first to introduce negative interest rates.“central banks have a considerable amount of their assets in very short-dated assets,” said galy. “they’re much more exposed than any other type of investor to negative interest rates.”the imf lists reserves as allocated -- those whose currency composition has been identified -- and unallocated. unallocated reserves in the third quarter totaled $5.6 trillion, or 47 percent of the $11.8 trillion total.to contact the reporter on this story: lananh nguyen in new york at lnguyen35@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: dave liedtka at dliedtka@bloomberg.net kenneth pringle, greg storeypress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 interview with mario draghi, president of the ecb, conducted by giovanni di lorenzo on 17 december 2014, published on 15 january 2015you have a clear-cut reputation. luca di montezemolo, the former ceo of fiat and ferrari who attended the same school as you in rome, said that you were always the most competent and serious one – mario, the prize pupil.he exaggerates. i’ve never regarded myself as the best. most certainly not. i went to school because i was sent there.but you may have felt the burden of responsibility more than others: you lost your father at the age of fifteen, and your mother passed away only a little later. you were suddenly a very young head of family.i can remember when, as a 16-year-old, i came back from holidays at the sea with a friend. he went home and could do what he liked. i, by contrast, was confronted with a stack of letters that i had to deal with, bills that had to be paid. but young people do not reflect on what they have to deal with and how they should do so. they simply get on with it. that is important, that is what prevents them from becoming depressed even in adverse circumstances.they perhaps also understand at an early stage what they must do to survive, for example, work hard.belief in hard work was something that my parents taught us. my father used to say that work is the most important element in any person’s life.that sounds very much like a german virtue.there are lots of people who work hard everywhere in the world. but possibly he might have been influenced by his knowledge of german culture. his german was almost as good as his italian. in the 1930s, while responsible for the financing of energy projects at the   institute for industrial reconstruction (iri), he travelled a great deal to germany to see what was being done there in this field. in fact it was not uncommon at that time -- he was born in 1895 and married late, aged 52 -- even for middle class families to be educated with the sense of belonging to a european culture that would extend beyond the national borders.what else did he leave you?the importance of following your convictions with consistent action and with courage if need be. he once told me that there was a monument in a city square in germany with an inscription that read more or less as follows: if you have lost money, you have lost nothing, for you can get it back with a good business deal. if you have lost your honour, you have lost much, but you can regain it through a heroic deed. if you have lost courage, however, you have lost everything.you were born in 1947. were you ever tempted to join the protest movement of 1968?i had sympathy for some of issues raised, i shared the critical stance towards a culture that we regarded at the time as obsolete, but i was a marginal participant to the protest movement.  typical of that generation was a mixture of criticism and self-confidence, given that the world was experiencing growth......there were many opportunities available to you...... indeed. i can remember that most of my university classmates and i got many job offers after graduation. they were forwarded to us directly from the university secretariat. at the same time, we were angry that our institutions, our universities and our country were unable to function better, to address inequalities, to satisfy our desire for change.did you sympathise with any political grouping?no. my convictions were along what you would call today ideas of liberal socialism, not really suited for extremist groups.my hair was quite long, but not very long. and, that aside, i did not have parents whom i might have rebelled against.people close to you say that the period that really shaped mario draghi was that as from 1971, the five years he spent in the united states. is that so?that is correct. you asked me earlier whether there was a specific moment when i realised what work meant. well, in the united states, i learnt what hard work is and how much there is to do.initially i was admitted at mit as a special student, that is on a temporary basis. to become a regular student, i had to convince my professors i was worth keeping. there i learned that incentives can work wonders. my scholarship covered the rental costs and tuition fees for only the first two years. i had to work to pay for everything else. fortunately mit helped by giving its students teaching assignments and paying for them. later, when my daughter was born, i got a job with a computer company some 40 miles from boston. the typical day was made up of attending classes, studying for exams and later writing the dissertation, fulfilling teaching assignments and working at the computer company. it was not impossible but it was a very long day, sometimes as long as 18 hours.  that would have taught anybody what hard work is.looking back, this institute has become something of a legend. you studied together with paul krugman, a subsequent winner of the nobel prize, and ben bernanke, president of the us central bank until early 2014. and then there are the renowned professors ...... i once counted them – there are five nobel laureates among my professors: paul samuelson, bob solow ...... yes, as well as franco modigliani, and then there are peter diamond and bob engle.were you aware of the fact that you were part of an elite group?oh yes. mit accepted only very few students, 20 to 25 per year. but it was a very special elite, one in which you had to earn a place every day.would you say that you also gained something of an american mindset there?of course such an intense and extraordinary experience leaves a legacy that helped to forge my personality today – as a true european.but what was it like at the time?well, during those years i felt like i was maturing professionally in a very open environment, one in which you are assessed in terms of your capabilities -- a place where you are what you do.thus nobody ever asked about your origins.nobody, and in the united states, that, generally, remains the case to this day.did you ever feel homesick?i certainly did miss italy a little, but the 1970s were not really pleasant in my country. there was terrorism, an inflation rate that reached 20% ...didn’t that inflation erode what your father left as inheritance?what we inherited was not very large, but enough for his three children to study. the first time i returned   to italy in 1976 i found that the equivalent of a few hundred euros was all that remained of our inheritance. this was because the family court judge had instructed the guardian of my two younger siblings to invest the money in fixed-interest treasury bills. and that made all the money disappear into thin air.so you should actually understand why people in germany are so afraid of inflation.that is precisely the point: in germany, some people say of me – ah, that italian, he is sure to fuel inflation in the german economy! and i explain to them that their experience of inflation dates back to the 1920s, while mine is far more recent. those were difficult years. when we returned to italy we went to trento because it was there that i found my first university teaching post.trento was a political hotspot at the time, a stronghold of the extreme left.it certainly was a very left wing university, to the extent that a small number of students from there later became violent terrorists. i was supposed to teach students how a capitalist economy works, which was what i learned at mit.how did you do that?certainly it was not easy but for a teacher it was also rewarding.did those students of sociology ever protest against you?no, but there is a story in this context that is quite amusing. i held a seminar on a text written, i believe, by paul samuelson, on capitalism, and   explaining some of the differences to marxist economics. when the time for the exams approached, students came to me with the following suggestion: “professor, we want to take a group examination.” i asked them what that was. i didn’t have a clue, given that i had been in the united states for years. “well, it works like this,” they told me, “you ask us a question and one of us will answer it for the whole group.” so i looked at them and said, “okay, we’ll do it like this: if that student answers the question correctly, the whole group will pass the examination. but if he can’t, the whole group fails.” the student who was asked did not come up with the correct answer, so the whole group failed. the same thing then happened a few more times, with the group involved becoming smaller each time and the students finally deciding to sit the examinations as individuals.when you explained the capitalist system to your students, you presumably tried to highlight the advantages that this system has, and probably did so out of conviction ...has this conviction diminished over the past years and decades?i share a view of society in which individual incentives are regarded as important and rules are deemed to be indispensable for a proper functioning of markets. that is my cultural background, so to speak, and my views on these issues have never changed.what has proved to be most disappointing to you about the capitalist system since your student days?well, quite a number of issues can be mentioned in this respect. one of the disappointments is the latest financial crisis.yes, indeed. and then there is, how shall i put it, that predatory instability ...what do you understand by predatory?you know the saying “the winner takes it all.” i do not regard that as being always right and proper especially in environments where social mobility is limited -- often the winners who take it all are the same people. beyond any ethical consideration, this is bound to generate instability.and the 2008 crisis what does the former goldman sachs top manager say: couldn’t the experts have predicted it?yes, pretty much, though of course neither precisely nor in its devastating extent. it could have been foreseen a few years before it happened, and it was foreseen by some economists like bob shiller, the 2013 nobel prize winner, or ragu rajan, the current governor of the reserve bank of india. the protagonists themselves knew that things couldn’t go on like they were. the financial sector overshot the mark. there was a reduction in the quality of loans, just think of subprime lending in the us, in standards, checks, oversight of lending -- there were enough signs. furthermore, in the early 2000s several rules which certainly would have been helpful in mitigating the crisis were revoked. since then, a lot has been done to reinforce those rules and regulations.do you sometimes think that you are the public person that in germany is the least understood?whose fault is this lack of understanding: germany’s or mario draghi’s?my position is actually quite simple: we have the mandate to guarantee price stability. the ecb was established in the tradition of the bundesbank. but there is a big difference, as the ecb is not responsible for just one country, but 19. the instruments that it has to fulfil this mandate are different. that is, i would say, the message that some in germany must understand. the mandate hasn’t changed, but time and circumstances have. that’s important. and yes, you are probably right: some people do not want to understand me on that.people here in germany wonder how the countries that have not budgeted well and have for decades failed to reform can be rewarded with loans and low interest rates. and are thus getting the countries that have worked hard and made sacrifices to pay for it?it’s not true. so far, thanks also to the strict monitoring by the governments of these hard-working countries, they have not paid much if anything. but also the european institutions played a role. the ecb has thus far not made any losses and each year, it distributes billions in profits to its members and among them to the bundesbank, which passes these profits on to the ministry of finance, and so to the people of germany. what is more, they benefit from the fact that public and private credit are unusually cheap. and consider also the target 2 balances ...... and which some people claim is money for which germans would be liable in the event of losses. people who make much of this argument forget to say that these target 2 balances have fallen by half since july 2012. what does this mean? it means that less is being borrowed from the central bank, it means that confidence is growing in the system. private money is coming into circulation again, and it is being invested in other countries. the lesson is clear. anything that strengthens confidence in the euro is also beneficial for the german tax payer.but the most pain is caused by the low interest rates, which you said in handelsblatt two weeks ago will stay low.one must make a distinction here: there are interest rates that we set with our monetary policy, and there are interest rates on long-term securities set by the markets. the latter are more directly relevant for savers. the fact that our key policy rates are low and expected to stay low for quite some time surely has an impact on long-term interest rates. but there are two more fundamental reasons why those rates are low: first, because the whole world and above all the euro area is bringing its money to germany and investing it in these securities so interest rates fall. germany acts as a safe haven in times of crisis. as confidence returns, this should be less the case. and second, because expected inflation and the long-term growth forecast for the economy are both unfortunately very low. as our policy brings back inflation to close to 2% and growth picks up, more normal levels of interest rates will return.this explanation lets the ecb off the hook.draghi: let me be clear: central bank policy is not about punishing german savers, and it is not about rewarding weak countries. the european central bank’s mandate is to achieve an inflation rate of just below 2% for the euro area as a whole. to fulfil that at this time, it must keep interest rates low and must work towards an expansionary monetary policy which accompanies growth. that’s the point, not punishment or rewards. but sometimes it is hard to explain this to everyone in germany, including in discussions with some politicians...what are they saying to you?they say: in that way you are removing their incentive to push through reforms.and isn’t that true? italy and france are two examples.our job is not and cannot consist of taking on the reform tasks of individual governments – not least since we lack the democratic mandate to do so. do you believe then that it would be better for german savers if we tried to raise interest rates?if you put it that way, the answer is obvious.because we would then create deflation and recession. anybody can see that the current economic situation calls for an expansionary monetary policy. if monetary policy was restrictive, even more companies would go bankrupt. and then long-term interest rates – the interest rates that affect the savings of germans and other europeans – would fall further.but when the interest rate is near to zero and you want inflation at 2%, then this will consume even more of the assets that germans want to save for their old age.but this reasoning is wrong! if inflation were to rise, we would have to raise rates again.why do we need inflation anyway, even if it is very low?yes, why? we’ve learnt this lesson from japan. in japan there wasn’t this 2% objective, and in the 1990s prices began to fall. the problem was not that prices were falling, but that people thought that they would never rise again, they would keep falling further and further. so they stopped buying things, because they thought they could get them even more cheaply at a later date. production fell, so prices fell even further, and so the economy became slower and slower. we are not in that situation, yet.that’s what we call deflation.yes, what i described is a negative deflationary spiral. the only thing that counters this is the credibility of our inflation objective -- the attainment of which requires the continuation of our expansionary monetary policy.but you have already given us this expansionary monetary policy!our expansionary monetary policy has already contributed to a turnaround in the growth of loans to firms. but that is not enough. if firms don’t increase productivity, they will not be competitive.that means that countries and firms must introduce reforms.right! productivity must increase particularly in the so-called southern countries. there even before the crisis, many companies were no longer productive partly because they had not invested in new technology, partly because the countries as a whole were no longer competitive. for many years easy credit conditions allowed them to import from the rest of the euro area while increasing their debt, both public and private. the crisis made it clear that growth is sustainable only if it is not accompanied by unsustainable debt levels. when this condition is not satisfied brief periods of growth are followed by deep recessions, as the recent history of the u.s. and of some euro area countries shows. that is why our expansionary monetary policy must be accompanied by higher productivity. those countries need to make structural reforms to make investment profitable. i have been saying this for years now: we are pulling our weight but the governments also have to do their bit.are you telling me that is where your sphere of influence stops?exactly, we can only provide access to funding, we can only remove one of the obstacles, and nothing else.so we now have credit with an interest rate close to zero. in addition to that, we now have the unbelievable blessing of falling oil prices that many countries are enjoying, which is not down to you though. despite all this, the crisis countries are only making slow progress, if at all. do you not sometimes have your own doubts as to whether your measures are truly working?you see, the falling oil prices are a good thing but to the extent that they have a negative impact on people’s inflation expectations not a good thing at all. the danger is that people may start believing that we will not go back to an inflation rate of 2% very soon, not even in five years and this by itself would have a recessionary effect. shall i show you what the expectations’ curve for the inflation rate looks like? it is actually astonishing.look at this (he holds out a piece of paper): the average annual inflation rate expected during the course of the following year used to stand at around 1.77% in the past; in 2013 it stood at 1.08% and now it is only 0.37%.in europe. now, the figures for the future five-year period. in the past, the average inflation expected for the next five years was 2.31% and today it stands at 1.68%. looking at a ten-year period, it stood at 2.09% in the past and today it stands at 1.15%. that’s how it goes!and what does this mean, do you think?it means that the risk of deflation is still low but it is definitely higher that it was a year ago.you are more concerned about deflation than inflation then?both are undesirable. but from a central banker’s perspective, inflation is easier to tackle than deflation. why? when there is inflation, you raise the interest rates. in this way, the price of money increases, the volume of cash in the economy shrinks and the pressure on prices and wages recedes. with deflation it is harder. we are now in a situation in which we should reduce the interest rate further, but that is no longer possible. at this point, we need to take recourse to unconventional measures, meaning we need to change the size and the composition of the european central bank’s balance sheetare you talking about the thousand billion that you want to spend over the next few years, predominantly by purchasing government bonds, and which is to be decided upon at the ecb over the next week.i never said “thousand”, but as guidance, i mentioned the balance sheet size of the european central bank at the beginning of 2012.there is huge criticism in germany of the large-scale purchase of government bonds, also from political parties. is it the worst response that you have had thus far as president of the central bank?possibly the three months   after my speech in london were similar. ( what is meant is draghi’s commitment at an investors’ conference in july 2012, in which he said that he would “do whatever it takes” within the mandate in order to keep the euro, which led to a lot of protest in germany.)and what do you think, will the majority be in favour of your plan?all members of the governing council of the ecb are fully committed to comply with our mandate. of course there are differences on how it should be done, but it isn’t as if we had an endless number of options.germany is the biggest lender of all the euro area countries, whilst italy and the united states are amongst those countries in the world with the largest debt. is that the reason for the differences, for the completely different opinions on monetary policy?it is a complex question better answered in an essay rather than in an interview. there are many reasons for these differences. some of them are cultural and find their roots in the different histories of economic thought. part of the explanation resides in the spectacular success that the bundesbank’s monetary policy had in the 70s. and another main reason is that such policy is the perfect complement to the fiscal discipline and the culture based on stability which are an integral part of the socio-economic foundations of this country.many germans fear, in particular, that the debtor countries will be unable to redeem their loans. the options available in such cases are indeed frightening: state bankruptcy, the national central banks continue to print money, loans are prolonged in perpetuity, debt that we are burdening future generations with...in our currency union, such fears and the ensuing pressure are actually a further stimulus for debtor countries to undertake the structural reforms needed for growth and eventually pay back their loans. but be it should be clear that a break-up of the union would not be in the interest of germany.which law states that all countries must remain in the euro area at any price? is there really “no alternative”, as angela merkel claims?that has become a dictum in germany: in the discussions on whether to help greece or not, ms merkel said that she had “no alternative” but to save the euro. this remark also then gave rise to the name of the “ alternative für deutschland ” movement.our countries wanted the euro as a fundamental step of a process that should lead to greater and more significant unity in europe. the euro is irreversible.what would be so bad about greece, a country where so many don’t want the euro, simply exiting? would the eu not be able to cope with that quite well?please understand that i would not like to comment as any statement could be used politically. to speculate about possible outcomes at this stage is pointless.that is less of an economic reasoning, and more of a political reasoning.it is both political and economic reasoning. you are asking me why i consider the euro to be irreversible? it is part of the treaty. but, just imagine what would happen if the euro were to disappear, which was already a matter of speculation in 2012. if all countries were to start devaluing, prices would no longer be stable. would the countries where complaints about reforms and fiscal consolidation are the loudest be better off exiting the euro area? they would still have to continue with their reforms! you cannot simply keep on devaluing a currency forever: it would simply lead to higher prices.you are considered in this country as someone who has a particular understanding of southern europe. do you sometimes find yourself having to defend germany to the italians?there is an equally large, equally irrational prejudice towards germany as there is in germany towards italy. it is the task of all of us, of all the european citizens to fight these prejudices and to behave so as not justify them.the prejudice is that germany wants to bring europe to heel?in italy, but for this matter this happens in many other countries in the euro area, there is often a failure to understand that, within a currency union our policy decisions affect the other members, and we can no longer behave as though we were alone in the world.so what are you trying to explain to the italians and other southern europeans?we have given ourselves some common rules. they must be respected. if the rules are not respected, there is no trust. and without trust, people call into question the foundations for the common currency.are you offended by the charge of being an agent of the southern countries?have you come to accept this label? what are you doing to counter it?i don’t accept any labels, but i present facts. we are responsible for price stability. we are not there to provide advantages for one country or another, or even to punish german savers. i keep saying this, but ...... the message is difficult to get across?i can but quote paul krugman: “ when faith meets evidence, evidence doesn’t stand a chance”. this is everything other than helpful. the simplification of the discussion you see in many places is in fact just simplistic and leads to wrong conclusions. a great german economist, rudi dornbusch, used to say: “ complicated questions have easy, wrong, answers.”would you describe angela merkel as a friend?“friend” is not the right word in this context but i have a good working relationship with her as with other european leaders.are you constantly in contact with her?draghi: insofar as this is compatible with the ecb’s independence.finance minister schäuble has said that cheap money should not be allowed to dent the reform zeal.i am pretty confident that we will manage to do what has to be done within the limits of our mandate.what about the reports speculating that you could become italian president? maybe this speculation has also to do with the reports that you are not so happy to be in frankfurt. your predecessor, jean-claude trichet, was almost always here and took care personally of every detail.frankfurt has become the best site one can imagine from which to run the monetary policy for 19 countries, and now with the establishment of the single supervisory mechanism, can well be named the monetary and financial policy centre of europe. the members of the ecb’s executive board are responsible for the areas of competence that i have assigned to them. my management style is based on delegation but also on control which i do both personally and collegially with the executive board. i find that works well.at any rate, people say that you are in italy as much as possible, or somewhere else ...i like to go to italy, when the work in frankfurt is done, and i must go everywhere else where my presence is needed. the ecb, as the name says, is a european institution, and it is the second largest central bank in the world. you cannot lead it solely out of frankfurt. but the nickname “mr somewhere else” has pursued me for 20 years!since your time at the italian treasury?yes, i had a thousand things to do. sometimes people tried to find me and could not so. they said: “draghi is never there, he’s somewhere else!”what is actually so bad about being touted as the president of italy?i do not wish to support any – i repeat, any – speculation of that nature. it is of course a great honour to be mentioned, but it is not my job. what is important is the job i am doing at the moment. i am happy to be able to do this job and i will continue to pursue it.do you sometimes have the feeling that you are being used as a scapegoat – by both sides?if this is the price to be paid for a job well done, i am happy to pay it. but what is certain is that no one in europe has ever won an election by invoking my name.reproduction is permitted provided that the source is acknowledged.
rt @albertogalasso: toyota to share fuel-cell vehicle patents free of charge.
@joshgans blogged about similar strategy by tesla in june:

 my colleague, alberto galasso has a post at hbr on whether apple’s patent wars are a pr rather than a legal strategy.the first one is the marketing effect of ip litigation.  “apple says samsung copied iphone” was the typical news headline during the first weeks of litigation. the case was not only mentioned on specialized business press; it was front page news material for major newspapers around the globe. international news channels devoted several minutes of their prime time to the patent case. the opening statements by apple’s lawyer, harold mcelhinny, alleging that “samsung copied the iphone” and that “samsung went far beyond the world of competitive intelligence and crossed into the dark side” were translated in a multitude of languages and displayed next to pictures of steve jobs, one of the most charismatic ceos of all time. how much would it cost to have similar media coverage through a traditional advertising campaign? probably way more than apple’s lawyer bills. that certainly seems like a compelling case. you want to signal to the market that your were the inventor and, whatever the outcome of patent litigation, it can help provide that message.no sooner had that post appeared that elon musk of tesla motors went precisely in the opposite direction  announcing that tesla would no longer assert patent rights that it had previously displayed with pride. his post is so wonderfully constructed that i am going to reproduce it here in full:it is 448 words that i believe (despite its length) may well become the gettysburg address for entrepreneurship and innovation. yes i know i am calling it early but it is incredible in its clarity; so much so that i posted it to rapgenius to ensure it is properly annotated.if apple’s patent strategy is pr, then what is this? basically, it is the same thing. tesla have clearly decided that patents would not likely protect them from anything. the response could have been to just leave them as be. however, instead, they have positioned themselves in a different way — as open and encouraging of all innovation on electric vehicles rather than gasoline. leaving alone claims is consistent with an image of caring more about the environment than about corporate profits. in other words, it is pure pr.what we are down to then is that ip strategy — whether to assert patents or relinquish them — is pr regardless.[update: a point of clarification. just because i think it is good pr does not mean (a) i believe that this was a poor decision from tesla’s perspective — in fact, it was a great decision as patents were not doing them any good and (b) this could have benefits in terms of encouraging innovation on electric cars which no economist is going to oppose. my point was that, regardless of these other things, any announcement of anything can be taken as good pr. in this case it was entirely appropriate as it reinforced tesla’s identity as being committed to the environment. for apple, their action reinforced their identity of being innovators.]
 by roberto on october 28, 2011if you're interested in a formative debate on the key trends that led to the transition from a fundamentally feudal economy to one that was recognizably capitalist, this is your book. essentially, the collection of articles constitutes an argument against the conventional wisdom at the time(that demographic declines and surges were the key drivers of change) by using examples that were similar in terms of population changes but resulted in radically different outcomes. this provides room for an analysis founded on the relationship to social class that local institutions had as the key driver in how that evolution to capitalism manifested.it's problematic, as as many bold arguments are, in that it overemphasizes its own big idea not just against the existing orthodoxy but also presumes a great deal against other countercurrents (including ones not yet imagined when it was written) less founded in a marxist analysis of historical cause and effect. but that's about the worst thing i can say about the content. in terms of readability it is a work that is condemned to be skimmed rather than read by all but the most dedicated readers, and that is unfortunately what relegates it to the status of background reference if you're interested in the field rather than something you would be likely to read in its own right or, god forbid, for pleasure.comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try again
rt @yzp: @pmarca for all your  support of entrepreneurs marc.
here's a little something i wrote thinking of your work.
 sitting here in the office waiting for my next meeting i decide – coffee in hand - to scribble a little thought of gratitude to all those who supported us and equally anyone who supported any entrepreneur in the past year and is considering doing it in 2015.here's to life's greatest adventurers; here's to our modern explorers. here's to the entrepreneurs all over the world. to all the ones who are trying to make a difference by being the difference. to the courage you have in being different. to the ones that failed time and time again and to those who supported them in life's unavoidable setbacks. to those who believed in them. to those who found a little kindle of entrepreneurial passion and refused to let the flame of entrepreneurship die. to the dreamers, the fools, the stubborn and the persistent. to those whose heart beats loudest. to the setbacks you'll encounter and those who lent a hand to help you overcome them. to the single parents. to the jobless. to those barely surviving. to the vendors on the street. to all of you have not give up on life. to my heroes.. entrepreneurs, those who became out of passion, necessity or desperation to survive, to the ones who aren't visible and received no recognition for their sacrifices. to the courageous ones who struggle every day and get looked down on by those who have regular incomes. to the family, friends and fools who supported the modern aspiring alchemists in the art of business, with all its natural setbacks. to the investors who know that a business is a rollercoaster and are prepared to ride it out in the same boat through the storm as opposed to sitting on the shore passively. to the mentors, incubators, supporters, fans, bloggers, writers and twitterati who shared pearls of wisdom that gave us perspective for free. to those who lent money, time, their network or a friendly ear to the entrepreneurs when they struggled to make it another month to those in comfortable positions in large corporates that took the risk of doing business with the start-ups and opened doors for them on the back of their reputations.there will be setbacks aplenty. it is life. sometime there will be a fine line between persistence and stubbornness. sometime we will feel no-one understands us. entrepreneurship is about trade-offs. entrepreneurship is not a job. it is an attitude. irrespective if you make it or not, you got off your butt and gave it a shot at taking this wild beast called life by the horns. being an entrepreneur is like being in love. you can write all you want, but you won't experience the magic until you've tried it.here’s to a 2015 of continued struggles, sweat and tears, uncomfortable conversations, of learning and growing, of highs and lows (often within the same day), of being in charge of your destiny and of finding friends & business partners with whom to go through this wonderful adventure together. a year of resetting difficult relationships (and believe me, the entrepreneurial journey will test the best of friendships). here's to never losing sight of the big dream, but balancing the practicability of achieving that dream. here's to the sacrifices you have made and will made in order to live a day like a lion vs a 100 like a sheep. yes. look up at those who made it. but remember that entrepreneurship is like hollywood - for every successful actor there are 100.000 struggling ones. and even the successful ones were struggling once.… and if you ever wonder why to become an entrepreneur here are some articles i wrote that might – just might – restore your faith:
 what policy vision will govern the future of technological innovation? will innovators be forced to constantly seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy new devices and services, or will they be generally left free to experiment with new technologies and business models?in permissionless innovation: the continuing case for comprehensive technological freedom, adam thierer argues that if the former disposition (“the precautionary principle”) trumps the latter (“permissionless innovation”), the result will be fewer services, lower quality goods, higher prices, diminished economic growth, and a decline in the overall standard of living.when public policy is shaped by “precautionary principle” reasoning, it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, and long-run prosperity. by contrast, “permissionless innovation” has been the secret sauce that fueled the success of the internet and much of the modern tech economy in recent years, and it is set to power the next great industrial revolution—if we let it.
 posted by jason furman on january 09, 2015 at 09:30 am esttoday’s solid employment report caps off a strong year for the u.s. labor market, which achieved a number of important milestones in 2014. total job growth last year was the strongest since 1999, while the unemployment rate fell at the fastest pace in three decades. although nominal wages fell in december, inflation-adjusted wages have generally been rising, and job growth has picked up in sectors that traditionally provide good, middle-class jobs. this week, the president has been laying out his vision to build on this progress by increasing access to community college, supporting the recovery in the housing sector and investing in u.s. manufacturing. on top of these steps, the president looks forward to working with congress and taking action on his own authority to invest in america’s infrastructure, close tax loopholes and encourage job creation in america, support working families, expand overseas markets for american goods and services, make common-sense reforms to the immigration system, and raise the minimum wage. 1. the private sector has added 11.2 million jobs over 58 straight months of job growth, extending the longest streak on record. today we learned that total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 252,000 in december, mainly reflecting a 240,000 increase in private employment. private-sector job growth was revised up for october and november by a combined 50,000 so that over the past three months, private-sector job growth has averaged 280,000 per month. private employment has risen by at least 200,000 for 11 consecutive months, the first time that has happened since the 1990s. 2. total employment rose by 2.95 million in 2014, the most in any calendar year since 1999. private-sector employers added 2.86 million jobs last year, the strongest private-sector job growth in any calendar year since 1997. the pace of overall job growth has increased, averaging 246,000 per month in 2014, up from 194,000 per month last year. on a percentage basis, the economy is adding jobs at a rate of about 2 percent per year, also on pace for the largest percentage increase in any calendar year since the late 1990s. crucially, the pickup in the pace of job growth in 2014 has primarily been in industries with higher wages. for instance, the pace of manufacturing job growth has more than doubled to 16,000 per month this year, from 7,000 per month last year, and average weekly earnings for manufacturing workers are about $170 higher than for all private-sector workers. as discussed in greater detail below (see point #4), overall real average earnings have generally been growing, but there is more work to be done to raise wages and address longer-standing challenges around family incomes. 3. the annual average unemployment rate fell 1.2 percentage points between 2013 and 2014, the largest such decline since 1984. the rapid drop in the unemployment rate from an annual average of 7.4 percent in 2013 to 6.2 percent in 2014 is consistent with a range of indicators from the household survey that show the labor market strengthened considerably during 2014. in particular, the broader measures of labor underutilization published by the bureau of labor statistics—including some people who have withdrawn from the labor force or who are working part-time for economic reasons—fell faster than the official unemployment rate in 2014. last year, these alternative measures recorded their largest annual declines since they were first published in 1994. additionally, in 2014, declining long-term unemployment accounted for about two-thirds of the decline in the overall unemployment rate, a disproportionate share given that about one-third of the jobless are long-term unemployed. finally, while the annual average labor force participation rate edged down slightly relative to last year, it has been roughly stable, on balance, since late 2013. the stabilization of the participation rate helped to raise the employment-to-population ratio. 4. the nominal average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers was $20.59 in 2014, up 2.2 percent from 2013. while inflation data for december 2014 are not yet available, nominal earnings growth is likely to have exceeded inflation for the second straight year. in fact, the projected 0.7 percent increase in real earnings in 2014 is slightly faster than the average annual increase of 0.5 percent seen from 2000 to 2007. although earnings rose in 2014 as a whole, the december decline in earnings is a reminder that more progress is still needed to overcome the decades-long challenge in this area that preceded the crisis. 5. the construction and health care sectors saw strong job gains in december. looking over the 58-month streak of private-sector job growth, december was one of the top 10 strongest months for construction (+48,000) and health care and social assistance (+44,000). in contrast, retail trade (+8,000) and transportation and warehousing (+3,000) saw job growth that was well below recent trends. manufacturing added 17,000 jobs last month, in line with its average in 2014 as a whole. the manufacturing sector has now added 786,000 jobs over the past 58 months, the industry’s strongest job growth in since the 1990s. across the 17 industries shown below, the correlation between the most recent one-month percent change and the average percent change over the last 12 months was 0.69, a bit below previous months, reflecting divergence from recent trends in a number of sectors. as the administration stresses every month, the monthly employment and unemployment figures can be volatile, and payroll employment estimates can be subject to substantial revision. therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.jason furman is chairman of the council of economic advisers.
 drop in rouble value not only decimating amount sent home by workers from caucasus and central asia, but could lead to political unrestaccording to data projections based on world bank figures, nine countries that rely heavily on roubles sent home from russia could collectively lose more than $10bn in 2015. photograph: jussi nukari/rex featuresrussia’s rouble crisis is posing a major threat to countries along its southern fringe, whose economies rely heavily on billions of dollars shipped home every year by their own citizens working within russia .the 50% drop in the rouble has not only decimated the value of remittances sent home by workers from the caucasus and central asia, but is discouraging migrants from staying in russia to earn a salary for themselves and their families. according to data projections by the guardian, based on world bank figures, nine countries that rely heavily on cash sent home from russia for their economic buoyancy could collectively lose more than $10bn (£6.6bn) in 2015 because of the weak russian currency.“i’ve sacrificed starting a family, i’ve sacrificed any kind of normal life to work here, and now i’m only able to send home a few hundred dollars a month,” said aziz, who works at a car repair plant in northern moscow. his regular job and some moonlighting as a cab driver has typically earned him around £600 per month to send home to his parents and sisters, who live in the fergana valley in uzbekistan . now he is lucky to earn half that sum. “i’m starting to think there is not much point in staying. life is miserable enough here anyway, the only reason to be here was for the money. i think it could be time to go home.”aziz is not the only person thinking about leaving. as the economic situation in russia deteriorates, authorities have also introduced a new harsher system for obtaining work permits for migrant workers. currently, there are millions of citizens of former soviet countries working illegally in russia.“so far people are not leaving en masse, mainly because they are worried they won’t be able to come back,” says gavkhar dzhurayeva, who runs an organisation offering free legal support to migrant workers. “however, lots of people are talking about it, if things don’t improve.”the tendency could be problematic for russia too, which is expected to rely on immigrant labour for the formidable building projects as the country prepares to host the 2018 world cup.according to the world bank , 21% of armenia’s economy, 12% of georgia’s, 31.5% of kyrgyzstan’s, 25% of moldova’s, 42% of tajikistan’s, 5.5% of ukraine’s, 4.5% of lithuania’s, 2.5% of azerbaijan’s and 12% of uzbekistan’s, rely on remittances.these are some of the highest rates in the world. of the five countries globally whose gdp is most reliant on these payments, three are former soviet republics. in most of these cases money from immigrants in russia comprises a significant portion of these inflows. about 40% of remittances to armenia, georgia, moldova and ukraine are from russia, rising to 79% for kyrgyzstan .already, the sharp decline in the rouble has forced currency devaluations in turkmenistan this month, and speculation that kazakhstan’s tenge may need a further devaluation against the dollar after a 19% move last february.the economies of the region are strongly tied together, with belarus sending more than half of its exports to russia, and the nascent eurasian economic union supposedly tying together russia, belarus and kazakhstan as a single bloc. armenia and kyrgyzstan have also joined. in addition to the plummeting rouble, these countries will also have to deal with a potentially huge shortfall in remittances, which cannot but have an effect on gdp.in october 2014 the world bank estimated that remittances for the year to the nine countries mentioned earlier would have totalled $33.3bn by the end of 2014. of this figure, about $19bn would have been outflows from russia.at the time of the world bank estimate, one us dollar exchanged for 40 roubles. by the end of the year, the currency had lost about 50% of its value. if that new rate held steady throughout this year – and remittances were otherwise unchanged – their value would drop precipitously in 2015, to just $7.6bn.it is also worth noting that the figures given are the official numbers, sent via bank transfers. the real amounts, which include wads of dollars brought home in person by migrants or given to friends to carry, are likely to be much higher.a weak rouble over a sustained period of time would have a minimal impact in the baltics, but in several other countries the effects could be felt far more. in those countries where gdp relies so heavily on migrants sending money back home, a prolonged currency crisis throughout 2015 would, all other factors remaining the same, potentially even lead to double-digit economic contraction.most vulnerable are the central asian countries of kyrgyzstan, tajikistan and uzbekistan, where the ailing economies and dictatorial political systems are in large part propped up by the money from its nationals working in russia.in uzbekistan, ageing dictator islam karimov said in 2013 that migrant workers who went to russia were “lazy” and should find a job at home, but in reality, there is little work in uzbekistan, where £100 per month is considered a good salary and many towns simply have no opportunity for work at all. regional experts say that if the money flow from migrant labourers dries up, rulers like karimov would be in serious trouble.“if oil continues falling and the rouble continues falling, then migrants will begin to return home,” says daniil kislov, who runs fergana.ru, a central asia news portal. “there are 2.4 million uzbek migrants in russia, and those are just the official figures. these people and their families are all surviving because of money made in russia. essentially russia has saved uzbekistan and tajikistan from revolution, and if all these people return it will cause a social explosion. not today, but maybe in a year, or two, or five.”
 in my life, i have given a fuck about many people and many things. i have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. and those fucks i have not given have made all the difference.people often say the key to confidence and success in life is to simply “not give a fuck.” indeed, we often refer to the strongest, most admirable people we know in terms of their lack of fucks given. like “oh, look at susie working weekends again, she doesn’t give a fuck.” or “did you hear that tom called the company president an asshole and still got a raise anyway? holy shit, that dude does not give a fuck.” or “jason got up and ended his date with cindy after 20 minutes. he said he wasn’t going to listen to her bullshit anymore. man, that guy does not give a fuck.”chances are you know somebody in your life who, at one time or another, did not give a fuck and went on to accomplish amazing feats. perhaps there was a time in your life where you simply did not give a fuck and excelled to some extraordinary heights. i know for myself, quitting my day job in finance after only six weeks and telling my boss that i was going to start selling dating advice online ranks pretty high up there in my own “didn’t give a fuck” hall of fame. same with deciding to sell most of my possessions and move to south america . fucks given? none. just went and did it.now, while not giving a fuck may seem simple on the surface, it’s a whole new bag of burritos under the hood. i don’t even know what that sentence means, but i don’t give a fuck. a bag of burritos sounds awesome, so let’s just go with it.the point is, most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given. we give a fuck about the rude gas station attendant who gave us too many nickels. we give a fuck when a show we liked was canceled on tv. we give a fuck when our coworkers don’t bother asking us about our awesome weekend. we give a fuck when it’s raining and we were supposed to go jogging in the morning.fucks given everywhere. strewn about like seeds in mother-fucking spring time. and for what purpose? for what reason? convenience? easy comforts? a pat on the fucking back maybe?because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life fucks us.indeed, the ability to reserve our fucks for only the most fuckworthy of situations would surely make life a hell of a lot easier. failure would be less terrifying. rejection less painful. unpleasant necessities more pleasant and the unsavory shit sandwiches a little bit more savory. i mean, if we could only give a few less fucks, or a few more consciously-directed fucks, then life would feel pretty fucking easy.what we don’t realize is that there is a fine art of non-fuck-giving. people aren’t just born not giving a fuck. in fact, we’re born giving way too many fucks. ever watch a kid cry his eyes out because his hat is the wrong shade of blue? exactly. fuck that kid.developing the ability to control and manage the fucks you give is the essence of strength and integrity. we must craft and hone our lack of fuckery over the course of years and decades. like a fine wine, our fucks must age into a fine vintage, only uncorked and given on the most special fucking occasions.this may sound easy. but it is not. most of us, most of the time, get sucked in by life’s mean trivialities, steamrolled by its unimportant dramas; we live and die by the sidenotes and distractions and vicissitudes that suck the fucks out of us like sasha grey in the middle of a gangbang.this is no way to live, man. so stop fucking around. get your fucks together. and here, allow me to fucking show you.subtlety #1: not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being differentwhen most people envision giving no fucks whatsoever, they envision a kind of perfect and serene indifference to everything, a calm that weathers all storms.this is misguided. there’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference. people who are indifferent are lame and scared. they’re couch potatoes and internet trolls. in fact, indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality they actually give too many fucks. they are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. therefore, they make none. they hide in a grey emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed and self-pitied, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life.my mother was recently screwed out of a large chunk of money by a close friend of hers. had i been indifferent, i would have shrugged my shoulders, sipped some mocha and downloaded another season of the wire . sorry mom.but instead, i was indignant. i was pissed off. i said, “no, screw that mom, we’re going to lawyer the fuck up and go after this asshole. why? because i don’t give a fuck. i will ruin this guy’s life if i have to.”this illustrates the first subtlety about not giving a fuck. when we say, “damn, watch out, mark manson just don’t give a fuck,” we don’t mean that mark manson doesn’t care about anything; on the contrary, what we mean is that mark manson doesn’t care about adversity in the face of his goals, he doesn’t care about pissing some people off to do what he feels is right or important or noble. what we mean is that mark manson is the type of guy who would write about himself in third person and use the word ‘fuck’ in an article 127 different times just because he thought it was the right thing to do. he just doesn’t give a fuck.this is what is so admirable — no, not me, dumbass — the overcoming adversity stuff. the staring failure in the face and shoving your middle finger back at it. the people who don’t give a fuck about adversity or failure or embarrassing themselves or shitting the bed a few times. the people who just laugh and then do it anyway. because they know it’s right. they know it’s more important than them and their own feelings and their own pride and their own needs. they say “fuck it,” not to everything in life, but rather they say “fuck it” to everything unimportant in life. they reserve their fucks for what truly fucking matters. friends. family. purpose . burritos. and an occasional lawsuit or two. and because of that, because they reserve their fucks for only the big things, the important things, people give a fuck about them in return.subtlety #2: to not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversityeric hoffer once wrote: “a man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. when it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”the problem with people who hand out fucks like ice cream at a goddamn summer camp is that they don’t have anything more fuckworthy to dedicate their fucks to.think for a second. you’re at a grocery store. and there’s an elderly lady screaming at the cashier, berating him for not accepting her 30-cent coupon. why does this lady give a fuck? it’s just 30 cents.well, i’ll tell you why. that old lady probably doesn’t have anything better to do with her days than to sit at home cutting out coupons all morning. she’s old and lonely. her kids are dickheads and never visit. she hasn’t had sex in over 30 years. her pension is on its last legs and she’s probably going to die in a diaper thinking she’s in candyland. she can’t fart without extreme lower back pain. she can’t even watch tv for more than 15 minutes without falling asleep or forgetting the main plotline.so she snips coupons. that’s all she’s got. it’s her and her damn coupons. all day, every day. it’s all she can give a fuck about because there is nothing else to give a fuck about. and so when that pimply-faced 17-year-old cashier refuses to accept one of them, when he defends his cash register’s purity the way knights used to defend maidens’ virginities, you can damn well bet granny is going to erupt and verbally hulk smash his fucking face in. eighty years of fucks will rain down all at once, like a fiery hailstorm of “back in my day” and “people used to show more respect” stories, boring the world around her to tears in her creaking and wobbly voice.if you find yourself consistently giving too many fucks about trivial shit that bothers you — your ex-girlfriend’s new facebook picture, how quickly the batteries die in the tv remote, missing out on yet another 2-for-1 sale on hand sanitizer — chances are you don’t have much going on in your life to give a legitimate fuck about. and that’s your real problem. not the hand sanitizer.way too many fucks given.in life, our fucks must be spent on something. there really is no such thing as not giving a fuck. the question is simply how we  each choose to allot our fucks. you only get a limited amount of fucks to give over your lifetime, so you must spend them with care. as my father used to say, “fucks don’t grow on trees, mark.” ok, he never actually said that. but fuck it, pretend like he did. the point is that fucks have to be earned and then invested wisely. fucks are cultivated like a beautiful fucking garden, where if you fuck shit up and the fucks get fucked, then you’ve fucking fucked your fucks all the fuck up.subtlety #3: we all have a limited number of fucks to give; pay attention to where and who you give them towhen we’re young, we have tons of energy. everything is new and exciting. and everything seems to matter so much. therefore, we give tons of fucks. we give a fuck about everything and everyone — about what people are saying about us, about whether that cute boy/girl called us back or not, about whether our socks match or not or what color our birthday balloon is.as we get older, we gain experience and begin to notice that most of these things have little lasting impact on our lives. those people’s opinions we cared about so much before have long been removed from our lives. we’ve found the love we need and so those embarrassing romantic rejections cease to mean much anymore. we realize how little people pay attention to the superficial details about us and we focus on doing things more for ourselves rather than for others.bunk moreland, not giving a fuck since 2002.essentially, we become more selective about the fucks we’re willing to give. this is something called ‘maturity.’ it’s nice, you should try it sometime. maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy. as bunk moreland said in the wire (which, fuck you, i still downloaded it) to his partner detective mcnulty: “that’s what you get for giving a fuck when it wasn’t your turn to give a fuck.”then, as we grow older and enter middle age, something else begins to change. our energy levels drop. our identities solidify. we know who we are and we no longer have a desire to change what now seems inevitable in our lives.and in a strange way, this is liberating. we no longer need to give a fuck about everything. life is just what it is. we accept it, warts and all. we realize that we’re never going to cure cancer or go to the moon or feel jennifer aniston’s tits. and that’s ok. life fucking goes on. we now reserve our ever-dwindling fucks only for the most truly fuckworthy parts of our lives: our families, our best friends, our golf swing. and to our astonishment, this is enough. this simplification actually makes us really fucking happy .then somehow, one day, much later, we wake up and we’re old. and along with our gum lines and our sex drive, our ability to give a fuck has receded to the point of non-existence. in the twilight of our days, we carry out a paradoxical existence where we no longer have the energy to give a fuck about the big things in life, and instead we must dedicate the few fucks we have left to the simple and mundane yet increasingly difficult aspects of our lives: where to eat lunch, doctors appointments for our creaky joints, 30-cent discounts at the supermarket, and driving without drifting to sleep and killing a parking lot full of orphans. you know, practical concerns.then one day, on our deathbed, (hopefully) surrounded by the people we gave the majority of our fucks to throughout our life, and those few who still give a fuck about us, with a silent gasp we will gently let our last fuck go. through the tears and the gently fading beeps of the heart monitor and the ever-dimming fluorescence encapsulating us in its divine hospital halo, we drift into some unknowable and unfuckable place.cover image credit: ifindkarma , kitten owned by audun rønningen from norway.
 writankar mukherjee | 15 january 2015, 8:57 am istkata: india's largest cellphone retailer, the mobilestore, has revamped its e-commerce strategy, promising four-hour delivery in 90 cities and towns in what could be the first sign of offline retail fighting back e-commerce.the retailer will offer phones on its website at rs 200-500 more than the lowest price across ecommerce sites on that day. it hopes customers will pay the extra for doorstep services such as payment by cash or card after delivery, buyback of old handset, data transfer and installation of accessories - all bundled in the offer.other large brick-and-mortar cellphone chains like sangeetha mobiles and univercell too are planning to reboot their e-commerce venture and scale it up with faster delivery with their stores acting as warehouses. these chains plan to offer competitive online pricing, which will be lower than their store prices but may not be the lowest compared with ecommerce portals since they would comply with manufacturer's pricing policy, which they claim their e-commerce rivals don't.the mobilestore has also tied up with price comparison websites such as mysmartprice-.com and zopper.com to attract e-commerce buyer traffic and will offer online the entire suit of services it offers in its 700-odd stores. offline chains are coming up with new strategies to win back buyers as conversion of walk-in customers to final sales fell in stores by 20-25% since diwali.some chains even reported an up to 40% fall in cellphone sales since last diwali with flipkart, amazon and snapdeal running huge discounts. as per industry estimates, the number of online shoppers doubled in 2014 over the previous year to 40 million. cellphones are the topselling product in indian e-commerce, accounting for almost 35% of all transactions."even e-commerce firms charge a premium for faster delivery, but we will offer at a really competitive price and deliver it at the fastest pace. the cellphone will be delivered by our trained sales people from stores, who will offer much more value-added service than any of the e-commerce website can do at present," said the mobilestore ceo himanshu chakrawarti.
 i used to work for banks. now i write about them, and about finance and economics generally. although i originally trained as a musician and singer, i worked in banking for 17 years and did an mba at cass business school in london, where i specialized in financial risk management. i’m the author of the coppola comment finance & economics blog, which is a regular feature on the financial times's alphaville blog and has been quoted in the economist, the wall street journal, the new york times and the guardian. i am also associate editor at the online magazine pieria and a frequent commentator on financial matters for the bbc. and i still sing, and teach. after all, there is more to life than finance.the author is a forbes contributor. the opinions expressed are those of the writer.
 zurich—the soaring swiss franc that caused howls in financial markets is creating a bonanza in stores, where shoppers are suddenly getting discounts on everything from vegetables to party dresses.on monday, basel-based coop said it was cutting prices on more than 200 types of fruit and vegetables imported from the european union. the supermarket chain, switzerland’s second-largest retailer behind migros, said further price cuts for...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 ‘we have made many mistakes, but we have put [our reforms] in motion,’ mr. renzi said at a news conference in rome on monday. bloomberg news
 a man sending money through m-pesa.imagine having no banking relationship whatsoever – no bank account, no credit card, no debit card.you’d have to cash your paycheck for an exorbitant fee and then fork over bills to buy money orders to send funds. you couldn’t shop online. you’d be in constant fear of being robbed.an estimated 2.5 billion adults worldwide live in this costly, inconvenient manner. now, after decades of failed government pledges to help the “unbanked,” new mobile phone-focused technologies and outside-the-box approaches to money, identity and regulation are encouraging hopes of an impending escape from this financial straitjacket.“we feel that we are on the cusp of a revolution,” says rodger voorhies, director of the financial services for the poor initiative at the bill & melinda gates foundation. “the fact that mobile handsets are so distributed provides the opportunity to radically change the cost of payments.” he cites a mckinsey & co. study finding that transaction costs for the poor could be cut by 90%.the gates foundation has partnered with the world bank and a separate consortium of governments, private sector providers and development agencies to roll out a global financial inclusion strategy . it is also providing grants to startups offering “mobile money” solutions.at stake is globalization’s next boom. total financial inclusion could unlock the $9.6 trillion in “dead capital” assets that peruvian economist hernando de soto says the world’s poor own but can’t leverage. it could free up billions in fees that immigrants pay for annual remittances, flows that are three times that of world aid budgets. and it would open world markets to tens of millions of prospective new suppliers of goods and services.a year ago, world bank president jim yong ki set a goal of “universal financial access” by 2020 . similarly bold objectives have in the past come and gone without success — including in the u.s., where the federal deposit insurance corporation estimates there are 9.6 million unbanked households . so skepticism is warranted.still, the root causes of financial exclusion are known: inadequate documentation, onerous regulations, and inefficient, outdated banking infrastructure, all of which trap the poor in a vicious cycle. they are denied bank loans — not because of bad borrowing behavior but because they can’t prove their reputations or affirm their assets – and so depend on usurious payday lenders and pawn shops. those who are seamstresses, food vendors or other microbusiness owners cannot cheaply send or receive money, which cuts them off from new markets and suppliers and stymies growth.now a new model presents itself: kenya’s groundbreaking m-pesa service, which lets people send monetary equivalents via simple sms messages. after launching in 2007, m-pesa is used by two thirds of kenya’s adult population and, according to owner safaricom, handles transactions worth 43% of its gdp. its success has converted nairobi into a vibrant “silicon savannah” hub of mobile banking innovation and spawned imitators around the world.
 samsung purchase of blackberry would make sense: kumarwhat’s blackberry ltd. really worth? that old question’s back again.the mobile-device maker got a lift wednesday after reuters, citing an unidentified person and documents, reported that samsung electronics co. (005930) approached the company with an initial takeover offer price of $13.35 to $15.49 a share. both blackberry and samsung denied the report.at the high end of the reported price range, blackberry would be valued at about $7.1 billion after subtracting net cash, or 24 times its trailing 12-month earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to data compiled by bloomberg. the last time investors assigned blackberry that rich of a valuation, it was still the leader in smartphones: its devices controlled half the market and apple inc.’s iphone had yet to outsell them.blackberry’s market share has since shrunk to about 1 percent.“that’s a lot of money for a company with about 1 percent market share in the u.s.,” roger entner , an analyst with recon analytics in dedham, massachusetts , said in a phone interview. “god bless them if they’re getting that, but that’s a lot of money for a company that’s not going anywhere.”on a revenue basis, the potential offer is a multiple of 1.9, which blackberry shares haven’t commanded since early 2011, data compiled by bloomberg show.the blackberry ltd. classic mobile device is displayed at press conference during the 2015 consumer electronics show (ces) in las vegas, nevada, u.s., on jan. 7, 2015. closethe blackberry ltd. classic mobile device is displayed at press conference during the... read morethe blackberry ltd. classic mobile device is displayed at press conference during the 2015 consumer electronics show (ces) in las vegas, nevada, u.s., on jan. 7, 2015.to contact the reporters on this story: tara lachapelle in new york at tlachapelle@bloomberg.net ; brooke sutherland in new york at bsutherland7@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: beth williams at bewilliams@bloomberg.net mohammed hadipress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 it is often argued that for poor countries, increases in agricultural productivity result in higher non-agricultural output, but the theory is ambiguous and the empirical evidence is limited. this column presents evidence from a natural experiment provided by china’s early 1980s agricultural reforms. higher agricultural output induced by the reforms led to quantitatively important growth in non-agricultural output. this growth appears to be primarily due to rural savings increasing the supply of capital to the non-agricultural sector.for most countries, development and industrialisation are inextricably linked. a classic literature in development argues that, for the poorest countries, improving the productivity of the agricultural sector may provide the initial spur to industrialisation (e.g. rosenstein-rodan 1943, schultz 1953, lewis 1954). this view has been influential with policymakers – according to the world bank (2007), “there are many success stories of agriculture as an engine of growth early in the development process”.however, while the correlation between agricultural productivity and the size of the non-agricultural sector is undeniable, the empirical evidence for increases in agricultural productivity causing industrialisation is thin. it is easy to imagine an alternative scenario where higher agricultural productivity increases the profitability of farming and crowds out the non-agricultural sector. to the extent that agricultural productivity does result in higher non-agricultural output, we know little about how it does so. does higher farm productivity reduce the rural demand for labour, or do farmers provide an important source of demand and capital to industrialists?my research addresses these questions by comparing counties in china which, by virtue of their relative suitability for cash crops and grains, benefitted differentially from china’s 1978–1984 agricultural reforms (marden 2014). counties suited to cash crops benefitted more from reforms, and enjoyed faster growth in agricultural output. part of this increase in agricultural output was saved, increasing the supply of capital to local non-state firms and stimulating the growth of the non-agricultural sector. there were positive linkages from agriculture to industry in early reform-era china.counties suited to cash crops benefitted more from china’s agricultural reforms, because prior to the reforms the chinese government imposed a policy of rural self-sufficiency in food. at this time, chinese agricultural productivity was low, and most farmers faced binding subsistence constraints. prevented from importing food from elsewhere, even farmers with land highly suitable for growing cotton or oilseeds (the main cash crops in china) had to specialise in grain production to avoid starvation. there were also political incentives to produce grain, and most farmers faced quotas for grain deliveries to the central government. by relaxing these policies, the reforms effectively liberalised the planting of cash crops.notes: map indicates where county level data is available, and shows suitability for cash crops defined as the ratio of the value of output of a cell’s best cash crop (of cotton, rapeseed, and peanuts) divided by the best grain (of rice, maize, wheat, and soy). underlying measure is continuous but has been grouped into jenks categories for readability.the first part of my analysis demonstrates that counties suited to cash crops did benefit from the freedom to plant these crops. i use pre-reform prices and a global database of theoretical crop yields to identify counties that were endowed with land more suited for cash crops than grains. then i trace the growth of agricultural output for 561 non-metropolitan counties over forty years. suitability for cash crops does not predict growth pre-reform. however, after the reforms, counties began to specialise in cash crops if they were suited to them, and enjoyed significantly faster growth in aggregate agricultural output. back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that specialisation in cash crops increased chinese agricultural output by around 10% between 1978 and 1985 (about one-fifth of the total increase, and two-thirds of the increase lin (1992) attributes to the contemporaneous decommunalisation of agriculture).i then turn to whether this increase in agricultural productivity led to higher non-agricultural output. the setting of my study, china, helps me explore the link between the sectors in two ways. first, in the early 1980s, china was poor and the agricultural sector was relatively large. a large agricultural sector and underdeveloped industrial sector will tend to make linkages from agriculture to the rest of the economy more important. second, china’s reform-era institutions resulted in well-documented geographic frictions in capital and labour markets. these frictions prevented the equalisation of wages and capital costs over space and kept local shocks local – farmers’ savings were often lent to nearby firms, and labour no longer required for farming sought work close to home.as a result, counties suited to cash crops also enjoyed a relative increase in manufacturing and service-sector output after the reforms (they were growing at the same rate before). a 1% increase in agricultural output due to specialisation was associated with a 1.2% increase in non-agricultural output between 1978 and 1995. counties suited to cash crops also had faster post-reform growth in savings and investment.these results indicate that there were forward linkages, but they do not indicate why there were linkages. i consider the possibility of linkages through three classic channels. first, growing cash crops could be less labour-intensive than grains, which would free up labour for manufacturing and services. second, richer farmers could purchase more manufactures and services, driving up demand for these goods. third, richer farmers could save more, providing capital for local firms.my main results – that agricultural productivity led to higher savings, investment, and non-agricultural output – are consistent with any of these channels. other outcomes are more revealing:if growing cash crops was labour-saving, then the number of workers in agriculture should fall in places suited to cash crops. i show that the share of labour in agriculture increases. this is consistent with previous work suggesting that cash crops are more labour-intensive than grains.if the linkages were due to richer farmers demanding more non-agricultural goods, then linkages should be stronger in places where trade costs are higher and importing these goods is expensive. i show that the opposite is true – linkages are weaker in more isolated counties.if increases in the supply of capital were driving the results then the price of capital should fall. although i don’t observe the price of capital faced by firms, i can observe firm behaviour. after the reforms, non-state firms located in counties suited to cash crops behave as if they face cheaper capital costs.put together, these additional results indicate that the observed linkages from agriculture to the rest of the economy were primarily due to rural saving increasing the supply of capital to local firms. this suggests that programmes which increase the productivity of agriculture may also benefit the wider economy, and that an ‘agriculture first’ development strategy could be more effective than previously thought.lewis, w a (1954), “economic development with unlimited supplies of labour”, the manchester school 22(2): 139–191.lin, j y (1992), “rural reforms and agricultural growth in china”, american economic review 82(1): 34–51.rosenstein-rodan, p n (1943), “problems of industrialisation of eastern and southeastern europe” economic journal 53(210/211): 202–211.schultz, t w (1953), the economic organization of agriculture, new york: mcgraw-hill.world bank (2007), world development report 2008: agriculture for development.
 david cameron says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read" -- and no doubt many in his party will agree with him, politically. but if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots.what david cameron thinks he's saying is, "we will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." there are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. if your whatsapp or google hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years ), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. they -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. that includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.but this is just for starters. david cameron doesn't understand technology very well, so he doesn't actually know what he's asking for.for david cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. the very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. they are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.cameron is not alone here. the regime he proposes is already in place in countries like syria, russia, and iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). there are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.david cameron has already shown that he believes he can order the nation's isps to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). the next step is to order chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. this is a formidable technical challenge. intrinsic to core internet protocols like ipv4/6, tcp and udp is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. this makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.more ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the uk are allowed to execute. this is very hard indeed. we do have, in apple's ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. these companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of parliament) to block secure software. even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other eu states and countries like the usa are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her iphone in paris or new york could come to the uk with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."but there is the problem of more open platforms, like gnu/linux variants, bsd and other unixes, mac os x, and all the non-mobile versions of windows. all of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. the commercial operators -- apple and microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the pcs now in existence to run code that the pm wants to ban.more difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like gnu/linux and bsd. these operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's it). there is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.this, then, is what david cameron is proposing:* all britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept* all major code repositories, such as github and sourceforge, must be blocked* virtually all academic security work in the uk must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry r&d  and the security services* all packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped* proprietary operating system vendors (microsoft and apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to britons* free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outrightdavid cameron will say that he doesn't want to do any of this. he'll say that he can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. but anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". if any commodity pc or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. jailbreaking an os isn't hard. downloading an app isn't hard. stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the whole nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.i write books. my latest are: a ya graphic novel called in real life (with jen wang); a nonfiction book about the arts and the internet called information doesn't want to be free: laws for the internet age (with introductions by neil gaiman and amanda palmer) and a ya science fiction novel called homeland (it's the sequel to little brother ). i speak all over the place and i tweet and tumble , too.
 workers install chinese solar panels near tianjin, china, on june 11, 2012.solar power is an environmentalist’s dream, but for decades it was too expensive to be practical. in the past few years, that has finally been changing. americans are signing up in droves to put panels on their roofs, not only for the good of the climate, but because—once you factor in government incentives—it’s often cheaper than conventional electricity, especially in sunny states. that was unimaginable only 10 years ago.will oremus is slate's senior technology writer.the boom has been fueled by cheap solar panels from china, which has been heavily subsidizing solar manufacturing. the glut has been good not only for american customers, but for u.s. companies that install solar panels. startups like sunrun and the elon musk–backed solarcity have grown explosively by installing chinese-made panels on u.s. homes and businesses, often through financing mechanisms that require no money down. * as a result, the solar industry has been a bright spot in the u.s. economy, with jobs growing by 20 percent a year. it now employs 140,000 americans and counting, and is one of the few sectors in which president obama’s promise of “green jobs” has actually materialized.but the good times could be coming to an end. it’s not that china is cutting off the supply of cheap panels. it’s that the united states is threatening to slap new tariffs on them that could sharply drive up the price. it would also likely prompt china to retaliate with more duties on u.s.-manufactured polysilicon, a key ingredient in those panels.the push comes from america’s small and struggling domestic solar-panel manufacturing industry, which can’t compete with the discounted wares from china. ironically, it’s a german-owned firm, solarworld ag, whose u.s. division is lobbying for the federal government to protect it from foreign rivals. on the other side are u.s. solar panel installers that rely on chinese goods. as analyst eric wesoff once joked , one side is wearing an american flag over a german flag, and the other has an american flag draped over a chinese flag.legally, countervailing tariffs and anti-dumping duties may or may not be justified—it’s always hard to tell with a mixed-market system like china’s. but from an environmental perspective, they’re likely to do a lot more harm than good. and from an economic perspective, they’re just plain bizarre.remember, the u.s. government wants americans to buy solar panels, and it subsidizes those purchases through rebates and incentives. the chinese government wants chinese companies to build solar panels, and it subsidizes their manufacture. and yet rather than celebrate this fortuitous arrangement, the world’s top economic powers find themselves on the brink of a trade war that could cripple a promising industry in both countries, kill jobs, and hurt the environment all at once. it’s a terrible trade-policy trifecta.there’s still time to avert the worst impacts of the misguided imbroglio. but that would require solarworld ceo frank asbeck and his counterparts in the solar-panel installation industry, including sunedison founder jigar shah, to stop posturing and find some common ground. and it would require the obama administration to display some common sense and negotiate a settlement with china. so far, common sense has been in short supply.the dispute centers on the chinese government’s aggressive promotion of its solar-panel manufacturing industry. almost nonexistent in 2000, that industry has surged past japan, germany, and the u.s., and now dominates the global market. but china’s supply overshot demand and prices dropped sharply. that has been great for u.s. consumers and installers. for manufacturers, not so much. solarworld headed up a coalition of manufacturers and pressed the u.s. government to take action, alleging that china’s subsidies amounted to unfair government interference and that chinese firms have been “dumping” their panels on the u.s. market at below cost.they scored a win in 2012, when the u.s. commerce department agreed to impose tariffs of 24 to 36 percent on chinese photovoltaic panels. as it turned out, though, the duties did little to stem the flow. the chinese manufacturers simply outsourced part of the production process to taiwan. so solarworld brought a new suit this winter asking the government to broaden the tariffs and extend them to chinese panels made in taiwan. last week, the u.s. international trade commission agreed to move forward with the investigation; it’s scheduled to issue a preliminary ruling on march 28.this time, the decision could have big implications for the american solar industry. solar panels would get more expensive. solar panel installers, which employ far more workers than u.s. manufacturers, would suffer. on top of that, china would almost certainly retaliate with new tariffs of its own on u.s.-manufactured polysilicon, a key ingredient in solar panels. that’s what it did last time .all that to try to even the playing field for a u.s. solar manufacturing industry that probably wouldn’t be competitive on the global market anyway, especially since conventional photovoltaics have become almost a commodity. “the u.s. is very unlikely to ever be the world’s supplier of panels,” says mark thurber, associate director of stanford university’s program on energy and sustainable development. “lost-cost manufacturing at volume is just not going to be our strength.” and remember, the company that stands to gain the most isn’t even american.that makes it a bit rich when solarworld’s asbeck complains, as he did in an open letter to president obama recently, that “china is improperly seizing control of an industry that the united states invented, pioneered, and grew.” as with the last round of this trade battle, solarworld is laying the patriotism on thick, painting those lobbying against the tariffs as “holding water for the chinese.” for his part, shah has blasted solarworld as “a german company … manipulating u.s. trade procedure in order to prop up its own failing business.”there may be some truth to asbeck’s contention that china intentionally drove down the cost of panels in order to give its own companies a stranglehold on a fast-growing market. or it could be that china simply misjudged the demand, building too much capacity too fast, with the result that its manufacturers were forced to cut prices or go out of business . many have folded.the u.s. is justified in wanting to ensure that china isn’t just flooding the market in order to corner it. but it would be far better served by addressing the problem through negotiation than a new round of punitive duties. that’s what the european union did in a similar case against china, which it settled last year without irreparable harm to any of the parties concerned. china itself appears perfectly willing to pick up the phone . why hasn’t obama?*correction, feb. 19, 2014: a previous version of this article misstated that sunpower was among the startups that benefit from cheap chinese solar panels. in fact sunpower manufactures its own panels, whereas sunrun installs panels imported from china and other countries.  ( return. )
 buenos aires—argentines have long bemoaned trade barriers that occasionally led to shortages of imported car tires, iphones and medicine. but these days, women here are ruing the scarcity of a much more personal item: tampons.on friday, retailers and tampon distributors said they were scrambling to arrange the delivery of fresh shipments, possibly from brazil, as early as next week. for now, women are finding it nearly impossible to find tampons at pharmacies and smaller supermarkets around the country—an embarrassing...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
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 for james dimon, chairman and chief executive of j.p. morgan chase & co., there were the usual questions wednesday about legal costs, net interest margin and compensation.but then analysts homed in on the topic du jour, peppering the bank chief with possibly the largest question of all: should he break up the bank?to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 an additional 2.95 million americans found work in 2014, the most in 15 years. closean additional 2.95 million americans found work in 2014, the most in 15 years.an additional 2.95 million americans found work in 2014, the most in 15 years.the u.s. is back in the driver’s seat of the global economy after 15 years of watching china and emerging markets take the lead.the world’s biggest economy will expand by 3.2 percent or more this year, its best performance since at least 2005, as an improving job market leads to stepped-up consumer spending, according to economists at jpmorgan chase & co., deutsche bank ag and bnp paribas sa. that outcome would be about what each foresees for the world economy as a whole and would be the first time since 1999 that america hasn’t lagged behind global growth, based on data from the international monetary fund.“the u.s. is again the engine of global growth,” said allen sinai , chief executive officer of decision economics in new york. “the economy is looking stellar and is in its best shape since the 1990s.”in the latest sign of america’s resurgence, the labor department reported today that payrolls rose 252,000 in december as the unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent, its lowest level since june 2008. all told, an additional 2.95 million americans found work in 2014, the most in 15 years.u.s. bond prices fell after the report as investors focused on a surprise drop in hourly wages last month. ten-year treasury yields fell six basis points to 1.96 percent at 1:36 p.m. in new york.the u.s. is breaking away from the rest of the world partly because it has had more success working off the debt-driven excesses that helped precipitate the worst recession since the great depression.“the progress has been far greater in the u.s.,” glenn hubbard , dean of the columbia business school in new york and a former chief white house economist, told the american economic association annual conference in boston on jan. 3.delinquencies on consumer installment loans fell to a record-low 1.51 percent in the third quarter, the american bankers association said on jan. 8. that’s “well under” the 15-year average of 2.3 percent on such loans, which include credit cards and borrowing for car purchases and home improvements, it said.u.s. households have benefited from the strengthening job market and the collapse in oil prices. the nationwide average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.17 yesterday, the cheapest since may 2009, according to figures from motoring group aaa.while wage gains have lagged -- average hourly earnings fell 0.2 percent last month from november -- they will accelerate as the labor market continues to tighten, according to mohamed el-erian , a bloomberg view columnist and an adviser to munich-based allianz se.“it’s just a matter of time before wage growth picks up,” he told bloomberg television’s “in the loop” program.spending is already strengthening. households splurged on new cars, appliances, televisions and clothing as spending climbed 0.6 percent in november, double the gain in october, according to figures from the commerce department in washington. light-vehicle sales last year totaled 16.5 million in 2014, the most since 2006.“the economy picked up a nice tailwind at the end of the year,” bill fay , group vice president for toyota motor corp.’s u.s. sales arm, said on a jan. 5 conference call. “this strength will carry the auto industry to a sixth straight year of growth in 2015 with analyst projections ranging as high as 17 million.”at $11.5 trillion in 2013, u.s. personal consumption expenditures were larger than the gross domestic product of any other country that year, including china, according to statistics from the imf in washington. the figures aren’t adjusted to reflect price discrepancies for the same goods in different nations -- so-called purchasing power parity -- which tends to inflate the output of developing nations where consumers pay less for everything from haircuts to coffee.deutsche bank economists led by david folkerts-landau in london forecast u.s. gdp will expand 3.7 percent this year, after climbing 2.5 percent in 2014. the u.s. will contribute close to 18 percent to global growth of 3.6 percent in 2015, compared with 7 percent for all other industrial countries combined, they wrote in a jan. 9 report.while the u.s. is gathering strength, the bric nations -- brazil, russia, india and china -- are facing tougher times after spending much of the last 15 years basking in the attention of global investors.brazil’s debt was downgraded last year for the first time in a decade while russia is heading into recession, its economy pummeled by the collapse of oil prices and u.s. and european sanctions. growth in china and india has slowed as both countries grapple with revamping their economies.“close the book on emerging markets driving global growth,” nancy lazar , co-founder and a partner at cornerstone macro lp in new york, wrote in a jan. 8 report to clients.even jim o’neill , the former goldman sachs group inc. chief economist who coined the brics acronym, has soured on some of its members, saying in an e-mail that he would be tempted to remove brazil and russia from the group if they fail to revive their flagging economies.“it is tough for the bric countries to all repeat their remarkable growth rates” of the first decade of this century, said o’neill, a bloomberg view columnist and former chairman of goldman sachs asset management international.he argued, though, that even at a slower growth rate, china will add more to the world economy this year than the u.s., when measuring their output on a purchasing power parity basis.the u.s. has pulled ahead of other industrial nations partly because its policy-making has been better, according to paul mortimer-lee , chief economist for north america at bnp paribas in new york.european central bank president mario draghi and his colleagues are still weighing whether they should buy government bonds to fight off the danger of deflation -- a step that the federal reserve first took back in 2009.u.s. budget policy also has been more effective than the euro region’s austerity strategy, which undercut the continent’s economy, mortimer-lee added.even alberto alesina , a long-time proponent of government spending cuts, thinks the euro area should adopt a more expansionary fiscal stance. alesina, who is a professor at harvard university in cambridge, massachusetts, told the aea conference on jan. 5 that he favors more “aggressive” tax cuts by the region’s policy makers.japan, meanwhile, managed to throw its economy back into a recession by raising its consumption tax to 8 percent from 5 percent on april 1.looking across much of the rest of the world, “the u.s. continues to dominate,” hubbard said.to contact the reporter on this story: rich miller in washington at rmiller28@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: chris wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net mark rohnerpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 by jessica e. lessin jan. 19, 2015 comment by jessica e. lessinthe most valuable source of news about the technology industry for the world’s professionals.“the information has turned out to be incredibly worth the price tag, if you're into tech news. really solid stuff i look forward to.”“the information lives up to its name - real information about the topics, issues, companies, and people that i need to know the most about.”“pretty clear that the information is on fire. good work guys!”“the information is a source of ideas and larger thematic trends for me. i seek it out the way i do non fiction books on the industry. it's a bit like the barron's of tech and media.”“the information is on fire. it's like the startup/tech section of what should be in the economist. reporting + credible analysis.”“the information has quickly made itself a must-read: unique and valuable insights every day.”“so it's happened - the information has become a daily must-read for me. that was quick!”for no additional cost, meet the people pulling the strings in the technology industry at our exclusive, subscriber-only events across the country.since launching last december, we've been the first to write about and analyze the industry’s biggest acquisitions and major product developments.what tech leaders are talking about now – and what the rest of the business world will be talking about a year from now, whether the blockchain or messaging 2.0our earliest subscribers include leaders of the hottest startups and the biggest technology companies and financial institutions.our reporters have previously worked at the wall street journal and other leading publications.no aggregation, no bullshit. we only write articles that matter to our subscribers and are backed by exclusive reporting.
 global shipping routes crisscross the world’s oceans in this map of shipping lanes derived from a 2008 study of the human impact on marine ecosystems. credit: grolltechmaritime traffic on the world’s oceans has increased four-fold over the past 20 years, according to a new study published by the american geophysical union quantifying global ship traffic and its impacts on the environment.the research used satellite altimeter data to estimate the number of vessels on the ocean every year between 1992 and 2012.according to the findings, the number of ships traversing the oceans grew by 60 percent between 1992 and 2002, and grew even faster during the second decade of the study, peaking at rate of increase of 10 percent per year in 2011.traffic went up in every ocean during the 20 years of the study, the report notes. in the indian ocean, home to some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, ship traffic grew by more than 300 percent over the 20-year period, according to the research.in their report, the american geophysical union said that the uptick in maritime traffic has likely also caused more water, air and noise pollution.“i found it quite worrisome that the ship traffic grew so much, even in very remote regions of the world,” said jean tournadre, a geophysicist at ifremer, the french institute for the exploitation of the sea in plouzane, and the study author. “especially when we know that they are the major source of pollution [on the open ocean].”international trade and the sizes of merchant fleets have grown rapidly over the past two decades, explaining the steep rise in ship traffic, the study reports. the new analysis has been accepted for publication in geophysical research letters, a journal of the american geophysical union.the study notes that burgeoning ship traffic has increased the amount of pollution in the atmosphere, particularly above the sri lanka-sumatra-china shipping lane, where there has been 50 percent increase in nitrogen dioxide over the 20-year period, according to the study.tournadre said he hopes the new study will increase scientists’ understanding of how human activities are affecting marine ecosystems and improve models of atmospheric pollution in the open ocean.the new dataset will provide scientists with invaluable insights into the patterns of ship traffic and the traffic’s effect on the environment, said batuhan osmanoglu, a radar systems engineer at nasa’s goddard space flight center in green belt, md., who was not involved in the study.“the nice thing about this study is that they have a unique dataset, that maybe we’re looking at for the first time,” he said. “whenever you have a unique dataset you can quite easily learn something new.”the new study is the first to track ship traffic on a global scale, tournadre said. currently, ship traffic is monitored using the automatic identification system (ais), which tracks vessels accurately when near the coast but limited once ships are out of range on the open ocean. the new method outlined in the study used altimeters aboard satellites to detect the location of ships at sea, much like similar instruments have been used to track icebergs.in 2007, tournadre was poring over hordes of satellite data for signs of icebergs in polar seas, when he noticed an odd shape in the data.“we had some unconventional data in a region, and careful analysis showed us that it was a lighthouse near shipping lanes,” he said. “as we processed the data over the whole globe, we also detected ships.”tournadre found that the altimetry data accurately reproduced known shipping lanes and could be used to estimate the number of vessels on the ocean worldwide. the study used altimetry data from seven different satellites to map ship traffic from 1992 to 2012.using satellite data made it possible to calculate ship traffic for the entire globe, whereas ais records provide relatively limited coverage in both space and time, tournadre said. the new method also allowed him to look back at two decades of traffic using archived data, and give independent measurements of ship traffic that were not based on the will or capability of ships to transmit their own positions.however, tournadre also cautions that some of the growth he has seen in ship traffic could be overestimated because ships, especially container ships, have become larger over the past two decades and possibly easier to detect with altimetry data.gcaptain is the top-visited maritime and offshore industry news site in the world.  since 2007, gcaptain has proven to be a highly effective platform for information sharing and a source for up-to-date and relevant news for industry professionals worldwide.
 lawrence summers, professor of harvard university and former u.s. treasury secretary, said the true test of the secular stagnation thesis in the u.s. will come over the next few years. closelawrence summers, professor of harvard university and former u.s. treasury secretary,... read morelawrence summers, professor of harvard university and former u.s. treasury secretary, said the true test of the secular stagnation thesis in the u.s. will come over the next few years.secular stagnation hung over the annual meeting of more than 5,000 economists from around the world this past weekend -- as a description of the economy and not as comment on the liveliness of the cocktail parties.support for the thesis that the industrial world is mired in a prolonged period of slow or no growth was dimmed, though not banished, by the recent strength of the u.s. economy.a standing-room only crowd packed a hotel ballroom on jan. 3 to hear two leading proponents of the proposal, professors lawrence summers of harvard university and robert gordon of northwestern university in evanston, illinois , defend their views.“just because we have 5 percent growth doesn’t mean we are out of the woods,” summers, a former treasury secretary and senior white house official, told the american economic association meeting in boston , alluding to the u.s. economy’s pace of expansion in the third quarter.he rattled off a variety of reasons for caution. among them: the risk of financial bubbles, the difficulties the federal reserve may face in raising interest rates back to more normal levels, and continued excess capacity in japan and europe.summers also compared the euro area’s situation today with that of japan in the late 1990s, before it slipped into a deflationary funk, and warned that the u.s. could be in for an extended period of a “dismal growth rate below 1-1/2 percent.”fellow harvard professor greg mankiw took issue with that gloomy prognosis as far as the u.s. is concerned. in particular, he highlighted the improving labor market, where unemployment is at a six-year low and wages have begun to rise. closefellow harvard professor greg mankiw took issue with that gloomy prognosis as far as... read morefellow harvard professor greg mankiw took issue with that gloomy prognosis as far as the u.s. is concerned. in particular, he highlighted the improving labor market, where unemployment is at a six-year low and wages have begun to rise.fellow harvard professor greg mankiw took issue with that gloomy prognosis as far as the u.s. is concerned. in particular, he highlighted the improving labor market, where unemployment is at a six-year low and wages have begun to rise.“we are returning to normalcy,” said mankiw, who is also chairman of the economics department at harvard in cambridge, massachusetts and a former chief white house economist.the outcome of the debate over secular stagnation has widespread ramifications for the economies and societies of industrial countries.meager growth raises the risk of economies falling into deflation while making it harder for governments to reduce budget deficits and debt as tax revenue falls and spending rises. it would also depress living standards and could exacerbate tensions over income inequality.there is “growing evidence of socioeconomic decay” as the u.s. economy struggles, gordon said, pointing to the rise in the prison population and “the enormous increase in the number of children born outside of wedlock.”he argued that the u.s. economy will be held back by slow growth both of productivity and the labor force.“the fruits of the third industrial revolution” in information technology “may be coming to an end,” said gordon, who is a member of the economic panel that dates the start and finish of u.s. recessions.the productivity of non-farm business workers has risen an average 1 percent per year since the start of 2010, less than half the rate over the past 15 years, according to data from the labor department in washington .there has certainly been secular stagnation when it comes to the average, inflation-adjusted earnings of households, which have been essentially flat since around 2000, robert hall of stanford university in california told the conference.hall, who heads the recession-dating panel of the national bureau of economic research, highlighted the drop in labor-force participation and said much of the decline has occurred in upper-income households.summers said the true test of the secular stagnation thesis in the u.s. will come over the next few years. if the fed can raise rates toward 4 percent before a recession hits, that will call into question his argument that the economy needs abnormally low borrowing costs to overcome the structural forces holding it back.the u.s. central bank has kept rates near zero since december 2008, and most fed officials expect to begin raising them at some point this year.as far as glenn hubbard is concerned, the issue is already settled: secular stagnation is not a reality in the u.s.“the u.s. continues to dominate” the global economy, particularly the industrial world, hubbard, dean of the columbia business school in new york and another former chief white house economist, told the conference.a spate of recent statistics bears that out. the 5 percent annual gain in gross domestic product in the third quarter was the most since 2003 and followed an advance of 4.6 percent in the preceding three months, according to data from the commerce department in washington.the 321,000 increase in payrolls in november was the biggest in almost three years. and consumer confidence as measured by the new york-based conference board is near a seven-year high.“a lot of the discussion about secular stagnation is probably going to end at this aea meeting,” mankiw said. “i don’t think there is going to be another session next year on it.”to contact the reporter on this story: rich miller in washington at rmiller28@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: chris wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net alister bullpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 one consequence of america’s diversity explosion is a rise in multiracial marriages. in 1960, before immigration levels to the united states started to rise, multiracial marriages constituted only 0.4 percent of all u.s. marriages. that figure increased to 8.4 percent in 2010 and for recent newlyweds, 15 percent. not surprisingly the prevalence of out-marriage is high for new minorities, hispanics and asians, in light of the large pool of potential partners who are of different origins. more than four in ten new marriages of each group marry someone of a different race—with whites the most likely partners.  additionally, the vast majority of marriages involving american indians are multiracial marriages. many of these marriages involve spouses who identify as multiracial persons, signaling an extensive blurring that has already occurred among american indian and white populations.while multiracial marriages involving blacks are the least likely among major racial groups, the recent rise in such marriages is significant, as black-white marriages were prohibited in 16 states until 1967. the fact that nearly three in 10 new black marriages are multiracial with most of them to white spouses reflects an important shift toward blurring a long-held color line in the united states.
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 some of my previous posts have made reference to what warren buffett calls "the institutional imperative". in a nutshell, it's the tendency for organizations to:- resist changes in direction;- make less than optimal use of corporate funds;- support even very foolish initiatives;- imitate, at times rather unwisely, the actions of peer companies.as buffett explains below, the "troops" will all too often just fall in line with the folly.in fact, he explains that they will even provide the supporting justification for ill-advised initiatives simply because it has become the focus of their business leader.an investor won't necessarily see the impact of this behavior in the short run numbers but, over the long haul, it matters a lot when it comes to the creation per share intrinsic value for owners."my most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' in business school, i was given no hint of the imperative's existence and i did not intuitively understand it when i entered the business world. i thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. but i learned over time that isn't so. instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.for example: (1) as if governed by newton's first law of motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) the behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. after making some expensive mistakes because i ignored the power of the imperative, i have tried to organize and manage berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. furthermore, charlie and i have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem."it's a big factor in many large -- and sometimes not so large -- organizations. the problem is it's not always visible to the investor.yet it's still worth watching for clues.occasionally, the actions of senior management will reveal a whole lot over time.independent minded business leaders who build organizations that are less susceptible to the "imperative" are out there. even if hard to gauge from the outside, it's still worth attempting to figure out who "gets it" and are willing to take appropriate action; it's worth figuring out who understands the damage it does and how to create an environment that mitigates the tendency.capable leaders of good businesses can end up producing lots of additional wealth for owners by creating the right kind of corporate culture.this site does not provide investing recommendations as that comes down to individual circumstances. instead, it is for generalized informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. visitors should always do their own research and consult, as needed, with a financial adviser that's familiar with the individual circumstances before making any investment decisions. bottom line: the opinions found here should never be considered specific individualized investment advice and never a recommendation to buy or sell anything.
 as they prepare for holiday reading in tuscany, city bankers are buying up    rare copies of an obscure book on the mechanics of weimar inflation    published in 1974.federal reserve chairman ben bernanke, himself a scholar of the great depression, has indicated he would consider extra stimulus for the economy. during the inflationary crisis of weimer germany, grand pianos became a currency of sorts, according to an account of the period.  
rt @obsoletedogma: venezuela could have 1,000% inflation in 2015 http://t.co/ku24odgb21

 venezuela's president nicolas maduro said in televised speeches earlier this month that he saw no need to cut the government subsidies that leave gasoline selling for 6 cents a gallon, and that he will keep a 6.3 bolivar-per-dollar fixed exchange rate for priority imports. closevenezuela's president nicolas maduro said in televised speeches earlier this month that... read morevenezuela's president nicolas maduro said in televised speeches earlier this month that he saw no need to cut the government subsidies that leave gasoline selling for 6 cents a gallon, and that he will keep a 6.3 bolivar-per-dollar fixed exchange rate for priority imports.venezuela president nicolas maduro, set to announce a new currency system today, needs to devalue the bolivar or risk inflation passing 1,000 percent as soon as next year, according to bank of america corp.under the current system, venezuela’s overvalued bolivar means that the government effectively sells the dollars it gets from oil exports at a discount, compelling policy makers to print extra currency to cover domestic spending needs. currency controls that limit venezuelans’ access to dollars have spawned a black market in which the greenback fetches 172 bolivars, compared with officially sanctioned exchange rates that range from 6.3 to about 50 bolivars per dollar.“if we don’t see a large adjustment of the exchange rate , we’re almost certain to have triple-digit inflation and i wouldn’t be surprised to see the economy veering into four-digit annual inflation,” francisco rodriguez , the chief  andean economist at bank of america, said by phone from new york on dec. 28, before maduro scheduled his announcement. the government “needs to print money to finance the deficit and it is running a deficit because its revenues in bolivars are too low.”rodriguez, a former chief economist for the venezuelan national assembly, also co-edited the book “venezuela before chavez: anatomy of an economic collapse” with harvard university professor ricardo hausmann. he taught economics at wesleyan university before joining bank of america in 2011.the venezuelan information ministry didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the risk of 1,000% inflation and changes to the currency regime.maduro will detail the changes in a televised address due to start at 3:30 p.m. new york time. the price of venezuela’s benchmark bonds due 2027 was little changed today at 48 cents on the dollar. the country’s debt lost 31 percent in 2014, more than any other nation tracked by bloomberg indexes.maduro said in televised speeches earlier this month that he saw no need to cut the government subsidies that leave gasoline selling for 6 cents a gallon, and that he will keep a 6.3 bolivar-per-dollar fixed exchange rate for priority imports.the most recent official data is that annual inflation in venezuela was 63 percent in august, the fastest in the world. a more up-to-date estimate based on the depreciation of the bolivar on the black market is 183 percent, according to steve hanke , a professor of applied economics at johns hopkins university and director of the troubled currencies project at the cato institute .venezuela adopted currency controls in 2003 to defend dwindling reserves against what then-president hugo chavez called “savage capitalists.” the controls have evolved over the years to include the foreign-currency auctions where the government limits the supply of greenbacks.manufacturers can sometimes get a rate of 12 bolivars in weekly government auctions, while individuals and importers of non-essential products are offered restricted amounts for about 50 bolivars in a daily sale.“i will make some very important announcements about the program for economic recovery in 2015 and all the facets of the nation’s financial stability in venezuelan and freely convertible currency, all the steps we’re going to take, the new currency exchange system,” maduro said yesterday in a speech broadcast on state television.the bolivar weakened 42 percent on the black market in the fourth quarter, according to data from dolartoday.com, outpacing even the 29 percent decline in the russian ruble. both currencies have been pressured by declines in price of oil, which makes up 95 percent of venezuela’s exports and is the country’s principal source of hard currency.with no access to international capital markets and falling revenue from oil sales, maduro is dependent on loans from allies or on printing more money to plug his growing budget deficit.“if they continue with their social welfare and income redistribution programs, they’ll be forced to run the printing press at an ever accelerating rate,” hanke said. “there is tremendous pressure on them to keep spending and their sources of financing have dried up.”venezuela’s m2 money supply , a measure of the amount of bolivars in the economy that includes bank notes in circulation as well as retail savings, rose by 64 percent in the past 12 months. that is three times as fast as any other country tracked by bloomberg.“it turns into a vicious circle,” rodriguez said. “printing money leads to inflation, which leads to overvaluation which leads to printing more money.”to contact the reporter on this story: sebastian boyd in santiago at sboyd9@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: brendan walsh at bwalsh8@bloomberg.net lester pimentelpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 source: gompers, “rise and fall”, op cit.many of the top firms moved either entirely or partly to lbos: j.h. whitney & co. (one of the original vc firms, in the business since 1946); patricof associates (alan patricof returned to the vc fold in 2006 with his current fund greycroft partners); welsh, carson, anderson & stowe; warburg pincus; merrill, pickard, anderson & eyre; bain capital; and ta associates were some of the more prominent. even sequoia started backing lbos.“we still want to invest in new ideas, but we will do it through more mature companies.”instead of backing entrepreneurs to develop new companies, many deal makers are emphasizing investments in companies that plan to grow through acquisitions…the growth of the venture capital industry is making it harder to find worthy new companies to support. so they have to find other place to put their money. (wall street journal, “venture capital turns to mergers for faster growth and lower risk”, 1/7/1986.)as veteran venture capitalist fred adler put it: “venture capital has more parts than it used to. we’re a lot more flexible about how we use our money.” (wall street journal, “venture capital turns to mergers for faster growth and lower risk”, 1/7/1986.)even when vcs were investing in startups, the companies were unlike the ones that had generated the phenomenal 1980 vc returns. the new wisdom was to lower risk by investing in well-understood, slower growth markets. vcs also limited risk by shunning technology.some of the hottest venture deals these days are being done in a field that is mostly low-tech or even no-tech: specialty retailing…most of these smaller outfits are trying to carve their niche with the same basic strategy of lavishing tremendous amounts of personal attention on the customer. to use the emerging buzzword, they seek to be “full-service” retailers. (wall street journal, “full-service’ specialty retailers draw venture capital”, 5/1/1989.)vcs backed companies like staples (founded 1985) and starbucks (founded 1985), despite their high capital requirements and lack of barriers to entry.in the past 12 months, venture capitalists have invested a hefty $18.5 million in staples, inc…but in the same period–apparently lured by [staples] initial success–an estimated $10 million has been invested in at least five competing start-ups. (wall street journal, “retail start-up decides to start out big”, 5/14/1987.)as in the high-tech sectors, initial success was followed by over-funding.one of the hottest venture capital investment ideas–bankrolling office-supply discount chains–is starting to sour. in the past two years, investors poured nearly $200 million into at least 16 office-supply “supermarket” chains. but today, the flood of entrants threatens a market-share war, and the result may be hard times. several companies seem to be faltering, and at least two have closed. (wall street journal, “growth in office-supply ‘supermarkets’ threatens tough war for market share”, 12/1/1988.)top funds, like us venture partners and nea, moved “from their traditional high-tech portfolios into specialty retailing and consumer product investments.” 31 vcs had always backed retail companies (jiffy lube in 1979, for instance) but the volume of these deals increased. consumer was the largest single vc investment category, by dollars, in 1984 32 . and it was the largest category of vc-backed ipos in 1984, 1985, and 1986 33 . one unnamed venture capitalist said in the journal “although the prospects for unusually big hits like apple and sun are small, you can get good results with greater consistency.” 34 this turned out to be wishful thinking.while consumer related and ‘other products and services’ grew as a percent of vc disbursements, semiconductors, computer hardware, and communication shrank. software and services did not start to take off until the ’90s.source: national science foundation, science & engineering indicators – 2002, appendix table 06-19by the end of the decade venture capitalists started to admit that the attempt to create predictable returns had failed.in the mid-1980s, many [venture capitalists] experimented with investments in such low-tech industries as specialty retailing. results were generally disappointing, in part because the financiers often didn’t understand what they were getting into. (wall street journal, “venture capitalists find low-tech firms appealing”, 6/20/1991.)vcs acknowledged their inability to get venture capital returns in low-tech businesses by investing in more low-tech businesses:seeking greater safety, some venture capitalists say they increasingly invest in food retailing and distribution, waste management and other areas where emerging technology generally isn’t a factor. (ibid.)vcs disliked high-technology because the high-tech sectors of the day were poor candidates for venture. investments in cable-tv and cell-phone infrastructure could never have achieved the types of returns that an apple computer or genentech did, because they required so much capital. (even though capital-intensive companies like federal express had gone on to be successful ipos in the 1970s, they were still bad investments for their early backers 35 .) early stage investors, what few remained by the late 1980s, lowered their sites to avoid being crushed by future capital requirements. in biotech they gave up even trying to build self-sustaining companies that might one day go public.instead of building corporations and taking them public one day, these venture capitalists now develop companies purely for sale to big corporations. they make smaller investments for shorter periods than in the past. more than ever…they limit their risks and focus on developing products rather than companies. (wall street journal, “biotech start-ups are increasingly bred just to be sold”, 7/19/1989.)the vc investing landscape had, essentially, bifurcated. one group of vcs made small, earlier investments and  tried to manage their risk by investing in established markets or by building products, not companies; another group made much larger, later investments and tried to manage their risk by investing in companies that were not “startups” at all.the initial successes of the venture industry in the first half of the decade have led to an excess of “megafunds”–venture pools with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest. the sheer size of these funds has, in many instances, transformed seed capital from a primary activity to a marginal one. (wall street journal, “venture capital’s new look”, 5/20/1988.)the number of risk takers is decreasing.venture capitalists’ job is to invest in risky projects. but after shying away from risk for years, vcs finally found there was no longer anybody willing to found a risk-taking company. the number of high-tech starts plummeted.it looked, for a time, like high-tech was done. marc andreessen recently described the silicon valley he moved to in 1994:it was dead. dead in the water. there had been this pc boom in the ’80s, and it was gigantic—that was apple and intel and microsoft up in seattle. and then the american economic recession hit—in ’88, ’89—and that was on the heels of the rapid ten-year rise of japan. silicon valley had had this sort of brief shining moment, but japan was going to take over everything. and that’s when the american economy went straight into a ditch. you’d pick up the newspaper, and it was just endless misery and woe. technology in the u.s. is dead; economic growth in the u.s. is dead. (new york magazine, “ in conversation: marc andreessen “, 10/19/2014.)but, as every good contrarian knows, things are darkest before the dawn.there’s a big day coming, about a mile awaythere’s a big day coming, and i can hardly wait.it changed fast. a headline in the wall street journal in august 1991 moaned “venture capital funding for small companies plunges.” 37 a year later the headline read “venture funds regain appetite for start-ups.” 38 start-ups were back in favor.in 1993, investor interest in…young companies often focused on the new media and communications industry segments. the spotlight on new media and the emerging information superhighway helped early stage companies. (wall street journal, “firms backed by venture capitalists do well in ipos”, 1/14/1994.)the technologies enabling “new media” were not new. aol and cisco were both formed in the ’80s. the fiber optics that became the backbone of the “information superhighway” had also been laid in the ’80s 39 and the multimedia capabilities of pcs were the result of years of work 40 .the catalyst for the 1990s revolution was the invention of the world wide web by tim berners-lee in 1990. in january 1993, marc andreessen and eric bina released the first version of mosaic, an open-source web browser. also in 1993, cern announced the web was free for anyone to use, at just the time when the nsf freed the academic internet to connect with commercial networks. the 1990s had begun, high-tech was saved.consumer adoption of the web created some early winners. aol went public in 1992; netcom in 1994; uunet, spyglass and netscape in 1995; lycos, excite, yahoo!, compuserve, infoseek, c/net, and e*trade in 1996; and amazon, onsale, go2net, n2k, nextlink, and sportsline in 1997. then ipos got crazy. ten internet ipos in 1995 turned into 18 in 1996, 15 in 1997, and 40 in 1998; but in 1999 there were 272. even in 2000 there were 148, despite the stock market crash of march of that year (in 2001 reality sank in and there were only 6 internet ipos.) 41the large early stock price gains by netscape, amazon, and others rewoke investors to the potential of technology stocks and they bid up any company that had any involvement with the internet. private tech companies took advantage of the market opportunity by going public and investors bought these up too. these companies could not yet be evaluated on objective measures like earnings, so investors used the rising stock prices as the rationale to keep buying. anyone who questioned the sustainability of prices was told they just didn’t “get it.” 42entrepreneurs and venture investors struggled to satisfy the appetite of ipo investors. they took startups to market before they had proved their long-term viability, and funded any startup that might be able to make it to the public markets quickly. companies were funded with questionable markets, management teams, business models, and products.regardless, venture investors often made good money on these short-term bets. venture returns hit heights they had never seen, not even in the high-flying ’70s.money poured into venture at a rate that belied the 1980s warnings that the industry would need to shrink to prosper.and many more new funds were started to take the money.in march 2000, some investors realized that some of the public internet companies could not, under any reasonable growth and valuation assumptions, be worth what the market valued them at. they sold, and prices went down. other investors, seeing prices go down, decided to cut their risk by also selling. prices went down further. there was a brief rally and then investors lost their nerve. on march 27, 2000 the nasdaq, where many of the internet companies had listed their stock, closed at 4,959. by april 14, less than three weeks later, it had dropped more than 30%, to 3,321. the nasdaq lost half its value by the end of the year. it has never, even after almost 15 years, returned to the highs of march 2000.the ’90s were a bubble. investors bought stocks because they could sell into a rising market. vcs backed companies because they could take them public. everyone took brash product and market risks because the public markets did not care about these sorts of risks. but the ’80s were not a bubble. not every cycle is a bubble.if the fatal flaw of the ’90s was hubris–“this time it’s different”–the fatal flaw of the ’80s was fear. venture capitalists were afraid to take risks. instead they invested in known markets, less ambitious entrepreneurs, and later-stage companies. but you can’t get great returns without taking big risks: risk and reward are correlated. in the ’90s entrepreneurs and investors took huge risks and got big returns. in the ’80s they tried to avoid risk and got nothing.a couple of weeks ago the new york times said:the economics of starting companies, and investing in them, has changed over the last 15 years, said andy rachleff, a founder of benchmark capital…before the ascendancy of the internet, he said, venture capitalists invested in areas that had high technical risk and low market risk. it took a lot of capital to get these companies off the ground, but the odds that the company would succeed were relatively high if the company could deliver on its technology promise. “today,” he said, “it’s the opposite.”for that reason, many of the larger, more established venture funds are investing later, writing larger checks after concepts have proved themselves. these firms, which include andreessen horowitz, benchmark and sequoia capital, still account for the majority of all venture capital dollars. (new york times, venture capital is looking for ways to outrun the herd , 12/10/2014.)risk is uncertainty about the future. high technical risk means not knowing if a technology will work. high market risk means not knowing if there will be a market for your product. these are the primary risks that the vc industry as a whole contemplates. (there are other risks extrinsic to individual companies, like regulatory risk, but these are less frequent.)each type of risk has a different effect on vc returns. technical risk is horrible for returns, so vcs do not take technical risk. there are a handful of examples of high technical risk companies that had great returns–genentech 43 , for example–but they are few 44 . today, vcs wait until there is a working prototype before they fund, but successful vcs have always waited until the technical risk was mitigated. apple computer, for example, did not have technical risk: the technology worked before the company was funded.market risk, on the other hand, is directly correlated to vc returns. when apple was funded no one had any way of knowing how many people would buy a personal computer; the ultimate size of the market was analytically unknowable. dec, intel, google, etc. all went into markets that they helped create. high market risk is associated with the best vc investments of all time. in the late ’70s/early ’80s and again in the mid to late ’90s vcs were comfortable funding companies with mind-boggling market risk, and they got amazing returns in exchange. in the mid to late ’80s they were scared and funded companies with low market risk instead, and returns were horrible.today is like the 1980s. there are a plethora of me-too companies, companies with a new angle on a well-understood market, and companies founded with the hopes of being acquired before they need to bring on many customers. vcs are insisting on market validation before investing, and are putting money into sectors that have already seen big exits (a sign of a market that has already emerged.)saying vcs used to take high technical risk and now take high market risk is both an overly optimistic view of the past–the mythical golden age of heroic vcs championing the development of new technologies–and an overly optimistic view of the present–gutsy vcs funding radical innovations that create entirely new markets. neither of these things is true. vcs have never funded technical risk and they are not now funding market risk 45 . the vc community is purposely avoiding risk because we think we can make good returns without taking it. the lesson of the 1980s is that no matter how appealing this fantasy is, it’s still a fantasy.people in the vc industry talk about the ’60s, when institutional venture capital took off. they talk about the ’70s, when iconic companies like apple and genentech were founded and the microcomputer industry emerged. they talk about the ’90s and the internet bubble. they don’t talk about the ’80s; the ’80s are the missing piece of the puzzle. you can have lots of plausible theories about what venture capitalists as a class can do to get good returns, until you take the 1980s into account. then you can only have one: the only thing vcs can control that will improve their outcomes is having enough guts to bet on markets that don’t yet exist. everything else is noise.the 1990s are not our map, the 1980s are. don’t worry about irrational exuberance fueling a bubble, that is not what is happening. worry about fear of risk. we know where that leads: once again straight into the ditch.- thanks to justin singer for reading drafts of this and helping me think it through.“venture capital industry resources,” venture capital journal (july 1984), pp. 4-6. cited in bygrave & timmons, p. 165  ↩gompers, paul a. “the rise and fall of venture capital.” business and economic history 23.2 (1994) : 1–26. this paper is an excellent summary of venture capital pre-1990s, written just as the era was closing.  ↩, 1992, p. 149. although out of print, this book remains one of the best books on venture capital. you can buy it used on amazon for as little as $4.  ↩during the 1980s. it’s interesting to note that for post-1990s-vintage venture funds there is a bias towards experience: follow-on funds vastly outperformed first-time funds in the period 1990-1999. thompson reuters, 2008 investment benchmarks report: venture capital, figure 3.011.  ↩the idea of a “dominant design” that signals product innovation giving way to process innovation comes from utterback, james m., and william j. abernathy, “a dynamic model of product and process innovation”, omega 3(6) (1975) 639-656. it is very well described for a business audience in mastering the dynamics of innovationwall street journal, “as software products and firms proliferate, a shakeout is forecast”, 2/23/1984.  ↩winchester disk drive industry stats from sahlman, william a., and howard h. stevenson. “capital market myopia.” journal of business venturing 1985 : 7-30.  ↩disk drive company connor peripheral, for example, was founded in 1985 and went public in 1988. it produced an excellent return for its vcs.  ↩cisco went public in 1990 and was one of the best performing ipos of the ’90s. but what was a $6.4 billion revenue company by 1997 was in 1990 only $69 million in revenue. it raised venture only once, in 1988, from sequoia. the company’s prospects were so iffy at the time that the founders had to sell a controlling interest to sequoia, who turned around and ousted them before the ipo.  ↩wall street journal, “venture capital dims for startups, but not to worry”, 1/24/1990.  ↩national science foundation, science & engineering indicators – 2002, appendix table 06-19.  ↩the first $25 million in venture funding for federal express was crammed down in a pay-to-play funding in 1974. venture capital journal, “more money for federal express”, april 1974, p. 2.  ↩the wall street journal, in september 1986, said: “if industry plans succeed, fiber optic technology soon will vastly increase the capacity of of the u.s. long-distance telephone system…this fiber optic system will blaze telecommunication’s path into the 21st century.” wall street journal, “fiber optics promises high-tech revolution,” 9/9/1986.  ↩wall street journal, “vast changes loom as computers digest words, sounds, images,” 6/7/89.  ↩ipo data compiled by prof. jay ritter, univ. of florida .  ↩i can’t do justice to this late 1990s mindset here, that is another post. it was somewhat ludicrous even at the time and even to those of us who were true believers in the enormous importance of the internet.  ↩the history of genentech shows pretty clearly that vcs are explicitly uncomfortable with technical risk. a great read on this is sally smith hughes’ genentech: the beginnings of biotech .  ↩why this should be so is a pretty interesting question in itself. i’ve floated several hypotheses to friends but have nothing compelling.  ↩this is a macro view. of course vcs have funded companies that have high technical risk, and of course vcs fund companies that have high market risk. but it is not what they are doing generally.  ↩
rt @peterwsinger: validating @elonmusk and @stephenhawking_ worries about robot takeover....

"robot takes up beer pong"
 last year, gizmag reported on empire robotics’ versaball gripper , which looks like an executive stress ball, but is, in fact, an industrial robotic gripper designed to safely handle a wide variety of objects. to show that all work and no play makes jack a dull robot, versaball will take on pong champions from bpong.com and attendees at ces 2015, which will be held in las vegas from january 6 to 9.when versaball was introduced last year, it's purpose was to create a precision handling effector for robots that was simple, versatile, inexpensive, and safe to use around humans, yet was also precise, able to handle a wide variety of objects without retooling or reprogramming, and used a simple on/off actuator command. in this case, drawing air out of the effector to make it grip, and letting air back in to make it let go. unlike mechanical grippers based on hands, the design of the bag-like effector provides the gripping qualities.in the youtube video below, empire robotics demonstrates that versaball can not only pick up ping pong balls, but can also fire them into designated cups with great precision. it works a bit like an air cannon. in order to grip objects, the versaball sucks air out of the ball's polymer casing, causing the sand-like particles inside to form around the object being grasped and locked tight like coffee grounds in those vacuum packs that feel like bricks until they're opened. to let go, versaball blows air into the ball, the particles fall apart, and the object is released.the clever bit is that if the air is forced into the ball with a bit more pressure, the object gets shot out like a ping pong ball out of a pop gun. with proper control of the pressure, and a bit of aiming, this allows versaball attached to a ur arm to fire a pong ball seven feet (2.1 m) into a small plastic cup with considerable precision.versaball will take on any attendee at ces 2015 in a game of beer pong, building up to a match between the robot and the winners of bpong's world series of beer pong in a "man vs machine" round at 3:00 pm pst on january 6.empire robotics says that the purpose of the game is more than a way of giving ces goers a laugh. it's also meant to demonstrate versaball's ability to pick up and handle delicate objects, its ability to grip consistently, and to shoot a ball where it wants to with predictability. it also shows how versaball can work safely in cooperation with humans because the bean bag-like gripper is unlikely to hurt trapped fingers.the versaball is available as a research kit from empire robotics and comes in a variety of sizes and shapes.the video below shows versaball playing a round of beer pong.
 like many prominent journalists before him, new yorker pop-music critic sasha frere-jones is taking his talents to a website most people haven't heard of (so far, at least). the new york times reports that after 11 years at the magazine, frere-jones is heading to genius to serve as its executive editor. after launching in 2009 as rap genius, a site devoted to annotating rap lyrics, the company expanded beyond music last summer to include all types of text, from literature to legal documents. frere-jones may still contribute to the magazine, and he said he's leaving for a variety of reasons. he's excited about genius's ambitious project, naturally, but he admitted he was also thinking about his bedtime. "and i’ll be honest," he said, "i don’t want to stay up until 4 a.m. any more at shows, and you can annotate lyrics during the day."
rt @sub8u: scale! in 2014, amazon is estimated to have shipped 5 billion items (2 bn from third-parties).
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 the moto g became a success for motorola and challenged what low-cost android phones could be. daniel boczarski/getty images hide captionthe moto g became a success for motorola and challenged what low-cost android phones could be.around this time every year, retailers gird their loins and prepare to slash prices for the holiday shopping season. for many stores, black friday and cyber monday are opportunities to clear old stock (at a mild loss) and trigger a surge of spending that carries on well into december. deals on toys, televisions and tablets are meant to pull you into stores, where you're likely to splurge on other things like towels ... or perhaps a new cellphone.depending on when and where you look this week you'll be able to snag a new flagship class phone for as little as a penny if you're willing to sign a 2-year contract. there are a few contract-free devices being discounted this weekend, but the bulk of them aren't exactly the amazing "doorbusters" they're being advertised as. they're throwaway phones meant for short-term use. that's not a knock against the cheap phone market, however. in fact, some of the most interesting developments in cellphone tech are focused on the so-called "low end."once upon a time when you walked into a store looking to buy a new cell phone, you were presented with three options. high-end devices like apple's iphone and samsung's galaxy line were cutting edge, but expensive. mid-range phones like htc's desire series were cheaper, but not nearly as powerful. low-end phones were the most affordable, but also the most technologically limited of the bunch. their processors were slower, their screens were less crisp, and their build quality often left much to be, well, desired.looking at the market today, many things are the same. high-end phones are still pricey and aspirational while the midrange is still middling. cheap smartphones, however, are in a state of disruption. bargain-basement gadgets are giving way to bigger, better devices that are just as affordable. manufacturers like microsoft, motorola and oneplus are redefining what an affordable cellphone can do, and demanding that we put the term "low end" to rest.before it was officially acquired by microsoft , nokia released the lumia 520, 521 and 525 handsets that quickly became the most popular windows phones in the world . a sub-$100 price point and fairly smooth everyday use made the series ideal for first-time smartphone users. since then, microsoft has rolled out more cheap models that feature significant hardware upgrades, while maintaining ridiculously low price points. entry-level lumias demonstrated what companies could accomplish by building software meant to run on simpler, cheaper hardware.for the most part, the low-end smartphone market is dominated by android. with windows phone 8, however, microsoft targeted one of android's biggest weaknesses — performance. as powerful and customizable as android is, it has a track record of poor performance on phones with lower specs. windows phone may not be as popular as android, but it's a relatively standardized platform — meaning that using one windows phone feels like using nearly every windows phone.rather than treating the low end as an afterthought, microsoft began the trend of treating it as an opportunity to provide all consumers with a compelling experience.
rt @balajis: two authors in one!
- it relevance declining
http://t.co/xbtltjqrvn
- software has "dominion"
 by "bertknowles" on may 30, 2004just reading through the reviews already posted here shows how big a stir carr's ideas have caused. because of vested interests or emotional ties, some people have a deep fear of any criticism of it, and it blinds them to the reality of the situation. in my humble opinion, as someone who's worked in the it field for nearly two decades, i think carr has it exactly right. it's best to treat the technology as a fairly boring necessity - be frugal, buy standardised components, don't believe the hype. the book is carefully argued, and it makes for quite compelling reading. ignore it at your own risk.comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try againby anonymous reader on july 5, 2005this book, as nicholas carr has claimed about it, "doesn't matter". as one reviewer stated, carr is a good writer but should have kept his assertion to a short article.carr claims that it (hardware and software technologies) is becoming a commodity and therefore that by itself it does not provide competitive advantage. this is eye-opening and insightful only if one believes all the claims of the dot-com era (some of which are still turning out to be true after all) and if one does not understand that the economy is getting more competitive all the time. so what? isn't everything becoming commoditized? what is left after the information age and outsourcing of everything? some say it is the creative age, in which creativity and innovation are what confer true advantage - human mental processes, some of which have to do with using or applying technology differently.carr readily admits good use of it does confer an advantage - but again, isn't this true with any input or tool? it is management and innovative use of the input rather than the input itself that confers some advantage.one needs a much more sophisticated hands-on understanding of it besides the superficial observation that hardware and software technologies are becoming commodities available to all -- besides, this argument is only true in a 30,000 foot view of the world.when one looks closer, in most cases the "free" open source software that is theoretically available to all is not truly available to all because the expertise needed to use it is very limited. can all organizations use linux, perl, mysql, etc. equally well? if not, are they really "available to all", or only to those who can actually use them? read more ›comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try againthis is just an article from harvard business review blown up into a book. get the article reprint and save yourself time and money.comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try againby "rogkburns" on may 29, 2004i'm not a technologist and have no particularly strong feelings about information technology one way or the other. in my own experience, computers have good points and bad points. the reason i bought this book in the first place is because i read an interesting review of it in the new york times. now having read the book itself, i can say that i think it's really as much about how competition and strategy as about information technology per se. it's a very illuminating and thought-provoking book. it weaves together discussions of history, economics, and technology in an engaging way. the discussion gets complicated at times but it's always clearly written, even when the author's describing fairly esoteric aspects of software production. unlike just about every other business book i've read, there's little jargon and few wasted words. it moves fast and covers a lot of ground. the book ends with a broader discussion of some of the the social and political consequences of computerization, which is also fascinating. so i can't say whether all carr's recommendations are valid or not, and i guess that doesn't really matter to me. i enjoyed the book, and i learned a lot from it. i'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in business or business history.comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try againby "khulse6" on may 17, 2004when i saw the hysterical reaction of some big wigs in the tech industry to carr's argument (steve ballmer called it "hogwash"), it made it seem like the author was an anti-technology extremist. so i was surprised to find this book to be so calmly written and so knowledgeable about the history of information technology. carr isn't saying that it is unimportant or that technological progress won't continue but that most companies won't be able to use it itself to provide a strategic advantage. he shows that companies like american airlines and reuters used to be able to use their systems to block competitors, but that's not possible anymore. in fact, he says, trying to get an advantage by creating a customized system will probably backfire by being too costly and complicated. it's better to just find a standardized solution that does what you want it to do at the lowest cost possible. this seems to me fairly sensible advice, and carr provides a lot of evidence to support it. the book puts it into a broader context which i found very helpful.comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try againby john matlock on june 23, 2004full title: does it matter? information technology and the corrosion of competitive advantage -- with $2 trillion being spent on computers and communications each year there is an underlying assumption that it is critical to increasing the competitive advantage and strategic success of a business.but with the ready availability of computers, storage, software and people, has the it function perhaps become one of the foundation building blocks of a corporation, just like sales, engineering or manufacturing?similar to other books that are appearing, the author argues that it is time to look at it with a managerial view. what are you getting for the investment? is it simply another cost center or a strategic benefit to the company? how do you control costs and yet get the information you need in a timely manner? the book provides an interesting and timely view of such points.comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try again
  “it was like walking into a nightmare,” says matsuda, 42, a former transportation adviser to the late democratic senator frank lautenberg. “i looked around and said, ‘guys, what’s happening?’”the bush administration’s last marad loan guarantee, a $140 million deal to help a politically connected firm build two “superferries” to shuttle passengers around hawaii, imploded shortly after matsuda arrived. marad got stuck with the ferries, which it eventually offloaded to the navy. then a marine services outfit with a marad loan went bankrupt, prompting panicky meetings about whether seizing its collateral—a supply boat at work in nigeria’s offshore oil industry—would spark an international incident. then another dying shipping company missed a payment on a loan secured by four double-hulled oil tankers. after weeks of confusion, marad’s lawyers informed matsuda he needed to arrest the four football-field sized ships.“honestly, i didn’t even know you could arrest ships,” he recalls.marad struggled just to locate the tankers, which were scattered around the gulf of mexico and the eastern seaboard. one captain apparently turned off his transponders to evade detection. “they were moving from port to port to avoid us,” an official recalls. “we’d go looking for a ship, they’d be gone before we got there.” the four ships were finally tracked down in three states; federal marshals had to board them, place them under arrest and claim them for the government. marad ended up selling them for scrap, recovering just $7 million of the $88 million it was owed.this is what can happen, matsuda says, when a little marine agency like marad is assigned to evaluate big-money credit deals. “it’s never going to lure financial talent away from wall street,” says matsuda, who left the government in 2013 and is now a transportation consultant in washington. “it’s not a bank.”no, marad is not a bank. it’s more accurate to say it runs the shipbuilding-loan division of a much larger bank—in fact, america’s largest bank.that bank currently has a portfolio of more than $3 trillion in loans, the bulk of them to about 8 million homeowners and 40 million students, the rest to a motley collection of farmers and fishermen, small businesses and giant exporters, clean-energy firms and fuel-efficient automakers, managed-care networks and historically black colleges, even countries like israel and tunisia. it has about 120 different credit programs but no consistent credit policy, requiring some borrowers to demonstrate credit-worthiness and others to demonstrate need, while giving student loans to just about anyone who wants one. it runs a dozen unconnected mortgage programs, including separate ones targeting borrowers in need, native americans in need, veterans in need and, yes, native american veteran borrowers in need. its problems extend well beyond deadbeat shipbuilders.that bank, of course, is the united states government—the real bank of america—and it’s unlike any other bank.for starters, its goal is not profit, although it is profitable on paper, and its loans are supposed to help its borrowers rather than its shareholders, better known as taxpayers. its lending programs sprawl across 30 agencies at a dozen cabinet departments, with no one responsible for managing its overall portfolio, evaluating its performance or worrying about its risks. the closest it gets to coordination is an overwhelmed group of four midlevel office of management and budget employees known as “the credit crew.” they’re literally “non-essential” employees—they were sent home during the 2013 government shutdown—and they’re now down to three, because their leader is on loan to the department of housing and urban development. when i suggested to omb officials that the crew seemed understaffed to oversee a credit portfolio 25 percent larger than jpmorgan chase’s, someone pointed out that it’s hiring an intern.these unregulated and virtually unsupervised federal credit programs are now the fastest-growing chunk of the united states government, ballooning over the past decade from about $1.3 trillion in outstanding loans to nearly $3.2 trillion today. that’s largely because the financial crisis sparked explosive growth of student loans and federal housing administration mortgage guarantees, which together compose two-thirds of the bank of america. but even after the crisis, as a washington austerity push has restrained direct spending, many credit programs have kept expanding, in part because they help politicians dole out money without looking like they’re spending. in 2012, congress boosted funding for a transportation loan program called tifia eightfold, while launching a similar initiative for water projects called wifia. there’s now talk of a new credit program for public buildings—naturally, bifia.data: office of management and budget (housing includes fha, department of veterans' affairs, usda rural housing service); illustration by oliver mundayone reason for the bank’s explosive growth is old-fashioned special-interest politics, as beneficiaries of credit programs—the real estate industry, for-profit schools, the farm lobby, small-business groups, even shipbuilders—push aggressively to grow them. a washington money spigot, once opened, is almost never turned off. since fishermen in the northwest halibut/sablefish and alaska king crab fisheries got their own $24 million loan program, it’s a good bet that nobody’s paid closer attention to it on capitol hill than their lobbyists. but the federal credit boom has just as much to do with arcane budget politics. critics believe the unorthodox government accounting system for credit programs dramatically understates their costs, encouraging congress to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in expected savings that might never materialize. it’s not just a theoretical risk: the fha has already received a series of unpublicized quasi-bailouts since the financial crisis, amounting to more than the $45 billion government bailout the corporate bank of america received in 2008. some critics believe student loans, budgeted as a government moneymaker, could be heading for a far worse fiscal disaster.but the financial and political risks associated with federal credit have not yet registered with most policymakers, much less the public, even after credit controversies like the solar manufacturer solyndra’s default on its clean-energy loan, the escalating student debt crisis and the high-profile effort by congressional republicans to kill the low-profile export-import bank. “the depth of ignorance is stunning,” says brookings institution fellow douglas elliott, a former investment banker who wrote a book called uncle sam in pinstripes about the government as a financial institution.some of the federal government’s credit operations produce failure rates no private bank would tolerate. the department of agriculture’s loan programs promoting biofuel refineries, rural broadband and renovations of rural apartment buildings have all performed even worse than marad’s, recovering less than 40 cents per dollar, the kind of return you might expect lending to your brother-in-law. the average default rate for private bank loans is about 3 percent; by contrast, the state department’s “repatriation” loans to americans who get stuck without cash abroad have a 95 percent default rate. usda’s main mortgage program for rural families retrieves just 3 cents on the dollar from borrowers who default, suggesting it barely tries to collect when loans go bad.michael grunwald is a senior staff writer for politico magazine.
 an immigration and customs enforcement agent checks under a car’s hood as it waits to enter the u.s. from mexico through the san ysidro port of entry in san diego. a majority of meth seizures at the border in the last fiscal year were made in san diego. (gregory bull/ap)san diego — seizures of methamphetamine soared at the u.s.-mexico border during fiscal 2014, accelerating a trend that began several years ago as new laws that limited access to the drug’s chemical ingredients made it harder to manufacture it in the united states.meth seized by the u.s. customs and border protection’s san diego field office accounted for nearly two-thirds — 63 percent — of all the meth seized at all ports of entry nationwide in the fiscal year ended sept. 30, the san diego union-tribune newspaper reported sunday.almost all of the meth consumed in the united states was once manufactured domestically, with san diego as a known production hub.but a crackdown in the united states on the precursor chemicals used to make the synthetic drug has pushed its manufacture south of the border, where drug cartels find it cheaper and easier to produce and smuggle over the border than cocaine from south america, the paper reported.with the california border as their main smuggling route, “the mexican cartels are flooding the u.s. marketplace with their cheap methamphetamine,” said gary hill, the u.s. drug enforcement administration’s assistant special agent in charge in san diego.u.s. customs and border protection figures show a 300 percent increase in meth seizures at california ports of entry from fiscal 2009 to 2014.agents find the drug, often in smaller quantities, strapped to pedestrians crossing the border, in gas tanks, mixed in with clothing or hidden in food cans emptied of their original contents. in some instances, smugglers are liquefying the drug and trying to conceal it as windshield-washer fluid.undercover agents are buying it in san diego for about $3,500 a pound — about a third of the cost of a pound of cocaine — and prices have been decreasing since 2008, hill said. he added that, unlike with cocaine, drug cartels can eliminate the middleman by directly overseeing meth manufacturing, and the smaller overhead means a cheaper street price in the united states.joe garcia, interim special agent in charge of u.s. immigration and customs enforcement homeland security investigations in san diego, said much of the meth coming into san diego is headed north. los angeles has emerged as an important hub for shipments headed elsewhere, he said.“our investigations take us through all corners of the country,” he said. “it’s going into canada as well.”authorities in san diego have seen the consequences of more meth coming across the border.emergency-room visits and deaths are up, as are the number of arrests for meth, said angela goldberg, coordinator for the meth strike force, an effort by law enforcement and health officials in san diego county to combat meth.and drug prosecutions in san diego county for meth jumped from eight in 2013 to 60 in 2014.“it’s very hard to get past these drug cartels,” goldberg said. “they’re very good at what they do.”
 just in time for the federally-recognized-holiday-of-25-december-that-shall-go-unnamed we have a suitable gift for science deniers everywhere. alex epstein’s the moral case for fossil fuelsscience deniers? yes, sir. those who deny the science that failed forecasts imply failed theories, and those that claim fossil fuels have been more harmful than good to the human race. invariably and amusingly, these deniers use fossil fuel-derived technologies, like computers, to make their claims. but we don’t expect rationality from deniers, do we?deniers is as stupid a word as it sounds, folks. be embarrassed for whomever uses it. to the book!here is a scientific near certainty: if we were to curtail dramatically the use of fossil fuels, the world would be destroyed. here is a scientific probability: that if we do not dramatically curtail the use of fossil fuels, the world might be inconvenienced by global warming.the chance of heat doom is exceedingly small both because the models which predict this devastation have proved themselves incapable of making skillful forecasts, thus there is little evidence of such a calamity, and because humans are clever at adapting to changes in the environment, proved by you sitting at your computer reading this. but the chance that we fall into chaos and death by the removal of oil is so certain as to be almost a truism.incidentally, when epstein uses world he means human beings, their livelihoods and culture and not anything else. aren’t these the most important things on the planet? doesn’t the welfare of human beings trump every other consideration?if you say “yes”, you are sane.  if not, not—and probably even a little dangerous. if you would choose the life of a tree or snail over a person, then you are fundamentally broken.  many are. and it is this divide—people versus everything else—which most interests epstein. this is why he says correctly things like “the 50-95 percent bans [of fossil fuels] over the next several decades that have been proposed, is a guaranteed death sentence for billions—we would be willing to accept ten times more hurricanes if we had to.” and “the less [oil] we produce, the more preventable suffering and death will exist. to not use fossil fuels, therefore, is beyond a risk—it is certain moral peril for mankind.”wait. who endorses 95-percent bans?  bill mckibben, for one. and don’t forget john holdren, president obama’s science adviser, called mckibben “the nation’s leading environmentalist.”i was thrilled to read that epstein understood “ hindcasting ” is not a measure of future forecast skill.  he knows “a model is not valid until it makes real, forward predictions“, a once prominent scientific precept now abandoned for obvious political reasons.  epstein also knows that “every prediction of drastic future consequences is based on speculative models that have failed to predict the climate trend so far and that speculate a radically different trend than what has actually happened in the last thirty to eights years of emitting substantial amounts of co2.” i wept when i read that.here’s more science epstein knows: “what’s most striking is that these extremely positive plant effects of co2 are scientifically uncontroversial yet practically never mentioned, even by the climate science community. this is a dereliction of duty.” i once mentioned this to a prominent scientist during a television interview at the madrid royal science academy.  the scientist went apoplectic, said it wasn’t, couldn’t be true!  yeesh. try taking carbon dioxide from plants and see how many bowls of corn flakes you can fill.the book is filled with wisdom, but my favorite story is the (admittedly cartoon-like) graph which appears at the top of this post.  unquestionably, co2 output from humans is on the increase. but look at what tremendous benefits that arise from this!  life expectancy is soaring, and so is our ability to create things.  population is also increasing.why? don’t you like people? are you a hater? those who misunderstand malthus never get this right. it is increasing food supplies and other creature comforts provided by oil that caused the population increase (and now decrease in birth rates in western nations). “to put it bluntly, in our ‘natural climate,’ absent technology, human beings are as sick as dogs and drop like flies.” if there wasn’t enough food, then there wouldn’t be new people. that’s that. that people can’t see this seems to be one of those uncorrectable errors, an error which is a central tenet of enviro-religion.a natural gas fire would warm them nicely.epstein emphasizes that resources are made, not discovered. gaseous and liquid pockets of stuff underground amount to nothing until we turn them into useful things. “oil is the most coveted (and controversial) fuel in the world because it is almost eerily engineered by natural processes, not just for cheapness, not just for reliability, not just for scalability, but also for another characteristic crucial to a functional civilization: portability.” and “it’s true that once we burn a barrel of oil, it’s gone. but it’s also true that human ingenuity can dramatically increase the amount of coal, oil, or gas that is available.” like by the new f-word, fracking.“for something to be cheap and plentiful, every part of the process to produce it, including every input that goes into it, must be cheap and plentiful.” this is not so for wind and solar energy, nor biofuels.  the first two are not reliable, are expensive, variable and unpredictable. the last sacrifices food for expensive feel-good car fuel. how about hydropower, then? why not! it’s clean, sure, and efficient? oops. no. “environmental activists have spent decades shutting down as many hydroelectric dams as possible…despite hydro’s proven track record as a cheap, reliable source of co2-free power, in the name of protecting species of fish, free-flowing rivers, and other justifications that focus on nonhuman nature.”people are well down the list of things to protect for environmentalists.example? epstein writes of a lake in china, a “vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals…seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals…dalahai villagers say their teeth began to fall our, their hair turned white…severe skin and respiratory disease..cancer rates rocketed.” etc. he puts this story to college students who then call for whatever it is that caused this lake to be “banned”.until they learn this waste is the result of processing for solar energy materiel. then students have appointments they suddenly remember.environmentalists want to “minimize” our “impact” on the environment. but to minimize is to eliminate, for if any man lives, even for a moment, he must necessarily “impact” the environment. even dying “impacts”. thus the only way to minimize is for everybody to commit suicide instantly.skip it. logical arguments won’t get you far when dealing with enviro-religion, nor with the mostly well-to-do westerners who pray at the temple of gaia. quoting milton friedman: “the rich in ancient greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing—running servants replaced running water. television and radio—the patricians of rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leads artists as domestic retainers] ” the wealthy environmentalists have their comforts, but what they can’t abide is anybody else joining their club.“there are 7 billion people in the world, but 1.3 billion have no electricity” and another 3 billion have very little.  if by allowing these people to use oil, we ever-so-slightly, and probably not at all, increase the chance of a wee increase in the temperature, one which we could well adapt to, then it’s worth it. unless you care more about yourself than others.ah, but everybody already knows environmentalists love the people and hate people. example. “prince philip, former head of the world wildlife fun, has said, ‘in the event that i am reincarnated, i would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.'” charming.we need to say “loudly and proudly” that “human life is our one and only standard of value.” yet what do oil companies do? epstein discovered exxon mobil, shell, and chevron won’t even use the word oil on their home pages. they instead focus on “charitable contributions”, they praise their enemies as “idealistic”, they apologize for their “environmental footprint.” they play only defense. “the industry’s position amounts to this: ‘our product isn’t moral, but it’s something that we will need for some time as we transition to the ideal fossil-free future.'”epstein outlines four common bad arguments (there are more).  (1) “abuse-use”: “it is irrational to say that because a technology or practice can be abused, it ought not be used.” if we followed this reasoning, we’d have to eliminate all government. right?  (2) “false-attribution”: as in showing your water can catch fire and blaming fracking. “a more sophisticated version of false attribution uses prestigious studies based on speculative models.” amen. (3) “no-threshold”: “a poison or pollutant is always a combination of substance and dose….people said we should have zero tolerance for radiation—not knowing, apparently, that the potassium in their bone tissue emits radiation, enough so that sleeping with a spouse gives you almost as much radiation as standing right outside a nuclear power plant.” (4) “artificial” “man-made.” all we need say here is boo!what about fusion, the epitome of clean, renewable, potentially unlimited energy? “leading environmentalist jeremy rifkin: ‘it’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.'” “paul erhlich: developing fusion for human beings would be ‘like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.'” and that’s only a small sample of the appeals to emotion progressives use. radiation! boo!epstein wanders into strange territory when he says curious and false things about religions (“many religious people think that it is wrong to eat certain foods or to engage in certain sexual acts, not because there is any evidence that these foods or acts are unhealthy or otherwise harmful to human beings but simply because they believe god forbids them”),  and he uses too many stacked bar and line charts, which are always a sin. but nobody bats 1.000.  buy the book.mr epstein graciously provided me with my draft copy of his book. all emphasis marks above original.
 china is `top uncertainty' for global market: taochina ’s factory-gate prices extended a record stretch of declines, with the sharpest drop in two years in december, suggesting room for further monetary easing.the producer-price index slumped 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the national bureau of statistics said in beijing today, compared with the median projection for a 3.1 percent decline in a survey of analysts by bloomberg news. the slide has yet to be fully reflected in consumer prices , which rose 1.5 percent, matching the median estimate.tumbling oil and metal prices have extended the run of producer-price declines to a record 34 months, adding to deflationary pressures worldwide as china’s export prices drop. economists anticipate the central bank will follow up a november interest-rate cut with further reductions, and with lower reserve requirements for lenders.“the oil price drop is one factor, but the more important factor of the ppi decline is the weakness of the global economy -- look at europe and japan ,” said larry hu, head of china economics at macquarie securities ltd. in hong kong. “with trade and other inflation transmission methods, the whole world is facing disinflation pressure.”factory-gate prices of oil and gas slumped 19.7 percent from a year earlier in december, while coal tumbled 12.2 percent and ferrous metals 19 percent, according to a statement on the nbs website.“the oil price slump is way faster than expected and domestic demand is weak,” said zhu haibin , chief china economist at jpmorgan chase & co. in hong kong. zhu said an expected weak start of 2015 will prompt the government to step up measures to support the economy.to contact bloomberg news staff for this story: xiaoqing pi in beijing at xpi1@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: malcolm scott at mscott23@bloomberg.net rina chandranpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 even veteran currency traders who have seen it all were shocked.the swiss national bank’s surprise decision on thursday to stop reining in the value of the swiss franc prompted an extraordinary move in the currencies market, one bigger than any that traders could remember. the franc soared 23% against the euro and 21% versus the dollar, as...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 genius, the andreessen horowitz-backed startup that made headlines earlier this week when it poached pop music critic sasha frere-jones from the new yorker and hired new yorker contributor christopher glazek, has quietly made major changes in the last month—bringing on two well-connected millennials to handle p.r. and branding and testing a new feature, currently in beta, that promises to fundamentally transform the service.the company recently hired emily segal as creative director and retained audrey gelman as a spokeswoman. segal is a cofounder of the “trend forecasting group” k-hole, which has among other things the distinction of coining the term “normcore” ( read more here if you must ). gelman, who has been profiled by the new york times and the new york observer , handled the press for scott stringer’s successful comptroller campaign two years ago, and inspired allison williams’ character on hbo’s “girls,” now heads the “millennial strategy” division at strategic communications firm skdknickerbocker, where she is a senior vice president.the company has often received bad press in the past—both as a result of the antics of cofounder mahbod moghadam (who was finally ousted from the company last may) and the site's early reputation as a place where white people mock rap lyrics . genius could certainly use a rebrand and a better media strategy, especially as it prepares to introduce its new web annotation feature to the public—but its next moves could prove much bigger even than that.genius (formerly rap genius, and before that, rap exegesis) started life as a lyrics annotation site that let people upload the lyrics to rap songs and then leave notes explaining their meanings. the site soon expanded to other genres of music and then other types of text, such as poetry, speeches, and the like. in may 2013, it launched news genius , a section of the site in which the text of major news stories could be posted and annotated. last july, it added the ability to embed annotatable text into other websites.earlier this month, though, the company quietly introduced what could become its most significant feature—the ability to annotate any page on the web. currently in beta testing, the new functionality lets users add genius.com/ to the beginning of any url to access a version of the page on genius. the page is fully annotatable, so users can highlight and annotate any text on the page and view others’ annotations.right now, only a small group of beta testers—among them genius employees, longtime users of the platform, andreessen horowitz partners marc andreessen and ben horowitz, cuny journalism professor jeff jarvis, and fusion editor felix salmon—have the ability to actually create annotations on web pages, but anyone can view them.this feature brings genius close to its stated goal to “annotate the world.” when andreessen first invested in genius back in october 2012, he said that he wanted the company to eventually develop technology that could annotate any page on the web. it was a technology he had first thought about building in 1993, when he created the first web browser, mosaic. but the feature was scrapped before mosaic was released.“i often wonder how the internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything … 20 years later, rap genius finally gives us the opportunity to find out,” he wrote in a post on genius .the web page annotation feature that genius introduced earlier this month seems to fulfill andreessen’s vision—with one exception: users are required to go through genius.com to annotate other web sites’ pages. when someone views a nytimes.com article in genius (such as this one ), they are visiting genius rather than nytimes.com, even if much of the content is coming from nytimes.com.in many ways, genius’ web annotation feature is a new form of aggregation, and like older forms of news aggregation, it raises questions about the relationship between content producers and aggregators. just a few years ago, there were serious debates about whether aggregators like the huffington post and gawker were “stealing” traffic and ad revenue from newspapers. in march 2011, the new york times' then-executive editor bill keller memorably compared the huffington post’s business model to that of somali pirates.in the past, genius has been accused of stealing content. back when it was just a lyrics site, it hosted song lyrics uploaded by users without paying to license the lyrics from music publishers. though this is a common practice among free lyrics sites, it is technically illegal since the lyrics are copyrighted. last may, genius finally settled with the music publishers and began licensing lyrics.but genius’ web annotation feature will have a more complex effect on news sites’ revenue models. a source inside the company told capital that visiting a site’s web page in genius will still trigger a hit (and presumably revenue from display ads) for the site being annotated. the source also said that genius cannot be used to bypass online publications’ hard paywalls. unlike google cache, genius is accessing a live version of the page, so attempts to view paywalled content—such as a financial times article or capital pro content—in genius will just show (an annotatable version of) a website’s standard “this article requires a subscription” message.so it seems genius is not taking away traffic and ad revenue from news sites, though it is taking away a measure of control. since genius does not require news sites to implement their technology on the sites themselves—instead routing the annotations through genius.com—there is no way for news sites to opt out of the feature.an annotation left on a vox.com article by timothy lee  about genius’ pitch to news organizations touts this as a feature—and itself provides an example: “even if annotation is a feature that users and website operators want, genius will face a second challenge: convincing sites to use genius' own technology instead of building their own,” lee writes in the article.if you view the article in genius , you can see that a beta tester with the username vesuvius has highlighted the above passage and added an annotation with a message to other websites: “it isn’t the website’s choice. they don’t need to be persuaded. they are being annotated.”
 
 until recently, china’s internet economy was consumer driven. the country leads the world in the number of internet users, and chinese enterprises deploy sophisticated e-commerce strategies. the same companies, though, have lagged behind the united states and other developed nations in using the internet to run key aspects of their businesses (exhibit 1).china’s internet has been more consumer than enterprise driven.that’s changing. china’s companies are quickly climbing the adoption curve. their increased digital engagement will not only give the economy a new burst of momentum but also change the nature of growth. china sorely needs a new leg of expansion because the industrial growth of recent years—driven by heavy capital expenditures in manufacturing—will be difficult to sustain. the internet, by contrast, should foster new economic activity rooted in productivity, innovation, and higher consumption.for global companies counting on china for continued growth, the new internet wave will change the nature of competition: it will enable the most efficient chinese companies to grow more quickly, shine more transparency on business and consumer markets, and create conditions for a better allocation of capital.a new mckinsey global institute report looks broadly at the coming transformation. 1 our research shows that chinese companies are investing heavily in the building blocks of the internet economy: cloud computing, wireless communications, new digital platforms, big data analytics, and more. across six sectors (exhibit 2), which accounted for 25 percent of chinese economic activity in 2013, we find that increased internet adoption could add 60 billion to 1.2 trillion renminbi (about $10 billion to $190 billion) in gdp to individual sectors by 2025. about one-third of these gains will come from the creation of entirely new markets, the remainder from productivity gains across the value chain. when we scale up this level of growth across all sectors of the economy, we find that internet adoption could add 4 trillion to 14 trillion renminbi to gdp by 2025. the internet is also expected to contribute 7 to 22 percent of total gdp growth from 2013 to 2025. 2the adoption of new internet applications may have a substantial economic impact in key sectors of china’s economy.as the new technologies cascade through markets, less productive business models will cede ground to more innovative ones. companies will realize broad productivity gains in operations by automating processes, streamlining product development, and digitally reinforcing their supply chains. similar improvements will take shape in marketing and distribution as sales organizations deploy the internet to expand their reach and enrich customer interactions. consumers and businesses alike will benefit from lower prices and transaction costs, as well as better goods and services. and in a significant shift, a more wired world will allow china’s entrepreneurs and small and midsize businesses—often handicapped by lower productivity—to scale up rapidly at lower cost.more specifically, our exploration of how chinese enterprises are integrating the internet into their processes suggests five implications for competition and market dynamics:china’s industrial expansion will probably slow down from its levels during the past decade, and companies are struggling with excess capacity. many are looking to the internet for a new set of tools to engineer productivity improvements. in the automotive sector, one example is anji logistics, a subsidiary of saic motor. using sensors and communications capabilities—the internet of things—the company manages logistics for automakers and other oems, helping them optimize inventory levels and transport routes.our findings, in fact, indicate that supply-chain and operations improvements will be the most potent contributor to internet-led value gains in autos.china’s chemical industry, while still in the relatively early stages of internet use, is exploring ways to employ big data on inventory levels and shipments to improve forecasting and product planning. in china’s dynamic real-estate sector, online markets operated by players such as anjuke and soufun are streamlining information-search and transaction processes, thus shaving commissions and bringing down prices for customers. healthcare providers are implementing remote patient monitoring to stretch their footprints to underserved patient populations while substantially saving costs for patients with chronic disease.an underdeveloped financial infrastructure has constrained some areas of china’s economy. the growing use of internet platforms, combined with increased data and analytics capabilities, means that china’s financial institutions can allocate their scarce resources more effectively and expand the economy’s base of borrowers and investors.one of china’s most significant gaps is in lending to small and midsize enterprises. data about a growing number of companies and new analytics tools are giving banks better ways to target risk, thereby lowering the incidence of nonperforming loans and increasing the confidence of lenders. digitally mediated transactions, meanwhile, are reducing lending costs—another benefit for smaller business borrowers.a parallel trend is unfolding in consumer lending. digitization allows banks and other credit suppliers to monitor huge numbers of transactions and to evaluate the risks posed by borrowers more effectively while expanding loans. regulators are authorizing pilot programs in online lending by newly formed private players. technology companies such as alibaba and tencent are using access to massive amounts of data to lower lending risks and expand the horizons of consumer credit. our research suggests that better risk management could create the greatest amount of additional value in china’s financial services.securities firms, insurers, and banks are building mobile and online channels to distribute new and more specialized products to a long tail of investors. online discount brokers, for example, are using internet platforms to lower commissions on investment products. this development has given rise to popular products such as yu’ebao (created by alipay), a money-market fund that lets consumers easily move excess savings to accounts bearing higher interest. online mortgage lending is taking hold as well, expanding the base of home buyers.social technologies and new digital platforms ease the way for richer interactions with customers and allow companies to meet demand from a more diverse range of buyers, often in new or hard-to-reach markets. jiangsu sanfangxiang and shandong chambroad, early movers among china’s domestic chemical manufacturers, are using e- commerce platforms to cut administrative and transaction costs and to provide a base for closer collaboration with their customers. following the pattern in the b2c realm, china’s b2b players are using internet technologies to expand their markets from large cities to smaller ones. chemical manufacturers in the agricultural sector are sizing up the potential for big data to help farmers monitor crop conditions in real time, allowing these companies to customize their offerings of products to increase farm yields.automakers, meanwhile, are finding that popular vehicle-shopping sites, such as autohome and bitauto (yiche.com), help them to identify and inform likely car buyers. that is proving to be an important tool for increasing conversion rates among undecided shoppers. chinese car buyers, like those in the west, are demanding systems offering gps, maintenance alerts, and diagnostics that not only improve the customer experience but also offer robust data to manufacturers for improving products and marketing efforts. in addition, internet sites are sparking china’s online used-car markets, where companies like cheyipai and youxinpai are bridging the information gap and helping dealerships source quality used cars.across consumer markets, companies are using china’s established social and search sites, such as baidu, to mine data on ever-changing tastes and customer preferences. their ability to expand delivery through mobile channels is growing as well. in real estate, china’s big residential-property developer vanke has experimented with location-based advertising, using tencent’s advertising platform, guangdiantong, to build awareness among potential buyers. vanke has also partnered with online marketplace taobao to offer promotional coupons to purchasers. in healthcare, advanced communication technologies permit china’s first-tier hospitals, via regional health-information networks, to extend high-quality treatment to underused lower-tier hospitals by linking patients to medical specialists.the internet blazes new pathways to innovative products, services, and business models. digitally enabled innovation will add a new dimension to the efforts of chinese companies, large and small, to compete as they climb the learning curve.in consumer electronics, companies are gaining familiarity with open-source processes that can transform r&d. these processes widen access to innovative designs that can differentiate products and get them to market faster. mobile-device maker xiaomi has built a community of fans, known as mi fen (a play on words that means rice flour and is short for xiaomi fan), who provide feedback and recommendations for smartphone designs, consumer-friendly features, and other improvements. computer maker lenovo held a chuang ke 3 competition where 50,000 participants contributed close to 100,000 product ideas. 4 some participants even developed their products with funds raised on crowdsourcing platforms. volkswagen’s china operations, meanwhile, launched the people’s car project to develop new concepts. to shape product innovations, chemical manufacturers are starting to share information with suppliers and customers, hoping to enlist their expertise.as internet capabilities are integrated with a growing number of products, new business models are arising. china’s fast-moving internet-tv market is a case in point. because chinese consumers are highly price sensitive, vendors often make little money from hardware. instead, they are looking for ways to use digital platforms to create “multisided” markets where revenue streams flow from services such as media content and advertisements. letv, for instance, provides its internet-tv set-top-box hardware for free but charges 490 renminbi for a 12-month subscription. this model has sparked new collaborations between china’s tv manufacturers and content providers seeking to bundle services with hardware offerings. some companies are swiftly turning to successful new models pioneered beyond china’s borders. following the trend in western cities where popular smartphone apps have revolutionized taxi services, residents of china’s major urban areas now use didi and kuaidi to summon the nearest available cab.internet technologies lower entry barriers across sectors, giving unexpected competitive power to new players, from online insurers without field agents to mobile-service providers with capital-light models. this new competition may render the business models of some established players obsolete, weeding out companies that can’t adapt. in china, businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees contribute 70 percent of gdp. 5 yet for the most part, they lag behind bigger players in productivity. going digital will neutralize some of the disadvantages these enterprises face, by helping them manage supply chains more effectively, cement customer loyalty, lower transaction costs, and achieve wider distribution.one example of the trend is appliance maker xiaogou. originally lacking the scale or capabilities to build up a network of brick-and-mortar distributors, xiaogou shifted to the exclusive use of online platforms for marketing and distribution. we expect that a growing number of smaller chinese enterprises will eventually become “micromultinationals” by operating from new platforms, particularly as the number of digitally savvy chinese entrepreneurs continues to grow.since the chinese market lies at the heart of growth strategies for many global companies, senior executives must ready them to compete on the new terrain. four principles will help define their response.zero in on the customer. given the size and rapid growth of china’s consumer market, companies have often prospered by focusing on large-scale production and mass-market channels. looking forward, customer needs will become increasingly fragmented. to meet this challenge, companies have to widen their choice of suppliers, glean the more detailed customer insights available from better information, and ultimately produce a broader and more complex portfolio of products targeted to what consumers really want.consider the competitors you don’t know yet. the internet has unleashed a new era of intense competition, and companies will need to be fast and flexible to stay ahead. competition can emerge rapidly from unexpected corners, and as barriers between sectors become blurred, start-ups based on digital models will gain momentum. leaders will need to commit resources to the digital transformation to maintain their position. although the cost of these efforts will strain companies in the short term, they will open the way for long-term benefits.retool operations for a digital age. agility is the key word. across the new chinese landscape, internet capabilities will require much more than a focus on customer-facing operations. a new operating strategy will integrate internet technologies into back-office functions, production processes, and supply chains, to achieve new efficiencies. cios and other technology specialists will need to change their mind-set about big data, adopt multichannel models, and champion operational improvements.drill down on your organizational capabilities. across china, companies are facing talent shortages for highly specialized roles in big data analytics, particularly in sectors such as finance, where changes are coming fast. meantime, labor-intensive industries will need to attract more knowledge workers as digital technologies become “wrappers” for many goods and services. outside hiring to attract new talent will be needed, but companies must also be creative about developing their talent pipelines, exploring industry collaboration to create skills in short supply in china, and seeking out partnerships with universities.the open-ended characteristics of internet technologies will challenge traditional business models that keep value-chain activities in-house. the next phase of change will tax the capabilities of companies in china, and executives should be open to collaborative ecosystems involving partnerships with upstream suppliers, downstream vendors, and consumers. china’s increasingly wired landscape, in short, is changing the face of business there and challenging the strategies even of companies that have prospered through earlier waves of tumultuous growth.yougang chen is a principal in mckinsey’s hong kong office; jeongmin seong is a senior fellow of the mckinsey global institute, where jonathan woetzel is a director.
 sasha frere-jones here. i’m happy to announce that i’ve become the executive editor of music at genius. for the last eleven years, i’ve been a staff writer and the pop critic at the new yorker. (you can read that work here .) there is no better job in criticism than working for the new yorker. if you want to learn how to write clearly and accurately, while retaining a distinct voice, this magazine will teach you. subscribe. you’ll love it.as a teen, i became a touring and recording musician after working in theater. in my late twenties, i became a professional music critic (slowly, and in a poorly organized way).this hybrid past made me especially interested in the possibilities of genius. the site uses the web’s native tools to unpack and annotate songs. you may be obsessed with lyrics, details of production, or the story of how a song came to be; there is a hefty list of things you can learn about any piece of music, even if you think you know it by heart. genius song pages are powered by a community that knows songs, sometimes better than the artists. a good page can collate different, sometimes conflicting, commentaries — using text, image and video — and put those layers in one, easy accessible place. that one laser-eyed tweet about magic! that had no specific destination? it can live on a genius page.one of the web’s strengths is that it revises itself, admitting new information and incorporating dissenting views, rather than simply waving at them, regally. genius is, by design, an open and unfinished text — a reader who doesn’t think an annotation is strong enough can log on and make that song page more robust.genius pages begin as evidence of the community’s debate and, eventually, live as a resource for the larger audience of casual fans, journalists, academics, and anyone who wants to know what m.o.p are yelling at the start of “ante up.”also, it’s called genius, not rap genius. look at the genres at the top of the page. yup. lots of choices!so what will i be doing?first off, i’ll be annotating – some on my own and a lot with all of you.i’ll also work with you all @genius-editorial-board to answer some hard questions. how do we build a community that produces more annotations like this one and fewer like this one ? how do we deal with pop? what does the best possible annotated version of blank space look like? what kind of artist annotations should we seek out? how do we get more artists annotating other artists’ work?i’ll bring in artists to tell the stories behind recordings and help correct errors. that doesn’t mean every artist annotation has to be a tablet delivered from on high – some of my favorites are nothing like that, and show that stars can be self-deprecating, too . i’ll also be looking to expand our circle of contributors as well — people who’ve lurked, people who’ve been curious, some who’ve been critical. i will stay awake with you and help make these pages as good as they can be.see you on the songs.
rt @mdhughes: wodehouse's is good, but the best is olin shivers http://t.co/mfjjpatsng
 who should i thank? my so-called ``colleagues,'' who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? my worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? my parents, who are still waiting for me to quit ``fooling around with computers,'' go to med school, and become a radiologist? my department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?my god, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if i went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. i couldn't get through the day as it is without the prozac and jack daniels i keep on the shelf, behind my tops-20 jsys manuals. i start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. a 10 oz. jack 'n zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. they look at me funny; they think i twitch a lot. i'm not twitching. i'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm sig-sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in amerika.if i thought anyone cared, if i thought anyone would even be reading this, i'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. but no one does, and no one will. so i can pretty much say exactly what i think.
 26 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much betterby dylan matthews on december 29, 2014the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias. bad economic news gets more coverage than good news. negative experiences affect people more, and for longer , than positive ones. so it's natural for things like russia's incursion into ukraine or the rise of isis or the ebola outbreak to weigh on us more than, say, the fact that extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, or that life expectancy is increasing, especially in poor countries. but it's worth paying some attention to the latter factors. the world is getting much, much better on a whole variety of dimensions. here are just a few.this is probably the most important chart on this list. the extraordinary rate of economic growth in india and china — as well as slower but still significant growth in other developing countries — has led to a huge decline in the share of the world population living on less than $1.25 a day, from 52 percent in 1981 to 43 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2010. that's a low bar for what counts as poverty, and some development experts are arguing we should be using a global poverty line of $10-15 a day instead, but that very debate is a sign of the tremendous progress made in recent decades.this animated map shows the global hunger index — a measure of undernutrition calculated by the international food policy research institute — across the world form 1990 to 2014. red and orange countries have especially high levels of hunger and undernutrition, while green ones have lower rates. so it's encouraging to watch the globe gradually get less red and more green over the past 24 years.any amount of child labor is too much child labor, and the pace at which it's being reduced is not fast enough to meet the international labor organization's goal of eliminating hazardous child work by 2016. but the rate of decline — one third reduction from 2000 to 2012 — is nontrivial and worth celebrating.work hours in the us haven't fallen much in recent decades, certainly in relation to europe, but compared to the late 19th century, developed countries have much more reasonable work schedules today.one reason the huge amount of economic progress made globally in recent decades gets ignored is that living standards for the median american have been fairly stagnant. one exception to that pattern, however, is the fact that cheaper food has freed up americans to spend more on other expenses. "between 1960 and 2007, the share of disposable personal income spent on total food by americans fell from 17.5 to 9.7 percent, and the share of income spent on food at home fell from 14.1 to 5.6 percent," the usda notes, and they've stayed at that low level since.globally, both male and female life expectancy increased by six years from 1990 to 2012, but the gains were highest in low-income countries, which saw an increase of about nine years for both men and women. there's still substantial inequality between rich and poor countries; male life expectancy is 15.6 years higher in high-income countries compared to low-income ones, and female life expectancy is 18.9 years higher. but the gap is slowly closing, even as rich countries continue to make gains as well.child mortality has fallen by nearly half since 1990. if you look at developing regions, the gains are even more impressive . in east asia, latin america, and north africa, the under-five mortality rate fell by over two thirds between 1990 and 2013, and in sub-saharan africa it fell by 48 percent.maternal mortality declined by 45 percent between 1990 and 2013, according to the world health organization. you can see the drop has been especially dramatic in african countries.this chart, taken from gregory clark's a farewell to alms , tracks the height of male skeletons found in europe across nearly 2000 years, and compares those data points to recent, more complete height data in the us and sweden. for nearly two millennia, male heights were stable, but upon the advent of the industrial revolution, they began to shoot up. there are many determinants of human height, but nutrition and overall living standards are crucial ones. we happen to be living in the first couple centuries of human existence to see huge advances in living standards, which shows up in height data, among many other places.malaria's still one of the world's biggest killers, particularly in tropical regions. it's treatable, but far more effective than treatment is prevention through insecticide-treated bednets. access to those has grown substantially in recent years, as this chart from the world health organization shows. if you'd like to help buy and distribute bednets, the against malaria foundation is a very effective charity doing just that.guinea worm is a nonfatal but debilitating parasitic infection, and as recently as 1986, millions of people got it every year. there is no vaccine or cure. guinea worms grow in your body cavity, then work their way out of your body, often through your leg or foot. once the worm's exposed, it needs to be gradually coaxed out of your body in a sterile environment. if, to relieve the pain, you place your foot in water with a worm exposed, the worm will burst and send millions of larvae into the water supply. if people drink the water later, then they're at risk of getting the worm too. but despite the lack of a modern medical treatment for the condition, it's almost gone, due to a coordinated international eradication campaign spearheaded by jimmy carter and the carter center.we don't know exactly why the teen birth rate has fallen so fast — 38.4 percent annually between 2007 and 2013 — though as sarah kliff explains , there are a number of plausible factors. everything from increased access to iuds and plan b to 16 and pregnant probably played some role. but the trendline is dramatic and hugely encouraging.according to gallup, there was never a point in the post-war era when a majority of americans were regular smokers. but all the same, we've come a long way from 1955, when 45 percent of americans reported smoking in a given week, to 2014, when a mere 21 percent do.less than a century removed from the world wars, it can be hard for people to believe that war is on the decline. but in the long run, deaths from organized political violence are falling, as steven pinker's the better angels of our nature details. "the rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point," pinker wrote in an excerpt in the wall street journal .it's not just pinker either: analysts like john mueller , joshua goldstein , and john horgan have persuasively argued that the end of war is in sight. "war is merely an idea," mueller writes. "unlike breathing, eating, or sex, war is not something that is somehow required by the human condition or by the forces of history. accordingly, war can shrivel up and disappear, and it seems to be in the process of doing so."it's not just interstate violence that's declining. as research from criminologist manuel eisner shows, homicide in european countries has been on the decline for centuries. eisner estimates that in the 1200s and 1300s, europe had an average homicide rate of about 32 per 100,000. by the 1900s, that rate had fallen to about 1.4 per 100,000.the us has historically been an outlier among rich countries, with an unusually high homicide rate. we still have a much higher rate than western european countries do, but it's been declining sharply in recent decades.of course, non-murder violent crime is also important, and it has been falling steadily in the us since the early 1990s, as part of the overall dramatic decline in crime rates.world nuclear weapons stockpiles peaked in 1986, and the period since then has seen a sharp decline in us and russian stockpiles, and, thus, the overall global total. there have been some lapses in the international nonproliferation regime, with pakistan and north korea developing weapons, but south africa and post-ussr belarus, kazakhstan, and ukraine all voluntarily gave up their arms.in the 1970s, autocracies outnumbered democracies by a considerable margin. soviet bloc countries were uniformly dictatorial, but the us didn't make democracy promotion a particular priority in the cold war either, allying with a number of brutal dictatorships from south korea to chile to greece. but after the fall of the berlin wall , the communist dictatorships almost all vanished, and most of the eastern european ones were replaced with democratic systems. us-backed military governments in latin america lost power, and a number of african dictators fell. the result was that in 2013, the average world polity iv score — a measure used by political scientists to track the prevalence of democracy — was higher than it's ever been .we still have a lot to do to improve access to education, but even in developing countries like china and india, average years of schooling (standardized here to "equivalent years of primary education … using weights based on the earnings differential associated with years of primary, secondary, and tertiary education") have been growing swiftly.increased access to education has, unsurprisingly, coincided with increased literacy. a lot of progress has also been made by reducing racial gaps in literacy. in 1870, 79.9 percent of african-americans aged 14 or older were illiterate, and by 1950 that number had only fallen to 10.6 percent or so. but by 1979, according to national center for education statistics data, the illiteracy rate was down to 1.6 percent.the us unsheltered homeless population has fallen by nearly 32 percent since 2007.normally, one would expect the homeless population to rise during an economic downturn. but apart from an uptick in 2010, homelessness has declined in the us since the financial crisis. better yet, the decline comes entirely because there are fewer unsheltered homeless people. the sheltered population ticked up a bit, but mostly, homelessness fell overall.moore's law — the empirical observation, first made by intel's gordon moore, that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every two years — has fueled the extraordinary growth in computing power over the past half century. and while some analysts argue that progress will slow within the next decade (or that it already has ), decades of exponential progress are extraordinary, even if the trend doesn't continue — and optimists in the industry argue that it can .at this point, internet use is fairly universal in developed countries — which occurred very, very rapidly, as this chart emphasizes — and while it's less prevalent in developing countries and the world at large, the trendlines are going in the right direction.climate change is the one big area where we're not making progress, and things are getting considerably worse. there's no sugar-coating that. one bright spot is the declining price of solar power, which is fueling a rapid increase in adoption. the chart here breaks down the price of solar panels between the cost of the actual photovoltaic modules they use to generate electricity and "system" costs, which brad plumer explains as "all the little steps along the way that are required to take a photovoltaic panel from the factory and put it on your roof." the latter is getting cheaper, helping fuel the decline.more of a visual learner? then check out this interview with the center for global development's charles kenny (author of the upside of down and getting better ), who runs through a wide array of positive trends, from longer life expectancy to falling murder rates to increased beer consumption.
 berlin—the two-year-old alternative for germany built itself into a potent political force with a push to get germany to quit the euro. after the paris attacks, though, one of the party’s leaders says it is likely to focus more on the role of islam in the country.more of the political debate has to focus on whether muslims are prepared to integrate into german society, the upstart party’s co-chairman, konrad adam, said sunday.to read the full story, subscribe or log in
rt @monkbent: spot on! this is absolutely the piece to read for people whining about air travel /via @rsgore
 harold meyerson does not like what's happening to air travel:next month, jetblue is adding a first-class section to its hitherto classless -- but relatively classy -- planes. by virtue of not having a first-class section, jetblue has been able to provide something that most airlines have long since abolished: legroom for its passengers.but the egalitarian seating plan has long since disappeared from nearly every airline, and jetblue is a decided latecomer to the prevailing model of airline seating, which we will term the piketty-saez seating plan, or pssp.to be sure, airlines are in no way responsible for the polarization of income and wealth that defines our time. increasingly, however, their seating plans reflect that polarization, with more and more space and amenities showered on their first-class passengers (whose fares rise accordingly), while less and less space and fewer -- increasingly, no -- amenities are provided to coach passengers.in capital in the 21st century , economist thomas piketty provides data that show conclusively that our current level of economic inequality now is comparable to that at the start of the 20th-century -- before two world wars, a great depression, and the reforms of the new deal and european social democracy produced a more broadly shared prosperity.a comparison of today’s airliners with the great fin-de-siecle passenger ships would reveal a similar disparity in their treatment of passengers -- lavish accommodations for first class, and the bulk of the passengers in steerage. as a socio-economic tract, titanic could be remade today set on an airliner.frankly, i don't like what's happening to air travel, either. as i may have mentioned a time or two, i'm very tall. and my legs are disproportionately long, even for my hulking size; i rock a 35-inch inseam in low heels. so as you can imagine, i have felt somewhat ... unfriendly toward the current vogue for giving passengers a hobson's choice between two classes of seating: first and ant man .i'm less fussed about checked-baggage charges, because i never liked waiting at baggage claim anyway. and i am not sad at all about the disappearance of sodden, tasteless, horrible meals that made the plane smell and clogged the aisles with the serving carts that delivered them.but still, there's the legroom. and the clot at the airport if you're not in the "elite flier" lane.so i am sympathetic to meyerson's plaint. and yet it also seems churlish to complain about inequality when this is hardly a matter of the huddled masses against the selfish plutocrats. you know who suffers most from these changes in airline policy? upper-middle-class people with very good jobs.let's recall that back in the good old days of flying, most people didn't. they couldn't; it was far too expensive. an airline flight was something you might do once in a very long while, for a special occasion like a honeymoon or a graduation.as deregulation pushed prices down, more people flew. after the invention of travel websites, a lot more people flew -- and based their flying decision entirely on price.the result is what you see today: to stay price-competitive for tourists, airlines have ruthlessly slashed services so that the headline price they see on expedia will be as low as possible. they've crammed as many seats as they can into the back section, where those tourists sit. and they've used increasingly sophisticated software to make sure that the planes are always as full as possible. meanwhile, the airports haven't really gotten much bigger, and the security screenings have gotten much more onerous, which means that unless you have elite status on your airline, you can count on waiting in an interminable queue just to be allowed to walk to your gate. the result is a miserable travel experience, but who really cares if you only take a flight every third august?the answer is "business travelers," and they care because a lot of employers are not as generous with the airline bookings as they used to be. forget business class -- now they won't even let you book on your preferred airline if someone else is cheaper. farewell, elite status; farewell, upgrades and expedited screening. hello, fellow cattle, and would you mind getting your elbow out of my eye?like meyerson, i find it all intensely irritating. but i can't really work up a justifiable rage because too many people are being allowed to fly. after all, takeoff slots are limited, so if the planes had fewer seats, some folks have to stop flying -- probably the least well-off, who give up on well-earned vacations or family visits so the business travelers can stretch their legs.but what about first class? you ask. why can't they take out those seats? well, have you looked at the price of a first-class ticket? the premium charged for first class is much more than proportional to the extra space they take up. which means that folks buying first-class tickets are subsidizing those of us forced to sit back in the bleachers. if first class went away, again, who would lose out? the poorest fliers who can least afford the higher ticket prices.yes, this is somewhat complicated by the fact that many people in first class are elite fliers. but again, the elite fliers are less price-sensitive than the tourists -- which means that they, too, subsidize those who shop only on price. you can think of planes as being filled with basically three kinds of people: coach fliers who only look at the price tag; elite fliers, who will pay extra for a seat on their preferred airline as long as the damage is not too bad; and first-class fliers, who apparently have some sort of money tree in the backyard. the latter two groups are the reason that the proletariat gets such good ticket prices. and because the elite fliers do generally have to spend some time in coach, they're also the reason that the airlines don't actually stack the rest of us like cordwood.so while the conditions may be atrocious, it seems uncivil to complain too much. however bad things might be in the air, they're not nearly as bad as being stuck on the ground because you can't afford a ticket.to contact the writer of this article: megan mcardle at mmcardle3@bloomberg.net.to contact the editor responsible for this article: brooke sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net.megan mcardle is a bloomberg view columnist who writes on economics, business and public policy. she is the author of "the up side of down." read more.
 how opec weaponized the price of oil against u.s. drillersshale oil production in north dakota, u.s. closeshale oil production in north dakota, u.s.shale oil production in north dakota, u.s.if there ever was doubt about the strategy of the organization of petroleum exporting countries, its wealthiest members are putting that issue to rest.representatives of saudi arabia, the united arab emirates and kuwait stressed a dozen times in the past six weeks that the group won’t curb output to halt the biggest drop in crude since 2008. qatar’s estimate for the global oversupply is among the biggest of any producing country. these countries actually want -- and are achieving -- further price declines as part of an attempt to hasten cutbacks by u.s. shale drillers, according to barclays plc and commerzbank ag.crude fell 48 percent last year and has declined 35 percent since opec affirmed its output target on nov. 27. that decision, while squeezing revenues for opec members in 2015, aims at preserving their market share for years to come.“the faster you bring the price down, the quicker you will have a response from u.s. production -- that is the expectation and the hope,” said jamie webster, an analyst at consultants ihs inc. in washington . “i cannot recall a time when several members were actively pushing the price down in both word and deed.”u.s. crude production totaled 9.13 million barrels a day last week, up about 1 million barrels from a year ago and 49,000 from the opec meeting in november. horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in underground shale rock have boosted output by 66 percent over the past five years. exports, still limited by law, reached a record 502,000 barrels a day in november, according to the energy information administration.the group will stand by its decision not to cut output even if prices fall and wait at least three months before considering an emergency meeting, u.a.e. energy minister suhail al-mazrouei said dec. 14. closethe group will stand by its decision not to cut output even if prices fall and wait at... read morethe group will stand by its decision not to cut output even if prices fall and wait at least three months before considering an emergency meeting, u.a.e. energy minister suhail al-mazrouei said dec. 14.the four middle east opec members are counting on combined reserve assets estimated by the international monetary fund at $826.4 billion to withstand the plunge in prices. petroleum represents 63 percent of their exports. at least 10 calls and several e-mails to the oil ministries of all four countries on jan. 7 and yesterday weren’t answered.the price decline will cost all 12 opec members a total of $257 billion in lost revenue this year, according to the eia. venezuela has a 93 percent chance of defaulting on its debt over the next five years, according to cma, a data provider owned by mcgraw hill financial inc. president nicolas maduro said dec. 13 that “there is no possibility of default” and on jan. 7 that the country has “the capacity to obtain the financing” it needs.opec won’t reverse course even if oil prices fall as low as $20 a barrel or non-opec countries offer to help with production cuts, saudi arabian oil minister ali al-naimi said in an interview with the middle east economic survey on dec. 21. the kingdom may even bolster output if non-opec nations do so, he said. the global oversupply is 2 million barrels a day, or 6.7 percent of opec output, qatar estimates.the group will stand by its decision not to cut output even if prices fall and wait at least three months before considering an emergency meeting, u.a.e. energy minister suhail al-mazrouei said dec. 14. he said clearing the surplus may take years, abu dhabi-based newspaper the national reported jan. 6.opec has no plans to meet before its next scheduled conference in june, kuwaiti oil minister ali al-omair said on dec. 16. prices will recover in the second half as oil producers with the highest costs are compelled to scale back operations, he said.it wouldn’t be the first time u.s. drillers are caught up in an opec battle for market share. in 1986, saudi arabia opened its taps and sparked a four-month, 67 percent plunge that left oil just above $10 a barrel. the u.s. industry collapsed, triggering almost a quarter-century of production declines, and the saudis regained their leading role in the world’s oil market.“it seems in their interest to have a swift fall rather than a slow, grinding fall,” miswin mahesh, an analyst at barclays in london, said by phone. “a swift drop in prices would bring more changes to non-opec supply,” while a more gradual decline would let companies in other oil nations “merge and become more efficient.”not all share this view. ubs group ag analysts said that hastening a price slump isn’t a practical strategy because oil demand and supply respond too slowly to price changes.“i doubt that they target a lower price,” giovanni staunovo, an analyst at ubs in zurich, said by e-mail on jan. 5. “supply and demand are quite inelastic in the short-term.”brent for february settlement decreased 85 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $50.11 a barrel on the london-based ice futures europe exchange. it’s the lowest close since april 28, 2009.saudi arabian oil ministers sought to undermine prices in the 1980s and 1990s with their public comments, according to amy myers jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the university of california-davis. the tactic was used to pressure other opec members into agreeing to quota changes, she said.there are signs that opec’s approach is starting to work. rigs targeting oil in the u.s. declined for the sixth time in seven weeks, by 17 to 1,482 last week, baker hughes inc. said on its website on jan. 5. there will be a serious decline in u.s. shale oil investment in 2015, fatih birol, chief economist of the international energy agency in paris, said on dec. 22.“some opec countries, most specifically gulf states, obviously think that it’s best to get unpleasant things over and done with,” eugen weinberg , head of commodities research at commerzbank ag, said by e-mail from frankfurt . “the recent wordings showed they are still firm about this strategy.”to contact the reporter on this story: grant smith in london at gsmith52@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: alaric nightingale at anightingal1@bloomberg.net stephen cunninghampress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 andy baio has kept the early net alive by digitizing long-forgotten vhs tapes.conventional wisdom has it that anything published online can never be truly erased. people petition governments for the " right to be forgotten "—to have personal information and images permanently removed from the internet. but look for a screenshot or image from a page of the very early web, and you'll find it almost impossible to locate. prominent technologist andy baio , who runs the site waxy.org , where he promotes tech ephemera and news, has discovered an unlikely portal to an era that has all but disappeared from today's internet, and quite nearly from the human record: vhs tapes. with these tapes, now viewable on youtube, comes a critical look into a period that set the stage for the massive design and technological changes society has undergone over the past 20 years.the internet archive was founded in 1996. it's an open-source project that houses 435 billion historical snapshots of webpages. but what of the digital traces that lived before 1996? much of those have been lost to time.in the late aughts, baio figured out where he might be able to find this historical data. he began collecting instructional vhs tapes about the early web from thrift stores and amazon's used video section, where he could get them for about a dollar each. with names like internet power and computability they contain plenty of outdated jargon and quaint "gee wiz" attitudes, and were largely aimed at people who had an internet connection but didn't know what to use it for. turns out, these videos make up some of the only documentation left of that online era.the obvious thing looking at these old screenshots is simply how little control designers had.baio began uploading the videos in 2008. he uploaded some to viddler, a site that predates youtube and allowed him to attach detailed blog posts and annotations. others appeared on blip.fm, until the service unceremoniously deleted all of its videos without notice. still others appear on youtube, though baio only made the archive fully public a few months ago.the tapes are artifacts of an extinct internet, providing insights into the way we saw the web 20 years ago, and perspective on what it has grown into today. some of the material seems hilariously basic—though it reveals how little some basic structures of the internet have changed. "the focus is around using [the internet] as a giant encyclopedia," baio says of the videos presentations. "they say things like, 'a website is like a book. it's divided into chapters, and clicking a hyperlink is like going to a page.'"one of the biggest differences between the web then and now? design. in the mid '90s, the web was a massive repository of static information, seemingly put there by someone else and by mysterious means. "this was [before the popularity of] geocities," baio says. "there were web indexes like yahoo and early search engines" but even these basic tools wouldn't help the average person who was unfamiliar with the web [find websites easily]. if you managed to get online it was still a time where a lot of stuff was found by word of mouth," baio says.something that was one line of html in 1996 becomes extremely hard to do now, and you're not even doing it right.he goes on: "the obvious thing looking at these old screenshots is simply how little control [designers] had. the browser defaults determined so much back then. you didn't have control over even the background color. it's a wash of gray." it was a time when the browser-mandated default font was times new roman, links were blue, and bulleted lists abounded. even basic design decisions like where to place an image were made automatically by the browser.ironically, this "early web" aesthetic has been popping up everywhere over the past few years, adhering to the popular theory that nostalgia comes in 20 year cycles . you'll find it in fashion, music, and even homages by web designers themselves , who yearn for the simplicity of '90s web design and the anything-is-possible feeling of the pre-corporatized internet.nostalgia for the early web reaches beyond mere aesthetics. it extends into the underlying structures that gave designers and programmers a visceral connection to their machines. recently, baio tried to recreate a common feature of the early era of personal websites: the embeddable, autoplaying midi file. these were extremely popular on early personal web pages. "they were small enough, they were supported by the browser, and they fit in the free storage space," baio says. but today, "browsers don't support midi by default, or at all." this forced him to use a mildly absurd roundabout to achieve what would have been incredibly simple to code 20 years ago. baio rendered a midi file as an mp3, badly, so as to retain its crappy, authentic '90s sound. "today's sound cards are too good," he joked. then, to allow it to autoplay, he needed to add a javascript program to the mix. "so you've taken what would have been a 10k file, a tiny file with just instructions for what notes to play, and you've rendered it out into an mp3 file which is 3mb, insanely huge in comparison to a midi file," he says. "so something that was one line of html in 1996 becomes extremely hard to do now, and you're not even doing it right."there's a concept in computer programming called " abstraction ," which describes the fact that programming languages, as they get easier for humans to use, they also inch farther away from binary—from the language that the computer actually understands. today, writing in cutting-edge programming languages like ruby or clojure, your code is translated many times before it becomes something that can actually interface with the hardware. the evolution of web design has seen a similar shift toward using tools that are more intuitive for humans and less intuitive for machines. take tools like squarespace or wordpress, which allow users to create professional-looking web pages without coding anything themselves. this has the side effect of making it much more difficult for us to understand what's really going on when we click a button or press play on a video. it's a level of trust in machines, and in the many programmers and web designers who have come before us, that, as vikram chandra points out in his excellent book geek sublime, can lead to inexplicable and sometimes dangerous bugs.abstraction, both literal and metaphorical, is another reason why projects like baio's are so important. "without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures," the internet archive writes on its website. as computers become faster, more advanced, and easier to use, their history retreats at a frightening speed. we have to make an active attempt to save what documentation of this pivotal time in history we have. otherwise it could be drowned by the tides of progress for good.
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 caracas jan 12 (reuters) - venezuela is securing financing from qatari banks, president nicolas maduro said from doha on monday, as he seeks to boost his country's coffers amid falling oil prices and a recession."we're firming up a financial alliance with important banks in qatar, that are giving us sufficient oxygen to cover the fall in oil revenue," maduro said without providing details."we're raising financing for several billion dollars, not only for 2015, but also for 2016," he added in comments to journalists.venezuela's tightening financial situation has fanned market anxiety about a default, especially as oil slumps to near six-year lows. maduro has vowed to pay bondholders and most economists doubt a default is coming in the near-term, but  investors are getting skittish as the economic crisis worsens.venezuela depends on oil for 96 percent of its export revenue.credit suisse estimates venezuela faces a foreign exchange financing gap of some $33.9 billion should its oil basket average $50 this year. the basket dropped to $42.44 per barrel last week.maduro, whose popularity has plunged because of the economic crisis, toured china and oil-producing countries this week, apparently to seek financing and shore up support for action on oil prices by the organization of the petroleum exporting countries.his push, however, has failed to convince opec's gulf members to cut output, delegates said on monday.and while maduro announced $20 billion in chinese investment, he did not mention new loans from beijing to help ease a worsening shortages of basic goods ranging from toilet paper to chicken."maduro will therefore return to venezuela mid-week with little concrete to show from his trip, as shortages of basic goods continue to bite amid worsening economic conditions," teneo intelligence said in a note.           (writing by alexandra ulmer. editing by andre grenon)
 you are about to read your last free item this month.to register, get added benefits and unlimited access to articles, become a member . already a member? sign in .we examined a broad swath of disciplines, from art and advertising, to entertainment and technology, to pop culture and fashion, in order to pinpoint the individuals and teams—and even married couples—who have evolved the creative landscape over the last 12 months. their art, ads, tunes, films and ideas got us thinking, connecting, singing and creating some more. we hope they'll provide all of you with inspiration for the year to come.
 investors snapped up dollars, pushing the greenback to its highest level against major currencies since september 2003, as they ramped up bets the u.s. economy will pull ahead of the rest of the world this year, with the federal reserve in the driver’s seat.but as the value of the dollar rises against the currencies of some of the country’s biggest trading partners, so do the risks to america’s manufacturing and tourism sectors and to broader financial markets, economists and industry officials say. another worry: the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 product roadmaps typically focus on building up a product, adding features as the product evolves and grows. while that’s great, in my experience building quibb , i’ve found that removing features is also an important aspect of product design and management.there’s not much guidance on making products more simple, crisp and less bloated. in making decisions to remove various features, i’ve seen how more mature companies do the same — identifying and weighing tradeoffs to make tough decisions, working toward the goal of building a better product.in reviewing an existing feature that’s on the chopping block, it’s important to separate the impacts that feature has on both users of the product and those making the product. while oftentimes the goals of users and the company are aligned, that’s not always the case.quora encountered this situation a few years ago with their direct question feature. the feature allowed you to ask another quora member a question directly from their profile.this feature probably created a lower barrier, allowing you to directly ask the exact person you wanted to answer a question. it was removed as the company found that if people answered those questions directly, that valuable information wouldn’t end up on the main question page on the sitewhile this feature enabled a behavior that users find useful, it diminishes the valuable content the company is building.users you’ve identified as your ‘target market’ aren’t always the ones who use your product at the start. you probably have a detailed understanding of what this user looks like, and have good reasons for why you’d like more of your users to be like them.products have natural life cycles of users (i.e. early through to late adopters), but it’s important to not let the uniqueness of those early groups affect how you build and create features for your target audience. weighing exactly which features you need to keep that early group interested but will still work for your later target audience is hard.building too many features in that way can mean you’ll have to remove them later.there’s a recent trend that’s making the tradeoff issue more palpable for established tech companies. instead of completely remove a feature , developers move the functionality into a new product.dropbox has done this with its photo-sharing product carousel , facebook has done this with messenger  and foursquare has also done this with swarm . while most of us aren’t able to directly replicate this strategy, it can shine some light on the importance of keeping products crisp and focused, especially on mobile devices.recently, i’ve had several conversations with smart entrepreneurs as they try to adjust their web-first product for a mobile experience. it’s a completely different way of interacting with a product, so the mobile version often looks and acts differently from the web version.deciding which features to remove from mobile is another tough product design decision. twitter has done a great job at this. its web app settings are extensive, with a whopping 13 sub-menus.recognizing that all of these settings would be overwhelming on mobile, twitter made the decision to strip down which settings features are accessible on mobile.the tradeoffs for removing features on one platform is always difficult as you try to maintain a simple yet comparable experience across all versions of your product.all of these tradeoffs and decision criteria are important to think about as you launch and remove feature. there’s also the actual technical limitations and requirements of a feature.whenever you build a new feature, you’re entering into a contract to keep that code up-to-date and compatible with all other features you’ll choose to add in the future. by adding just a few features to a simple product, dependencies go up quickly and can be difficult for a small, resource-strapped team to manage.supporting os versions, load times, legacy costs, scaling… the list is long! sometimes, the value in removing a technically complex, low performing feature can free up a much larger proportion of resources to be devoted to an existing, more popular and higher leverage feature.an early quibb feature involved parsing twitter bios of the people who weren’t yet a member, but that an existing quibb member followed. if i could match up their company’s name, i could assume that they were coworkers and therefore that person was an ideal candidate for them to invite.over time, i realized the feature was causing many problems. members complained that their feeds were slow to load. after weighing the tradeoffs, i removed the feature as i didn’t have the resources to make it work well within the technological constraints of the product at the time, and could make much better use of the resources elsewhere.simplicity over time and at scale is one of the more difficult tasks any product designer has.the inspiration for this post came after reading a line in ben horowitz’s good product manager, bad product manager , where he writes: “good product managers crisply define the target.”
 i used to work for banks. now i write about them, and about finance and economics generally. although i originally trained as a musician and singer, i worked in banking for 17 years and did an mba at cass business school in london, where i specialized in financial risk management. i’m the author of the coppola comment finance & economics blog, which is a regular feature on the financial times's alphaville blog and has been quoted in the economist, the wall street journal, the new york times and the guardian. i am also associate editor at the online magazine pieria and a frequent commentator on financial matters for the bbc. and i still sing, and teach. after all, there is more to life than finance.the author is a forbes contributor. the opinions expressed are those of the writer.
 in his 2014 state of the union address,2014 saw our economy growing at a record pace,an auto industry in high gear,and real action on immigration and climate change.2014 was a year of action.before we look toward where we’re going.watch chief of staff denis mcdonough reflect on his 10 highlights from 2014.over the past 57 months in a row,extending the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record.
 by christopher ingraham december 29, 2014 follow @_cingrahamwith yet another airliner gone missing over southeast asian airspace, there's no question that 2014 has been a year beset by mysterious air tragedies . but there's a surprising fact hiding behind this year's high-profile air tragedies: 2014 has been the safest year for flying since, well, ever.these numbers come from the aviation safety network, an online service that tracks airline accidents and safety incidents over the years. their data show that including the disappearance and presumed crash of airasia 8501, there have been a total of 20 fatal airliner accidents this year -- the lowest since asn's records start in 1942. asn's numbers only include commercial flights with 14+ passengers -- e.g., the type of flights we usually think of when we think about flying somewhere. but a larger database maintained by the bureau of aircraft accidents archives , which includes smaller flights, private aircraft and military planes, paints the exact same picture .2014 has seen something of a spike in fatalities, however. asn's numbers show 1,007 deaths for 2014 so far, a figure which includes only major commercial airliner accidents. the airasia flight and the two malaysia air flights earlier in the year account for over half of those fatalities -- 699. and again, these numbers follow the same pattern seen in the larger baaa database .flying will never not be an unsettling experience -- there's nothing natural about packing yourself into an aluminum tube with hundreds of strangers and getting hurtled across the sky at high speed. airlines certainly aren't helping things as they seek to make the default flying experience ever more miserable to nudge us into purchasing "upgrades ," like adequate legroom. but holiday travelers should rest a little easier knowing that flying now is safer than it's ever been.christopher ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. he previously worked at the brookings institution and the pew research center.
 the word television comes from ancient greek τῆλε (tèle), meaning "far", and latin visio, meaning "sight".invention of the television was work of many people in the 19th century and early 20th century.facsimile transmission systems for still photographs pioneered methods of mechanical scanning of images in early 19th century. alexander bain introduced the facsimile machine in 1843 to 1846. frederick bakewell demonstrated a working laboratory version in 1951.willoughby smith discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium in 1873.the nipkow disk . this schematic shows the circular paths traced by the holes, that may also be square for greater precision. the area of the disk outlined in black shows the region scanned.as a 23-year-old german university student, paul julius gottlieb nipkow proposed and patented the nipkow disk in 1884. [6] this was a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it, so each hole scanned a line of the image. although he never built a working model of the system, variations of nipkow's spinning-disk " image rasterizer " became exceedingly common. [7] constantin perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the international electricity congress at the international world fair in paris on august 25, 1900. perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of nipkow and others. [8] however, it was not until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology, by lee de forest and arthur korn among others, made the design practical. [9]the first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of images was by georges rignoux and a. fournier in paris in 1909. a matrix of 64 selenium cells, individually wired to a mechanical commutator , served as an electronic retina . in the receiver, a type of kerr cell modulated the light and a series of variously angled mirrors attached to the edge of a rotating disc scanned the modulated beam onto the display screen. a separate circuit regulated synchronization. the 8x8 pixel resolution in this proof-of-concept demonstration was just sufficient to clearly transmit individual letters of the alphabet. an updated image was transmitted "several times" each second. [10]in 1911, boris rosing and his student vladimir zworykin created a system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the " braun tube" ( cathode ray tube or "crt") in the receiver. moving images were not possible because, in the scanner, "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy". [11]by the 1920s, when amplification made television practical, scottish inventor john logie baird employed the nipkow disk in his prototype video systems. on march 25, 1925, baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion, at selfridge's department store in london. [12] since human faces had inadequate contrast to show up on his primitive system, he televised a ventriloquist's dummy named "stooky bill" talking and moving, whose painted face had higher contrast. by january 26, 1926 he demonstrated the transmission of image of a face in motion by radio. this is widely regarded as first television demonstration. the subject was baird's business partner oliver hutchinson. baird's system used the nipkow disk for both scanning the image and displaying it. a bright light shining through a spinning nipkow disk set with lenses projected a bright spot of light which swept across the subject. selenium photoelectric tube detected the light reflected from the subject and converted it into a proportional electrical signal. this was transmitted by am radio waves to a receiver unit, where the video signal was applied to a neon light behind a second nipkow disk rotating synchronized with the first. the brightness of the neon lamp was varied in proportion to the brightness of each spot on the image. as each hole in the disk passed by, one scan line of the image was reproduced. baird's disk had 30 holes, producing an image with only 30 scan lines, just enough to recognize a human face. in 1927, baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between london and glasgow . in 1928, baird's company (baird television development company/cinema television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal, between london and new york, and the first shore-to-ship transmission. in 1929, he became involved in the first experimental mechanical television service in germany. in november of the same year, baird and bernard natan of pathé established france's first television company, télévision- baird -natan. in 1931, he made the first outdoor remote broadcast, of the epsom derby . [13] in 1932, he demonstrated ultra-short wave television. baird's mechanical system reached a peak of 240-lines of resolution on bbc television broadcasts in 1936 though the mechanical system did not scan the televised scene directly. instead a 17.5mm film was shot, rapidly developed and then scanned while the film was still wet.an american inventor, charles francis jenkins also pioneered the television. he published an article on "motion pictures by wireless" in 1913, but it was not until 1923 that he transmitted moving silhouette images for witnesses, and it was on june 13th, 1925 that he publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures. in 1925 jenkins used nipkow disk and transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion, over a distance of five miles from a naval radio station in maryland to his laboratory in washington, d.c., using a lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution. [14] [15] he was granted the u.s. patent no. 1,544,156 (transmitting pictures over wireless) on june 30, 1925 (filed march 13, 1922).herbert e. ives and frank gray of bell telephone laboratories gave a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television on april 7, 1927. the reflected-light television system included both small and large viewing screens. the small receiver had a two-inch-wide by 2.5-inch-high screen. the large receiver had a screen 24 inches wide by 30 inches high. both sets were capable of reproducing reasonably accurate, monochromatic moving images. along with the pictures, the sets also received synchronized sound. the system transmitted images over two paths: first, a copper wire link from washington to new york city, then a radio link from whippany, new jersey . comparing the two transmission methods, viewers noted no difference in quality. subjects of the telecast included secretary of commerce herbert hoover . a flying-spot scanner beam illuminated these subjects. the scanner that produced the beam had a 50-aperture disk. the disc revolved at a rate of 18 frames per second, capturing one frame about every 56 milliseconds . (today's systems typically transmit 30 or 60 frames per second, or one frame every 33.3 or 16.7 milliseconds respectively.) television historian albert abramson underscored the significance of the bell labs demonstration: "it was in fact the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to this time. it would be several years before any other system could even begin to compare with it in picture quality." [16]in 1928, wrgb then w2xb was started as world's first television station. it broadcast from the general electric facility in schenectady, ny . it was popularly known as " wgy television".meanwhile in the soviet union , léon theremin had been developing a mirror drum-based television, starting with 16 lines resolution in 1925, then 32 lines and eventually 64 using interlacing in 1926, and as part of his thesis on may 7, 1926 he electrically transmitted and then projected near-simultaneous moving images on a five foot square screen. [15] by 1927 he achieved an image of 100 lines, a resolution that was not surpassed until 1931 by rca, with 120 lines.[ citation needed ]on december 25, 1925, kenjiro takayanagi demonstrated a television system with a 40-line resolution that employed a nipkow disk scanner and crt display at hamamatsu industrial high school in japan. this prototype is still on display at the takayanagi memorial museum in shizuoka university , hamamatsu campus. his research in creating a production model was halted by the us after japan lost world war ii . [17]because only a limited number of holes could be made in the disks, and disks beyond a certain diameter became impractical, image resolution on mechanical television broadcasts was relatively low, ranging from about 30 lines up to 120 or so. nevertheless, the image quality of 30-line transmissions steadily improved with technical advances, and by 1933 the uk broadcasts using the baird system were remarkably clear. [18] a few systems ranging into the 200-line region also went on the air. two of these were the 180-line system that compagnie des compteurs (cdc) installed in paris in 1935, and the 180-line system that peck television corp. started in 1935 at station ve9ak in montreal . [19] [20]the advancement of all-electronic television (including image dissectors and other camera tubes and cathode ray tubes for the reproducer) marked the beginning of the end for mechanical systems as the dominant form of television. mechanical tv usually only produced small images. it was the main type of tv until the 1930s. the last mechanical television broadcasts ended in 1939 at stations run by a handful of public universities in the united states.in 1897, j. j. thomson , an english physicist in his three famous experiments, was able to deflect cathode rays, a fundamental function of the modern crt. the earliest version of the crt was invented by the german physicist ferdinand braun in 1897 and is also known as the braun tube. [21] [22] it was a cold-cathode diode , a modification of the crookes tube with a phosphor -coated screen.in 1907, russian scientist boris rosing used a crt in the receiving end of an experimental video signal to form a picture. he managed to display simple geometric shapes onto the screen, which marked the first time that crt technology was used for what is now known as television. [23] in 1908 alan archibald campbell-swinton , fellow of the royal society (uk), published a letter in the scientific journal nature in which he described how "distant electric vision" could be achieved by using a cathode ray tube (or "braun" tube, after its inventor, karl braun ) as both a transmitting and receiving device, [24] [25] he expanded on his vision in a speech given in london in 1911 and reported in the times [26] and the journal of the röntgen society. [27] [28] in a letter to nature published in october 1926, campbell-swinton also announced the results of some "not very successful experiments" he had conducted with g. m. minchin and j. c. m. stanton. they had attempted to generate an electrical signal by projecting an image onto a selenium-coated metal plate that was simultaneously scanned by a cathode ray beam . [29] [30] these experiments were conducted before march 1914, when minchin died, [31] but they were later repeated by two different teams in 1937, by h. miller and j. w. strange from emi , [32] and by h. iams and a. rose from rca . [33] both teams succeeded in transmitting "very faint" images with the original campbell-swinton's selenium-coated plate. although others had experimented with using a cathode ray tube as a receiver, the concept of using one as a transmitter was novel. [34] the first cathode ray tube to use a hot cathode was developed by john b. johnson (who gave his name to the term johnson noise ) and harry weiner weinhart of western electric , and became a commercial product in 1922.[ citation needed ]in 1926, hungarian engineer kálmán tihanyi designed a television system utilizing fully electronic scanning and display elements and employing the principle of "charge storage" within the scanning (or "camera") tube. [35] [36] [37] [38] the problem of low sensitivity to light resulting in low electrical output from transmitting or "camera" tubes would be solved with the introduction of charge-storage technology by kálmán tihanyi beginning in 1924. [39] his solution was a camera tube that accumulated and stored electrical charges ("photoelectrons") within the tube throughout each scanning cycle. the device was first described in a patent application he filed in hungary in march 1926 for a television system he dubbed "radioskop". [40] after further refinements included in a 1928 patent application, [39] tihanyi's patent was declared void in great britain in 1930, [41] and so he applied for patents in the united states. although his breakthrough would be incorporated into the design of rca 's " iconoscope " in 1931, the u.s. patent for tihanyi's transmitting tube would not be granted until may 1939. the patent for his receiving tube had been granted the previous october. both patents had been purchased by rca prior to their approval. [36] [37] charge storage remains a basic principle in the design of imaging devices for television to the present day. [40]on 25 december 1926, kenjiro takayanagi demonstrated a tv system with a 40-line resolution that employed a crt display at hamamatsu industrial high school in japan. [42] this was the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver. takayanagi did not apply for a patent. [43]on september 7, 1927, farnsworth's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 green street in san francisco . [44] [45] by september 3, 1928, farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press. [45] in 1929, the system was further improved by elimination of a motor generator, so that his television system now had no mechanical parts. [46] that year, farnsworth transmitted the first live human images with his system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife elma ("pem") with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required). [47]meanwhile, vladimir zworykin was also experimenting with the cathode ray tube to create and show images. while working for westinghouse electric in 1923, he began to develop an electronic camera tube. but in a 1925 demonstration, the image was dim, had low contrast and poor definition, and was stationary. [48] zworykin's imaging tube never got beyond the laboratory stage. but rca, which acquired the westinghouse patent, asserted that the patent for farnsworth's 1927 image dissector was written so broadly that it would exclude any other electronic imaging device. thus rca, on the basis of zworykin's 1923 patent application, filed a patent interference suit against farnsworth. the u.s. patent office examiner disagreed in a 1935 decision, finding priority of invention for farnsworth against zworykin. farnsworth claimed that zworykin's 1923 system would be unable to produce an electrical image of the type to challenge his patent. zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application, [49] he also divided his original application in 1931. [50] zworykin was unable or unwilling to introduce evidence of a working model of his tube that was based on his 1923 patent application. in september 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts and determined to go forward with the commercial manufacturing of television equipment, rca agreed to pay farnsworth us$1 million over a ten-year period, in addition to license payments, to use farnsworth's patents. [51] [52]in 1933 rca introduced an improved camera tube that relied on tihanyi's charge storage principle. [53] dubbed the iconoscope by zworykin, the new tube had a light sensitivity of about 75,000 lux, and thus was claimed to be much more sensitive than farnsworth's image dissector.[ citation needed ] however, farnsworth had overcome his power problems with his image dissector through the invention of a completely unique "multipactor" device that he began work on in 1930, and demonstrated in 1931. [54] [55] this small tube could amplify a signal reportedly to the 60th power or better [56] and showed great promise in all fields of electronics. a problem with the multipactor, unfortunately, was that it wore out at an unsatisfactory rate. [57]at the berlin radio show in august 1931, manfred von ardenne gave a public demonstration of a television system using a crt for both transmission and reception. however, ardenne had not developed a camera tube, using the crt instead as a flying-spot scanner to scan slides and film. [58] philo farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system, using a live camera, at the franklin institute of philadelphia on august 25, 1934, and for ten days afterwards. [59] [60]mexican inventor guillermo gonzález camarena also played an important role in early tv. his experiments with tv (known as telectroescopía at first) began in 1931 and led to a patent for the "trichromatic field sequential system" color television in 1940. [61]in britain the emi engineering team led by isaac shoenberg applied in 1932 for a patent for a new device they dubbed "the emitron", [62] [63] which formed the heart of the cameras they designed for the bbc. on november 2, 1936, a 405-line broadcasting service employing the emitron began at studios in alexandra palace , and transmitted from a specially built mast atop one of the victorian building's towers. it alternated for a short time with baird's mechanical system in adjoining studios, but was more reliable and visibly superior. this was the world's first regular high-definition television service. [64]the original american iconoscope was noisy, had a high ratio of interference to signal, and ultimately gave disappointing results, especially when compared to the high definition mechanical scanning systems then becoming available. [65] [66] the emi team under the supervision of isaac shoenberg analyzed how the iconoscope (or emitron) produces an electronic signal and concluded that its real efficiency was only about 5% of the theoretical maximum. [67] [68] they solved this problem by developing and patenting in 1934 two new camera tubes dubbed super-emitron and cps emitron . [69] [70] [71] the super-emitron was between ten and fifteen times more sensitive than the original emitron and iconoscope tubes and, in some cases, this ratio was considerably greater. [67] it was used for an outside broadcasting by the bbc, for the first time, on armistice day 1937, when the general public could watch in a television set how the king lay a wreath at the cenotaph. [72] this was the first time that anyone could broadcast a live street scene from cameras installed on the roof of neighbor buildings, because neither farnsworth nor rca could do the same before the 1939 new york world's fair .on the other hand, in 1934, zworykin shared some patent rights with the german licensee company telefunken. [73] the "image iconoscope" ("superikonoskop" in germany) was produced as a result of the collaboration. this tube is essentially identical to the super-emitron.[ citation needed ] the production and commercialization of the super-emitron and image iconoscope in europe were not affected by the patent war between zworykin and farnsworth, because dieckmann and hell had priority in germany for the invention of the image dissector, having submitted a patent application for their lichtelektrische bildzerlegerröhre für fernseher (photoelectric image dissector tube for television) in germany in 1925, [74] two years before farnsworth did the same in the united states. [75] the image iconoscope (superikonoskop) became the industrial standard for public broadcasting in europe from 1936 until 1960, when it was replaced by the vidicon and plumbicon tubes. indeed it was the representative of the european tradition in electronic tubes competing against the american tradition represented by the image orthicon. [76] [77] the german company heimann produced the superikonoskop for the 1936 berlin olympic games, [78] [79] later heimann also produced and commercialized it from 1940 to 1955, [80] finally the dutch company philips produced and commercialized the image iconoscope and multicon from 1952 to 1958. [77] [81]american television broadcasting at the time consisted of a variety of markets in a wide range of sizes, each competing for programming and dominance with separate technology, until deals were made and standards agreed upon in 1941. [82] rca, for example, used only iconoscopes in the new york area, but farnsworth image dissectors in philadelphia and san francisco. [83] in september 1939, rca agreed to pay the farnsworth television and radio corporation royalties over the next ten years for access to farnsworth's patents. [84] with this historic agreement in place, rca integrated much of what was best about the farnsworth technology into their systems. [83] in 1941, the united states implemented 525-line television. [85] [86]the world's first 625-line television standard was designed in the soviet union in 1944, and became a national standard in 1946. [87] the first broadcast in 625-line standard occurred in 1948 in moscow. [88] the concept of 625 lines per frame was subsequently implemented in the european ccir standard. [89]in 1936, kálmán tihanyi described the principle of plasma display , the first flat panel display system. [90] [91]the basic idea of using three monochrome images to produce a color image had been experimented with almost as soon as black-and-white televisions had first been built. among the earliest published proposals for television was one by maurice le blanc in 1880 for a color system, including the first mentions in television literature of line and frame scanning, although he gave no practical details. [92] polish inventor jan szczepanik patented a color television system in 1897, using a selenium photoelectric cell at the transmitter and an electromagnet controlling an oscillating mirror and a moving prism at the receiver. but his system contained no means of analyzing the spectrum of colors at the transmitting end, and could not have worked as he described it. [93] another inventor, hovannes adamian , also experimented with color television as early as 1907. the first color television project is claimed by him, [94] and was patented in germany on march 31, 1908, patent № 197183, then in britain , on april 1, 1908, patent № 7219, [95] in france (patent № 390326) and in russia in 1910 (patent № 17912). [96]scottish inventor john logie baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission on july 3, 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination. [97] baird also made the world's first color broadcast on february 4, 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from baird's crystal palace studios to a projection screen at london's dominion theatre . [98]mechanically scanned color television was also demonstrated by bell laboratories in june 1929 using three complete systems of photoelectric cells , amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to superimpose the red, green, and blue images into one full color image.the first practical hybrid system was again pioneered by john logie baird. in 1940 he publicly demonstrated a color television combining a traditional black-and-white display with a rotating colored disk. this device was very "deep", but was later improved with a mirror folding the light path into an entirely practical device resembling a large conventional console. [99] however, baird was not happy with the design, and as early as 1944 had commented to a british government committee that a fully electronic device would be better.in 1939, hungarian engineer peter carl goldmark introduced an electro-mechanical system while at cbs , which contained an iconoscope sensor. the cbs field-sequential color system was partly mechanical, with a disc made of red, blue, and green filters spinning inside the television camera at 1,200 rpm, and a similar disc spinning in synchronization in front of the cathode ray tube inside the receiver set. [100] the system was first demonstrated to the federal communications commission (fcc) on august 29, 1940, and shown to the press on september 4. [101] [102] [103] [104]cbs began experimental color field tests using film as early as august 28, 1940, and live cameras by november 12. [105] nbc (owned by rca) made its first field test of color television on february 20, 1941. cbs began daily color field tests on june 1, 1941. [106] these color systems were not compatible with existing black-and-white television sets, and as no color television sets were available to the public at this time, viewing of the color field tests was restricted to rca and cbs engineers and the invited press. the war production board halted the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from april 22, 1942 to august 20, 1945, limiting any opportunity to introduce color television to the general public. [107] [108]as early as 1940, baird had started work on a fully electronic system he called the " telechrome ". early telechrome devices used two electron guns aimed at either side of a phosphor plate. the phosphor was patterned so the electrons from the guns only fell on one side of the patterning or the other. using cyan and magenta phosphors, a reasonable limited-color image could be obtained. he also demonstrated the same system using monochrome signals to produce a 3d image (called "stereoscopic" at the time). a demonstration on august 16, 1944 was the first example of a practical color television system. work on the telechrome continued and plans were made to introduce a three-gun version for full color. however, baird's untimely death in 1946 ended development of the telechrome system. [109] [110]similar concepts were common through the 1940s and 50s, differing primarily in the way they re-combined the colors generated by the three guns. the geer tube was similar to baird's concept, but used small pyramids with the phosphors deposited on their outside faces, instead of baird's 3d patterning on a flat surface. the penetron used three layers of phosphor on top of each other and increased the power of the beam to reach the upper layers when drawing those colors. the chromatron used a set of focusing wires to select the colored phosphors arranged in vertical stripes on the tube.one of the great technical challenges of introducing color broadcast television was the desire to conserve bandwidth , potentially three times that of the existing black-and-white standards, and not use an excessive amount of radio spectrum . in the united states, after considerable research, the national television systems committee [111] approved an all-electronic compatible color system developed by rca , which encoded the color information separately from the brightness information and greatly reduced the resolution of the color information in order to conserve bandwidth. the brightness image remained compatible with existing black-and-white television sets at slightly reduced resolution, while color televisions could decode the extra information in the signal and produce a limited-resolution color display. the higher resolution black-and-white and lower resolution color images combine in the brain to produce a seemingly high-resolution color image. the ntsc standard represented a major technical achievement.color bars used in a test pattern , sometimes used when no program material is available.although all-electronic color was introduced in the u.s. in 1953, [112] high prices and the scarcity of color programming greatly slowed its acceptance in the marketplace. the first national color broadcast (the 1954 tournament of roses parade ) occurred on january 1, 1954, but during the following ten years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white. it was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965 in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that fall. the first all-color prime-time season came just one year later.early color sets were either floor-standing console models or tabletop versions nearly as bulky and heavy, so in practice they remained firmly anchored in one place. the introduction of ge's relatively compact and lightweight porta-color set in the spring of 1966 made watching color television a more flexible and convenient proposition. in 1972, sales of color sets finally surpassed sales of black-and-white sets. also in 1972, the last holdout among daytime network programs converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season.color broadcasting in europe was not standardized on the pal format until the 1960s, and broadcasts did not start until 1967. by this point many of the technical problems in the early sets had been worked out, and the spread of color sets in europe was fairly rapid.by the mid-1970s, the only stations broadcasting in black-and-white were a few high-numbered uhf stations in small markets, and a handful of low-power repeater stations in even smaller markets such as vacation spots. by 1979, even the last of these had converted to color and by the early 1980s b&w sets had been pushed into niche markets, notably low-power uses, small portable sets, or use as video monitor screens in lower-cost consumer equipment. by late 1980's even these areas switched to color sets.
 u.s. labor markets became much less fluid in recent decades. job reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 1990, and worker reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 2000. the declines cut across states, industries and demographic groups defined by age, gender and education. younger and less educated workers had especially large declines, as did the retail sector. a shift to older businesses, an aging workforce, and policy developments that suppress reallocation all contributed to fluidity declines. drawing on previous work, we argue that reduced fluidity has harmful consequences for productivity, real wages and employment. to quantify the effects of reallocation intensity on employment, we estimate regression models that exploit low frequency variation over time within states, using state-level changes in population composition and other variables as instruments. we find large positive effects of worker reallocation rates on employment, especially for young workers and the less educated. similar estimates obtain when dropping data from the great recession and its aftermath. these results suggest the u.s. economy faced serious impediments to high employment rates well before the great recession, and that sustained high employment is unlikely to return without restoring labor market fluidity.a non-technical summary of this paper is available in the january 2015 nber digest .  you can sign up to receive the nber digest by email.you may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from ssrn.com ($5) for electronic delivery.you should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate  associate of the nber, a journalist , an employee of the u.s. federal government with a ".gov" domain name, or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy .if you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work vpn or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper  emailed to your work email address below.  the email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution.  gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.
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rt @lindayueh: asda boss sees another tough year for food retailers in 2015
 by harry kretchmer business reporter, bbc newsasda's chief executive andy clarke has told the bbc he has never seen profitability fall so quickly in the uk supermarket sector.he says 2015 could be as challenging.in an interview with bbc 5 live's wake up to money , broadcast on wednesday, he said discount grocers have had a striking impact on retailing.analysts kantar worldpanel say aldi and lidl have reached a record combined market share of 8.6% of all shopping done at major uk grocery chains.end quote paul foley former uk managing director, alditheir rise has come at the expense of the "big four" supermarkets, tesco, asda, sainsbury's and morrisons."the level of profitability decline in some retailers over the course of 2014 - we've never seen it before," said mr clarke. "it suggests 2015 is going to be equally as challenging."although asda has suffered less than rivals such as tesco from the rise of the discounters, its market share fell 1% in the three months to december according to kantar worldpanel.the discounters are planning to make bigger inroads into the uk this year.so confident are they that danish discounter netto is returning to the uk after a 4 year absence.interestingly, the company is being partnered by sainsbury, in what some see as a "can't beat them, join them" move.established aldi is on a major expansion drive, with plans to create 35,000 new jobs in the uk and to almost double its total number of stores to 1,000 by 2022.the former uk managing director of aldi, paul foley, told wake up to money the rise of the discounters was "unstoppable.""the golden age of food retail profits by big, very successful, very well run businesses is over and discounters are the disrupters."mr foley said the discounters were likely to grow to take a 20% market share.morrisons has been hit hard by the rise of aldi and lidl. it reported a 6.3% fall in sales in the three months to november and a fall in half year profits of just over 30%.in october the supermarket responded with the launch of match & more , a loyalty card that matches prices against aldi and lidl, as well as the big four."the number one driver of store choice used to be convenience - it's absolutely now about price.shoppers are generally more accepting of the discounters. they view it as a badge of honour”end quote natalie berg global research director, planet retail"we still have the same relative number of customers, they're just shopping slightly less frequently and buying slightly less."the bitter supermarket price war has forced the grocery market into deflation. according to the latest figures from the office for national statistics food prices have fallen by 1.7%.kantar worldpanel reported that the value of uk grocery sales fell for the first time in two decades in november.supermarket expert and loyalty magazine editor annich mcintosh, says the changes the industry is experiencing are profound."this modern shopper is unlike any we've known before - a person with a mobile phone who can compare prices instantly.global research director at analysts planet retail, natalie berg describes the rise of the discounters as part of "a perfect storm"."i think there's been a real shift just in the past 18 months."shoppers are generally more accepting of the discounters. they view it as a badge of honour and they're happy to shop those own brands"despite the threats, asda chief executive andy clarke sees grounds for optimism."kwik save had a place in this market for a good period of time and it disappeared from the landscape."they're a very different shopping experience. they've got roughly 10% of the product range of a superstore."but mr clarke had this warning: "the discounters will grow and there will be winners and losers."former aldi uk boss paul foley is bullish about the german retailers' prospects. "the game's only half over."mark price, the managing director of waitrose, is also upbeat.the high-end supermarket has grown market share, and said discounters aren't having an impact on sales.mr price had this advice for waitrose's rivals: "be very clear with your customers what you stand for."the ones that do that well will do extraordinarily well and they'll survive. the ones that do it less well will find the going tougher."wake up to money is broadcast weekdays on bbc 5 live. you can sign up to the podcast via the 5 live website.
 shares of macau’s two largest casino operators are heading for their first annual losses in more than four years as chinese gamblers cut spending amid an anti-graft campaign and record bets on the stock market.the chart of the day compares the performance of sands china ltd. (1928) and galaxy entertainment group ltd. against china ’s two biggest brokerages by market value in hong kong trading. casino revenue in macau slumped last month to 24.3 billion patacas ($3 billion), the lowest level since september 2012, while trading on the shanghai and shenzhen stock exchanges reached a high of 1.24 trillion yuan ($200 billion) yesterday.sands china and galaxy entertainment have lost at least 30 percent in 2014 as the city’s casino revenue dropped for six straight months. the two stocks surged more than 500 percent in the previous four years as an influx of mainland tourists helped macau become the world’s largest gambling hub. citic securities ltd. and haitong securities ltd. have jumped more than 38 percent this year amid a world-beating rally in shanghai shares, even after a market sell-off yesterday.“customers who used to wager on casino tables are probably now sitting at home betting on stocks,” said tai hui, hong kong-based chief asia market strategist at jpmorgan asset management. “investors are levering up on margin trading , or ‘using a small knife to cut a large tree.’”a man walks towards the casino lisboa, operated by sjm holdings ltd., illuminated at night in macau, china. the world’s largest gambling hub saw its biggest drop in history in october. closea man walks towards the casino lisboa, operated by sjm holdings ltd., illuminated at... read morea man walks towards the casino lisboa, operated by sjm holdings ltd., illuminated at night in macau, china. the world’s largest gambling hub saw its biggest drop in history in october.the outstanding value of chinese equity purchases using borrowed money climbed to a record 881.1 billion yuan as of dec. 5, according to data from the shanghai and shenzhen bourses. the shanghai composite index sank 5.4 percent yesterday, the most in five years, after jumping 25 percent in the previous four weeks to its highest level since 2011.while mainland regulators have eased regulations on investors using margin debt to buy shares, macau’s government has tightened visa rules for chinese visitors and cracked down on the use of unionpay debit cards to bypass mainland currency controls. president xi jinping , who has spearheaded the anti-corruption campaign, is expected to visit macau this month.to contact the reporters on this story: richard frost in hong kong at rfrost4@bloomberg.net ; billy chan in hong kong at bchan101@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: michael patterson at mpatterson10@bloomberg.netpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.2015 is proving to be a bad year for bitcoin investors. since january 1, the virtual currency's price has fallen 40 percent, from $320 to $190. and that's on top of big losses in 2014.this price decline will inevitably spark a wave of stories about how bitcoin is doomed. but we shouldn't read too much into it.remember, people were astonished when bitcoin's price first broke into the triple digits in early 2013. the high price meant that thousands of people were — irrationally, perhaps — betting that the technology had a bright future. maybe you think they're crazy, but today's price of $190 is no less a vote of confidence than it was two years ago.and bitcoin has recovered from major price declines before. the worst crash in bitcoin history, in percentage terms,  occurred in late 2011 , when the value of one bitcoin fell from $32 to $2. people —  including me — wrote stories about how bitcoin was stuck in a downward spiral from which it couldn't recover. but we were wrong. the price stabilized and then began rising again in 2012.that's because the value of bitcoin-the-currency doesn't have much to do with the usefulness of bitcoin-the-network. if you want to send someone $1,000 over the bitcoin network, you can do that when one bitcoin is worth $100 or $10 as easily as you can when it's worth $1,000. you just buy and sell a correspondingly larger number of bitcoins.ultimately, bitcoin's success or failure depends on  whether someone finds a "killer app" that will make the technology useful to a large number of people. maybe that won't happen, and recent price declines may reflect growing pessimism by bitcoin supporters. but this year's low prices don't prove bitcoin is failing any more than last year's high prices proved the opposite.
 charles c. mann, a correspondent for the atlantic, science, and wired, has written for fortune, the new york times, smithsonian, technology review, vanity fair, and the washington post, as well as for the tv network hbo and the series law & order. a three-time national magazine award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the american bar association, the american institute of physics, the alfred p. sloan foundation, and the lannan foundation. his 1491 won the national academies communication award for the best book of the year. he lives in amherst, massachusetts.a few years ago, while i was researching a book on the history of globalization, i suddenly realized that i was seeing the same two names on a lot of the smartest stuff i was reading. the names belonged to two economists, daron acemoglu and james robinson. much of their work focused on a single question: why are poor places poor, and is there something we can do about it?this is one of the most important questions imaginable in economics—indeed, in the world today. it is also one of the most politically fraught. in working on my book, i read numerous attempts by economists, historians and other researchers to explain why most of north america and europe is wealthy and why most of asia, africa and latin america is not. but these usually boiled down to claims that rich nations had won the game by cheating poor places or that poor places had inherently inferior cultures (or locations) which prevented them from rising. conservative economists used the discussion as a chance to extol the wide-open markets they already believed in; liberal economists used it to make the attacks on unrestrained capitalism they were already making. and all too often both seemed wildly ignorant of history. i can’t recall encountering another subject on which so many people expended so much energy to generate so little light.acemoglu and robinson were in another category entirely. they assembled what is, in effect, a gigantic, super-complete database of every country’s history, and used it to ask questions—wicked smart questions. they found unexpected answers—ones that may not satisfy partisans of either side, but have the ring of truth.why nations fail is full of astounding stories. i ended up carrying the book around, asking friends, “did you know this?” the stories make it a pleasure to read. more important, though, acemoglu and robinson changed my perspective on how the world works. my suspicion is that i won’t be the only person to say this after reading why nations fail."should be required reading for politicians and anyone concerned with economic development." —jared diamond, new york review of books"...bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful. it may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece."—washington post“for economics and political-science students, surely, but also for the general reader who will appreciate how gracefully the authors wear their erudition.”—kirkus reviews“this is an intellectually rich book that develops an important thesis with verve. it should be widely read.” —financial times"ranging from imperial rome to modern botswana, this book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations...as ambitious as jared diamond's guns, germs, and steel."“the main strength of this book is beyond the power of summary: it is packed, from beginning to end, with historical vignettes that are both erudite and fascinating. as jared diamond says on the cover: 'it will make you a spellbinder at parties.' but it will also make you think.” —the  observer (uk)"why nations failis a truly awesome book. acemoglu and robinson tackle one of the most important problems in the social sciences—a question that has bedeviled leading thinkers for centuries—and offer an answer that is brilliant in its simplicity and power. a wonderfully readable mix of history, political science, and economics, this book will change the way we think about economic development. why nations fail is a must-read book." —steven levitt, coauthor of freakonomics"you will have three reasons to love this book. it’s about national income differences within the modern world, perhaps the biggest problem facing the world today. it’s peppered with fascinating stories that will make you a spellbinder at cocktail parties—such as why botswana is prospering and sierra leone isn’t. and it’s a great read. like me, you may succumb to reading it in one go, and then you may come back to it again and again." —jared diamond, pulitzer prize–winning author of the bestsellers guns, germs, and steel and collapse"a compelling and highly readable book. and [the] conclusion is a cheering one: the authoritarian ‘extractive’ institutions like the ones that drive growth in china today are bound to run out of steam. without the inclusive institutions that first evolved in the west, sustainable growth is impossible, because only a truly free society can foster genuine innovation and the creative destruction that is its corollary." —niall ferguson, author of the ascent of money"some time ago a little-known scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. the wealth of nations is still being read today. with the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, daron acemoglu and james robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading why nations fail." —george akerlof, nobel laureate in economics, 2001"why nations fail is so good in so many ways that i despair of listing them all. it explains huge swathes of human history. it is equally at home in asia, africa and the americas. it is fair to left and right and every flavor in between. it doesn’t pull punches but doesn’t insult just to gain attention. it illuminates the past as it gives us a new way to think about the present. it is that rare book in economics that convinces the reader that the authors want the best for ordinary people. it will provide scholars with years of argument and ordinary readers with years of did-you-know-that dinner conversation. it has some jokes, which are always welcome. it is an excellent book and should be purchased forthwith, so to encourage the authors to keep working." —charles c. mann, author of 1491 and 1493“imagine sitting around a table listening to jared diamond, joseph schumpeter, and james madison reflect on over two thousand years of political and economic history.  imagine that they weave their ideas into a coherent theoretical framework based on limiting extraction, promoting creative destruction, and creating strong political institutions that share power and you begin to see the contribution of this brilliant and engagingly written book.” —scott e. page, university of michigan and santa fre institute“this fascinating and readable book centers on the complex joint evolution of political and economic institutions, in good directions and bad. it strikes a delicate balance between the logic of political and economic behavior and the shifts in direction created by contingent historical events, large and small at ‘critical junctures.' acemoglu and robinson provide an enormous range of historical examples to show how such shifts can tilt toward favorable institutions, progressive innovation and economic success or toward repressive institutions and eventual decay or stagnation. somehow they can generate both excitement and reflection.” —robert solow, nobel laureate in economics, 1987“it’s the politics, stupid! that is acemoglu and robinson’s simple yet compelling explanation for why so many countries fail to develop. from the absolutism of the stuarts to the antebellum south, from sierra leone to colombia, this magisterial work shows how powerful elites rig the rules to benefit themselves at the expense of the many.  charting a careful course between the pessimists and optimists, the authors demonstrate history and geography need not be destiny. but they also document how sensible economic ideas and policies often achieve little in the absence of fundamental political change.”—dani rodrik, kennedy school of government, harvard university“two of the world’s best and most erudite economists turn to the hardest  issue of all: why are some nations poor and others rich? written with a deep knowledge of economics and political history, this is perhaps the most powerful statement made to date that ‘institutions matter.’  a provocative, instructive, yet thoroughly enthralling book.” —joel mokyr, robert h. strotz professor of arts and sciences and professor of economics and history, northwestern university“a brilliant and uplifting book—yet also a deeply disturbing wake-up call. acemoglu and robinson lay out a convincing theory of almost everything to do with economic development. countries rise when they put in place the right pro-growth political institutions and they fail—often spectacularly—when those institutions ossify or fail to adapt.  powerful people always and everywhere seek to grab complete control over government, undermining broader social progress for their own greed. keep those people in check with effective democracy or watch your nation fail.” —simon johnson, co-author of 13 bankers and professor at mit sloan“this important and insightful book, packed with historical examples, makes the case that inclusive political institutions in support of inclusive economic institutions is key to sustained prosperity. the book reviews how some good regimes got launched and then had a virtuous spiral, while bad regimes remain in a vicious spiral.  this is important analysis not to be missed.” —peter diamond, nobel laureate in economics“acemoglu and robinson have made an important contribution to the debate as to why similar-looking nations differ so greatly in their economic and political development. through a broad multiplicity of historical examples, they show how institutional developments, sometimes based on very accidental circumstances, have had enormous consequences. the openness of a society, its willingness to permit creative destruction, and the rule of  appear to be decisive for economic development.” —kenneth arrow, professor emeritus, stanford university, nobel laureate in economics, 1972“acemoglu and robinson—two of the world's leading experts on development—reveal why it is not geography, disease, or culture which explains why some nations are rich and some poor, but rather a matter of institutions and politics. this highly accessible book provides welcome insight to specialists and general readers alike.” —francis fukuyama, author of the end of history and the last man and the origins of political order“some time ago a little known scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail.  the wealth of nations is still being read today.  with the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, daron acemoglu and james robinson have re-tackled this same question for our own times.  two centuries from now our great-great-…-great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading why nations fail.” —george akerlof, nobel laureate in economics, 2001“in this stunningly wide ranging book acemoglu and robinson ask a simple but vital question, why do some nations become rich and others remain poor?  their answer is also simple—because some polities develop more inclusive political institutions.  what is remarkable about the book is the crispness and clarity of the writing, the elegance of the argument, and the remarkable richness of historical detail.  this book is a must read at a moment where governments right across the western world must come up with the political will to deal with a debt crisis of unusual proportions.” —steve pincus, bradford durfee professor of history and international and area studies, yale university“the authors convincingly show that countries escape poverty only when they have appropriate economic institutions, especially private property and competition. more originally, they argue countries are more likely to develop the right institutions when they have an open pluralistic political system with competition for political office, a widespread electorate, and openness to new political leaders. this intimate connection between political and economic institutions is the heart of their major contribution, and has resulted in a study of great vitality on one of the crucial questions in economics and political economy.” — gary s. becker, nobel laureate in economics, 1992“this not only a fascinating and interesting book: it is a really important one.  the highly original research that professors acemoglu and robinson have done, and continue to do,  on how economic forces, politics and policy choices evolve together and constrain each other, and how institutions affect that evolution, is essential to understanding the successes and failures of societies and nations.  and here, in this book, these insights come in a highly accessible, indeed riveting form.  those who pick this book up and start reading will have trouble putting it down.” ¯michael spence, nobel laureate in economics, 2001"in this delightfully readable romp through 400 years of  history, two of the giants of contemporary social science bring us an inspiring and important message: it is freedom that makes the world rich. let tyrants everywhere tremble!" —ian morris, stanford university, author of why the west rules – for now“acemoglu and robinson pose the fundamental question concerning the development of the bottom billion. their answers are profound, lucid, and convincing.” ―paul collier, professor of economics, oxford university, and author of the bottom billion
rt @sub8u: interesting thought...
"drones will come before fully automated cars" -  @helengreiner
 "you can solve a mobility problem easier because they don't have to deal with all that stuff on the ground," says greiner, who wears a tiny toy robot, dangling from her necklace. "it's almost like you are cheating. drones will come before fully automated cars."
 draghi `very likely' to announce qe at ecb meeting: ballsdeflation is stalking the euro area.as european central bank policy makers gather for their first meeting of 2015 today, the backdrop is a 0.2 percent annual drop in consumer prices , the first in more than five years. for president mario draghi , who wants to open the money tap, the data may push the central bank closer to the unprecedented step of buying government bonds to revive growth and inflation.ecb officials are working on a plan to purchase sovereign debt as they strive to prevent a deflationary spiral of falling prices and households postponing spending, a risk draghi has said can’t be “entirely excluded.” in addition to moribund growth, the region risks being further unsettled by elections in at least three countries this year and mounting concern about the future of the single currency.“hello deflation,” said holger schmieding , chief economist at berenberg bank in london . “even if we do not share the widespread concerns about dangerous deflationary dynamics,” the ecb is “miles away” from its goal near 2 percent, he said.economists in a bloomberg survey had forecast the rate to fall to minus 0.1 percent.the euro fell for a fourth day against the dollar and was down 0.5 percent at $1.1827 as of 12:03 p.m. london time. it earlier declined to $1.1819, the lowest in nine years.a shopper carries his purchases as he walks along a balcony in the mall of berlin in berlin, germany. a sluggish economy and plunging oil prices are damping inflation across the euro region. closea shopper carries his purchases as he walks along a balcony in the mall of berlin in... read morea shopper carries his purchases as he walks along a balcony in the mall of berlin in berlin, germany. a sluggish economy and plunging oil prices are damping inflation across the euro region.a separate report showed unemployment remained at 11.5 percent in november. joblessness in italy rose to a record 13.4 percent. german unemployment, calculated under a national measure, fell to 6.5 percent in december, the lowest in more than two decades.the last time the euro area’s inflation rate went negative in 2009, the economy was struggling to recover from the recession that followed the collapse of lehman brothers holdings inc. this time, the decline was partly driven by sluggish growth and a drop in crude oil prices of about 50 percent in the past year.energy prices fell 6.3 percent in december from a year earlier, according to today’s report. core euro-zone inflation, which strips out volatile items such as energy, food, tobacco and alcohol, increased to 0.8 percent year-on-year in december.ecb officials have taken different approaches in analyzing the impact of plunging oil prices on the economy. while draghi has warned of a dis-anchoring of inflation expectations and signaled support for qe, bundesbank president jens weidmann favors not acting at this time, arguing that the drop could be a “mini-stimulus package.”ecb chief economist peter praet told germany ’s boersen-zeitung last month that in an environment in which inflation expectations are “extremely fragile,” officials cannot “simply look through” the slide in energy costs. praet makes a recommendation at the start of each monetary-policy meeting.central bank staff have worked on qe proposals in the past two months, and dutch newspaper het financieele dagblad reported yesterday that governors may be offered three different options to choose from at their jan. 22 meeting.“according to the ecb’s own logic, with sub-zero inflation, no sign of a material pickup on the horizon, and inflation expectations de-anchoring, there is a compelling case for further monetary easing,” said teunis brosens, an economist at ing groep nv in amsterdam. “the question no longer seems ‘if’ the ecb is going to announce qe, but ‘how’ it will be tailored.”since june, the ecb has cut interest rates twice, offered cheap long-term loans to banks to jumpstart lending and started a purchase program for asset-backed securities -- a decision weidmann and german executive board member sabine lautenschlaeger opposed.“if you look at past experience we’ve taken major monetary-policy decisions in a situation where there was no unanimity,” draghi said after the ecb’s dec. 4 meeting. “so this is what we have to keep in mind.”to contact the reporter on this story: stefan riecher in frankfurt at sriecher@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: fergal o’brien at fobrien@bloomberg.net jana randow, paul gordonpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 saudi arabia isn't the nicest ally to have. the desert kingdom just handed out   a sentence of  1,000 lashes to a blogger for running a website devoted to freedom of speech. not exactly the kind of regime we want to have in our circle of friends, especially once you figure in their financial support for islamic state and other radical islamist groups.but you go to war with the allies you have, not the allies you wish you had. and in the global oil price war against russia and iran, saudi arabia is the u.s.’s indispensable ally. by continuing to pump the black stuff at an undiminished rate, the saudis are repeating the trick they pulled in the mid-'80s, allowing oil prices to plunge in response to western supply increases, thus depriving their rival (iran) and ours (russia) of revenue -- and, in the process, temporarily tanking the u.s. shale industry.it would be nice if we could escape this cycle -- to say nothing of limiting global carbon emissions. but oil remains the indispensable commodity, without which industrial civilization will be thrown back to the coal age -- or worse. so we’re stuck with the saudis, stuck with russia and iran, and stuck with our dependence on a single nonrenewable pollution-generating resource.but what if we had a real-life iron man, to build us magical “ arc reactors ” and solve our energy needs forever. well, we do have the man who inspired the movie version of tony stark --tesla founder elon musk.musk and tesla haven’t invented the arc reactor, but they are making rapid incremental improvements to a more down-to-earth technology -- the lithium-ion battery. tesla’s planned “gigafactories” in nevada and (possibly) new york will harness economies of scale to an unprecedented degree, building on improvements that have slashed battery-based energy storage costs during the past two decades.just to give you an idea of how fast battery costs have declined, here is a chart (via futurist ramez naam ) showing how the amount of energy that can be stored in lithium-ion batteries per $100 rose from 1991 to 2005:that data is from a 2009 study by duke university. nor did storage efficiency stop after 2005; according to naam, the cost of electric-car batteries declined by 40 percent from 2010 to 2013. the tesla gigafactories are projected to drive costs down at an even faster rate.these declines, unlike the recent 50 percent drop in oil prices, are not temporary. they are driven by increasing demand, which spurs technological progress -- not by reduced demand, which lowers the oil price. in the case of oil, new technologies such as fracking allow us to get more oil, but always at a higher cost than before -- in the case of batteries, technology just keeps getting better and better.a 2011 mckinsey & co. analysis reported that battery prices would have to drop by about three-quarters to make electric cars cost-competitive at gas prices of $2.50 per gallon. but that was four years ago, and battery prices have continued falling. we could see cost-competitive electric cars taking over the road in as little as a decade. that’s how fast the cost trend is moving.of course, that will require extensive modifications to our transportation-energy infrastructure -- we’ll need to replace gas stations with charging stations. that’s why iron man – er, elon musk – has decided to allow other companies to use tesla's patented technology free of charge. when other car companies get in on the electric-car game -- such as general motors, which just announced a new electric car, the chevy bolt -- the incentive increases to build more electric-charging infrastructure. the more charging infrastructure gets built, the more incentive there is for consumers to buy electric cars, and so forth -- a classic case of a network effect.electric cars won't free humanity from the need for oil. we also use oil for making plastics and other products, and for heating. heating oil will eventually be supplanted by solar power, of course, for which musk’s batteries will also come in handy (bye bye, utility industry!). and we use oil for jet fuel, which can’t easily be replaced with batteries.but ground transportation still makes up the bulk of our oil use. so when batteries advance to the point where oil is no longer used for cars and trucks, the saudis, russians and iranians will find themselves selling what is suddenly a niche product. and simultaneously, the u.s., japan, europe and other energy importers will find themselves free from the yo-yo of global oil prices.in other words, it’s less than two decades until we are free from the yoke of the petrostates and their nasty, backward regimes. go iron man! …um, i mean, elon musk.       to contact the author on this story:to contact the editor on this story:noah smith is an assistant professor of finance at stony brook university and a freelance writer for a number of finance and business publications. he maintains a personal blog, called noahpinion. read more.
 wechat count with some features that allow companies to develop “mini-apps” in order to launch interactive marketing campaigns.it is essential for brands to interact with their costumers and wechat makes it possible.wechat is the most popular mobile messaging platform in china with over 368 million active users monthly, therefore companies can’t ignored this social media network.wechat is an effective tool for brands to share information and latest news with their followers. a marketing trend in wechat is present new products and promotions, create exclusive contest and games to engage followers.during the last months, many fashion and luxury brands have opened a wechat account, as reported by fashionbi’s marketing research. the reason of its growing importance is that wechat enables brands to have a one-to-one communication with their followers.due its efficacy, an increasing number of global brands are integrating wechat into their marketing strategies. with this app, brands are looking for interact with its potential consumers through creative ways in order to capture their attention and get their involvement.montblanc and “moon phase” campaign:the swiss watch brand has launched a campaign which is based in the importance of moon phases for chinese population.montblanc offers to its followers the chance to participate in a promotion of its meisterstück heritage perpetual calendar and bohème perpetual calendar jewelry watches, which includes on the watch dial a moon phase complication that tracks the wax and wane of the moon.in the campaign, members had to type their gender and birthdate into the app in order to receive information of their birth moon phase and the effect on their personality, love, hobbies and work.wang xiaoya, a chinese astrology author was the person in charge to develop the results.the french fashion brand created the campaign “kissing habits survey” on wechat along with its lipsticks collection. members before ask the eight-question survey about kisses, had to choose their gender and star sign. once finishing, users received the results and lipstick recommendations.a short time later, ysl continued the marketing strategy with the campaign “an invitation to kiss” based on its mini-movie which talks about six couples and each one of which is tied to one lip gloss color from its collection gloss volupté. to participate, users had to share their love stories and tag their lovers for an opportunity to win a lip gloss.the world’s premier jewelers developed a campaign for qixi festival, the chinese valentine’s day. the followers had to share pictures showing a “proof of love” for a chance to win gifts.the british luxury brand teamed up with wechat to offer an exclusive experience for its followers. through wechat, the users could view the fashion week autumn/winter 2014 womenswear show and also they could receive audio from the designers about the runway looks, exclusive photos of the show, and text messages from celebrities.burberry has created an interactive “parallel social events” via wechat, which allowed to followers to take part in the event.during the fifa world cup, mercedes-benz created a campaign in wechat. the members with the purpose to win gifts, through moments had to send their wishes of good luck to the german national football team which is sponsored by the automobile brand.the american skincare brand developed a game via wechat called “fair and rosy skin, show your ‘meng-ness’ cheek to cheek”. the game consist in put the cheeks against a picture of li dongxue, a famous actor and then, the members receive a score for how cute they are. the followers have the opportunity to share their results and win wechat red envelopes.due the michael kors jet set experience, an event to celebrate the opening of brand’s the first china flagship store in shanghai, the fashion brand developed a app on wechat called “jet set experience”, through which followers had access to live images and interactive news feed.the swiss watch brand, for its exhibition “la maison”, created an o2o (online-to-offline) marketing strategy. through wechat, brands encourage users to visit a store or event and provide them a high-quality experience. for the event, tag heur developed a mobile game which consisted in scan codes and answer questions while they visited the exhibition.the american fashion brand has taken advantage of the gamification, a technological feature available in wechat which allows brands incorporate mobile games into its campaigns. kate spade for the mid-autumn festival launched a flying-lantern game that allowed followers to choose the lantern color, write wishes and greetings on it and send it off into the sky.during the qixi festival, the swiss watchmaker created a campaign to inspire the poet in everybody. through the app, participants could compose a three-line poem and send it to their loved ones to impress them.as we see, wechat has become a powerful platform to engage costumers and therefore many brands has decided to integrate this powerful tool into their marketing strategies.it is very important for brands have presence in social media platforms to improve their visibility. if your company want to expand their presence or improve it, don’t hesitate to contact us.
 
 chinese smartphone maker xiaomi corp. is now officially the world’s most valuable tech startup, worth $46 billion—the exclamation point on a year of extraordinary valuations.valuations placed on tech startups world-wide stretched to record heights in 2014 and accelerated at an exceptional pace, even when compared with the late 1990s dot-com...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 the theory that men are idiots and often do stupid things is backed up by evidence in the christmas issue of the bmj. the findings are based on an analyses of sex differences in idiotic behaviour.sex differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency hospital admissions, and mortality are well documented. males are more likely to be admitted to an emergency department after accidential injuries, more likely to be admitted with a sporting injury, and more likely to be involved in a fatal road traffic collision.however, little is known about sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour. so researchers in north east england decided to test "male idiot theory" (mit) that many of the differences in risk seeking behaviour may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.they reviewed data on idiotic behaviours demonstrated by winners of the darwin award over a 20 year period (1995 to 2014), noting the sex of the winner. to qualify, nominees must improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race using astonishingly stupid methods.worthy candidates include a man stealing a ride home by hitching a shopping trolley to the back of a train, only to be dragged two miles to his death before the train was able to stop; and the terrorist who posted a letter bomb with insufficient postage stamps and who, on its return, unthinkingly opened his own letter.of the 413 darwin award nominations, 332 were independently verified and confirmed by the darwin awards committee. of these, 14 were shared by male and female nominees - usually overly adventurous couples in compromising positions - leaving 318 valid cases for statistical testing.of these 318 cases, 282 darwin awards were awarded to males, and just 36 awards given to females. males thus made up 88.7% of darwin award winners, and this sex difference is highly statistically significant, say the authors.this finding is entirely consistent with male idiot theory (mit) and supports the hypothesis that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.however, this study has limitations, add the authors. for example, women may be more likely to nominate men for a darwin award or the sex difference may reflect differences in alcohol use between men and women.despite this, it is puzzling that males are willing to take such unnecessary risks - simply as a rite of passage, in pursuit of male social esteem, or solely in exchange for "bragging rights," say the authors.they believe male idiot theory deserves further investigation, and, "with the festive season upon us, we intend to follow up with observational field studies and an experimental study - males and females, with and without alcohol - in a semi-naturalistic christmas party setting," they conclude.researchers have found that male and female brains respond in remarkably different ways to high-fat meals. those differences in the brain lead to greater inflammation and increased health risks in males that indulge on fatty ...people who engage in heterosexual group sex and partner swapping are increasing their risk of catching sexually transmitted diseases if they engage in multiple drug use, says a study published online in the journal sexually tr ...sex differences in behaviour—has the thrill gone?men have become less willing to engage in physically challenging activities over the past 35 years, according to a new study by the university of st andrews.in 1871, charles darwin sparked debate that continues today when he proposed that human sex differences evolved based on sexual selection. sexual selection is darwin's theory that certain physical, mental or psychological ...new research at washington university school of medicine in st. louis helps explain why brain tumors occur more often in males and frequently are more harmful than similar tumors in females. for example, ...the evaluation of public school teachers is a topic addressed regularly by voters and policymakers around the country. researchers at the university of missouri have identified a plan to evaluate teachers fairly using a "proportional" ...it may not come as a surprise that the more time college students, particularly freshmen, spend on facebook, the more their grades suffer. in his latest study, reynol junco, an associate professor of education ...poorer parents are just as involved in education, leisure, and sports activities with their children as better-off parents, a new study has found.how do people post important life events on facebook?when facebook users share information on important life events, do they prefer to do so directly (detailed status updated or wall posts) or indirectly (photos, change of job title)? how a person chooses to ...majority of young women and men prefer egalitarian relationships, study showsthe majority of young women and men today would prefer an egalitarian relationship in which work and family responsibilities are shared equally between partners if that possibility were available to them, ...2 / 5 (1) dec 11, 20143.3 / 5 (12) dec 11, 2014how about counting the percentage of males with patents?  just as one particular example.hey, it's cool.  dump on males all you want.  men invented tampons and lipstick and bras and everything else women love.  and men built every major industry in the world.  yes, men take risks.  sometimes they fail.  then you get to laugh your head off.2.7 / 5 (12) dec 11, 2014what a sexist piece of trash study.men have innovated and created 80% of all innovations. if that makes us idiots..well, something is seriously wrong with the people making the study.3.7 / 5 (13) dec 11, 2014the editors of this aggregator are certainly idiots for including this garbage.4.8 / 5 (10) dec 11, 2014how about counting the percentage of males with patents?  just as one particular example.hey, it's cool.  dump on males all you want.  men invented tampons and lipstick and bras and everything else women love.tampons have been used for thousands of years. earle haas probably didn't know.look to sumer for lipstick. you can make a passable lip gloss with alkanet.as for bras... 1480 according to a 2008 find... certainly not likely to be men doing the inventing then.christine hardt had the first bra patent.3 / 5 (4) dec 11, 2014the correct title for this study would be something like, "men more likely to be selected for darwin awards than women by a margin of __%."it would be fair to say that more men "earn" darwin awards.it would also be fair to say that live births are about 51% male, but those who survive to adulthood are only 49% male, due to factors such as increased risk-taking behaviors, the perception that beating a defenseless boy unconscious is "less" offensive than doing the same to a girl, etc.constructing something called "male idiot theory" illustrates in 1,000-point font that whoever is behind this has an agenda to push. in other words, this is one or more peoples' private conceits, that they will surely defend with all the vigor that people defend such conceits with, given vent.imagine if some group of people decided to coin the "female stupid bitch theory." would that article be published here? hmmm???????????5 / 5 (8) dec 11, 20143 / 5 (2) dec 11, 2014imagine a female science and technology.5 / 5 (14) dec 11, 20142.6 / 5 (5) dec 11, 2014men are more likely to be compelled by ego than by reason so this comes as no surprise. just look at all the sexist babble already posted...5 / 5 (8) dec 12, 20141 / 5 (1) dec 12, 2014now for a better overview of the genders: the speech is called "is there anything good about men?" by r. baumeister5 / 5 (5) dec 12, 2014excellent! now i don't have to make up excuses anymore, there is a scientific explanation that offers support!not rated yet dec 12, 2014some things have to be good about man...but they kept women centuries away from study, just for family related occupation, so yes, we can not accept the arguments about inventions, and prizes.5 / 5 (5) dec 12, 2014obviously tongue in cheek but males do of course get involved in more risky behavior than females. presumably sexual selection has something to do with it.4.3 / 5 (4) dec 12, 2014overall, men are 817 / 864 = 94.56% of all nobel winners.in medicine, men are 196 / 207 = 94.69% of all nobel winners.i'm surprised that such misandry was published by a major journal.if i write an article stating that "study supports the theory that 'women are idiots'", and cite nobel prize stats, will they publish it?5 / 5 (6) dec 12, 2014of these 318 cases, 282 darwin awards were awarded to males, and just 36 awards given to females.3 / 5 (2) dec 12, 2014this site is supposed to be a last refuge of sanity on the internet. moderators need to not post questionable social science pieces, and commenters need not have sexist comments. this applies to the ladies and men behind their screens equally.3 / 5 (2) dec 12, 2014it would get called sexist, taken down, and an apology would have to be issued. lol4.1 / 5 (13) dec 12, 2014whew! lots of injured egos here. maybe their next study should be on men's sense of humor.3.7 / 5 (3) dec 12, 2014what a waste of time, effort and paper. flawed on so many levels. and if this is meant to be a form of humour (which i sincerely hope, as the alternatives are worse), it's in bad taste for the bmj to publish it.3.7 / 5 (3) dec 12, 2014not rated yet dec 12, 2014it's the testosterone, the cause of all war.not rated yet dec 12, 2014was this study taken from one culture or many?in western society (though fortunately  this is happening less and less) men are "john wayned" and women are "betty crockered" into their roles from a very young age. boys are able to get away with 3 acts of violence and reckless behavior and girls are called out on the first one. some of this is biological to be sure, but most of it is attributable to culture imo.i would also say that men and women act "differently", the term idiotic itself has such a bias that i would look more deeply at the biases of those doing the study. we are, and continue to "grow up" as a species...this includes both men and women.4.5 / 5 (2) dec 12, 2014what some call an idiot others call a hero.an idiot strapped himself into a rocket and circled the earth.a hero strapped himself into a rocket and circled the earth.just because one person perceives the task idiotic doesn't make it so, if not for idiots we'd still be scratching the dirt for berries and bugs.5 / 5 (5) dec 12, 2014of these 318 cases, 282 darwin awards were awarded to males, and just 36 awards given to females.love the "cup half full" perspective, aa...:-)i suppose we could say men are more willing to do the "research" in determining probabilities...that fact that anyone takes this article at all seriously suggests we, as a society, are losing our sense of humor..5 / 5 (5) dec 12, 2014this isn't a valid study.they based their "research" on a comedy program. the darwin awards is by no means a valid source for anything. it'd be like calling all canadians idiots and claiming your research material to be south park.and yet, people will argue over a "study" that used a comedy site as a valid source.  the article doesn't mean anything, other than the fact that the people who called this a study should be reprimanded and told to find an actual source for material.not rated yet dec 12, 2014how dare they insult my ego!i am so angry i am going to speed my bike through traffic. to hell with the red lights- stupid things.1 / 5 (1) dec 12, 2014hard to refute as there is no female equivalent to the jackass films & shows. one of those guys died *from idiotic behavior!3 / 5 (4) dec 12, 2014it seems many of the commenters can't take a light-hearted joke. it's a statistic observation. the "study" doesn't conclusively give a cause for this behaviour, they simply note that it is there. why people are rushing to defend their gender, when it's simply an apt observation is beyond me. "ooo men invented everything, stop insulting us." it's not an insult, it's just a fact. the fact that they intended to conduct a follow-up "study" which would consist of people watching at their upcoming office christmas party should have been a clear message to those bruised egos that this is, in fact, a humorous bit of fun.not rated yet dec 12, 2014not rated yet dec 12, 2014the problem with this kind of humour is that it's only truly funny for the other one.  also we must come to the conclusion that for a while now the executives at phys.org have been targeting a whole new set of readers.  i for one got bored half way through the article but reading the comments was certainly amusing ;)5 / 5 (3) dec 12, 2014whew! lots of injured egos here. maybe their next study should be on men's sense of humor.do you feel this is something that every last person who reads it is obliged to laugh at? is it right that a "theory" based on a comedy award, which awards its recipients unscientifically, is presented on what is supposedly a legit science site? am i allowed to be annoyed by things without your permission? is your sense of humor the gold standard?it's the testosterone, the cause of all war.actually, testosterone helps people calm down and relax. men with aggression problems are statistically more likely to be short on testosterone. this was discovered in a prison experiment, where they thought the opposite would be true.1 / 5 (1) dec 13, 2014it seems many of the commenters can't take a light-hearted joke. it's a statistic observation. the "study" doesn't conclusively give a cause for this behaviour, they simply note that it is there. why people are rushing to defend their gender, when it's simply an apt observation is beyond me. "ooo men invented everything, stop insulting us." it's not an insult, it's just a fact. the fact that they intended to conduct a follow-up "study" which would consist of people watching at their upcoming office christmas party should have been a clear message to those bruised egos that this is, in fact, a humorous bit of fun.too bad that you miss the most important criticism, namely that publishing these kinds of mock-studies serves to discredit science and, especially, the credibility of noteworthy scientific periodicals like the bmj.not rated yet dec 13, 2014author is likely the type of person who, in grade school, thought that beating up other kids was a clever practical joke.this comment has been removed by a moderator.
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rt @maxcroser: as countries grew richer the share working in agriculture declined hugely

 structural transformation refers to the reallocation of economic activity across the broad sectors agriculture, manufacturing and services. this review article synthesizes and evaluates recent advances in the research on structural transformation. we begin by presenting the stylized facts of structural transformation across time and space. we then develop a multi-sector extension of the one-sector growth model that encompasses the main existing theories of structural transformation. we argue that this multi-sector model serves as a natural benchmark to study structural transformation and that it is able to account for many salient features of structural transformation. we also argue that this multi-sector model delivers new and sharper insights for understanding economic development, regional income convergence, aggregate productivity trends, hours worked, business cycles, and wage inequality. we conclude by suggesting several directions for future research on structural transformation.you may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from ssrn.com ($5) for electronic delivery.you should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate  associate of the nber, a journalist , an employee of the u.s. federal government with a ".gov" domain name, or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy .if you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work vpn or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper  emailed to your work email address below.  the email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution.  gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.users who downloaded this paper also downloaded these:
 pastebin, dailymotion, github blocked after dot order: reportanupam saxena , toi tech | dec 31, 2014, 01.44pm istthe block was first reported by pastebin, a website where you can store text online for a set period of time, through its social media accounts on december 19.new delhi: a number of indian users are reporting they're not able to access websites such as  pastebin, dailymotion and github while accessing the internet through providers such as bsnl and vodafone.the block was first reported by pastebin, a website where you can store text online for a set period of time, through its social media accounts on december 19. in a follow-up post on december 26, the site posted that it was still blocked in india on the directions of the indian government.a number of users also posted about the blocks on reddit threads confirming that the sites have been blocked by vodafone, bsnl and hathway, among others.http://t.co/e3zrknjjqo seems to have been blocked in india. if you are from india and unable to visit pastebin, please email us.— pastebin.com (@pastebin) december 19, 2014it now appears that the blocks are being carried out on the instructions of  dot (department of telecom). the telecom body reportedly issued a notification regarding the same on december 17. a screenshot of the circular has been posted on twitter by pranesh prakash. the notification mentions that 32 urls including pastebin, video sharing sites vimeo and dailymotion, internet archive site archive.org and github.com( a web-based software code repository), have been blocked under section 69a of the information technology act, 2000. dot has also asked isps to submit compliance reports. however, we have not been able to verify the authenticity of the circular.— pranesh prakash (@pranesh_prakash) december 31, 2014at the time of writing this story, we could not access pastebin, dailymotion and github on vodafone 3g and our office network that has access via dedicated lines. vodafone is not displaying any errors and is simply blocking access. however, a number of users report that they're getting an error that says 'the site is blocked as per the instructions of competent authority.' however, we were able to access all the websites on airtel 3g.stay updated on the go with the times of india’s mobile apps. click here to download it for your device.
 one of my favorite business books of all time is crossing the chasm by geoffrey moore. it is a classic. my boss and mentor from open market, gary eichhorn , made the entire management team read it in the 1990s to hammer home its important lessons as we stumbled through the chasm on our way to scaling from zero to nearly $100 million in revenue in a few years.i have been thinking about the challenges of crossing the chasm - that is, taking a cutting-edge product and selling it successfully to the mainstream, not just early adopters who are more tolerant of less complete solutions - and the challenges of scaling in general as many of my portfolio companies are dealing with these issues.  a few years ago, i wrote a few case studies on how some big players achieved scale - like  akamai , tripadvisor and athenahealth  - to help crystalize my thinking on the topic, but i thought it might be appropriate to write a more general blog post on the challenges that companies face at different points in the scaling process.  scaling up is becoming a hot topic lately, from non-profit endeavor  and the world economic forum focusing attention on the importance of scaling up companies in the global scale up declaration to the economist pointing out that israel's miraculous start up economy is seeking to transition from "start up" to "scale up".  i coined 2014 as the year of results , where the lofty promises would finally translate into real, tangible outcomes ( and it was for us ).  2015 may be the year of the scale up.dealing with scale up challenges is particularly important to me because of our firm's investment strategy.  we pride ourselves on being lifecycle investors, which means we invest very early on (typically at the seed or series a stage) and then stick with a company through exit.  some vcs prefer investing at the earliest stages and then cycle off the board of directors.  others prefer to come in at the later stages, post product-market fit, and not have to deal with the risk and roller coaster of the early stages.  gluttons for punishment, we prefer to start early, take the risk and stick around through the end.  as a result, i get to work with companies both during the search for product market fit and after they hit product market fit, and race headlong into the chasm.for quick context, i sit on the board of eleven flybridge portfolio companies and am an observer on two.  each of us typically makes one or two new investments per year (i made one new investment in 2014).  with that rhythm, if things are going according to plan, i should have a spread of companies across a wide range of scaling stages, as measured by annual revenue.if i plot my portfolio companies across a few broad revenue buckets, looking at 2014 figures, below is a chart.  they spread fairly evenly, although slightly more in the earlier stages as few companies achieve the kind of success that $> 50m in revenue entails.at each stage, there are different problems.  here are the patterns of issues i typically see at each stage - maybe you will recognize a few of them in your own companies:people:  founder-run and trying to recruit amazing technical talent (the product development team is a huge priority at this stage) and integrate a few senior managers to help prepare the company for scale - which leads to cultural clashes and communication challenges. also, the founders' roles' start to evolve (see:  " the other founder ") as functional areas and responsibilities become more precisely defined.product:  the product is buggy and incomplete - really more of a feature than a complete product - but it is past mvp.  customers are using it and deriving value and now the challenge is how to complete it - fast, before running out of money. business model:  running a lot of experiments - pricing, packaging, value proposition. always testing and trying to run fast tests to put up some strong metrics before running out of money (did i mention we're running out of money?).financing:  holy crap - we are running out of money in 6 months! have we acheived enough value-creating milestones to raise an up round? who will lead it (insiders vs. outsiders) and on what terms?people:  things are going well - everyone gets excited when the cash register rings after a few big sales. the first version of the go to market team is hired (i.e., first sales person, first marketing professional).  the founders are getting restless because they have been diluted, have less responsibility and realize that the company isn't going to reach $1 billion in 3 years. also, that first vp you hired was great from 0-1 and good from 1-10, but you're afraid she can't scale to the next level.product:  the product is better - a lot better - but now we have technical debt thanks to our success. anyone up for a rewrite? how much do we invest in a rearchitecture versus adding new features.business model:  time to get some channel and business partners on board, because adding revenue by adding sales and marketing dollars is going to be expensive - no matter what the early ltv vs. cac data shows.  the focus now is building a repeatable, scalable sales machine . financing:  the "hopes and dreams" financing stage is over. nothing ruins a good story like numbers and now we have numbers so we better have them look good enough to support a strong expansion round. and why does it look so easy to raise $20m on $100m pre for companies at an earlier stage than i am every time i read techcrunch, as my board reminds me every month (and can i stop having monthly board meetings already)? do we take a little venture debt to get us to give us some cushion as we progress to the next valuation inflection point.people:  the functional management team is running out of steam - do we need to roll up a few things and perhaps hire a coo? the board has too many investors on it (how did that happen?!) - can we add an outside director of two?  most critically, is the ceo scaling or is time to replace them as well (ideally not).product:  now that we have a robust product and paid down our technical debt, we seem to have lost our ability to run experiments - how do we maintain that mission-critical quality for all these customers while remaining as nimble as we were when we were a startup? also, customers are pushing us to provide a solution, not just a product, and so suddenly we need services and partners to round out our offering.business model:  now that we are at a reasonable scale, why are our gross margins so low and what can we do to fix it?  is it time to be profitable or should we continue to prioritize growth and invest ahead of revenue?  should we pursue adjacent m&a or tuck in acquisitions to expand our market footprint?financing:  is our market big enough to support another round (which puts the exit bar even higher)? is it time to consider an exit? would an ipo be possible in the future if we can continue growing 50-100% per year?people:  should we have a business unit structure or retain the functional structure?  do we have an ipo management team in place? is the ceo still a single point of failure or can she delegate effectively in the event of a road show? board committees start to really matter.product:  with a robust product and complimentary solution in place, let's open this sucker up - let's build as many apis as we can and evolve this thing into a platform. time to enlist some 3rd party developers!business model:  if we're not profitable at this point, we better be growing > 50%/year. how profitable should we be? are we seeing erosion in our ltv vs. cac math or is it continuing to scale nicely? where should our first international office be and how much should we invest?financing:  do we have the metrics to support a growth or mezzanine round?  let's expand our debt capacity and put in place a working capital line and receivables facility.people:  the a team is in place at the top and now we have to focus on solidifying the next level and providing them with great training, career paths, growth and additional stock options (in the form of refresh grants) as they are all getting approached by pesky recruiters.product:  we are in the midst of a feature war with competitors - how much do we invest in new product innovation versus continue to harden and prepare for scale. how can the product be changed to lower the cost of delivery for us and cost of ownership for our customers?business model:  services revenue and services partners become more important. investing more heavily in international.financing:  why haven't you filed the s-1 already?!one of the things i've learned from my two decades in startup land is that it doesn't get any easier as you scale - the problems just evolve, but there are still problems.  and opportunities.  but i guess that is what makes the startup game so fun.trackback url for this entry:
 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.economists are really smart and highly trained. and they're often terrible at predicting the future.a new analysis from deutsche bank's torsten slok (and tweeted by business insider's joe weisenthal on thursday) shows that economists' forecasts of the 10-year treasury rate have been way, way off for more than a decade now.the dotted lines represent forecasts according to the fed's survey of professional forecasters . the 10-year rate matters for a lot of reasons beyond the rate of return on treasuries — it's also tightly linked to mortgage rates, for example. in addition, it can drive investment decisions — lower rates here tend to mean higher returns on stocks, as investors flock from bonds to riskier (but higher-reward) equities.true, there were some crazy, unpredictable times for the 10-year in the last 12 years — when the us inched toward default in 2011, for example, the return on treasuries in fact  dropped . but this chart only goes to show that in good times and bad, economists very often are terrible at looking into the future.it's not just economists who are wrong; the market is sometimes, too.  businessweek also posted this chart on wednesday (also from slok), showing that federal funds futures have also been predicting a hike in the federal funds rate for five years now. that hike hasn't happened yet.
 for the past few years, one of the most exciting class of gadgets on display at ces has been drones. but the basic rules of what a drone was, and what it did, were stable. they got cheaper, lighter, and easier to use even as they became more powerful. but it was still a flying craft with a camera that required a pilot to operate. it was exciting that flying, a hobby which once took a lot of effort and skill, was suddenly available to anyone. even old, non-technical folks like martha stewart were smitten . but if there is one thing social media, smartphones, and selfie sticks have taught us, it’s that most people prefer to be in front of the camera.this year, the big feature drone companies were pushing at ces were units that could fly themselves, acting as your personal cinematographer in the sky. units like the airdog , hexo+ , zano , trace , and ghost all touted their “follow me” feature, where the drone locks onto you and flies anywhere you go. we saw hours of beautiful slow motion footage of extreme athletes capturing themselves in action. and while not everyone spends their days shredding down a mountain, normal people were offered the ability to launch a drone that shoots an amazing 360-degree selfie. who wouldn’t want that?however, all of this "follow me" tech is pretty limited in where it can actually be used, because most drones still lack a critical feature needed for autonomous flight: reliable "sense and avoid" technology that can see what’s around and use that data to make smart decisions about how to avoid accidents in real time. airdog and zano claim to have that technology already working in the lab, if not out in the real world yet. but so far it’s just big claims and vaporware. luckily, there was one amazing and tangible breakthrough this year, and it came from an unexpected source: intel.at its keynote this year, intel showed off drones that could fly themselves through a forest, navigating around trees. onstage, they reacted to people who moved towards them, dodging to avoid a collision. it was powerful sense-and-avoid technology, and it was powered by intel’s realsense , a system of camera hardware and software originally developed to allow people to control their computer without having to physically touch their mouse or keyboard. "this is a good example of technology being extended beyond its original intent," said intel ceo brian krzanich. "once we had that developed, we learned we could push that into drones."intel partnered with ascending technologies , a german company that makes industrial and research grade drones. they took an asctec firefly and used lightweight carbon fiber mounts to attach six realsense cameras on top for 360-degree coverage. ascending built a custom pci-express interface board and used a tiny, lightweight quad-core intel atom processor to crunch the data. it ran an algorithmic chain, processing depth information from six cameras, performing real-time sensor data fusion and state estimation, near-field obstacle avoidance, and path planning navigation. with realsense talking to the asctec trinity autopilot system, something remarkable happened.krzanich said intel is making the realsense sdk available to developers now, and expects to start selling the hardware sometime later this year. as this and competing technologies come to market, powerful sense and avoid will quickly proliferate across the industry. "the good news from ces 2015 is that the semiconductor giants are throwing billions of dollars of research and [production] capacity at problems we, the drone industry, need solved," said chris anderson, the ceo of 3d-robotics . "so between qualcomm’s work on real-time vision built into their snapdragon program and intel’s work on realsense vision, which is a standalone chip, those things are now going to be driving next year’s drones, and they are going to be available at a cost and speed that we, the drone industry, could never have done on our own."rapid progress in sense and avoid isn’t just great news because it will open up many amazing new abilities for both commercial and consumer drones. it’s critical because the industry, at least in the us, is in danger of being regulated to death. as someone who has fallen in love with drones, ces made me feel both excited and terrified at the same time. the drone industry today, at least in the us, is balanced on a knife’s edge. every year brings units that are cheaper, more powerful, and more autonomous. it has the potential to be the next multi-billion dollar tech industry, akin to pcs and smartphones: a ubiquitous gadget that becomes part of our daily life and pop culture.but new faa regulations, mandated by congress for 2015, could also derail the industry in a big way. reports on the agency’s plans have signaled they may make it much tougher for civilians to own and fly drones . and in the absence of federal rules, local governments are considering basically banning them entirely . reliable sense-and-avoid technology that regulators can rally behind as a safety standard is what the industry needs to ensure its continued expansion. last year that seemed like a long shot. now it seems like brilliant technology has put it well within our reach.
 you can tell a lot about a person by what they do between the hours of 7–11 p.m.gary vee published a fantastic medium post this week talking about the difference between luck and karma.per usual it caused me to step back and look at my own actions, but the thing that stuck out to me most was when he said the following:“there is a cynicism towards hard work that seems to emerge a lot in our world. people don’t want to admit that maybe they have to put in extra hours, stay up late, give up tv binge watching, and work. it’s easy for you to say i’m lucky, but does luck have anything to do with the fact that i’m writing this at 7pm on a sunday?”this really hit home to me. being an expecting father and many-hat-wearer at meetball , i often times find myself trying to walk the line between working 70 hour weeks and maintaining my relationships with those important to me.i spend a lot of time on twitter ( and yes, i do consider the way i use twitter as “work” ), and through this i stumble upon the real. fucking. hustle. that it takes to make it in this world. i spend anywhere between 1–5 hours on twitter during the day, with the majority of my personal consumption coming at night.i now see the importance of the “non-9–5" hours, for they are a glimpse into one’s soul.@garyvee sacrifices a part of his valuable family time to write a blog.@rrhoover is constantly commenting, hunting and meeting up . seriously, constantly.these individuals could easily justify kicking back and watching homeland, hitting up happy hour, or anything other than “work stuff” but instead they choose to go above and beyond. they realize the need to put in those extra few reps, because it is built into their mindset.i myself find some of my favorite working hours are between 8–11 on saturday mornings. there is no “expectation” for me to do work, but i find it to be the perfect time to reflect on the week and do research and strategize for the next.i’ve cut back on my weekend bar hops and have actually began moonlighting as an uber driver for some extra spending cash as an alternative. this allows me to wake up early for added productivity hours, while still being able to enjoy the occasional brunch or beach day with my fiance or friends ( hey, i do live in socal ).the most important aspect here is keeping those you love happy, and allowing yourself to really share sincere moments with them on a daily basis ( which can easily be lost in the hustle ). whether it is for 30 minutes or 4 hours, the key is to make the time valuable.take a walk and talk about their day.turn a chore into a bonding experience.there is no perfect balance, and it is different for everyone. one thing that is consistent for all of us however is that nothing comes easy, even if it seems as though it does for others. it takes muscle to hustle, and requires dedication and honesty with yourself to earn it.i appreciate you taking some of your spare time reading my thoughts, now go get back to work. i’ll be doing the same.
 create your own data transformation: [+]use a formula to modify and combine data series into a single line. for example, invert an exchange rate a by using formula 1/a, or calculate the spread between 2 interest rates a and b by using formula a - b.use the assigned data series variables above (e.g. a, b, ...) together with operators {+, -, *, /, ^}, braces {(,)}, and constants {e.g. 2, 1.5} to create your own formula {e.g. 1/a, a-b, (a+b)/2, (a/(a+b+c))*100}. the default formula 'a' displays only the first data series added to this line. you may also add data series to this line before entering a formula.
 create your own data transformation: [+]use a formula to modify and combine data series into a single line. for example, invert an exchange rate a by using formula 1/a, or calculate the spread between 2 interest rates a and b by using formula a - b.use the assigned data series variables above (e.g. a, b, ...) together with operators {+, -, *, /, ^}, braces {(,)}, and constants {e.g. 2, 1.5} to create your own formula {e.g. 1/a, a-b, (a+b)/2, (a/(a+b+c))*100}. the default formula 'a' displays only the first data series added to this line. you may also add data series to this line before entering a formula.
 by andrew mcafee on august 7, 2014my last post here took on zeynep tufekci and, by extension, others who believe the current trend of using robots and other forms of advanced technology for caregiving is, as she put it, “an abdication of a desire to remain human, to be connected to each other through care, and to take care of each other.”  i wonder how these self-appointed guardians of our humanity feel about the new iphone app that provides automated diagnoses of imminent mood swings for people with bipolar disorder.i love this technology, for the reasons nicely enumerated in this slate article by aimee swartz . bipolar disorder is common – it affects almost 6 million american adults — and can be very hard to live with, both for people with the condition and for those around them. none of my loved ones have it, thankfully, but i’ve watched families i know well suffer greatly as they try to help one of their members cope with the illness.many of the people with it would like to moderate their severe mood swings, but this can be hard to do because as swartz explains “once a manic episode has begun, the patient often becomes unreceptive to recommendations to seek medical care.” so it’s important to get to then as early as possible during the transition to that episode, when they’re still receptive. this is where priori, a technology under development by prof. melvin mcinnis  and his colleagues at the university of michigan, comes in. with informed consent and in accordance with privacy rules, priori collects the patients’ sides of their smartphone calls, then analyzes these sound files using machine learning techniques to figure out which characteristics of speech are most strongly related to the onset of a manic episode. importantly for privacy, the algorithms don’t track or analyze what patients are saying, only how they’re saying it.this might well be enough. in an small initial trial involving a half dozen people with relatively rapid mood swings, the app was successful at predicting when one was coming 65% of the time. this is pretty good, and as swartz points out it’ll only get better with more time and more data.mcinnis explains why this is so important: ““the classic way we have of monitoring individuals with bipolar disorder is what i call 18th-century medicine. people see their doctors, chat how their energy levels are during the day, how they’re sleeping at night, how they’re getting along at home and work to gauge how they’re going… [w]e [currently] diagnose an episode when it’s already started, and it’s already causing all kinds of problems.”in other words, our current, human-centric system of taking care of these highly vulnerable people isn’t working. so what would work better? it looks like a small, unobtrusive piece of technology might work pretty well here, and improve caregiving via automation.anyone got a problem with that, or want to make a case for why taking care of our mentally ill loved ones should remain human-centric and low tech? if so, i’m all ears.as a person with bipolar ii disorder, i think that what works is uniting both approaches — human-centric, through educating and empowering the individual to recognize when mood swings are imminent, and technology, through providing devices &that the individual can utilize to keep track. the emotional swings of bipolar make it very difficult to access memory, sometimes, and having a device or app that could provide unbiased (so, not coming from my frustrated spouse or irritated sibling or emotion-ridden other significant person) data on exactly how i am functioning and patterns that show how i have functioned before. that’s why this technology is useful – i’m relatively introspective, but mood really clouds my ability to recognize my own power in any given situation. however, i’m probably very unlikely to allow the app to help me if i don’t also have a human-centric, talk-based therapy to guide me through how to deal with the data provided about my mood swings as well. what bipolar people need are tools, through education, therapy, and roleplay practice, for recognizing stimuli and actually dealing with them in healthy ways.the “and low tech” part is where you’ve “shifted” the focus of zeynep’s article.i think her focus was centered more on “robots” as the central figure for taking care of grandma, one on one (i’m going to re-read it again to make sure). “one on one” is the key part of the equation there, removing the human from the equation.your focus is using technology to supplement (key word: supplement) the human part of the equation and improve the overall result, personally, i’m all for that.but removing the “human touch” from the equation altogether and replacing it with the current version of a robot … nope, it’s still an emotional transaction.anna, thank you for your comment – it’s very insightful and helpful.for more informations please visit this website:more and more great alone applications on smartphones, to the future will be like what else the sophistication of the feature to be provided?recent years, scientists and researches make exploitation to ultrasonic crushing technology and produced a set of ultrasonic crusher. from here: http://www.toption-china.com/products/ultrasonic-cell-crusher-ordinary-type . this development can improve the crushing effect of mineral stone with smoother and faster vibration.
 sasha frere-jones here. i’m happy to announce that i’ve become the executive editor of music at genius. for the last eleven years, i’ve been a staff writer and the pop critic at the new yorker. (you can read that work here .) there is no better job in criticism than working for the new yorker. if you want to learn how to write clearly and accurately, while retaining a distinct voice, this magazine will teach you. subscribe. you’ll love it.as a teen, i became a touring and recording musician after working in theater. in my late twenties, i became a professional music critic (slowly, and in a poorly organized way).this hybrid past made me especially interested in the possibilities of genius. the site uses the web’s native tools to unpack and annotate songs. you may be obsessed with lyrics, details of production, or the story of how a song came to be; there is a hefty list of things you can learn about any piece of music, even if you think you know it by heart. genius song pages are powered by a community that knows songs, sometimes better than the artists. a good page can collate different, sometimes conflicting, commentaries — using text, image and video — and put those layers in one, easy accessible place. that one laser-eyed tweet about magic! that had no specific destination? it can live on a genius page.one of the web’s strengths is that it revises itself, admitting new information and incorporating dissenting views, rather than simply waving at them, regally. genius is, by design, an open and unfinished text — a reader who doesn’t think an annotation is strong enough can log on and make that song page more robust.genius pages begin as evidence of the community’s debate and, eventually, live as a resource for the larger audience of casual fans, journalists, academics, and anyone who wants to know what m.o.p are yelling at the start of “ante up.”also, it’s called genius, not rap genius. look at the genres at the top of the page. yup. lots of choices!so what will i be doing?first off, i’ll be annotating – some on my own and a lot with all of you.i’ll also work with you all @genius-editorial-board to answer some hard questions. how do we build a community that produces more annotations like this one and fewer like this one ? how do we deal with pop? what does the best possible annotated version of blank space look like? what kind of artist annotations should we seek out? how do we get more artists annotating other artists’ work?i’ll bring in artists to tell the stories behind recordings and help correct errors. that doesn’t mean every artist annotation has to be a tablet delivered from on high – some of my favorites are nothing like that, and show that stars can be self-deprecating, too . i’ll also be looking to expand our circle of contributors as well — people who’ve lurked, people who’ve been curious, some who’ve been critical. i will stay awake with you and help make these pages as good as they can be.see you on the songs.
 last spring, matt sweeny flew from his hometown of sydney, australia, to san francisco. amid the clothing he’d packed in his suitcase, enough to last him three months, was a silver, saucer-like drone.sweeny, a hale 26-year-old with blond highlights, tinkered with his first drones in his dorm room. he’d arrived in san francisco with the same goal as the other hopeful young tech workers who stream into the bay area every week: to secure investors for his startup. he was further along than many of them; his 6-month-old company, flirtey, had lit up the international press the previous october with promises of delivering textbooks via drone, predating amazon’s announcement of its own drone-­delivery ambitions by two months, and google’s by ten. sweeny hoped that his company’s friendly name and breezy branding (stuff by air. anytime. anywhere.) would soften the perception of unmanned aerial vehicles ( uav s) as assassin machines.as he and his drone ubered from investor coffee to investor dinner, sweeny pitched a future in which ubiquitous flirtey drones delivered everything from pizzas to units of blood. the company had already completed more than 100 test deliveries in australia and was eager to expand to the u.s., where regulation of commercial drones was just getting underway. sweeny had envisioned an office with a view of the bay, but as he spoke to industry watchers in california, he heard that much of the actual flying would be happening several hundred miles east, in nevada. the state has long been a hub for military-drone development and deployment, and in december, it was chosen by the faa as one of six testing sites for commercial drones. so, four weeks after landing at sfo, sweeny rented a mustang and blazed east on interstate 80, toward a city whose name he’d heard for the first time just days before.upon his arrival in reno — long viewed as a seedier, warmed-over vegas — sweeny realized that the power dynamic had flipped. in the bay area, he had pitched investors who were seeing ten other entrepreneurs a day — a real-life version of shark tank. in reno, he was escorted around the city in an suv by a business development booster. he shook hands with the dean of engineering at the university of nevada at reno, which had recently begun offering a minor in drones. (a local community college is developing a uav program as well.) he checked out “startup row,” a few blocks of tech incuba tors and offices along the truckee river downtown.it was an effective pitch. sweeny moved from sydney to reno in june, having negotiated “very, very cheap rent” and use of the university’s indoor testing facility in exchange for an equity stake in his company, research collaboration, and a commitment to hiring from the school’s pool of drone minors.analysts estimate that commercial drones will become a $1.1 billion industry within a decade. the faa has been slow to anticipate regulatory issues, but its 2013 request for applications from would-be testing sites set off a scramble by various states, universities, and airfields to capture a piece of this emerging economy. nevada’s case rested heavily on its massive airspace and existing network of drone pilots, thanks to creech air force base, outside las vegas. savvy officials in reno, whose casino economy has been on the decline for more than a decade, recognized a potential opportunity.one afternoon in august, joel grace, vice president of marketing and competitive expansion at the economic development authority of western nevada, gave me a variation of the suv tour that had worked so well on sweeny. driving down reno’s main thoroughfare, grace dismissed the sights his city is known for — check-cashing and liquor stores, a scrubby casino whose parking-lot marquis flashed — as “the crud.” he parked outside a former city building inspections office whose mirrored windows reflected the harrah’s casino a few blocks away; a floor of empty cubicles in the building was set aside for a new public-private university research center for unmanned systems. in addition to sweeny, grace said, his team is in talks with six drone companies considering moves or expansions to reno, and one of them, the pasadena-based ashima devices, is planning to build a 35,000-square-foot plant in reno to manufacture its hexpuck uav , to be used for firefighting, search and rescue, and police work.barreling down route 395, past the rainbow-hued atlantis casino, grace listed nevada’s business-friendly bona fides: “no inventory tax, no franchise tax, no unitary tax, no corporate income tax, no personal income tax, no inheritance tax.” reno is an hour’s drive from lake tahoe’s skiing, kayaking, and rock climbing, he boasted, houses are cheap, and the community is small enough that “you’re one phone call away from the mayor at any time.”when we pulled up to reno stead airport, one of nevada’s designated testing sites, the municipal airfield was scattered with weekend-warrior cessnas. stead hosts the popular reno air races each september. while airport officials did not receive permission for a reaper drone to fly the course this year, as they had hoped, other models were parked in a “drone petting zoo.” we found lieutenant colonel warren “bum” rapp in his office, a military model helicopter sitting on his desk. a 27-year veteran of the marines and air force, and the former drone operation commander at creech, rapp had recently moved back to his native reno to man the commercial front: since may, he’s been running the state’s testing program, corralling paperwork, advising companies, and proselytizing for the drone industry at the reno rotary club and the nevada business alliance.since test drones were not yet zipping around the airport, rapp picked up a dji phantom quadcopter that he’d bought on amazon and walked down to the building’s indoor atrium. he set the 3-pound unit on a table and, using its hand controller, started the propellers whirring. the phantom lifted off, gradually climbing 10 feet in the air, hovering and pirouetting, dipping and rising. grace snapped photos on his smartphone for his 9-year-old son. rapp, staring at the drone intensely, landed it in the center of the table, looked up, and grinned.
 first published in esquire magazine, december 1983,reproduced by permission of international creative management. for academic use only.in 1948 there were seven thousand people in grinnell, iowa, including more than one who didn't dare take a drink in his own house without pulling the shades down first. it was against the law to sell liquor in grinnell, but it was perfectly legal to drink it at home. so it wasn't that. it wasn't even that someone might look in through the window and disapprove. god knew grinnell had more than its share of white ribbon teetotalers, but by 1948 alcohol was hardly the mark of cain it had once been. no, those timid souls with their fingers through the shade loops inside the white frame houses on main street and park street were thinking of something else altogether.they happened to live on land originally owned by the congregational minister who had founded the town in 1854, josiah grinnell. josiah grinnell had sold off lots with covenants, in perpetuity, stating that anyone who allowed alcohol to be drunk on his property forfeited ownership. in perpetuity! in perpetuity was forever, and 1948 was not even a hundred years later. in 1948 there were people walking around grinnell who had known josiah grinnell personally. they were getting old; grinnell had died in 1891; but they were still walking around. so... why take a chance!the plain truth was, grinnell had middle west written all over it. it was squarely in the middle of iowa's midland corn belt, where people on the farms said "crawdad" instead of crayfish and "barn lot" instead of barnyard. grinnell had been one of many protestant religious communities established in the mid-nineteenth century after iowa became a state and settlers from the east headed for the farmlands. the streets were lined with white clapboard houses and elm trees, like a new england village. and today, in 1948, the hard-scrubbed octagon soap smell of nineteenth century protestantism still permeated the houses and main street as well. that was no small part of what people in the east thought of when they heard the term "middle west. " for thirty years writers such as sherwood anderson, sinclair lewis, and carl van vechten had been prompting the most delicious sniggers with their portraits of the churchy, narrow minded middle west. the iowa painter grant wood was thinking of farms like the ones around grinnell when he did his famous painting american gothic. easterners recognized the grim, juiceless couple in wood's picture right away. there were john calvin's and john knox's rectitude reigning in the sticks.in the fall of 1948 harry truman picked out grinnell as one of the stops on his whistle-stop campaign tour, one of the hamlets where he could reach out to the little people, the average americans of the heartland, the people untouched by the sophisticated opinion-makers of new york and washington. speaking from the rear platform of his railroad car, truman said he would never forget grinnell, because it was grinnell college, the little congregational academy over on park street, that had given him his first honorary degree. the president's fond recollection didn't cut much ice, as it turned out. the town had voted republican in every presidential election since the first time abraham lincoln ran, in 1860, and wasn't about to change for harry truman.on the face of it, there you had grinnell iowa, in 1948: a piece of mid-nineteenth century american history frozen solid in the middle of the twentieth. it was one of the last towns in america that people back east would have figured to become the starting point of a bolt into the future that would create the very substructure, the electronic grid, of life in the year 2000 and beyond.on the other hand, it wouldn't have surprised josiah grinnell in the slightest.it was in the summer of 1948 that grant gale, a forty-five-year-old physics professor at grinnell college, ran across an item in the newspaper concerning a former classmate of his at the university of wisconsin named john bardeen. bardeen's father had been dean of medicine at wisconsin, and gale's wife harriet's father had been dean of the engineering school, and so bardeen and harriet had grown up as fellow faculty brats, as the phrase went. both gale and bardeen had majored in electrical engineering. eventually bardeen had taught physics at the university of minnesota and had then left the academic world to work for bell laboratories, the telephone company's main research center, in murray hill, new jersey. and now, according to the item, bardeen and another engineer at bell, walter brattain, had invented a novel little device they called a transistor.it was only an item, however: the invention of the transistor in 1948 did not create headlines. the transistor apparently performed the same function as the vacuum tube, which was an essential component of telephone relay systems and radios. like the vacuum tube, the transistor could isolate a specific electrical signal, such as a radio wave, and amplify it. but the transistor did not require glass tubing, a vacuum, a plate, or a cathode. it was nothing more than two minute gold wires leading to a piece of processed germanium less than a sixteenth of an inch long. germanium, an element found in coal, was an insulator, not a conductor. but if the germanium was contaminated with impurities, it became a "semiconductor." a vacuum tube was also a semiconductor; the vacuum itself, like the germanium, was an insulator. but as every owner of a portable radio knew, vacuum tubes drew a lot of current, required a warm-up interval before they would work, and then got very hot. a transistor eliminated all these problems and, on top of that, was about fifty times smaller than a vacuum tube.so far, however, it was impossible to mass-produce transistors, partly because the gold wires had to be made by hand and attached by hand two thousandths of an inch apart. but that was the telephone company's problem. grant gale wasn't interested in any present or future applications of the transistor in terms of products. he hoped the transistor might offer a way to study the flow of electrons through a solid (the germanium), a subject physicists had speculated about for decades. he thought it would be terrific to get some transistors for his physics department at grinnell. so he wrote to bardeen at bell laboratories. just to make sure his request didn't get lost in the shuffle, he also wrote to the president of bell laboratories, oliver buckley. buckley was from sloane, iowa, and happened to be a grinnell graduate. so by the fall of 1948 gale had obtained two of the first transistors ever made, and he presented the first academic instruction in solid-state electronics available anywhere in the world, for the benefit of the eighteen students majoring in physics at grinnell college.one of grant gale's senior physics majors was a local boy named robert noyce, whom gale had known for years. bob and his brothers, donald, gaylord, and ralph, lived just down park street and used to rake leaves, mow the lawn, baby-sit, and do other chores for the gales. lately grant gale had done more than his share of agonizing over bob noyce. like his brothers, bob was a bright student, but he had just been thrown out of school for a semester, and it had taken every bit of credit gale had in the local favor bank, not only with other faculty members but also with the sheriff, to keep the boy from being expelled for good and stigmatized with a felony conviction.bob noyce's father, ralph sr. was a congregational minister. not only that, both of his grandfathers were congregational ministers. but that hadn't helped at all. in an odd way, after the thing happened, the boy's clerical lineage had boomeranged on him. people were going around saying, "well, what do you expect from a preacher's son?" it was as if people in grinnell unconsciously agreed with sherwood anderson that underneath the righteousness the midwestern protestant preachers urged upon them, and which they themselves professed to uphold, lived demons of weakness, perversion, and hypocrisy that would break loose sooner or later.no one denied that the noyce boys were polite and proper in all outward appearances. they were all members of the boy scouts. they went to sunday school and the main sunday service at the first congregational church and were active in the church youth groups. they were pumped full of congregationalism until it was spilling over. their father, although a minister, was not the minister of the first congregational church. he was the associate superintendent of the iowa conference of congregational churches, whose headquarters were at the college. the original purpose of the college had been to provide a good academic congregational education, and many of the graduates became teachers. the conference was a coordinating council rather than a governing body, since a prime tenet of the congregational church embedded in its name, was that each congregation was autonomous. congregationalists rejected the very idea of a church hierarchy. a congregational minister was not supposed to be a father or even a shepherd, but, rather, a teacher. each member of the congregation was supposed to internalize the moral precepts of the church and be his own priest dealing directly with god. so the job of secretary of the iowa conference of congregational churches was anything but a position of power. it didn't pay much, either.the noyces didn't own their own house. they lived in a two-story white clapboard house that was owned by the church at park street and tenth avenue, at the college.not having your own house didn't carry the social onus in grinnell that it did in the east. there was no upper crust in grinnell. there were no top people who kept the social score in such matters. congregationalists rejected the idea of a social hierarchy as fiercely as they did the idea of a religious hierarchy. the congregationalists, like the presbyterians, methodists, baptists, and united brethren, were dissenting protestants. they were direct offshoots of the separatists, who had split off from the church of england in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and settled new england. at bottom, their doctrine of the autonomous congregation was derived from their hatred of the british system of class and status, with its endless gradations, topped off by the court and the aristocracy. even as late as 1948 the typical small town of the middle west, like grinnell, had nothing approaching a country club set. there were subtle differences in status in grinnell, as in any other place, and it was better to be rich than poor, but there were only two obvious social ranks: those who were devout, educated, and hardworking, and those who weren't. genteel poverty did not doom one socially in grinnell. ostentation did. the noyce boys worked at odd jobs to earn their pocket money. that was socially correct as well as useful. to have devoted the same time to taking tennis lessons or riding lessons would have been a gaffe in grinnell.donald, the oldest of the four boys, had done brilliantly at the college and had just received his ph.d. in chemistry at columbia university and was about to join the faculty of the university of california at berkeley. gaylord, the second oldest, was teaching school in turkey. bob, who was a year younger than gaylord, had done so well in science at grinnell high school that grant gale had invited him to take the freshman physics course at the college during his high school senior year. he became one of gale's star students and most tireless laboratory workers from that time on. despite his apparent passion for the scientific grind, bob noyce turned out to be that much-vaunted creature, the well-rounded student. he was a trim, muscular boy, five feet eight, with thick dark brown hair, a strong jawline, and a long, broad nose that gave him a rugged appearance. he was the star diver on the college swimming team and won the midwest conference championship in 1947. he sang in choral groups, played the oboe, and was an actor with the college dramatic society. he also acted in a radio drama workshop at the college, along with his friend peter hackes and some others who were interested in broadcasting, and was the leading man in a soap opera that was broadcast over station woi in ames, iowa.perhaps bob noyce was a bit too well rounded for local tastes. there were people who still remembered the business with the box kite back in 1941, when he was thirteen. it had been harmless, but it could have been a disaster. bob had come across some plans for the building of a box kite, a kite that could carry a person aloft, in the magazine popular science. so he and gaylord made a frame of cross-braced pine and covered it with a bolt of muslin. they tried to get the thing up by running across a field and towing it with a rope, but that didn't work terribly well. then they hauled it up on the roof of a barn, and bob sat in the seat and gaylord ran across the roof, pulling the kite. and bob was lucky he didn't break his neck when he and the thing hit the ground. so then they tied it to the rear bumper of a neighbor's car. with the neighbor at the wheel, bob rode the kite and managed to get about twelve feet off the ground and glide for thirty seconds or so and come down without wrecking himself or any citizen's house or livestock.livestock. . . yes. livestock was a major capital asset in grinnell, and livestock was at the heart of what happened in 1948. in may a group of bob noyce's friends in one of the dormitory houses at grinnell decided to have a luau, and he was in on the planning. the second world war had popularized the exotic ways of the south pacific, so that in 1948 the luau was an up-to-the-minute social innovation. the centerpiece of a luau was a whole roasted suckling pig with an apple or a pineapple in its mouth. bob noyce, being strong and quick, was one of the two boys assigned to procure the pig. that night they sneaked onto a farm just outside of grinnell and wrestled a twenty-five-pound suckling out of the pigpen and arrived back at the luau to great applause. within a few hours the pig was crackling hot and had an apple in its mouth and looked good enough for seconds and thirds, which everybody helped himself to, and there was more applause. the next morning came the moral hangover. the two boys decided to go see the farmer, confess, and pay for the pig. they didn't quite understand how a college luau, starring his pig, would score on the laugh meter with a farmer in midland iowa. in the state of iowa, where the vast majority of people depended upon agriculture for a livelihood and upon protestant morality for their standards, not even stealing a watermelon worth thirty-five cents was likely to be written off as a boyish prank. stealing a pig was larceny. the farmer got the sheriff and insisted on bringing criminal charges. there was only so much that ralph noyce, the preacher with the preacher's son, could do. grant gale, on the other hand, was the calm, well-respected third party. he had two difficult tasks: to keep bob out of jail and out of court and to keep the college administration from expelling him. there was never any hope at all of a mere slap on the wrist. the compromise grant gale helped work out? a one-semester suspension? was the best deal bob could have hoped for realistically.the night of the luau pig was quite a little scandal on the grinnell richter scale. so gale was all the more impressed by the way bob noyce took it. the local death-ray glowers never broke his confidence. all the noyce boys had a profound and, to tell the truth, baffling confidence. bob had a certain way of listening and staring. he would lower his head slightly and look up with a gaze that seemed to be about one hundred amperes. while he looked at you he never blinked and never swallowed. he absorbed everything you said and then answered very levelly in a soft baritone voice and often with a smile that showed off his terrific set of teeth. the stare, the voice, the smile; it was all a bit like the movie persona of the most famous of all grinnell college's alumni, gary cooper. with his strong face, his athlete's build, and the gary cooper manner, bob noyce projected what psychologists call the halo effect. people with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they're doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it. they make you see the halos over their heads.years later people would naturally wonder where bob noyce got his confidence. many came to the conclusion it was as, much from his mother, harriett norton noyce, as from his father. she was a latter-day version of the sort of strong-willed, intelligent, new england-style woman who had made such a difference during iowa's pioneer days a hundred years before. his mother and father, with the help of rowland cross, who taught mathematics at grinnell, arranged for bob to take a job in the actuarial department of equitable life in new york city for the summer. he stayed on at the job during the fall semester, then came back to grinnell at christmas and rejoined the senior class in january as the second semester began. gale was impressed by the aplomb with which the prodigal returned. in his first three years bob had accumulated so many extra credits, it would take him only this final semester to graduate. he resumed college life, including the extracurricular activities, without skipping a beat. but more than that, gale was gratified by the way bob became involved with the new experimental device that was absorbing so much of gale's own time: the transistor.bob was not the only physics major interested in the transistor, but he was the one who seemed most curious about where this novel mechanism might lead. he went off to the massachusetts institute of technology, in cambridge, in the fall to begin his graduate work. when he brought up the subject of the transistor at mit, even to faculty members, people just looked at him. even those who had heard of it regarded it merely as a novelty fabricated by the telephone company. there was no course work involving transistors or the theory of solid-state electronics. his dissertation was a "photoelectric study of surface states on insulators," which was at best merely background for solid-state electronics. in this area mit was far behind grinnell college. for a good four years grant gale remained one of the few people bob noyce could compare notes with in this new field.well, it had been a close one! what if grant gale hadn't gone to school with john bardeen, and what if oliver buckley hadn't been a grinnell alumnus? and what if gale hadn't bothered to get in touch with the two of them after he read the little squib about the transistor in the newspaper? what if he hadn't gone to bat for bob noyce after the night of the luau pig and the boy had been thrown out of college and that had been that? after all, if bob hadn't been able to finish at grinnell, he probably never would have been introduced to the transistor. he certainly wouldn't have come across it at mit in 1948. given what bob noyce did over the next twenty years, one couldn't help but wonder about the fortuitous chain of events.fortuitous. . . well! how josiah grinnell, up on the plains of heaven, must have laughed over that!grant gale was the first important physicist in bob noyce's career. the second was william shockley. after their ambitions had collided one last time, and they had parted company, noyce had concluded that he and shockley were two very different people. but in many ways they were alikefor a start, they both had an amateur's hambone love of being on-stage. at mit noyce had sung in choral groups. early in the summer of 1953, after he had received his ph.d., he went over to tufts college to sing and act in a program of musicals presented by the college. the costume director was a girl named elizabeth bottomley, from barrington, rhode island, who had just graduated from tufts, majoring in english. they both enjoyed dramatics. singing, acting, and skiing had become the pastimes noyce enjoyed most. he had become almost as expert at skiing as he had been at diving. noyce and betty, as he called her, were married that fall.in 1953 the mit faculty was just beginning to understand the implications of the transistor. but electronics firms were already eager to have graduate electrical engineers who could do research and development in the new field. noyce was offered jobs by bell laboratories, ibm, by rca, and philco. he went to work for philco, in philadelphia, because philco was starting from near zero in semiconductor research and chances for rapid advancement seemed good. but noyce was well aware that the most important work was still being done at bell laboratories, thanks in no small part to william shockley.shockley had devised the first theoretical framework for research into solid-state semiconductors as far back as 1939 and was in charge of the bell labs team that included john bardeen and walter brattain. shockley had also originated the "junction transistor," which turned the transistor from an exotic laboratory instrument into a workable item. by 1955 shockley had left bell and returned to palo alto, california, where he had grown up near stanford university, to form his own company, shockley semiconductor laboratory, with start up money provided by arnold beckman of beckman instruments. shockley opened up shop in a glorified shed on south san antonio road in mountain view, which was just south of palo alto. the building was made of concrete blocks with the rafters showing. aside from clerical and maintenance personnel, practically all the employees were electrical engineers with doctorates. in a field this experimental there was nobody else worth hiring. shockley began talking about "my ph.d. production line. "meanwhile, noyce was not finding philco the golden opportunity he thought it would be. philco wanted good enough transistors to stay in the game with ge and rca, but it was not interested in putting money into the sort of avant-garde research noyce had in mind. in 1956 he resigned from philco and moved from pennsylvania to california to join shockley. the way he went about it was a classic example of the noyce brand of confidence. by now he and his wife, betty, had two children: bill, who was two, and penny, who was six months old. after a couple of telephone conversations with shockley, noyce put himself and betty on a night flight from philadelphia to san francisco. they arrived in palo alto at six a.m. by noon noyce had signed a contract to buy a house. that afternoon he went to mountain view to see shockley and ask for a job, projected the halo, and got it.the first months on shockley's ph.d. production line were exhilarating. it wasn't really a production line at all. everything at this stage was research. every day a dozen young ph.d.'s came to the shed at eight in the morning and began heating germanium and silicon, another common element, in kilns to temperatures ranging from 1,472 to 2,552 degrees fahrenheit. they wore white lab coats, goggles, and work gloves. when they opened the kiln doors weird streaks of orange and white light went across their faces, and they put in the germanium or the silicon, along with specks of aluminum, phosphorus, boron. and arsenic. contaminating the germanium or silicon with the aluminum, phosphorus, boron, and arsenic was called doping. then they lowered a small mechanical column into the goo so that crystals formed on the bottom of the column, and they pulled the crystal out and tried to get a grip on it with tweezers, and put it under microscopes and cut it with diamond cutters, among other things, into minute slices, wafers, chips; there were no names in electronics for these tiny forms. the kilns cooked and bubbled away, the doors opened, the pale apricot light streaked over the goggles, the tweezers and diamond cutters flashed, the white coats flapped, the ph. d.'s squinted through their microscopes, and shockley moved between the tables conducting the arcane symphony.in pensive moments shockley looked very much the scholar, with his roundish face, his roundish eyeglasses, and his receding hairline; but shockley was not a man locked in the pensive mode. he was an enthusiast, a raconteur, and a showman. at the outset his very personality was enough to keep everyone swept up in the great adventure. when he lectured, as he often did at colleges and before professional groups, he would walk up to the lectern and thank the master of ceremonies and say that the only more flattering introduction he had ever received was one he gave himself one night when the emcee didn't show up, whereupon - bango!- a bouquet of red roses would pop up in his hand. or he would walk up to the lectern and say that tonight he was getting into a hot subject, whereupon he would open up a book and - whump! -a puff of smoke would rise up out of the pages.shockley was famous for his homely but shrewd examples. one day a student confessed to being puzzled by the concept of amplification, which was one of the prime functions of the transistor. shockley told him: "if you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."on november 1,1956, shockley arrived at the shed on south san antonio road beaming. early that morning he had received a telephone call informing him that he had won the nobel prize for physics for the invention of the transistor; or, rather, that he was co-winner, along with john bardeen and walter brattain. shockley closed up shop and took everybody to a restaurant called dinah's shack over on el camino real, the road to san francisco that had become palo alto's commercial strip. he treated his ph. d. production line and all the other employees to a champagne breakfast. it seemed that shockley's father was a mining engineer who spent years out on remote durango terrain, in nevada, manchuria and all over the world. shockley's mother was like noyce's. she was an intelligent woman with a commanding will. the shockleys were unitarians, the unitarian church being an offshoot of the congregational. shockley sr. was twenty years older than shockley's mother and died when shockley was seventeen. shockley's mother was determined that her son would someday "set the world on fire," as she once put it. and now he had done it. shockley lifted a glass of champagne in dinah's shack, and it was as if it were a toast back across a lot of hardwrought durango grit octagon soap sagebrush dissenting protestant years to his father's memory and his mother's determination.that had been a great day at shockley semiconductor laboratory. there weren't many more. shockley was magnetic, he was a genius, and he was a great research director? the best, in fact. his forte was breaking a problem down to first principles. with a few words and a few lines on a piece of paper he aimed any experiment in the right direction. when it came to comprehending the young engineers on his ph.d. production line, however, he was not so terrific.it never seemed to occur to shockley that his twelve highly educated elves just might happen to view themselves the same way he had always viewed himself: which is to say, as young geniuses capable of the sort of inventions nobel prizes were given for. one day noyce came to shockley with some new results he had found in the laboratory. shockley picked up the telephone and called some former colleagues at bell labs to see if they sounded right. shockley never even realized that noyce had gone away from his desk seething. then there was the business of the new management techniques. now that he was an entrepreneur, shockley came up with some new ways to run a company. each one seemed to irritate the elves more than the one before. for a start, shockley published their salaries. he posted them on a bulletin board. that way there would be no secrets. then he started having the employees rate one another on a regular basis. these were so-called peer ratings, a device sometimes used in the military and seldom appreciated even there. everybody regarded peer ratings as nothing more than popularity contests. but the real turning point was the lie detector. shockley was convinced that someone in the shed was sabotaging the project. the work was running into inexplicable delays, but the money was running out on schedule. so he insisted that one employee roll up his sleeve and bare his chest and let the electrodes be attached and submit to a polygraph examination. no saboteur was ever found.there were also some technical differences of opinion. shockley was interested in developing a so-called four-layer diode. noyce and two of his fellow elves, gordon moore and jean hoerni, favored transistors. but at bottom it was dissatisfaction with the boss and the lure of entrepreneurship that led to what happened next.in the summer of 1957 moore, hoerni, and five other engineers, but not noyce, got together and arrived at what became one of the primary business concepts of the young semiconductor industry. in this business, it dawned on them, capital assets in the traditional sense of plant, equipment, and raw materials counted for next to nothing. the only plant you needed was a shed big enough for the worktables. the only equipment you needed was some kilns, goggles, microscopes, tweezers, and diamond cutters. the materials, silicon and germanium, came from dirt and coal. brainpower was the entire franchise. if the seven of them thought they could do the job better than shockley, there was nothing to keep them from starting their own company. on that day was born the concept that would make the semiconductor business as wild as show business: defection capital.the seven defectors went to the wall street firm of hayden stone in search of start-up money. it was at this point that they realized they had to have someone to serve as administrator. so they turned to noyce, who was still with shockley. none of them, including noyce, had any administrative experience, but they all thought of noyce as soon as the question came up.  they didn't know exactly what they were looking for... but noyce was the one with the halo. he agreed to join them. he would continue to wear a white lab coat and goggles and do research. but he would also be the coordinator. of the eight of them, he would be the one man who kept track, on a regular basis, of all sides of the operation. he was twenty-nine years old.arthur rock of hayden stone approached twenty-two firms before he finally hooked the defectors up with the fairchild camera and instrument corporation of new york. fairchild was owned by sherman fairchild, a bachelor bon vivant who lived in a futuristic town house on east sixty-fifth street in manhattan. the house was in two sections connected by ramps. the ramps were fifty feet long in some cases, enclosed in glass so that you could go up and down the ramps in all weather and gaze upon the marble courtyard below. the place looked like something from out of the crystal palace of ming in flash gordon. the ramps were for his aunt may, who lived with him and was confined to a wheelchair and had even more fairchild money than he did. the chief executive officer of fairchild was john carter, who had just come from the corning glass company. he had been the youngest vice president in the history of that old-line, family-owned firm. he was thirty-six. fairchild camera and instrument gave the defectors the money to start up the new company, fairchild semiconductor, with the understanding that fairchild carnera and instrument would have the right to buy fairchild semiconductor for $3 million at any time within the next eight years.shockley took the defections very hard. he seemed as much hurt as angered, and he was certainly angry enough. a friend of shockley's said to noyce's wife, betty: "you must have known about this for quite some time. how on earth could you not tell me?" that was a baffling remark, unless one regarded shockley as the father of the transistor and the defectors as the children he had taken beneath his mantle of greatness.if so, one had a point. years later, if anyone had drawn up a family tree for the semiconductor industry, practically every important branch would have led straight from shockley's shed on south san antonio road. on the other hand, noyce had been introduced to the transistor not by shockley but by john bardeen, via grant gale, and not in california but back in his own hometown, grinnell, iowa.for that matter, josiah grinnell had been a defector in his day, too, and there was no record that he had ever lost a night's sleep over it.noyce, gordon moore, jean hoerni and the other five defectors set up fairchild semiconductor in a two-story warehouse building some speculator had built out of tilt-up concrete slabs on charleston avenue in mountain view, about twelve blocks from shockley's operation. mountain view was in the northern end of the santa clara valley. in the business world the valley was known mainly for its apricot, pear, and plum orchards. from the work bays of the light-industry sheds that the speculators were beginning to build in the valley you could look out and see the raggedy little apricot trees they had never bother to buldoze after they bought the land from the farmers. a few well known electronics firms were already in the valley: general electric and ibm, as well as a company that had started up locally, hewlett-packard. stanford university was encouraging engineering concerns to locate near palo alto and use the university's research facilities. the man who ran the program was a friend of shockley's, frederick e. terman, whose father had originated the first scientific measurement of human intelligence, the stanford-binet iq test.ibm had a facility in the valley that was devoted specifically to research rather than production. both ibm and hewlett-packard were trying to develop a highly esoteric and colossally expensive new device, the electronic computer. shockley had been the first entrepreneur to come to the area to make semiconductors. after the defections his operation never got off the ground. here in the santa clara valley, that left the field to noyce and the others at fairchild.fairchild's start-up couldn't have come at a better time. by 1957 there was sufficient demand from manufacturers who merely wanted transistors instead of vacuum tubes, for use in radios and other machines, to justify the new operation. but it was also in 1957 that the soviet union launched sputnik i. in the electronics industry the ensuing space race had the effect of coupling two new inventions?the transistor and the computer?and magnifying the importance of both.the first american electronic computer known as eniac, had been developed by the army during the second world war, chiefly as a means of computing artillery and bomb trajectories. the machine was a monster. it was one hundred feet long and ten feet high and required eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. the tubes generated so much heat, the temperature in the room sometimes reached 120 degrees. what the government needed was small computers that could be installed in rockets to provide automatic onboard guidance. substituting transistors for vacuum tubes was an obvious way to cut down on the size. after sputnik the glamorous words in the semiconductor business were computers and miniaturization.other than shockley semiconductor, fairchild was the only semiconductor company in the santa clara valley, but texas instruments had entered the field in dallas, as had motorola in phoenix and transitron and raytheon in the boston area, where a new electronics industry was starting up as mit finally began to comprehend the new technology. these firms were all racing to refine the production of transistors to the point where they might command the market. so far refinement had not been anybody's long suit. no tourist dropping by fairchild, texas instruments, motorola, or transitron would have had the faintest notion he was looking in on the leading edge of the most advanced of all industries, electronics. the work bays, where the transistors were produced looked like slightly sunnier versions of the garment sweatshops of san francisco's chinatown. here were rows of women hunched over worktables, squinting through microscopes doing the most tedious and frustrating sort of manual labor, cutting layers of silicon apart with diamond cutters, picking little rectangles of them up with tweezers, trying to attach wires to them, dropping them, rummaging around on the floor to find them again, swearing, muttering, climbing back up to their chairs, rubbing their eyes, squinting back through the microscopes, and driving themselves crazy some more. depending on how well the silicon or germanium had been cooked and doped, anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of the transistors would turn out to be defective even after all that, and sometimes the good ones would be the ones that fell on the floor and got ruined.even for a machine as simple as a radio the individual transistors had to be wired together, by hand, until you ended up with a little panel that looked like a road map of west virginia. as for a computer, the wires inside a computer were sheer spaghetti.noyce had figured out a solution. but fabricating it was another matter. there was something primitive about cutting individual transistors out of sheets of silicon and then wiring them back together in various series. why not put them all on a single piece of silicon without wires? the problem was that you would also have to carve, etch, coat, and otherwise fabricate the silicon to perform all the accompanying electrical functions as well, the functions ordinarily performed by insulators, rectifiers, resistors, and capacitors. you would have to create an entire electrical system, an entire circuit, on a little wafer or chip.noyce realized that he was not the only engineer thinking along these lines, but he had never even heard of jack kilby. kilby was a thirty-six-year-old engineer working for texas lnstruments in dallas. in january, 1959 noyce made his first detailed notes about a complete solid-state circuit. a month later texas instruments announced that jack kilby had invented one. kilby's integrated circuit, as the invention was called, was made of germanium. six months later noyce created a similar integrated circuit made of silicon and using a novel insulating process developed by jean hoerni. noyce's silicon device turned out to be more efficient and more practical to produce than kilby's and set the standard for the industry. so noyce became known as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit. nevertheless, kilby had unquestionably been first. there was an ironic echo of shockley here. strictly speaking, bardeen and brattain, not shockley, had invented the transistor, but shockley wasn't bashful about being known as the co-inventor. and, now eleven years later, noyce wasn't turning bashful either.noyce knew exactly what he possessed in this integrated circuit, or microchip, as the press would call it. noyce knew that he had discovered the road to el dorado.el dorado was the vast, still-virgin territory of electricity. electricity was already so familiar a part of everyday life, only a few research engineers understood just how, young and unexplored the terrain actually was. it had been only eighty years since edison invented the light bulb in 1879. it had been less than fifty years since lee de forest, an inventor from council bluffs, iowa had invented the vacuum tube. the vacuum tube was based on the light bulb, but the vacuum tube opened up fields the light bulb did not even suggest: long distance radio and telephone communicatlon. over the past ten vears, since bardeen and brattain invented it in 1948, the transistor had become the modern replacement for the vacuum tube. and now came kilby's and noyce's integrated circuit. the integrated circuit was based on the transistor, but the integrated circuit opened up fields the transistor did not even suggest. the integrated circuit made it possible to create miniature computers, to put all the functions of the mighty eniac on a panel the size of a playing card. thereby the integrated circuit opened up every field of engineering imaginable, from voyages to the moon to robots, and many fields that had never been imagined, such as electronic guidance counseling. it opened up so many fields that no one could even come up with a single name to include them all. "the second industrial revolution," "the age of the computer, " "the microchip universe, " "the electronic grid," none of them, not even the handy neologism "high tech. " could encompass all the implications.the importance of the integrated circuit was certainly not lost on john carter and fairchild camera back un new york. in 1959 they exercised their option to buy fairchild semiconductor for $3 million. the next day noyce, moore, hoerni, and the other five former shockley elves woke up rich, or richer than they had ever dreamed of being. each received $250,000 worth of fairchild stock.josiah grinnell grew livid on the subject of alcohol. but he had nothing against money. he would have approved.noyce didn't know what to make of his new wealth. he was thirty-one years old. for the past four years, ever since he had gone to work for shockley, the semiconductor business had not seemed like a business at all but an esoteric game in which young electrical engineers competed for attaboy's and the occasional round of applause after delivering a paper before the ieee, the institute of electrical and electronics engineers. it was a game supercharged by the fact that it was being played in the real world, to use a term that annoyed scientists in the universities. someone?arnold beckman, sherman fairchild, whoever?was betting real money, and other bands of young elves, at texas instruments, rca, bell, were out there competing with you by the real world's rules, which required that you be practical as well as brilliant. noyce started working for fairchild semiconductor in 1957 for twelve thousand dollars a year. when it came to money, he had assumed that he, like his father, would always be on somebody's payroll. now, in 1959, when he talked to his father, he told him: "the money doesn't seem real. it's just a way of keeping score."noyce took his family to visit his parents fairly often. he and betty now had three children, bill, penny, and polly, who was a year old. when they visited the folks, they went off to church on sunday with the folks as if it were all very much a part of their lives. in fact, noyce had started drifting away from congregationalism and the whole matter of churchgoing after he entered mit. it was not a question of rejecting it. he never rejected anything about his upbringing in grinnell. it was just that he was suddenly heading off somewhere else, down a different road.in that respect noyce was like a great many bright young men and women from dissenting protestant families in the middle west after the second world war. they had been raised as baptists, methodists, congregationalists, presbytenans, united brethren, whatever. they had been led through the church door and prodded toward religion, but it had never come alive for them. sundays made their skulls feel like dried-out husks. so they slowly walked away from the church and silently, without so much as a growl of rebellion, congratulated themselves on their independence of mind and headed into another way of life. only decades later, in most cases, would they discover how, absentmindedly, inexplicably, they had brought the old ways along for the journey nonetheless. it was as if... through some extraordinary mistake... they had been sewn into the linings of their coats!now that he had some money, bob noyce bought a bigger house. his and betty's fourth child, margaret, was born in 1960, and they wanted each child to have a bedroom. but the thought of moving into any of the "best" neighborhoods in the palo alto area never even crossed his mind. the best neighborhoods were to be found in atherton, in burlingame, which was known as very social, or in the swell old sections of palo alto, near stanford university. instead, noyce bought a california version of a french country house in los altos, a white stucco house with a steeply pitched roof. it was scenic up there in the hills, and cooler in the summer than it was down in the flatlands near the bay. the house had plenty of room, and he and betty would be living a great deal better than most couples their age, but los altos folks had no social cachet and the house was not going to make house & garden come banging on the door. no one could accuse them of being ostentatious.john carter appointed noyce general manager of the entire division, fairchild semiconductor, which was suddenly one of the hottest new outfits in the business world. nasa chose noyce's integrated circuits for the first computers that astronauts would use on board their spacecraft (in the gemini program). after that, orders poured in. in ten years fairchild sales rose from a few thousand dollars a year to $130 million, and the number of employees rose from the onginal band of elves to twelve thousand. as the general manager, noyce now had to deal with a matter shockley had dealt with clumsily and prematurely, namely, new management techniques for this new industry.one day john carter came to mountain vlew for a close look at noyce's semiconductor operation. carter's office in syosset, long island, arranged for a limousine and chauffeur to be at his disposal while he was in california. so carter arrived at the tilt-up concrete building in mountain vlew in the back of a black cadillac limousine with a driver in the front wearing the complete chauffeur's uniform? the black suit, the white shirt, the black necktie, and the black visored cap. that in itself was enough to turn heads at fairchild semiconductor. nobody had ever seen a limousine and a chauffeur out there before. but that wasn't what fixed the day in everybody's memory. it was the fact that the driver stayed out there for almost eight hours, doing nothing. he stayed out there in his uniform, with his visored hat on, in the front seat of the limousine, all day, doing nothing but waiting for a man who was somewhere inside. john carter was inside having a terrific chief executive officer's time for himself. he took a tour of the plant, he held conferences, he looked at figures, he nodded with satisfaction, he beamed his urbane fifty-seventh street biggie ceo charm. and the driver sat out there all day engaged in the task of supporting a visored cap with his head. people started leaving their workbenches and going to the front windows just to take a look at this phenomenon. it seemed that bizarre. here was a serf who did nothing all day but wait outside a door in order to be at the service of the haunches of his master instantly, whenever those haunches and the paunch and the jowls might decide to reappear. it wasn't merely that this little peek at the new york-style corporate high life was unusual out here in the brown hills of the santa clara valley. it was that it seemed terribly wrong.a certain instinct noyce had about this new industry and the people who worked in it began to take on the outlines of a concept. corporations in the east adopted a feudal approach to organization, without even being aware of it. there were kings and lords, and there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and serfs, with layers of protocol and perquisites, such as the car and driver, to symbolize superiority and establish the boundary lines. back east the ceos had offices with carved paneling, fake fireplaces, escritoires, bergeres, leather-bound books, and dressing rooms, like a suite in a baronial manor house. fairchild semiconductor needed a strict operating structure, particularly in this period of rapid growth, but it did not need a social structure. in fact, nothing could be worse. noyce realized how much he detested the eastern corporate system of class and status with its endless gradations, topped off by the ceos and vice-presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate court and aristocracy. he rejected the idea of a social hierarchy at fairchild.not only would there be no limousines and chauffeurs, there would not even be any reserved parking places. work began at eight a.m. for one and all, and it would be first come, first served, in the parking lot, for noyce, gordon moore, jean hoerni, and everybody else. "if you come late," noyce liked to say, "you just have to park in the back forty." and there would be no baronial office suites. the glorified warehouse on charleston road was divided into work bays and a couple of rows of cramped office cubicles. the cubicles were never improved. the decor remained glorified warehouse, and the doors were always open. half the time noyce, the chief administrator, was out in the laboratory anyway, wearing his white lab coat. noyce came to work in a coat and tie. but soon the jacket and the tie were off. and that was fine for any other man in the place too. there were no rules of dress at all, except for some unwritten ones. dress should be modest, modest in the social as well as the moral sense. at fairchild there were no hard-worsted double-breasted pinstripe suits and shepherd's-check neckties. sharp, elegant, fashionable, or alluring dress was a social blunder. shabbiness was not a sin. ostentation was.during the start-up phase at fairchild semiconductor there had been no sense of bosses and employees. there had been only a common sense of struggle out on a frontier. everyone had internalized the goals of the venture. they didn't need exhortations from superiors. besides, everyone had been so young! noyce, the administrator or chief coordinator or whatever he should be called, had been just about the oldest person on the premises, and he had been barely thirty. and now, in the early 1960s, thanks to his athletic build and his dark brown hair with the campus kid hairline, he still looked very young. as fairchild expanded, noyce didn't even bother trying to find "experienced management personnel." out here in california, in the semiconductor industry, they didn't exist. instead, he recruited engineers right out of the colleges and graduate schools and gave them major responsibilities right off the bat. there was no "staff," no "top management" other than the eight partners themselves. major decisions were not bucked up a chain of command. noyce held weekly meetings of people from all parts of the operation, and whatever had to be worked out was worked out right there in the room. noyce wanted them all to keep internalizing the company's goals and to provide their own motivations, just as they had during the start-up phase. if they did that, they would have the capacity to make their own decisions.the young engineers who came to work for fairchild could scarcely believe how much responsibility was suddenly thrust upon them. some twenty-four-year-old just out of graduate school would find himself in charge of a major project with no one looking over his shoulder. a problem would come up, and he couldn't stand it, and he would go to noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do. and noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100 ampere eyes, listen, and say: "look, here are your guidelines. you've got to consider a, you've got to consider b. and you've got to consider c. " then he would turn on the gary cooper smile: "but if you think i'm going to make your decision for you, you're mistaken. hey... it's your ass."back east, in the conventional corporation, any functionary wishing to make an unusually large purchase had to have the approval of a superior or two or three superiors or even a committee, a procedure that ate up days, weeks, in paperwork. noyce turned that around. at fairchild any engineer, even a weenie just out of cal tech, could make any purchase he wanted, no matter how enormous, unless someone else objected strongly enough to try to stop it. noyce called this the short circuit paper route. there was only one piece of paper involved, the piece of paper the engineer handed somebody in the purchasing department.the spirit of the start-up phase! my god! who could forget the exhilaration of the past few years! to be young and free out here on the silicon frontier! noyce was determined to maintain that spirit during the expansion phase. and for the time being, at least. here in the early 1960s. the notion of a permanent start-up operation didn't seem too farfetched. fairchild was unable to coast on the tremendous advantage noyce's invention of the integrated circuit had provided. competitors were setting up shop in the santa clara valley like gold rushers. and where did they come from? why, from fairchild itself! and how could that be? nothing to it... defection capital!defectors (or redefectors) from fairchild started up more than fifty companies, all making or supplying microchips. raytheon semiconductor, signetics. general microelectronics, intersil. advanced micro devices. qualidyne? off they spun, each with a sillier pseudotech engineerologism for a name than the one before. defectors! what a merry game that was. jean hoerni and three of the other original eight defectors from shockley defected from fairchild to form what would soon become known as teledyne semiconductors, and that was only round one. after all, why not make all the money for yourself! the urge to use defection capital was so irresistible that the word defection,with its note of betrayal, withered away. defectors were merely the fairchildren, as adam smith dubbed them. occasionally defectors from other companies, such as the men from texas instruments and westinghouse who started siliconix, moved into the santa clara valley to join the free-for-all. but it was the fairchildren who turned the santa clara valley into the silicon valley. acre by acre the fruit trees were uprooted, and two-story silicon modern office buildings and factories went up. the state of california built a new freeway past the area, route 280. children heard the phrase "silicon valley" so often, they grew up thinking it was the name on the map.everywhere the fairchild émigrés went, they took the noyce approach with them. it wasn't enough to start up a company; you had to start up a community, a community in which there were no social distinctions, and it was first come, first served, in the parking lot, and everyone was supposed to internalize the common goals. the atmosphere of the new companies was so democratic, it startled businessmen from the east. some fifty-five-year-old biggie with his jowls swelling up smoothly from out of his f. r. tripler modified-spread white collar and silk jacquard print necktie would call up from ge or rca and say, "this is harold b. thatchwaite," and the twenty-three-year-old secretary on the other end of the line, out in the silicon valley, would say in one of those sunny blond pale-blue-eyed california voices: "just a minute, hal, jack will be right with you. " and once he got to california and met this jack for the first time, there he would be, the ceo himself, all of thirty-three vears old, wearing no jacket, no necktie, just a checked shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of moccasins with welted seams the size of jumper cables. naturally the first sounds out of this jack's mouth would be: "hi, hal. "it was the 1960s. and people in the east were hearing a lot about california surfers, california bikers, hot rodders, car customizers, california hippies, and political protesters, and the picture they got was of young people in jeans and t-shirts who were casual, spontaneous, impulsive, emotional, sensual, undisciplined, and obnoxiously proud of it. so these semiconductor outfits in the silicon valley with their ceos dressed like camp counselors struck them as the business versions of the same thing.they couldn't have been more wrong. the new breed of the silicon valley lived for work. they were disciplined to the point of back spasms. they worked long hours and kept working on weekends. they became absorbed in their companies the way men once had in the palmy days of the automobile industry. in the silicon valley a young engineer would go to work at eight in the morning, work right through lunch, leave the plant at six-thirty or seven, drive home, play with the baby for half an hour, have dinner with his wife, get in bed with her, give her a quick toss, then get up and leave her there in the dark and work at his desk for two or three hours on "a coupla things i had to bring home with me."or else he would leave the plant and decide, well, maybe he would drop in at the wagon wheel for a drink before he went home. every year there was some place, the wagon wheel, chez yvonne, rickey's, the roundhouse, where members of this esoteric fraternity, the young men and women of the semiconductor industry, would head after work to have a drink and gossip and brag and trade war stories about phase jitters, phantom circuits, bubble memories, pulse trains, bounceless contacts, burst modes, leapfrog tests, p-n junctions, sleeping-sickness modes, slow-death episodes, rams, naks, moses, pcms, proms, prom blowers, prom burners, prom blasters, and teramagnitudes, meaning multiples of a million millions. so then he wouldn't get home until nine, and the baby was asleep, and dinner was cold, and the wife was frosted off, and he would stand there and cup his hands as if making an imaginary snowball and try to explain to her... while his mind trailed off to other matters, lsis, vlsis, alpha flux, de-rezzing, forward biases, parasitic signals, and that terasexy little cookie from signetics he had met at the wagon wheel, who understood such things.it was not a great way of life for marriages. by the late 1960s the toll of divorces seemed to those in the business to be as great as that of nasa's boomtowns, cocoa beach, florida. and clear lake. texas, where other young engineers were giving themselves over to a new technology as if it were a religious mission. the second time around the tended to "intramarry. " they married women who worked for silicon valley companies and who could comprehend and even learn to live with their twenty-four-hour obsessions. in the silicon valley an engineer was under pressure to reinvent the integrated circuit every six months. in 1959 noyce's invention had made it possible to put an entire electrical circuit on a chip of silicon the size of a fingernail. by 1964 you had to know how to put ten circuits on a chip that size just to enter the game, and the stakes kept rising. six years later the figure was one thousand circuits on a single chip; six years after that it would be thirty-two thousand, and evervone was talking about how the real breakthrough would be sixty-four thousand. noyce himself led the race; by 1968 he had a dozen new integrated circuit and transistor patents. and what amazing things such miniatunzation made possible! in december 1968 nasa sent the first manned flight to the moon, apollo 8. three astronauts, frank borman. james lovell, and william anders, flew into earth orbit, then fired a rocket at precisely the right moment in order to break free of the earth's gravitational field and fly through the minute "window" in space that would put them on course to the moon rather than into orbit around the sun, from which there could be no return. they flew to the moon, went into orbit around it, saw the dark side, which no one had ever seen, not even with a telescope, then fired a rocket at precisely the right moment in order to break free of the moon's gravitational pull and go into the proper trajectory for their return to earth. none of it would have been possible without onboard computers. people were beginning to talk about all that the space program was doing for the computer sciences. noyce knew it was the other way around. only the existence of a miniature computer two feet long, one foot wide, and six inches thick?exactly three thousand times smaller than the old eniac and far faster and more reliable?made the flight of apollo 8 possible. and there would have been no miniature computer without the integrated circuits invented by noyce and kilby and refined by noyce and the young semiconductor zealots of the silicon valley, the new breed who were building the road to el dorado.noyce used to go into a slow burn that year, 1968, when the newspapers, the magazines, and the television networks got on the subject of the youth. the youth was a favorite topic in 1968. riots broke out on the campuses as the antiwar movement reached its peak following north vietnam's tet offensive. black youths rioted in the cities. the yippies, supposedly a coalition of hippies and campus activists, managed to sabotage the democratic national convention by setting off some highly televised street riots. the press seemed to enjoy presenting these youths as the avant-garde who were sweeping aside the politics and morals of the past and shaping america's future. the french writer jean-francois revel toured american campuses and called the radical youth homo novus, "the new man," as if they were the latest, most advanced product of human evolution itself. after the manner of the superchildren in arthur c. clarke's childhood's end.homo novus? as noyce saw it, these so-called radical youth movements were shot through with a yearning for a preindustnal arcadia. they wanted, or thought they wanted, to return to the earth and live on organic vegetables and play folk songs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. they were anti technology. they looked upon science as an instrument monopolized by the military-industrial complex. they used this phrase, "the military-industrial complex," all the time. if industry or the military underwrote scientific research in the universities?and they underwrote a great deal of it?then that research was evil. the universities were to be pure and above exploitation, except, of course, by ideologues of the left. the homo novus had set up a chain of logic that went as follows: since science equals the military-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex equals capitalism, and capitalism equals fascism, therefore science equals fascism. and therefore, these much-vaunted radical youths, these shapers of the future, attacked the forward positions of american technology, including the space program and the very idea of, the computer. and therefore these creators of the future were what? they were luddites. they wanted to destroy the new machines. they were the reactionaries of the new age. they were an avant-garde to the rear. they wanted to call off the future. they were stillborn, ossified, prematurely senile.if you wanted to talk about the creators of the future, well, here they were here, in the silicon valley! just before apollo 8 circled the moon, bob noyce turned forty-one. by age forty-one he had become such a good skier, people were urging him to enter competitions. he had taken up hang gliding and scuba diving. when his daughter penny was almost fourteen, he asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and she said she wanted to drop from an airplane by parachute. noyce managed to convince her to settle for glider lessons instead. then, because it made him restless to just stand around an airfield and watch her soar up above, he took flying lessons, bought an airplane, and began flying the family up through the mountain passes to aspen, colorado, for skiing weekends. he had the same lean, powerful build as he had had twenty years before, when he was on the swimming team at grinnell college. he had the same thick dark brown hair and the same hairline. it looked as if every hair in his head were nailed in. he looked as if he could walk out the door any time he wanted to and win another midwest conference diving championship. and he was one of the oldest ceos in the semiconductor business! he was the edison of the bunch! he was the father of the silicon valley!the rest of the hotshots were younger. it was a business dominated by people in their twenties and thirties. in the silicon valley there was a phenomenon known as burnout. after five or ten years of obsessive racing for the semiconductor high stakes, five or ten years of lab work, work lunches, workaholic drinks at the wagon wheel, and work-battering of the wife and children, an engineer would reach his middle thirties and wake up one day; and he was finished. the game was over. it was called burnout, suggesting mental and physical exhaustion brought about by overwork. but noyce was convinced it was something else entirely. it was...age, or age and status. in the semiconductor business, research engineering was like pitching in baseball; it was 60 percent of the game. semiconductor research was one of those highly mathematical sciences, such as microbiology, in which, for reasons one could only guess at, the great flashes, the critical moments of inspiration, came mainly to those who were young, often to men in their twenties. the thirty-five year-old burnouts weren't suffering from exhaustion, as noyce saw it. they were being overwhelmed, outperformed, by the younger talent coming up behind them. it wasn't the central nervous system that was collapsing, it was the ego.now here you saw youth in the vanguard, on the leading edge. here you saw the youths who were, in fact, shaping the future. here you saw, if you insisted on the term, the homo novus!but why insist? for they were also of the same stripe as josiah grinnell, who had founded grinnell, iowa, at the age of thirty three!it was in 1968 that noyce pulled off the redefection of all redefections. fairchild semiconductor had generated tremendous profits for the parent company back east. it now appeared to noyce that john carter and sherman fairchild had been diverting too much of that money into new start-up ventures, outside the semiconductor field. as a matter of fact, noyce disliked many things "back east." he disliked the periodic trips to new york, for which he dressed in gray suits, white shirts, and neckties and reported to the royal corporate court and wasted days trying to bring them up to date on what was happening in california. fairchild was rather enlightened, for an eastern corporation, but the truth was, there was no one back east who understood how to run a corporation in the united states in the second half of the twentieth century. back east they had never progressed beyond the year 1940. consequently, they were still hobbled by all of the primitive stupidities of bureaucratism and labor-management battles. they didn't have the foggiest comprehension of the silicon valley idea of a corporate community. the brightest young businessmen in the east were trained?most notably at the harvard business school?to be little machiavellian princes. greed and strategy were all that mattered. they were trained for failure.noyce and gordon moore, two of the three original eight shockley elves still at fairchild, decided to form their own company. they went to arthur rock, who had helped provide the start-up money for fairchild semiconductor when he was at hayden stone. now rock had his own venture-capital operation. noyce took great pleasure in going through none of the steps in corporate formation that the business schools talked about. he and moore didn't even write up a proposal. they merely told rock what they wanted to do and put up $500,000 of their own money, $250,000 each. that seemed to impress rock more than anything they could possibly have written down, and he rounded up $2.51 million of the start-up money. a few months later another $300,000 came, this time from grinnell college. noyce had been on the college's board of trustees since 1962, and a board member had asked him to give the college a chance to invest, should the day come when he started his own company. so grinnell college became one of the gamblers betting on noyce and intel?the pseudotech engineerologism noyce and moore dreamed up as the corporate name. josiah grinnell would have loved it.the defection of noyce and moore from fairchild was an earthquake even within an industry jaded by the very subject of defections. in the silicon valley everybody had looked upon fairchild as noyce's company. he was the magnet that held the place together. with noyce gone, it was obvious that the entire work force would be up for grabs. as one wag put it, "people were practically driving trucks over to fairchild semiconductor and loading up with employees." fairchild responded by pulling off one of the grossest raids in corporate history. one day the troops who were left at fairchild looked across their partitions and saw a platoon of young men with terrific suntans moving into the executive office cubicles. they would always remember what terrific suntans they had. they were c. lester hogan, chief executive officer of the motorola semiconductor division in phoenix, and his top echelon of engineers and administrators. or, rather, c. lester hogan of motorola until yesterday. fairchild had hired the whole bunch away from motorola and installed them in place of noyce & co. like a matched set. there was plenty of sunshine in the santa clara valley, but nobody here had suntans like this bunch from phoenix. fairchild had lured the leader of the young sun-gods out of the arizona desert in the most direct way imaginable. he had offered him an absolute fortune in money and stock. hogan received so much, the crowd at the wagon wheel said, that henceforth wealth in the silicon valley would be measured in units called hogans. *(dirk hanson, the new alchemists, boston: little brown, 1982).noyce and moore, meanwhile, started up intel in a tilt-up concrete building that jean hoerni and his group had built, but no longer used, in santa clara, which was near mountain view. once again there was an echo of shockley. they opened up shop with a dozen bright young electrical engineers, plus a few clerical and maintenance people, and bet everything on research and product development. noyce and moore, like shockley, put on the white coats and worked at the laboratory tables. they would not be competing with fairchild or anyone else in the already established semiconductor markets. they had decided to move into the most backward area of computer technology, which was data storage, or "memory." a computer's memory was stored in ceramic ringlets known as cores. each ringlet contained one "bit" of information, a "yes" or a "no, " in the logic of the binary system of mathematics that computers employ. within two years noyce and moore had developed the 1103 memory chip, a chip of silicon and polysilicon the size of two letters in a line of type. each chip contained four thousand transistors, did the work of a thousand ceramic ringlets, and did it faster. the production line still consisted of rows of women sitting at tables as in the old shed-and-rafter days, but the work bays now looked like something from out of an intergalachc adventure movie. the women engraved the curcuits on the silicon photographically, wearing antiseptic mars voyage suits, headgear, and gloves because a single speck of dust could ruin one of the miniature circuits. the circuits were so small that "miniature" no longer sounded small enough. the new word was "microminiature." everything now took place in an air-conditioned ice cube of vinyl tiles, stainless steel, fluorescent lighting, and backlit plastic.the 1103 memory chip opened up such a lucrative field that other companies, including fairchild, fought desperately just to occupy the number-two position, filling the orders intel couldn't take care of. at the end of intel's first year in business, which had been devoted almost exclusively to research, sales totaled less than three thousand dollars and the work force numbered forty-two. in 1972, thanks largely to the 1103 chip, sales were $23.4 million and the work force numbered 1,002. in the next year sales almost tripled, to $66 million, and the work force increased two and a half times, to 2,528.so noyce had the chance to run a new company from start-up to full production precisely the way he thought shockley should have run his in palo alto back in the late 1950s. from the beginning noyce gave all the engineers and most of the office workers stock options. he had learned at fairchild that in a business so dependent upon research, stock options were a more powerful incentive than profit sharing. people sharing profits naturally wanted to concentrate on products that were already profitable rather than plunge into avant-garde research that would not pay off in the short run even if it were successful. but people with stock options lived for research breakthroughs. the news would send a semiconductor company's stock up immediately, regardless of profits.noyce's idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him. he didn't want any employee to look at the structure of intel and see a complex set of hurdles. it went without saying that there would be no social hierarchy at intel, no executive suites, no pinstripe set, no reserved parking places, or other symbols of the hierarchy. but noyce wanted to go further. he had never liked the business of the office cubicles at fairchild. as miserable as they were, the mere possession of one symbolized superior rank. at intel executives would not be walled off in offices. everybody would be in one big room. there would be nothing but low partitions to separate noyce or anyone else from the lowliest stock boys trundling in the accordion printout paper. the whole place became like a shed. when they first moved into the building, noyce worked at an old, scratched, secondhand metal desk. as the company expanded, noyce kept the same desk, and new stenographers, just hired, were given desks that were not only newer but bigger and better than his. everybody noticed the old beat-up desk, since there was nothing to keep anybody from looking at every inch of noyce's office space.  noyce enjoyed this subversion of the eastern corporate protocol of small metal desks for underlings and large wooden desks for overlords.at intel, noyce decided to eliminate the notion of levels of management altogether. he and moore ran the show: that much was clear. but below them there were only the strategic business segments, as they called them. they were comparable to the major departments in an orthodox corporation, but they had far more autonomy. each was run like a separate corporation. middle managers at intel had more responsibility than most vice-presidents back east. they were also much younger and got lower-back pain and migraines earlier. at intel, if the marketing division had to make a major decision that would affect the engineering division, the problem was not routed up a hierarchy to a layer of executives who oversaw both departments. instead, "councils," made up of people already working on the line in the divisions that were affected, would meet and work it out themselves. the councils moved horizontally, from problem to problem. they had no vested power. they were not governing bodies but coordinating councils.noyce was a great believer in meetings. the people in each department or work unit were encouraged to convene meetings whenever the spirit moved them. there were rooms set aside for meetings at intel, and they were available on a first come, first served basis, just like the parking spaces. often meetings were held at lunch time. that was not a policy; it was merely an example set by noyce. there were no executive lunches at intel. back east, in new york, executives treated lunch as a daily feast of the nobility, a sumptuous celebration of their eminence, in the lucullan expense-account restaurants of manhattan. the restaurants in the east and west fifties of manhattan were like something from out of a dream. they recruited chefs from all over europe and the orient. pasta primavera, saucisson, sorrel mousse, homard cardinal, terrine de legumes montesquiou, paillard de pigeon, medallions of beef chinese gordon, veal valdostana, verbena roast turkey with hayman sweet potatoes flown in from the eastern shore of virginia, raspberry soufflé, baked alaska, zabaglione, pear torte, creme brulee; and the wines! and the brandies! and the port! the sambuca! the cigars! and the decor! walls with lacquered woodwork and winking mirrors and sconces with little pleated peach-colored shades, all of it designed by the very same decorators who walked duchesses to parties for halston on eaton square! and captains and maitre d's who made a fuss over you in movie french in front of your clients and friends and fellow overlords! it was mount olympus in mid-manhattan every day from twelve-thirty to three p.m. and you emerged into the pearl-gray light of the city with such ambrosia pumping through your veins that even the clotted streets with the garbage men backing up their grinder trucks and yelling, " 'mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back," ' as if talking urban chippewa? even this became part of the bliss of one's eminence in the corporate world! there were many chief executive officers who kept their headquarters in new york long after the last rational reason for doing so had vanished...because of the ineffable experience of being a ceo and having lunch five days a week in manhattan!at intel lunch had a different look to it. you could tell when it was noon at intel, because at noon men in white aprons arrived at the front entrance gasping from the weight of the trays they were carrying. the trays were loaded down with deli sandwiches and waxed cups full of drinks with clear plastic tops, with globules of sprite or diet shasta sliding around the tops on the inside. that was your lunch. you ate some sandwiches made of roast beef or chicken sliced into translucent rectangles by a machine in a processing plant and then reassembled on the bread in layers that gave off dank whiffs of hormones and chemicals, and you washed it down with sprite or diet shasta, and you sat amid the particle-board partitions and metal desktops, and you kept your mind on your committee meeting. that was what noyce did, and that was what everybody else did.if noyce called a meeting, then he set the agenda. but after that, everybody was an equal. if you were a young engineer and you had an idea you wanted to get across, you were supposed to speak up and challenge noyce or anybody else who didn't get it right away. this was a little bit of heaven. you were face to face with the inventor, or the co-inventor, of the very road to el dorado, and he was only forty-one years old, and he was listening to you. he had his head down and his eyes beamed up at you, and he was absorbing it all. he wasn't a boss. he was gary cooper! he was here to help you be self-reliant and do as much as you could on your own. this wasn't a corporation...it was a congregation.by the same token, there were sermons and homilies. at intel everyone?noyce included?was expected to attend sessions on "the intel culture." at these sessions the principles by which the company was run were spelled out and discussed. some of the discussions had to do specifically with matters of marketing or production. others had to do with the broadest philosophical principles of intel and were explained via the socratic method at management seminars by intel's number-three man, andrew grove.grove would say, "how would you sum up the intel approach?" many hands would go up, and grove would choose one, and the eager communicant would say: "at intel you don't wait for someone else to do it. you take the ball yourself and you run with it. " and grove would say, "wrong. at intel you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. then you take another ball and run with it and when you've crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score twelve points instead of six."grove was the most colorful person at intel. he was a thin man in his mid-thirties with tight black curls all over his head. the curls ran down into a pair of mutton chops that seemed to run together like goulash with his mustache. every day he wore either a turtleneck jersey or an open shirt with an ornamental chain twinkling on his chest. he struck outsiders as the epitome of a style of the early 1970s known as california groovy. in fact, grove was the epitome of the religious principle that the greater the freedom- for example, the freedom to dress as you pleased- the greater the obligation to exercise discipline. grove's own groovy outfits were neat and clean. the truth was, he was a bit of a bear on the subject of neatness and cleanliness. he held what he called "mr. clean inspections." showing up in various work areas wearing his mutton chops and handlebar mustache and his harry belafonte-cane cutter's shirt and the gleaming chain work, inspecting offices for books stacked too high, papers strewn over desktops, everything short of running a white glove over the shelves, as if this were some california groovy communal version of parris island, while the chain twinkled in his chest hairs. grove was also the inspiration for such items as the performance ratings and the late list. each employee received a report card periodically with a grade based on certain presumably objective standards. the grades were superior, exceeds requirements, meets requirements, marginally meets requirements,and does not meet requirements. this was the equivalent of a, b, c, d, and f in school. noyce was all for it. "if you're ambitious and hardworking," he would say, "you want to be told how you're doing." in noyce's view, most of the young hotshots who were coming to work for intel had never had the benefit of honest grades in their lives. in the late 1960s and early 1970s college faculties had been under pressure to give all students passing marks so they wouldn't have to go off to vietnam, and they had caved in, until the entire grading system was meaningless. at intel they would learn what measuring up meant. the late list was also like something from a strict school. everyone was expected at work at eight a.m. a record was kept of how many employees arrived after 8:10 a. m. if 7 percent or more were late for three months, then every body in the section had to start signing in. there was no inevitable penalty for being late, however. it was up to each department head to make of the late list what he saw fit. if he knew a man was working overtime every night on a certain project, then his presence on the late list would probably be regarded as nothing more than that, a line on a piece of paper. at bottomó and this was part of the intel cultureó noyce and grove knew that penalties were very nearly useless. things like report cards and late lists worked only if they stimulated self-discipline.the worst form of discipline at intel was to be called on the antron ii carpet before noyce himself. noyce insisted on ethical behavior in all dealings within the company and between companies. that was the word people used to describe his approach, ethical; that and moral. noyce was known as a very aggressive businessman, but he stopped short of cutting throats, and he never talked about revenge. he would not tolerate peccadilloes such as little personal i'll-reimburse-it-on-monday dips into the petty cash. noyce's strong silent stare, his gary cooper approach, could be mortifying as well as inspiring. when he was angry, his baritone voice never rose. he seemed like a powerful creature that only through the greatest self-control was refraining from an attack. he somehow created the impression that if pushed one more inch, he wouid fight. as a consequence he seldom had to. no one ever trifled with bob noyce.noyce managed to create an ethical universe within an inherently amoral setting: the american business corporation in the second half of the twentieth century. at intel there was good and there was evil, and there was freedom and there was discipline, and to an extraordinary degree employees internalized these matters, as if members of cromwell's army. as the work force grew at intel, and the profits soared, labor unions, chiefly the international association of machinists and aerospace workers, the teamsters, and the stationary engineers union, made several attempts to organize intel. noyce made it known, albeit quietly, that he regarded unionization as a death threat to intel, and to the semiconductor industry generally. labor-management battles were part of the ancient terrain of the east. if intel were divided into workers and bosses, with the implication that each side had to squeeze its money out of the hides of the other, the enterprise would be finished. motivation would no longer be internal; it would be objectified in the deadly form of work rules and grievance procedures. the one time it came down to a vote, the union lost out by the considerable margin of four to one. intel's employees agreed with noyce. unions were part of the dead hand of the past... noyce and intel were on the road to el dorado.by the early 1970s noyce and moore's 1103 memory chip had given this brand-new company an entire corner of the semiconductor market. but that was only the start. now a thirty-two-year-old intel engineer named ted hoff came up with an invention as important as noyce's integrated circuit had been a decade earlier: something small, dense, and hidden: the microprocessor. the microprocessor was known as "the computer on a chip," it put all the arithmetic and logic functions of a computer on a chip the size of the head of a tack. the possibilities for creating and using small computers surpassed most people's imagining, even within the industry. one of the more obvious possibilities was placing a small computer in the steering and braking mechanisms of a car that would take over for the drive in case of a skid or excessive speed on a curve.in ted hoff, noyce was looking at proof enough of his hypothesis that out here on the electrical frontier the great flashes came to the young. hoff was about the same age noyce had been when he invented his integrated circuit. the glory was now hoff's. but noyce took hoff's triumph as proof of a second hypothesis. if you created the right type of corporate community, the right type of autonomous congregation, genius would flower. certainly the corporate numbers were flowering. the news of the microprocessor, on top of the success of the 1103 memory chip nearly trebled the value of intel stock from 1971 to 1973. noyce's own holdings were now worth $18.5 million. he was in roughly the same position as josiah grinnell a hundred years before, when grinnell brought the rock island railroad into iowa.noyce continued to live in the house in the los altos hills that he had bought in 1960. he was not reluctant to spend his money; he was merely reluctant to show it. he spent a fortune on landscaping, but you could do that and the world would be none the wiser. gradually the house disappeared from view behind an enormous wall of trees, tropical bushes, and cockatoo flowers. noyce had a pond created on the back lawn, a waterscape elaborate enough to put on a bus tour, but nobody other than guests ever saw it. the lawn stretched on for several acres and had a tennis court, a swimming pool, and more walls of boughs and hot-pastel blossoms, and the world saw none of that, either.noyce drove a porsche roadster, and he didn't mind letting it out for a romp. back east, when men made a great deal of money, they tended to put a higher and higher value on their own hides. noyce, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy finding new ways to hang his out over the edge. he took up paragliding over the ski slopes at aspen on a rogolla wing. he built a quicksilver hang glider and flew it off cliffs until a friend of his, a champion at the sport, fractured his pelvis and a leg flying a quicksilver. he also took up scuba diving, and now he had his porsche. the high performance foreign sports car became one of the signatures of the successful silicon valley entrepreneur. the sports car was perfect. its richness consisted of engineering beneath the body shell. not only that, the very luxury of a sports car was the experience of driving it yourself. a sports car didn't even suggest a life with servants. porsches and ferraris became the favorites. by 1975 the ferrari agency in los gatos was the second biggest ferrari agency on the west coast. noyce also bought a 1947 republic seabee amphibious airplane, so that he could take the family for weekends on the lakes in northern california. he now had two aircraft, but he flew the ships himself.noyce was among the richest individuals on the san francisco peninsula, as well as the most important figure in the silicon valley, but his name seldom appeared in the san francisco newspapers. when it did, it was in the business section, not on the society page. that, too, became the pattern for the new rich of the silicon valley. san francisco was barely forty-five minutes up the bayshore freeway from los altos, but psychologically san francisco was an entire continent away. it was a city whose luminaries kept looking back east, to new york, to see if they were doing things correctly.in 1974 noyce wound up in a situation that to some seemed an all-too-typical mid-life in the silicon valley story. he and betty, his wife of twenty-one years, were divorced, and the following year he "intramarried." noyce, who was forty-seven, married intel's personnel director, ann bowers, who was thirty-seven. the divorce was mentioned in the san francisco chronicle, but not as a social note. it was a major business story. under california law, betty received half the family's assets. when word got out that she was going to sell off $6 million of her intel stock in the interest of diversifying her fortune, it threw the entire market in intel stock into a temporary spin. betty left california and went to live in a village on the coast of maine. noyce kept the house in los altos.by this time, the mid-1970s, the silicon valley had become the late-twentieth-century-california version of a new city, and noyce and other entrepreneurs began to indulge in some introspection. for ten years, thanks to racial hostilities and the leftist politics of the antiwar movement, the national press had dwelled on the subject of ethnic backgrounds. this in itself tended to make the engineers and entrepreneurs of the silicon valley conscious of how similar most of them were. most of the major figures, like noyce himself, had grown up and gone to college in small towns in the middle west and the west. john bardeen had grown up in and gone to college in madison, wisconsin. walter brattain had grown up in and gone to college in washington. shockley grew up in palo alto at a time when it was a small college town and went to the california institute of technology. jack kilby was born in jefferson city, missouri, and went to college at the university of illinois. william hewlett was born in ann arbor and went to school at stanford. david packard grew up in pueblo, colorado, and went to stanford. oliver buckley grew up in sloane, iowa, and went to college at grinnell. lee de forest came from council bluffs, iowa (and went to yale). and thomas edison grew up in port huron michigan, and didn't go to college at all.some of them, such as noyce and shockley, had gone east to graduate school at mit, since it was the most prestigious engineering school in the united states. but mit had proved to be a backwater... the sticks... when it came to the most advanced form of engineering, solid-state electronics. grinnell college, with its one thousand students, had been years ahead of mit. the picture had been the same on the other great frontier of technology in the second half of the twentieth century, namely, the space program. the engineers who fulfilled one of man's most ancient dreams, that of traveling to the moon, came from the same background, the small towns of the midwest and the west. after the triumph of apollo 11, when neil armstrong and buzz aldrin became the first mortals to walk on the moon, nasa's administrator, tom paine, happened to remark in conversation: "this was the triumph of the squares. " a reporter overheard him; and did the press ever have a time with that! but paine had come up with a penetrating insight. as it says in the book of matthew, the last shall be first. it was engineers from the supposedly backward and narrow-minded boondocks who had provided not only the genius but also the passion and the daring that won the space race and carried out john f. kennedy's exhortation, back in 1961. to put a man on the moon "before this decade is out." the passion and the daring of these engineers was as remarkable as their talent. time after time they had to shake off the meddling hands of timid souls from back east. the contribution of mit to project mercury was minus one. the minus one was jerome wiesner of the mit electronic research lab who was brought in by kennedy as a special adviser to straighten out the space program when it seemed to be faltering early in 1961. wiesner kept flinching when he saw what nasa's boondockers were preparing to do. he tried to persuade to forfeit the manned space race to the soviets and concentrate instead on unmanned scientific missions. the boondockers of project mercury, starting with the project's director, bob gilruth, an aeronautical engineer from nashwauk, minnesota, dodged wiesner for months, like moonshiners evading a roadblock, until they got astronaut alan shepard launched on the first mercury mission. who had time to waste on players as behind the times as jerome wiesner and the massachusetts institute of technology...out here on technology's leading edge?just why was it that small-town boys from the middle west dominated the engineering frontiers? noyce concluded it was because in a small town you became a technician, a tinker, an engineer, and an and inventor, by necessity."in a small town," noyce liked to say, "when something breaks down, you don't wait around for a new part, because it's not coming. you make it yourself."yet in grinnell necessity had been the least of the mothers of invention. there had been something else about grinnell, something people noyce's age could feel but couldn't name. it had to do with the fact that grinnell had once been a religious community; not merely a town with a church but a town that was inseparable from the church. in josiah grinnell's day most of the towns people were devout congregationalists, and the rest were smart enough to act as if they were. anyone in grinnell who aspired to the status of feed store clerk or better joined the first congregational church. by the end of the second world war educated people in grinnell, and in all the grinnells of the middle west, had begun to drop this side of their history into a lake of amnesia. they gave in to the modern urge to be urbane. they themselves began to enjoy sniggering over sherwood anderson's winesburg, ohio, sinclair lewis's main street, and grant wood's american gothic. once the amnesia set in, all they remembered from the old days were the austere moral codes, which in some cases still hung on. josiah grinnell's real estate covenants prohibiting drinking, for example.... just imagine! how absurd it was to see these unburied bones of something that had once been strong and alive.that something was dissenting protestantism itself. oh, it had once been quite strong and very much alive! the passion, the exhilaration, of those early days was what no one could any longer recall. to be a believing protestant in a town such as grinnell in the middle of the nineteenth century was to experience a spiritual ecstasy greater than any that the readers of main street or the viewers of american gothic were likely to know in their lifetimes. josiah grinnell had gone to iowa in 1854 to create nothing less than a city of light. he was a new englander who had given up on the east. he had founded the first congregational church in washington, dc., and then defected from it when the congregation, mostly southerners, objected to his antislavery views. he went to new york and met the famous editor of the new york herald, horace greeley. it was while talking to josiah grinnell, who was then thirty-two and wondering what to do with his life, that greeley uttered the words for which he would be remembered forever after: "go west young man, go west." so grinnell went to iowa, and he and three friends bought up five thousand acres of land in order to start up a congregational community the way he thought it should be done. a city of light! the first thing he organized was the congregation. the second was the college. oxford and cambridge had started banning dissenting protestants in the seventeenth century; dissenters founded their own schools and colleges. grinnell became a champion of "free schools," and it was largely thanks to him that iowa had one of the first and best public-school systems in the west. to this day iowa has the highest literacy rate of any state. in the 1940s a bright youngster whose parents were not rich, such as bob noyce or his brother donald, was far more likely to receive a superior education in iowa than in massachusetts.and if he was extremely bright, if he seemed to have the quality known as genius, he was infinitely more likely to go into engineering in iowa, or illinois or wisconsin, then anywhere in the east. back east engineering was an unfashionable field. the east looked to europe in matters of intellectual fashion, and in europe the ancient aristocratic bias against manual labor lived on. engineering was looked upon as nothing more than manual labor raised to the level of a science. there was "pure" science and there was engineering, which was merely practical. back east engineers ranked, socially, below lawyers; doctors; army colonels; navy captains; english, history, biology, chemistry, and physics professors; and business executives. this piece of european snobbery that said a scientist was lowering himself by going into commerce. dissenting protestants looked upon themselves as secular saints, men and women of god who did god's work not as penurious monks and nuns but as successful workers in the everyday world. to be rich and successful was even better, and just as righteous. one of josiah grinnell's main projects was to bring the rock island railroad into iowa. many in his congregation became successful farmers of the gloriously fertile soil around grinnell. but there was no sense of rich and poor. all the congregation opened up the virgin land in a common struggle out on the frontier. they had given up the comforts of the east ... in order to create a city of light in the name of the lord. every sacrifice, every privation, every denial of the pleasures of the flesh, brought them closer to that state of bliss in which the light of god shines forth from the apex of the soul. what were the momentary comforts and aristocratic poses of the east...compared to this? where would the fleshpots back east be on that day when the heavens opened up and a light fell 'round about them and a voice from on high said: "why mockest thou me?" the light! the light! who, if he had ever known that glorious light, if he had ever let his soul burst forth into that light, could ever mock these, my very seed, with a main street or an american gothic! there, in grinnell, reigned the passion that enabled men and women to settle the west in the nineteenth century against the most astonishing odds and in the face of overbearing hardships.by the standards of st. francis of assisi or st. jerome, who possessed nothing beyond the cloak of righteousness, josiah grinnell was a very secular saint, indeed. and robert noyce's life was a great deal more secular than josiah grinnell's. noyce had wandered away from the church itself. he smoked. he took a drink when he felt like it. he had gotten a divorce. nevertheless, when noyce went west, he brought grinnell with him... unaccountably sewn into the lining of his coat!in the last stage of his career josiah grinnell had turned from the building of his community to broader matters affecting iowa and the middle west. in 1863 he became one of midland iowa's representatives in congress. likewise, in 1974 noyce turned over the actual running of intel to gordon moore and andrew grove and kicked himself upstairs to become chairman of the board. his major role became that of spokesman for the silicon valley and the electronic frontier itself. he became chairman of the semiconductor industry association. he led the industry's campaign to deal with the mounting competition from japan. he was awarded the national medal of science in a white house ceremony in 1980. he was appointed to the university of california board of regents in 1982 and inducted into the national inventors hall of fame in february 1983. by now intel's sales had grown from $64 million in 1973 to almost a billion a year. noyce's own fortune was incalculable. (grinnell college's $300,000 investment in intel had multiplied in value more than thirty times, despite some sell-offs, almost doubling the college's endowment. ) noyce was hardly a famous man in the usual sense, however. he was practically unknown to the general public. but among those who followed the semiconductor industry he was a legend. he was certainly famous back east on wall street. when a reporter asked james magid of the underwriting firm of l. f. rothschild, unterberg, towbin about noyce, he said: "noyce is a national treasure."oh yes! what a treasure, indeed, was the moral capital of the nineteenth century? noyce happened to grow up in a family in which the long-forgotten light of dissenting protestantism still burned brightly. the light, the light at the apex of every human soul! ironically, it was that long-forgotten light...from out of the churchy, blue-nosed sticks. . . that led the world into the twenty-first century, across the electronic grid and into space.surely the moral capital of the nineteenth century is by now all but completely spent. robert noyce turns fifty-six this month, and his is the last generation to have grown up in families where the light existed in anything approaching a pure state. and yet out in the silicon valley some sort of light shines still. people who run even the newest companies in the valley repeat noycisms with conviction and with relish. the young ceos all say: "datadyne is not a corporation, it's a culture, " or "cybernetek is not a corporation, it's a society, " or "honey bear's assets"? the latest vogue is for down-home nontech names?"honey bear's assets aren't hardware, they're the software of the three thousand souls who work here." they talk about the soul and spiritual vision as if it were the most natural subject in the world for a well-run company to be concerned about.on june 8, 1983, one of the valley's new firms, eagle computer. inc., sold its stock to the pubic for the first time. investors went for it like the answer to a dream. at the close of trading on the stock market, the company's forty-year-old ceo, dennis barnhart, was suddenly worth nine million dollars. four and a half hours later he and a pal took his ferrari out for a little romp, hung their hides out over the edge, lost control on a curve in los gatos, and went through a guardrail, and barnhart was killed. naturally, that night people in the business could talk of very little else. one of the best-known ceos in the valley said, "it's the dark side of the force." he said it without a trace of irony, and his friends nodded in contemplation. they knew exactly what force he meant.
 investor worries about another dot-com-style stock crash miss the point. the bubble is in the private market.barron’s shook stock markets around the world nearly 15 years ago with its “burning fast” cover, showing that many of america’s highflying, unprofitable internet stocks were about to run out of cash. in the month following our story, the nasdaq fell 31%. that was the start of a two-year 78% slide that became known as the dot-com bust.in recent months, as the dow jones industrial average and the standard & poor’s 500 repeatedly hit new highs, and the nasdaq finally looks poised to vault past its all-time high of 5049,...
 a half-century ago, there was deep and widespread concern that automation and new technology were leading to chronically high levels of unemployment. in retrospect, we know the fear at that time was unfounded. but it is nonetheless fruitful to review the controversy.to set the stage, the u.s. economy suffered 10 months of recession from april 1960 to february 1961 . the unemployment rate rose from 5.0% in june 1959 to 7.1% by may 1961. a widespread fear was that the job losses were due to the arrival of automation and electronic technology. for example, here are some excerpts from a time magazine article on february 24, 1961, "the automation jobless."the rise in unemployment has raised some new alarms around an old scare word: automation. how much has the rapid spread of technological change contributed to the current high of 5,400,000 out of work? ... while no one has yet sorted out the jobs lost because of the overall drop in business from those lost through automation and other technological changes, many a labor expert tends to put much of the blame on automation. ... dr. russell ackoff, a case institute expert on business problems, feels that automation is reaching into so many fields so fast that it has become "the nation's second most important problem." (first: peace.)the number of jobs lost to more efficient machines is only part of the problem. what worries many job experts more is that automation may prevent the economy from creating enough new jobs. ... throughout industry, the trend has been to bigger production with a smaller work force. ... many of the losses in factory jobs have been countered by an increase in the service industries or in office jobs. but automation is beginning to move in and eliminate office jobs too. ... in the past, new industries hired far more people than those they put out of business. but this is not true of many of today's new industries. ... today's new industries have comparatively few jobs for the unskilled or semiskilled, just the class of workers whose jobs are being eliminated by automation.thus, president john f. kennedy--who probably edged out richard nixon in the 1960 presidential race in substantial part due to the seemingly dicey state of the economy at the time-- delivered a speech to a joint session of congress on may 25, 1961 . the speech has become best-known for kennedy's call to put a man on the moon. but that was part ix of the speech. much earlier in section ii, kennedy stated:i am therefore transmitting to the congress a new manpower and training development program to train or retrain several hundred thousand workers particularly in those areas where we have seen chronic unemployment as a result of technological factors and new occupational skills over a four-year period, in order to replace those skills made obsolete by automation and industrial change with the new skills which the new processes demand. the u.s. unemployment rate had declined back to the range of 5.0% by august 1964, but concerns over how the u.s economy might adapt to technology and automation remained serious enough that president lyndon johnson signed into law a national commission on technology, automation, and economic progress . the commission eventually released its report in february 1966. when the unemployment rate had fallen to 3.8%.before reviewing the tone and findings of the commission, i'll just note that when i run into people who are concerned that technology is about to decimate u.s. jobs, i sometimes bring up the 1964 report. the usual response is to dismiss the 1964 experience very quickly, on the grounds that the current combination of information and communications technology, along with advanced in robotics, represent a totally different situation than in 1964. it's of course true that modern technologies differ from those of a half-century ago, but that isn't the issue. the issue is how an economy and a workforce makes a transition when new technologies arrive. it is a fact that technological shocks have been happening for decades, and that the u.s. economy has been adapting to them. the adaptations have not involved a steadily rising upward trend of unemployment over the decades, but they have involved the dislocations of industries falling and rising in different locations, and a continual pressure for workers to have higher skill levels.it is of course theoretically possible that the technological changes of our own time will be profoundly different than anything which has come before. there is of course no way of proving that something in the future either will or will not be completely different than what has come before, but i am highly wary of such claims. after all, history also reminds us of that claims about how the present moment is utterly unique can sound plausible at the time, but look less plausible even just a few years or a decade later. what strikes me in looking back at the 1966 report is how much the description of the problem sounds quite modern, but how the recommendations of policies sound by contemporary standards fairly extreme.for a sample, here's an overall perspective on technology and jobs from chapter two of the 1966 commission report:we believe that the general level of unemployment must be distinguished from the displacement of particular workers at particular time and places, if the relation between technological change and unemployment is to be clearly understood. the persistence of a high general level of unemployment in the years following the korean war was not the result of accelerated technological progress. its cause was interaction between rising productivity, labor force growth, and an inadequate response of aggregate demand.  this is firmly supported by the response of the economy to the expansionary fiscal policy of the last 5 years. technological change on the other hand, has been a major factor in the displacement and temporary unemployment of particular workers. thus technological change (along with other forms of economic change) is an important determinant of the precise places, industries, and people affected by unemployment. but the general level of demand for goods and services is by far the most important factor determining how many are affected, how long they stay unemployed, and how hard it is for new entrants to the labor market to find jobs. the basic fact is that technology eliminates jobs, not work. it is the continuous obligation of economic policy to match increases in productive potential with increases in purchasing power and demand. otherwise the potential created by technical progress runs to waste in idle capacity, unemployment, and deprivation."my guess is that a lot of contemporary economists could still sign on to most of this sentiment, a half-century later, although there would be squabbling on a few points.  for example, economic discussions in the early 1960s put a heavy emphasis on keynesian-style stimulation of aggregate demand, and at least some modern economists would put more emphasis on supply-side growth and adjustment problems. the focus here is primarily on job loss and unemployment, while a modern economist would be likely to focus at least as much on issues about rising inequality. and of course, the claim that "the basic fact is that technology eliminates jobs, not work" proved true for the 1960s, but there is controversy over whether it will continue to be true.the 1966 commission report offers a long list of recommendations, and i found it interesting to consider how many of the topics are still very much with us 50 years later.  it's worth remembering that this is a commission appointed by a democratic president at the heart of what came to be called johnson's "great society" wave of legislation. that said, here's a sampling of the recommendations:"we recommend a program of public service employment, providing, in effect, that the government be an employer of last resort, providing work for "hard-core unemployed" in useful community enterprises.""we recommend that economic security be guaranteed by a floor under family income. that floor should include both improvements in wage-related benefits and a broader system of income maintenance for those families unable to provide for themselves.""we recommend compensatory education for those from disadvantaged environments, improvements in the general quality of education, universal high school education and opportutnity for 14 years of free public education, eliminatino of financial obstacles to higher education, lifetime opportunities for education, training, and retraining ..." "we recommend the creation of a national computerized job-man matching system which would provide more adequate information on employment opportunities and available workers on a local, regional, and national scale. in addition to speeding job search, such a service would provide better information for vocational choice ..." there's more, including discussion of how to encourage the use of technology to address health and environmental concerns, to improve workplace conditions, and to make government work better. much of this list is more about overall goals ("improvements in the general quality of education") than about details of how public policy might address these goals. but viewed as a list of areas for concern, this list of priorities for helping a modern workforce adjust over time to changes in technology seems quite relevant today, a half-century later. the notion that this list still seems so relevant a half century later is in part, no doubt, because the underlying issues are hard ones. but it also seems a depressing commentary on some central inadequacies of public policy in the last half-century, and a grim commentary on the irrelevance of much of what passed for public debate in the 2014 election season.
 pablo iglesias (center), the head of podemos, after the presentation of the party in madrid; january 17, 2014. credit photograph by andrea comas / reuterslast summer, erik martin, the general manager of the link-sharing site reddit, whose job requires him to oversee online conversations about everything from my little pony to islamic state propaganda, noticed something strange. a spanish political party that he’d never heard of was using the web site to organize. “we’ve never seen anyone use reddit as an organizing tool, not like this,” he said. the party, called podemos (we can), was only a few months old at the time, but it had created a subreddit—in effect, a party home page hosted by reddit—with more than two thousand subscribers and significant traffic. about two hundred people were visiting the page at any given time, and there were a million page views in the month of july alone. “this was all in a market”—in southern europe—”where reddit is not even that popular,” martin said. on the party’s page, an array of filters directs users to caches of videos, proposals, debate topics, and news. there are “digital assemblies” (a sort of virtual plebiscite), “ask podemos” (question-and-answer sessions with party leaders), and “podemos plaza” (a freewheeling discussion via message board). the other day, one user linked to a grim news item meant to spawn a local protest initiative: the municipal government of madrid had dedicated a plaza to margaret thatcher.when martin and i spoke over the summer, he admitted that he didn’t know much about podemos: was it a serious party with serious prospects or was it a group of idealistic interlopers? that question has been on the lips of spaniards for months.elections for the european parliament are generally a somnolent affair—low on turnout, high on cynicism, slim on newsworthiness—but last may podemos upended the political landscape. just six months old, the party won 1.5 million votes, or eight per cent of the over-all vote count, and gained five seats in the european parliament. podemos’s rise drew votes away from the mainstream socialists, which meant that, for the first time in three decades, the two major parties—the left-of-center socialists and right-of-center partido popular—could not cover a majority of voters between them.podemos promoted itself as a populist alternative, using slogans that drew on a familiar international vocabulary with overtones of occupy and of the european anti-austerity movement: “we are the 99%”; “the debt is illegitimate”; “the two-party system is a thing of the past.” podemos’s leader and figurehead, a political-science professor named pablo iglesias, told the press, from the steps of the european parliament: “all that’s left in europe is a political élite that kneels before the financial powers … some europeans don’t want to be colonies of the troika.” recent austerity measures are largely the troika’s doing, and unemployment has spiked in spain, portugal, italy, and greece. this has made national politics seem like a futile affair, with local politicians answerable to berlin and brussels on economic policy. the sworn mission of podemos is to restore politics to the people. “we propose a grassroots politics—that is, to do away with the establishment parties and, from there, put in motion a method,” iglesias has said.for podemos, the method is the message. if you scroll through the party’s reddit page or listen to its spokesmen on the radio, you’ll get a litany of fair-minded gripes about austerity and political corruption and malfeasance in the banking sector. what you won’t hear, at least not yet, is a specific policy agenda. podemos’s success at the ballot box depends on keeping party pronouncements flexible and all encompassing in the run-up to next year’s elections. (some recent polls show podemos as the third-most-popular party in spain.)earlier this month, podemos began a formal process to hone its identity further by hosting reddit debates and referendums on the defining features of the party: how should the hierarchy and structure be organized? who should lead the party? (its current progenitors and spokespeople are placeholders, pending formal primaries.) what should be its official mission statement, and what sorts of public policies should it angle for? in mid-october, an actual assembly will be held in madrid to winnow the proposals circulating online and to set up discrete votes toward a charter. by november, the party will look somewhat less ragtag and more like a more typical party—that is, with a leadership structure and a platform in place.until then, podemos will be the world’s first reddit party. debates and online votes will shape the party as it stands for election in 2015. reddit works by simple up-or-down votes: a registered user posts something and other users give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. a particular post’s prominence on the site rises or falls by these ratings. it’s the direct democracy of web content, with all the attendant costs (herd mentality, internet rabble, scant checks on the integrity of content) and benefits (organically popular, egalitarian, full of surprises). each exchange on the podemos’s subreddit page—whether a back-and-forth with a party leader, a proposal, a particular line of debate, or press clip—is scored by reddit users, and this helps to determines whether or not it is absorbed into the party’s project. with this model, podemos is sounding out ideas about itself and about its world.a few weeks ago, i called eric labuske, a twenty-six-year-old from madrid who is a member of podemos. the party’s structure is an agglomeration of committees, or working groups, with different areas of focus; some are thematic and others are more administrative (logistics and production, participation, international relations). labuske is part of the “participation team,” so the administration of the party’s reddit page is his charge.the rough organization of podemos translates to the web fairly naturally, he told me. so-called circles of podemos supporters have cropped up throughout the country, organized most often by region (neighborhood, municipality) or by profession or orientation (engineers, web designers). these circles debate whichever issues are of particular importance to them. it’s difficult to say how many people form any given circle—sometimes the circles actually meet in person—but now they exist on podemos’s subreddit page. the model is a holdover from a protest movement, launched in 2011, known as 15-m, for the day, in may, when demonstrators took to the streets to protest political and economic deadlock. these protests began as simple street demonstrations, organized on social media, and grew into a broader and more sustained cri de coeur. “spain’s was probably one of the largest and best-organized protest movements in the world,” the economist joseph stiglitz told me recently. he had gone to meet with spanish protestors at the time, in retiro park, in madrid. “spain was very influential for occupy wall street. what you saw in spain was that this was clearly not the fringe of society,” he said. podemos culls its ranks from these so-called indignados and reflects that broad demographic: mostly young people, almost exclusively lefty, and uniformly disgruntled by the major political parties.over time, the 15-m movement became an umbrella group for hundreds of local chapters that held weekly assemblies in cities across spain. some of these groups were nimble and essential—in one area of madrid, for instance, a neighborhood assembly prevented authorities from carrying out home foreclosures—others, less so. the biggest challenge was finding a way to streamline the discussions. assemblies went on for hours , proposals were debated ad nauseam. “15-m showed us that sometimes an assembly wasn’t the most effective way of achieving consensus and reaching majorities,” labuske told me. “internet tools have helped improve this.”reddit has refined the process. proposals run the same gamut as they did on the streets of madrid, but you can now read through them at your leisure; the proposals that pass muster are voted up the chain. one especially popular proposal called for the party to lodge a legal suit against an infamous catalan politician who recently confessed to socking away millions of dollars, tax-free, in a swiss bank account in the course of several decades. (podemos filed a lawsuit jointly with other leftist parties.) in a certain sense, debate on reddit served as internal polling with the party faithful on the idea.podemos members have also used a tool called loomio to take the voting process online. loomio is designed to administer digital votes: it has a split screen with a pie chart on one side, reflecting the over-all vote count, and a text stream on the other, in which a voter can make her case in a tweet-length pitch. about sixty per cent of loomio’s traffic comes from spain, and, as of this month, there are more than nine hundred podemos-related groups on loomio.the founder of loomio, a young new zealander named benjamin knight, comes out of occupy. “being involved in the occupy movement was my first experience with collective decision-making on a large scale,” he told me. “that’s true of a lot of people involved in loomio. it was seeing the potential of democratic organizing and seeing it happen all over the world.” he was, by turns, inspired and bewildered by what he saw—so much potential for collective action but also such unwieldiness. loomio, which is still in its beta version, has been used in seventy-four countries, in twenty-five languages. podemos is employing it on the largest scale to date. knight is sanguine about podemos’s prospects, and not just because a hundred and seventy-five loomio users have been signing up each day in spain; he also appreciates the party’s ethos. “so much of the public discourse in spain is about collective intelligence. how do we get the government to unlock this collective intelligence?” he said.it’s still early to predict what is in store for podemos. in the meantime, the establishment parties are stealing glances over their shoulders. a few days after i spoke with labuske, he tweeted a link to an article in a digital newspaper, called eldiario.es, which reported more than half of the voters of the two major parties in spain do not have e-mail accounts. if the future of politics in spain will depend on how quickly and effectively a party can organize online, podemos seems to have a step up on its competition.
 we've seen several accounts of 3d-printing being used to save the lives of patients, and out of florida comes another such wonderful story.cardiovascular surgeons at miami children's hospital turned to 3d printing to print out a scale replica of a 4-year-old girl's heart so they could plan for a complicated surgery to save the girl's life. she suffers from a congenital condition called anomalous pulmonary venous connection (tapvc), which basically means her veins pump blood to the wrong part of her heart, causing breathing difficulties, lethargy and a weakened immune system that left her sick often.after a few band-aid surgeries that proved to be temporary fixes, doctors knew they needed to come up with a solution. the situation was dire, as the cardiac team estimated that she would only live for another few weeks, if not days, without a permanent fix. using the 3d-printed model, the doctors were able to plan a surgery that hadn't been performed before using parts from a donor heart, and today young adanelie gonzalez's blood is flowing normally and she's recovering in the hospital.the story recalls a couple of other similar cases, such as one at morgan stanley children's hospital of new york-presbyterian , where last year doctors also practiced a complex heart surgery on a 3d model before operating on a baby."3d printing adds another element in caring for extremely complex conditions where surgical intervention is not typically thought possible," pediatric cardiologist nancy dobrolet said in a release. "in adanelie's case, the 3d model provided us with way to create a surgical option for her survival."it's another example of the miracles 3d-printing is bringing to health care, and if it isn't enough to give you all of the feels, we don't know what will.a physician holds the 3d model of a young girl's heart as he explains the operation to save her life. video screenshot by leslie katz/cnet
 washington — on friday, the supreme court announced that it will be deciding the question of same-sex couples’ marriage rights this year.left unsaid, however, was the fact that the outcome is almost certain: nationwide marriage equality by july of this year.since the supreme court struck down the defense of marriage act’s ban on federal marriage recognition in 2013, the nation’s lower courts have created significant momentum toward this moment.but it is the supreme court’s actions over the past 15 weeks, and the broad set of cases the court agreed on friday to hear this spring , that makes the coming ruling practically preordained.by issuing several orders in recent months allowing for more and more same-sex couples to be marrying in more and more states, the supreme court has made nationwide marriage equality a far less radical decision. it also has made it so that a decision upholding state marriage bans as constitutional would cause significant, difficult problems.the supreme court has, in fact, played the key role in creating the national landscape that now exists: same-sex couples are marrying in, at least parts of, 37 states and washington, d.c.on oct. 5, 2014, that number was 19 states and d.c.and though there have been no opinions explaining why the supreme court has done what it has done since then and though the decisions do not, technically, bind the court, there is at least a majority of the court comfortable creating this landscape, which would be difficult and extraordinarily painful to undo.in that time, the supreme court’s actions have directly or indirectly led to same-sex couples being allowed to marry in 14 of the additional states with same-sex couples marrying now.the justices, on oct. 6, 2014, denied five states’ requests for the court to hear their cases and reverse the appeals court decisions that struck down marriage bans. that decision to deny those writs of certiorari meant same-sex couples began marrying in those states, as well as in six other states within those appeals court circuits.then, the supreme court refused to issue stays (or holds) of lower court rulings in idaho and later alaska while the states attempted to appeal the rulings. those orders, which came with no reasoning, followed the decision of the 9th circuit court of appeals to strike down idaho and nevada’s bans. because there already was an appeals court ruling in favor of marriage equality that applied to those states, the orders were seen as being similar to the court’s oct. 6 decision.but then, on dec. 19, 2014, the supreme court denied a stay during florida’s appeal of the federal marriage case challenging its ban. in florida, unlike in any of the other states where the justices allowed same-sex couples to begin marrying, the appeals court for that circuit had not ruled on the issue.this decision by a majority of the justices to allow same-sex couples to marry while appeals are ongoing — and before the supreme court has resolved the issue itself — means that a majority of the court is comfortable with that reality becoming the default.more than that, the decision to allow same-sex couples to marry before the supreme court has decided the issue creates more legitimacy for an eventual decision striking down the bans by increasing the number of states where same-sex couples already can marry. at this point, a decision striking down such bans nationwide only changes the situation in 15 states. before the justices started down this path on oct. 6, 2014, it would have meant changing the law of more than 30 states.additionally though, and perhaps making the outcome of this spring’s supreme court showdown even more certain, the supreme court would be opening up an unprecedented mess if it upheld the bans now as being constitutional.april deboer, right, speaks as her partner jayne rowse, left, looks on during a news conference in ferndale, mich., friday, jan. 16, 2015. the couple is challenging michigan’s ban on same-sex couples’ marriages. ap paul sancyaif the justices rule that kentucky, michigan, ohio, and tennessee’s bans are constitutional, that means that questions are going to be raised — and litigation is going to be filed — over the legitimacy of the now-closed cases in which review was denied in october 2014. in fact, the same thing would happen as to any state in which marriage equality was the result of a court decision that the ban was unconstitutional under the u.s. constitution.more striking, there would be questions raised — as already have been raised in michigan — about the validity of marriages entered into by same-sex couples during the times when the respective state bans were declared unconstitutional.it is almost incomprehensible to imagine the majority that created this landscape would turn around and force the rest of the country to take these painful steps to tear it apart.but all actions suggest there is a majority of the court that does not wish to see that and plans, after april’s arguments, to craft a ruling striking down those remaining bans and bringing nationwide uniformity to the issue.the clearest indication that the court seeks uniformity: they took cases involving both marriage itself and recognition of same-sex couples’ marriages entered into out-of-state.although some have suggested that this means the court could consider ruling in favor of same-sex couples on the recognition issue while deciding against them on the marriage issue, such a decision would still create complex problems in states where same-sex couples have legally married. taking both issues is an “all in” approach that will require an “all in” decision.the past 15 weeks have shown, time and time again, that a majority of the supreme court is not only ready for, but has been preparing the country for, a decision enforcing nationwide protection of same-sex couples’ right to marry.chris geidner is the legal editor for buzzfeed news and is based in washington, d.c. in 2014, geidner won the national lesbian & gay journalists association award for journalist of the year.
 in silicon valley, the spotlight is often on young entrepreneurs with fresh ideas that will change the world — people like mark zuckerberg of facebook, or jack dorsey of twitter.but for decades, two older titans of the high-tech industry thrived in that fast-paced world: gordon moore and andy grove of intel.speaking recently in a rare joint interview, the two discussed how their company survived, and what they think of the current crop of silicon valley techies.moore and grove met with us at the sunny offices of the moore foundation in palo alto, calif. moore is the co-founder of intel, the most profitable silicon chip maker in the world; his foundation is a retirement project. grove is the legendary former ceo of intel, and its first hire.the two men sat by big windows, overlooking a landscape of office parks where younger companies are using technology the pair helped make possible.and although they spent more than three decades working together, nowadays they say they only see each other about once a year. moore and grove were a successful duo, but they're kind of an odd couple.moore is a modest, introverted chemist. when he says of himself, "i'm a loner," grove nods his head and agrees.grove, who is jewish, survived nazi occupation as a child and later fled communist hungary. he arrived in the united states in 1956. he has a reputation for being a savvy businessman with a wry sense of humor."i'm an older, creakier version of the same aggressive young engineer that gordon hired," he says with a laugh.moore first hired grove at a startup called fairchild semiconductor, right after grove had finished his doctorate in chemical engineering. for five years, they worked together at fairchild. then in 1968, moore and another key executive, robert noyce, decided to leave and start their own company.when grove heard the two men were leaving, he just decided to go with them."i never got an offer" to join them, grove chuckles. "or, i should say, i never got an invitation."the company moore and noyce founded was intel. in 1968, other companies were already making chips to help businesses manage their payroll, accounting and banking. but, moore says, he saw room for a lot of growth."we got to the point that electronics were going into almost all consumer items," he says. "so, we had the feeling that this was the basic technology of some kind of a revolution."moore saw an opportunity for intel in a relatively new area: putting computer memory or data storage on microchips. these chips would allow computers to be faster.in 1970, grove and moore led intel when it came out with the industry's first mega-hit: low-cost memory on a chip. but developing that chip was tough. grove still puts his head in his hands when he thinks back to all the experiments."every pestilence that could kill a microchip hit it," he says with a sigh. "we had no idea what we were doing. key people [were] standing around and testing all the chips in a wafer: 'green light is good,' 'red light is bad.' "unfortunately, grove says, time after time, the result came out "red, red, red, red, red. and we were a schlocky little outfit of 50 people."finally, after two years — though grove says it felt like 20 — they got their chip.for many years that followed, intel dominated the memory business.when japanese firms started making memory chips cheaper and better, few companies could compete. a lot of american memory chip companies went under. that could have been intel's fate, back in 1985.but a conversation in one of the company's famous silicon valley cubicles was the beginning of intel's radical turnaround.intel's first hire (from left), andy grove, and intel co-founders robert noyce and gordon moore in 1978, the 10th anniversary of the company. grove is sitting on a graphical layout (a rubylith) of one of intel's early microprocessors. courtesy of intel hide captionintel's first hire (from left), andy grove, and intel co-founders robert noyce and gordon moore in 1978, the 10th anniversary of the company. grove is sitting on a graphical layout (a rubylith) of one of intel's early microprocessors.grove says he and moore were in his cubicle, "sitting around ... looking out the window, very sad." then grove asked moore a question."what would happen if somebody took us over, got rid of us — what would the new guy do?" he said."get out of the memory business," moore answered.grove agreed. and he suggested that they be the ones to get intel out of the memory business.under the new plan, the company laid off more than 7,000 employees, almost a third of its workforce. grove says it was agonizing to shut down plants."we like to go to places where we'd be the only manufacturer," he says. "when we pulled out, we left a hole."intel decided to beef up something that had been a side business. the company was also the inventor of the industry's first successful microprocessor.in the 1970s, microprocessors were used to control elevators, traffic lights, garage door openers and office printers. the chips are the brains of a computer, processing everything from computation to multimedia displays. intel went from making computers faster to making them smarter and cheaper.in a bit of irony, moore and grove, like many others in the industry, didn't see that their biggest customer product was on its way: the personal computer."we were exposed to apple's early products, and i could not imagine anything except trivial applications for that," grove says. for instance, he and moore thought a pc might be good for keeping recipes in the kitchen.yet it was the personal computer that fueled intel's success, along with some shrewd business moves by grove, who in the late 1980s became the company's ceo.there have been books and business school talks about intel's twists and turns. but grove's key move was his refusal to license intel's new cutting-edge microprocessor. intel would be its sole manufacturer.in 1997, time magazine put grove on the cover , choosing him as man of the year.but not all the talk about intel has been good. the chip maker has been the target of several antitrust suits. though intel hasn't admitted to wrongdoing, it has been forced to pay large settlements and fines and change some of its business practices.intel produced the world's first successful microprocessor. this photo shows that famous 4004. intel chips today are in four out of five personal computers. courtesy of intel hide captionintel produced the world's first successful microprocessor. this photo shows that famous 4004. intel chips today are in four out of five personal computers.what grove emphasizes is that they were trying to create products of value and a company that would last. today, grove thinks that many in silicon valley are merely hoping to make a quick profit. there are two words that make him cringe: "exit strategy," he says. "i hate it!"grove says too many young tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists want to sell their companies or go public — get rich and get out."i really don't have much respect for the people who live their lives motivated by an exit strategy existing, being performed," he says. "there was no option that we were trained in that says, 'if it gets too hard, get up and leave.' "grove says he spent 10 years turning intel back around.nowadays, both grove and moore look around at the silicon valley they helped to create, and they lament that the devices designed here are not manufactured in the united states. and they can back up that talk; intel does about three-quarters of its manufacturing domestically.moore and grove say they feel their biggest accomplishment is that in a fast-moving competitive industry, their company has survived."there were 50 other startups more or less in the semiconductor industry," moore says. "we're about the only ones still around."
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 thanks to technological progress that has been both relentless and predictable, mainframe computers were supplemented first by minicomputers, then microcomputers, personal computers, and most recently, smartphones and tablets. next up: smart devices.more than a billion intelligent, connected devices already comprise today’s “internet of things (iot).” the expected proliferation of hundreds of billions more places us at the threshold of a transformation sweeping across the electronics industry and many others.as the number of connected devices grows from billions to hundreds of billions, and as governments and corporations race to take control of devices and data, we need to save the iot.this “rescue” will require business and technology leaders to fundamentally rethink technology strategy by building solutions for radically lower cost, privacy and autonomy. business models that guide these solutions must embrace highly efficient digital economies and create collaborative value, all while creating improved products and user experiences. how can executives prepare for digital success as the iot keeps changing?
 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.it's easy to feel like the world is becoming a scarier place. isis has established a foothold in syria and iraq. russia is taking territory from ukraine . north korea (allegedly) attacked a major us movie studio . and, most recently, terrorists stormed the offices of charlie hebdo , killing twelve. policymakers certainly seem to think things are getting worse; in 2013, even before any of those developments, joint chiefs of staff chair gen. martin dempsey declared that the world was "more dangerous than it has ever been."but if you take a broader view, dempsey is completely, utterly wrong. if anything, the world is safer than it's ever been. the threat of nuclear exchange between the us and the soviet union has lifted. great power wars of the kind that plagued europe until 1945 are a thing of the past. peoples'  odds of dying from violence , including warfare, have never been lower.a dangerous world? , an edited volume released by the cato institute this past october, makes the case that the level of danger posed to the us by everything from terrorism to the rise of china to cyberattacks has been greatly exaggerated by policymakers and the press. i spoke with cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, christopher preble, who edited the book with ohio state professor and cato senior fellow john mueller, on tuesday. an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation follows.dylan matthews: what's the basic case that the world is getting safer?christopher preble: it's understandable why some people believe that we live in a particularly dangerous world. as the cliché goes, the media doesn't cover the planes that land safely. but if you look at it empirically, which steven pinker among others has done, a person's chances of dying a violent death are at historic lows. we're living longer, healthier lives. it's not unique to the united states, or even modern, western countries. there's quite a bit of evidence worldwide that we're living longer, better lives and that we're safer.the counterargument is that, while it's true that war is claiming fewer lives globally and the us has been remarkably secure from war for a long time, there are a whole range of new threats in addition to interstate war that collectively pose a greater danger than faced us in the past. we wanted to scrutinize that at a granular level, including terrorism, cyberattacks, climate change, human security , traditional state threats like china, etc. the end result is a collection of essays that hang together along one major theme: the world is not uniquely dangerous, it is not more dangerous than it has ever been, and if you look at it dispassionately it's safer than it was two or three decades ago.dm: what about nuclear weapons?  cold war-style brinkmanship is a thing of the past, but if proliferation to pakistan and north korea increased the odds of a weapon actually being used, by a state or a terrorist group, then that suggests the world has gotten less safe over the past two decades.cp: john mueller has written a whole book on this . he argues that most states and most terrorists have concluded that nuclear weapons are more trouble than they're worth. if the object is to terrorize, a determined terrorist can accomplish that, tragically, by purely conventional means, and fairly small-scale conventional means, like a backpack bomb. there's evidence some terrorist groups recognize this. john cites a message sent between al-qaeda leaders recovered in pakistan in 2004 that says, essentially, "don't waste your time on things that aren't attainable."that's not to say there's no concern. we'd all agree that trying to limit the amount of weapons-grade nuclear material in the world makes a low risk even lower, and the costs of doing that are manageable. the reason it's hard for terrorists to acquire this material is that they've attempted it in the past, and doing that attracts the attention of lots of people, including other people looking for nuclear material. this is an argument for normal, ongoing intelligence work.having said that, it's extremely difficult to pilfer or build a functioning thermonuclear device. acquiring nuclear material and spreading it around through a dirty bomb is less difficult, but those effects can be and have been exaggerated. we have very high standards for determining what's an acceptable level of exposure to radiological material, and that can lead to fears out of proportion to the actual danger.dm: proliferation also has the potential to destabilize the balance of power in certain regions — east asia in particular — in a way that makes war more likely. do you worry about that?cp: i worry about it, but i don't worry about it as much as many. many international relations experts think that the number one reason why the us behaves as it does is to discourage other people from acquiring nuclear weapons. that's the leading argument for why the us provides security guarantees to south korea and japan and germany.those concerns are overdone. you have evidence from history, which is in frank gavin's chapter, suggesting that when states acquire nuclear weapons, it doesn't spark a cascade. israel getting nuclear weapons didn't cause a proliferation of nuclear weapons states across the mideast. pakistan and india are locked in this back and forth, but i don't think you can call that a proliferation cascade. north korea is a nuclear weapons state, as we define it. they seem to be perfecting the ability to refine uranium and to make an actual device. we see no evidence that south korea and japan are more seriously considering acquiring weapons because north korea has moved in this direction.there's a lot of confidence in traditional deterrence. i think there's some evidence that nuclear weapons have a deterrent effect, but many states have concluded that the effect isn't great enough to warrant their own arsenal. so many states that could have a weapon if they chose to don't.dm: let's talk about conventional terrorism. mueller has for years argued persuasively that the potential for harm just isn't that great — the death toll is comparable to that of lightning strikes . the counterargument is that deaths from terrorism have a much greater psychological impact than deaths from lightning or bee stings. what do you say to that?cp: we wrote another book — me, benjamin friedman, and jim harper — on this topic, to which john contributed two chapters. the bottom line is that terrorism works through our reaction to it. that's both a psychological effect — how do people change behavior on the basis of their fear? — and an effect on policymakers — what policies do they implement? if those policies are demonstrably harmful to liberty, if they are unwise fiscally, then they're doing the terrorists' work for them.terrorism is different. we don't dispute that. it's incumbent on policymakers and elite opinion makers to speak candidly and honestly to the public, to treat them like adults, and to put the terrorism threat in context — not to diminish that threat, but to reduce its effectiveness. it's about building resiliency in society across the board. there's very little penalty for people making unsubstantiated claims about threats — not just terrorism — and we need to recognize that making outrageous claims is harmful in itself. there needs to be some pressure on people to speak dispassionately.dm: did isis change your thinking on this at all?an isis fighter in syria. (afp/getty images)cp: not really, for a couple reasons. isis may be a terrorist organization, and may be an insurgency, and may be a quasi-nation-state or attempting to become a quasi-nation-state, but it's hard to be all of those things simultaneously. austin long writes about this in his chapter, about the differences between insurgents and terrorists. most terrorists operate in the shadows. the hard part is not killing them, it's finding them. that's why traditional counterterrorism is an intelligence and information-gathering process. it's a lot like police work.by declaring itself a state and raising a flag over territory it seizes and holds, isis is trading away one of its key advantages, and opening itself up to more traditional military attacks. it's a virulent, reprehensible state, but it's not clear to me that it's a greater terrorist threat than other organizations that are continuing to operate in the shadows.dm: the sony hack , and the us government's allegation that north korea was behind it , has given cyberattacks more prominence as a potential threat. martin libicki talks about this in the book; how concerning is it, really?cp: i really like martin's chapter, and it's the first time i had studied this in any detail.we assume a bit too casually that a major cyber incident, even if it doesn't cause longstanding damage, would have long-term ramifications. martin effectively challenges that by pointing to the multi-hour nasdaq outage in 2013. there's no evidence that it was a deliberate attack, and yet afterwards the market recovered to the point that we barely remember that incident. martin doesn't mention this case specifically, but accidents that cause major disruptions to the power grid — like, as the legend goes, a squirrel running into a transformer and causing a major power outage throughout the northeast in 2003 — don't have a longstanding effect either.if accidents don't have longstanding effects, then why should we believe a deliberate attack would have a much greater effect? in the past, deliberate cyberattacks have not had longstanding permanent effects. yes, we will encounter something in the future that is unlike anything we've encountered before. but we can build in resiliency to deal with events we've already witnessed, and maybe reduce the effectiveness of future events. that's worthwhile.dm: russia's invasion of ukraine didn't directly threaten the us, but because of our treaty obligations under nato, a similar incursion into, say, estonia would create a problem for us. how big of a threat would that be?cp: because we have treaty obligations to estonia — but didn't to georgia in 2008, or to ukraine in 2014 — we have to think seriously about what those commitments mean. we have pledged to go to war with russia over pieces of territory that most americans couldn't identify on a map even if they were given serious hints. we did not have a serious debate in this country when nato expansion was pushed forward, and as nato moved closer to russia's borders, the likelihood of these sorts of incidents rose, and the likelihood of us involvement grew with it.my colleague justin logan and i have said that this is an opportunity to revisit those commitments, to think seriously about whether we should maintain them and whether they're credible.dm: you sometimes hear the argument that the us is needed to balance against china and prevent war between them and japan, or them and south korea. how necessary are we there?chinese president xi jinping and us president barack obama make some solid facial expressions. (feng li/getty images)cp: the short answer is that the us, in both economic and military power, is declining in relative terms even though it remains very powerful objectively, and therefore the effectiveness of its deterrent threats, with respect to nato and disputed territories in the asia-pacific, attenuates over time.the us commitment to defend japanese territorial claims is less credible than it was 20 years ago, because china's military capability is rising (slowly, but measurably) and the logical response would be for japan, which has a much greater interest in defending those claims, to enhance its ability to defend them itself rather than remain dependent on the us. the us security guarantee is a less effective deterrent that is, in turn, inhibiting a more effective deterrent.so what i'd like to have is a better deterrent, and i think a better deterrent is one that's founded on the nation in question, or those that are most proximate to the territory in dispute, not a country that's over 5,000 miles away.dm: what would a foreign policy that acknowledges the world has gotten safer look like? what should obama's national security team do differently?cp: when someone comes to them with a particular crisis and concern, they need to accurately assess the urgency of that crisis — whether it's an imminent threat, if it's just a threat that bears watching — and whom it threatens. does it threaten the us directly, or primarily us allies' interests? i don't think it's inappropriate to think in a fairly hierarchical way. the things we should be most worried about  are the ones that effect the us first, just as i'd expect japan to be most worried about things that effect them first. that's just human nature.after you establish what's really worth worrying about and you have some kind of hierarchy, it's important to understand the policy tools available. managing a problem is often a better approach than trying to solve it, if by solving it you actually make the problem worse. we've seen that play out tragically a number of times in recent years.i do not envy a president of the united states who has this enormous military power at his disposal. in any given instance, any given crisis, he appears to have the ability to address it, and if he chooses not to, he will only be criticized for not using that instrument. but he can't use it everywhere. we're not omnipotent. he's inevitably going to make choices.we need a rigorous process, and a fairly transparent process, where we lay out what we've chosen to do in each instance, and why. hopefully that would inform peoples' responses in the future. our allies could say, "in the last case the us chose to not engage, and therefore we should expect them to do that in the future, so maybe we should be in a position to do more instead of expecting the us to deal with it."
 the discovery of teixobactin could pave the way for a new generation of    antibiotics because of the way it was discovered.teixobactin has been found to treat many common bacterial infections such as tuberculosis photo: alamythe first new antibiotic to be discovered in nearly 30 years has been hailed    as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the fight against the growing resistance to drugs.teixobactin has been found to treat many common bacterial infections such as    tuberculosis, septicaemia and c. diff, and could be available within five    years.but more importantly it could pave the way for a new generation of antibiotics    because of the way it was discovered.scientists have always believed that the soil was teeming with new and potent    antibiotics because bacteria have developed novel ways to fight off other    microbes.but 99 per cent of microbes will not grow in laboratory conditions leaving    researchers frustrated that they could not get to the life-saving    natural drugs.now a team from northeastern university in boston, massachusetts, have    discovered a way of using an electronic chip to grow the microbes in the    soil and then isolate their antibiotic chemical compounds.they discovered that one compound, teixobactin, is highly effective against    common bacterial infections clostridium difficile, mycobacterium tuberculous    and staphylococcus aureus.professor kim lewis, director of the antimicrobial discovery centre said: “apart from the immediate implementation, there is also i think a paradigm    shift in our minds because we have been operating on the basis that    resistance development is inevitable and that we have to focus on    introducing drugs faster than resistancethe first antibiotic penicillin, was discovered by alexander fleming in 1928    and more than 100 compounds have been found since, but no new class has been    found since 1987.the lack of new drugs coupled with over-prescribing has led to bacteria    becoming increasingly resistant to modern medicines.dame sally davies, the government’s chief medical officer, said antibiotic    resistant was ‘as big a risk of terrorism; and warned that britain faced    returning to a 19th century world where the smallest infection or operation    could kill.the world health oganisation has also classified antimicrobial resistance as a "serious    threat’ to every region of the world which ‘has the potential to affect    anyone, of any age, in any country"however the new discovery offers hope that many new antibiotics could be found    to fight bacterial infections.crucially, the scientists believe that bacteria will not become resistant to    teixobactin for at least 30 years because of its multiple methods of attack.testing on mice has already shown that the antibiotic works well at clearing    infections, without side-effects. the team is now concentrating on upscaling    production so that it could be tested in humans.“right now we can deliver a dose that cures mice and a variety of models of    infection and we can deliver 10 mg per kg so it correlates well with human    usage,” added professor lewis.the breakthrough was heralded by scientists who said it could prove a ‘game-changer’ in the struggle against antimicrobial resistance.prof laura piddock, professor of microbiology at the university of birmingham,    said: “the screening tool developed by these researchers could be a ‘game    changer’ for discovering new antibiotics as it allows compounds to be    isolated from soil producing micro-organisms that do not grow under normal    laboratory conditions.”prof mark woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology, from the    university of edinburgh added: “any report of a new antibiotic is    auspicious, but what most excites me about the paper is the tantalising    prospect that this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg.“most antibiotics are natural products derived from microbes in the soil. the    ones we have discovered so far come from a tiny subset of the rich diversity    of microbes that live there.“lewis et al. have found a way to look for antibiotics in other kinds of    microbe, part of the so-called microbial “dark matter” that is very    difficult to study.”public health england also welcomed the breakthrough.“the rise in antibiotic resistance is a threat to modern healthcare as we know    it so this discovery could potentially help to bridge the ever increasing    gap between infections and the medicines we have available to treat them,” said prof neil woodford, head of public health england’s antimicrobial    resistance and healthcare associated infections reference unit.the research was published in the journal nature.
 this picture taken on aug. 3, 2014 shows some same-sex couples sitting in the compound of the american club, the venue of the annual vietnam pride parade party, in hanoi. closethis picture taken on aug. 3, 2014 shows some same-sex couples sitting in the compound... read morethis picture taken on aug. 3, 2014 shows some same-sex couples sitting in the compound of the american club, the venue of the annual vietnam pride parade party, in hanoi.vietnam taking the lead in gay rights in southeast asia by abolishing a ban on same-sex marriage has medical doctor thuan nguyen planning a wedding ceremony with his boyfriend of two years.“i am ready to have a wedding,” he said. “many, many young people in love are optimistic about the acceptance of gay weddings.”the revised law, while not officially recognizing same-sex marriage, places the communist country at the forefront of countries in asia becoming more accepting of gay people. the national assembly’s move is expected to attract more lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender travelers and boost vietnam’s $9 billion tourism industry.“this makes vietnam a leader in asia,” jamie gillen, a researcher of culture geography at national university of singapore, said by phone. “singapore just reaffirmed its ban on homosexual behaviors. vietnam is trying to pitch itself as a tolerant and safe country.”vietnam’s new marriage law, which went into effect new year’s day, abolished regulations that “prohibit marriage between people of the same sex.”same-sex marriages can now take place, though the government does not recognize them or provide legal protections in cases of disputes. the government abolished fines that were imposed on homosexual weddings in 2013.no other country in southeast asia has taken as big a step toward accepting same-sex marriage as vietnam, phil robertson , deputy asia director at human rights watch, said by phone.in thailand , efforts to address same-sex laws have stalled since the ascent of the military government in may, while cambodia, burma and laos have not put the issue on its legislative agenda, he said. the philippines is considering laws to ban same-sex marriage. indonesia and malaysia have “entrenched discriminatory views” against homosexuals and in brunei, “the new penal code sets out that those seeking to be involved in gay marriage could face whippings and long prison sentences,” robertson said.vietnam, which looks to boost an economy that has expanded less than 7 percent annually for seven consecutive years, reduced visa requirements for seven asian and european countries jan. 1 to make the country more attractive to overseas tourists. foreign visitors to vietnam are estimated to have increased to 7.9 million last year from 7.6 million in 2013, according to government data.“it is getting out that vietnam is a more friendly place” toward gay people, john goss, director of utopia asia , a gay resources website based in bangkok, said by phone. “gays in vietnam are certainly becoming more open. it has not ruffled any feathers as it might in some other countries in southeast asia . it will have a positive effect on tourism.”vietnam is already seeing an influx of lgbt travelers from abroad, said nguyen anh tuan, owner of gay hanoi tours , which has seen bookings increase by as much as 50 percent in the past year.the new law “indicates to everyone that vietnam is opening up more and welcomes everyone,” he said. “vietnam is changing very quickly. there are bigger gay communities and gay events.”twenty-nine percent of the lgbt community in the u.s. take at least five leisure trips a year, according to research by san francisco-based community marketing inc. the community generates $100 billion in tourism business in the u.s. alone and many make overseas trips, according to the company. forty-eight percent of gay households have annual incomes of at least $75,000, it said in its 2014 tourism survey.“many of them have double incomes,” goss said. “gay travel tends to be recession-proof.”vietnam’s lawmakers, who initially considered recognizing same-sex marriage, believed the country wasn’t ready for it, said luong the huy, legal officer at the institute for studies of society, economy and environment, known as isee, a vietnamese non-governmental organization that advocates for minority rights.“they say the society in vietnam needs some time to accept gay and lesbians in general,” he said. the revision in the law signals to the country that “same-sex marriage is not harmful to society,” huy said.vietnam, which has a population of about 90 million, has at least 1.65 million lgbt citizens ages 15 to 59, according to the hanoi-based isee.vietnamese perceptions of gays may also change with the december arrival of u.s. ambassador to vietnam, ted osius, along with his husband, clayton bond, and their son, huy said.“he promotes a very good image of a very successful person who is gay,” huy said. “we could get more support from civil society in vietnam because the american ambassador is gay.”vietnam’s leaders allow gay organizations to be established and last year permitted a gay pride bicycle ride with rainbow flags in hanoi, even as the government cracks down on political dissent, robertson said. more than 150 vietnamese dissidents are in detention, according to human rights watch .granting gays more freedoms is a way to blunt a bad human rights record, joerg wischermann, a researcher at the german institute of global and area studies, said in an e-mail.nonetheless, vietnam’s marriage law revision “is something extraordinary in a region in which many countries have deeply conservative societies,” he said.nguyen, 43, the hanoi doctor, said gay vietnamese want to push for the legal rights marriage confers on citizens. when a gay couple ends their relationship, or if one were to die, there is no legal framework for how to split assets, he said.“the government doesn’t have problems with equal marriage,” nguyen said. “it doesn’t have to do with the political system. this is determined by public opinion.”to contact the reporters on this story: john boudreau in hanoi at jboudreau3@bloomberg.net ; nguyen dieu tu uyen in hanoi at uyen1@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: k. oanh ha at oha3@bloomberg.net lars klemmingpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 com a economia americana dando sinais de revigoramento, mas o crescimento europeu e japonês parecendo capengar, todos concordam que o dólar deve subir em relação ao euro e ao iene. o único problema é que, quando todos concordam em que um particular movimento cambial é iminente, todos tendem a estar errados.prever taxas de câmbio é temerário, algo como prever o mercado acionário. isso pode ser atestado por várias gerações de economistas internacionais eminentes que apostaram seu dinheiro onde diziam que ele deveria estar ou, mais precisamente, no que suas teorias pregavam, e perderam até as calças. no caso atual, a presunção de que o dólar está destinado a subir se baseia na crença de que, com o crescimento americano acelerando e o mercado de trabalho se fortalecendo, o federal reserve (fed, banco central americano) em breve começará a elevar as taxas de juros. a europa, ao contrário, está atolada na recessão e em risco de deflação. em jackson hole, no mês passado, o presidente do banco central europeu (bce), mario draghi, sinalizou que o banco deve responder com um afrouxamento quantitativo. a recuperação do japão, por sua vez, está perdendo embalo na esteira da elevação do imposto sobre consumo no início deste ano, aumentando a probabilidade de que o banco do japão reforce suas políticas expansionistas.taxas de juros mais altas e aperto do crédito nos eua em relação a europa e japão terão o efeito de tornar os eua um lugar mais atraente para se investir. e, com isso, virão mais dólares.ademais, esse realinhamento de moedas é amplamente visto como uma coisa boa. com os gastos estagnados na europa e no japão, moedas mais fracas nesses países impulsionarão as exportações. com a demanda americana forte, os eua terão de depender de importações para suprir o consumo e investimento adicionais, senão a inflação vai acelerar, obrigando o fed a endurecer ainda mais rapidamente e acabar prematuramente com a festa. o déficit comercial americano poderá aumentar em consequência do dólar mais forte, mas esse é um pequeno preço a pagar para manter o crescimento.portanto, o que poderia dar errado? para começar, há o fato inquietante de que taxas de câmbio se modificam com rumores, não com fatos. o euro já caiu em relação ao dólar na última primavera (no hemisfério norte), quando a inflação na zona do euro desceu abaixo de 1% e surgiram expectativas de que o bce reagiria com alguma forma de política monetária heterodoxa. mais recentemente, ele caiu de novo, em resposta ao discurso do presidente draghi em jackson hole.em outras palavras, a expectativa de que o bce está prestes a fazer alguma coisa pouco convencional já chegou ao mercado. somente se os draghi & cia forem ainda mais agressivos do que os investidores atualmente esperam o euro cairá ainda mais. por enquanto, a queda da moeda foi limitada, de cerca de 5% ante o dólar desde o início do verão (europeu), e 3,5% ante uma cesta mais ampla de moedas, refletindo expectativas de que as ações do bce serão modestas. e 5% é muito pouco para pesar numa economia europeia encrencada. uma ação radical do bce seria uma história diferente, mas há várias razões - ideológicas, políticas e estruturais - para duvidar de que uma ação radical esteja nos planos.o iene caiu mais e mais rápido, perdendo cerca de um quinto do seu valor ante o dólar desde o advento da abenomics (como é conhecido o programa do primeiro-ministro japonês shinzo abe para a recuperação econômica do país). mas os benefícios para o japão têm ficado aquém do esperado. como as corporações japonesas terceirizaram e internacionalizaram boa parte da produção manufatureira, as exportações japonesas têm reagido com lentidão. o crescimento letárgico das exportações de veículos motorizados diz tudo.as exportações de carros, caminhões e ônibus estão estagnadas ante o pano de fundo de uma forte demanda global de veículos por nove meses seguidos. isso é um recado para a zona do euro não esperar demais apenas da desvalorização da moeda. a abenomics oferece, portanto, uma lição importante para a europa: uma política de expansão monetária provavelmente só ajudará se vier acompanhada de uma reforma estrutural concomitante.dito isso, há um cenário em que o euro e o iene poderiam cair fortemente ante o dólar. essa seria uma perturbação geopolítica grave, sendo um conflito aberto entre a rússia e a ucrânia apoiada pela otan o candidato óbvio. o suprimento de energia para a europa ocidental e o japão sofreria ruptura. as exportações europeias e japonesas ficariam ainda mais deprimidas. haveria uma fuga para o dólar, refletindo o status deste como a única moeda realmente segura, a singular liquidez dos mercados financeiros americanos e a segurança conferida ao poderio militar americano.neste cenário extremo, o dólar significativamente mais forte do que os entendidos preveem se materializaria. mas os problemas geopolíticos que produziriam esse resultado significariam tempos ainda mais duros na europa, no japão e, também, nos estados unidos. vamos esperar que os especialistas que preveem um dólar significativamente mais forte estejam errados, como já estiveram em outras ocasiões. / traduÇÃo de celso paciornikprofessor de economia e ciÊncias polÍticas na universidade da califÓrnia, em berkeley
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 please enter your email above and we will send you an email with further instructions. sign in?on the face of it, the ecb has many reasons to launch qe. for two years, inflation has consistently failed to reach the 2% target. in november, the annual  price growth was just 0.3%, while the recent collapse in oil prices  will generate further downward pressure in the coming months. even more  important, inflation expectations have started to de-anchor: forecasters  and investors expect the undershooting of the target to persist over  the medium term.low inflation  is already a serious obstacle to economic recovery and rebalancing  within the eurozone. outright deflation would be an even more dangerous  threat.so far, so good. deflation risk is a  legitimate reason for a central bank to loosen monetary policy. the ecb  has already pushed funding rates close to zero and deposit rates into  negative territory, as well as throwing money at banks and buying abs  and mbs in an attempt to get banks to lend. all this appears to have  done is slow the rate at which m3 lending is falling (in a credit-money economy, i regard m3 lending as the best indicator  of future ngdp growth). it's hard to argue that the ecb has done  anything like enough to counter deflationary pressures and restore  growth.  but i'm really not sure about this. he seems to think that the ecb must do qe because it has already been priced in by markets:should  the ecb disappoint expectations, bond and foreign-exchange markets  would confront an abrupt and damaging unwinding of positions: long-term  interest rates would rise, stock markets would sink, and the exchange  rate would appreciate.a failure to deliver what markets expect is a central bank failure, is it? really? more  importantly, if markets have already priced in qe, why would actually  doing qe make any difference? the price effects are already there, and  yet m3 lending is falling, unemployment remains stubbornly high, manufacturing pmi is on the floor and so are inflation expectations. i can  accept pisani-ferry's argument that the ecb must now do qe because  otherwise things will get much worse, but i can't see how it is going to  reverse the current deflationary trend unless it is far larger than the  programme the market has already priced in. "shock and awe" is needed. where is the political will for this?nor do i buy pisani-ferry's japan-nightmare-scenario. strictly speaking, a government that issues its own  currency (as japan does) can never be insolvent, so limiting qe for fear of inadvertently financing the fiscal deficit of an insolvent government doesn't make a great deal of sense. a sovereign currency issuer can suffer a run on its currency  and its debt, but as i've explained here ,  that's very unlikely in japan - and anyway, if a government is so untrustworthy that its currency is dumped by domestic users, the central bank is unlikely to have much credibility either. it can be argued that eurozone countries can and do go bankrupt because they don't issue  their own  currencies. in this respect they are more like us municipal authorities  than sovereign states. in comparing them with japan, pisani-ferry is  comparing  apples and pears. however, he makes two important points.firstly, qe supports fiscal deficits. pisani-ferry says this is because qe depresses long-term yields, which empirically seems not to be true .  the more nuanced argument is that it is because a central bank standing  ready to purchase its own government's debt sets a floor on the price  of that debt, effectively preventing a buyer's strike and therefore  supporting the fiscal position. i've explained this here. i'm  personally of the opinion that central bank support of fiscal deficits  via qe is a significant driver of the austerity story that is being sold  to electorates around the world. when the central bank supports the  price of government debt, the government's external borrowing constraint  is effectively neutralized. the rich and powerful, afraid of inflation,  then mobilise naive middle-class voters to impose severe restrictions on public spending, effectively replacing  the external constraint with a domestic one. turkeys do vote for  christmas if they are told to by the bbc .  but if the effect of qe - or the threat of qe - is to encourage fiscal authorities to tighten so severely that it causes demand  collapse and supply-side destruction , then it is completely counterproductive, isn't it?secondly, pisani-ferry points out that the real problem for the ecb is that there is no single fiscal authority:moreover, unlike its counterparts, the ecb  does not face a single interlocutor, and none of the governments that  hold it accountable is or feels in charge of the eurozone as a whole. this is the heart of the matter. the absence of a single fiscal authority is the fundamental  problem with the eurozone. but pisani-ferry doesn't get it quite right (my emphasis):this is a deeply unfavorable situation, which explains why the ecb, once  obsessed with the risk that governments would coalesce to assail its  independence, has turned into the staunchest advocate of fiscal-policy  coordination."fiscal-policy  coordination"? no. the ecb has become the eurozone's fiscal enforcer,  dictating policy to government after government over the last few years  and using empty threats to get its own way. it has caused the eurozone's depression not only through its monetary policy failures but also through its interference with fiscal policy . but the ecb is not wholly responsible for the eurozone disaster - after all, it has been forced to act as fiscal enforcer because of the absence of a unifying fiscal authority. the  truth is that the eurozone is in an unstable equilibrium. inexorable forces are forcing it  towards either consolidation or breakup. consolidation means creation of a supranational fiscal authority with tax-raising and  bond-issuing powers of its own. breakup....well, we all know what that  means. qe will do nothing to fix this.  indeed nothing the ecb can do will deal with the fundamental problem of  an incomplete and unstable monetary union. there is no political will for consolidation, and the growth of  nationalistic political movements makes the disorderly exit of one or more euro  member states increasingly likely.this is the "black  hole" theory of the eurozone. inexorable gravitational forces draw the  countries of the eurozone ever closer together. to start with, only the smaller and weaker countries experience the severe economic dislocation that is an inevitable consequence of the pull towards consolidation. but as they approach  consolidation - the "singularity" - the economic depression of the periphery spirals out to core countries, including the most powerful. even the mighty germany is slowing.....as the depression widens and deepens, massive political forces rip the  countries themselves apart. the eurozone collapses into a chaotic maelstrom of fragmentation and conflict.  and the people of europe pay a terrible  price.
 cari tuna and her husband committed in their 20s to the giving pledge, the campaign started by bill gates and warren buffet to encourage billionaires to donate most of their wealth. (lettering by joel holland for the washington post/photo by marvin joseph/the washington post)by ariana eunjung cha december 26, 2014 follow @arianaeunjungsan francisco — when cari tuna and her future husband, dustin moskovitz, a facebook co-founder, decided they would give away most of their multibillion-dollar fortune to charity, they thought of asteroids.or more specifically, the risk of one slamming to earth and causing mass destruction.it was one of many early ideas and it wasn’t that they had any special passion for or expertise in the subject, but it wasn’t a joke either. in trying to figure out how they could make the maximum impact with their money, the couple wanted to cast as wide a net as possible and systematically evaluate every cause on its merits.no matter how wacky or intractable a problem may seem at first glance.“we wanted to include anything that could seriously derail humanity’s progress,” tuna explained in a recent interview. “it’s a pretty scary list.”tuna and moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the giving pledge, the campaign started by bill gates and warren e. buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.they had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.with moskovitz working crazy hours at his new start-up, asana, a collaboration and messaging company, the primary responsibility for figuring out how to give away the money fell to tuna.their silicon valley peers had advice. what tuna heard the most was to pick a worthy cause she believed in such as poverty, education or oceanography and go from there. others recommended she look into problems that affected her personally.they noted the splash mark zuckerberg and his wife, priscilla chan, made in 2010 with their $100 million donation to the newark school system. and they pointed to the advances google co-founder sergey brin, who has a gene that puts him at higher risk for parkinson’s, has brought to the field with $150 million in donations.but those approaches didn’t quite resonate with tuna.tuna and moskovitz, who is pictured here, were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the giving pledge. (araya diaz/getty images for techcrunch)what she wanted to do was the most good they could in any area — which sounded simple enough but turned out to be incredibly difficult to execute.“the conventional wisdom is to say, ‘what am i passionate about?’ and go for something in that area,” tuna said. “that can be a great way to do things, but at the same time, i think that by just going with that, you’re leaving a lot of opportunity for impact on the table.”she points to iodine deficiency, which has been linked with low iqs in children in the developing world. it’s “not a super-sexy topic,” she says, but its remedy can have a major impact on a community and can be in­cred­ibly cheap and easy to implement.as tuna and moskovitz, now 29 and 30, respectively, began to compare one possibility with another and then another, they have become pioneers in an emerging philosophy of philanthropy known as “effective altruism” — which applies evidence and reason over things like emotion and intuition to determine where one can do the most good.the duo are emblematic of a new generation of millennial philanthropists seeking to give far beyond their own communities and experiences.americans have traditionally focused their donations on organizations such as schools, churches and cultural centers close to home. but with the rise of social networks that connect people the world over instantaneously, many millennials have a broader view of charity.after three years, several hundred interviews and trips that took them from washington think tanks such as the brookings institution to health clinics in burma and rural villages in kenya, they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: u.s. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. they plan to announce their first major focus areas in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year. tuna said she is excited to get started.“i came to this work without a really fixed worldview as most philanthropists do that are coming to this after highly successful careers in other fields,” said tuna, who serves as president of good ventures, the couple’s foundation. “i have a blank slate, and i’m trying to use that as an advantage.”when tuna first heard the name dustin moskovitz in 2009, she was fresh out of yale and a newbie reporter in the wall street journal’s san francisco bureau. a co-worker of hers knew him from college and thought they would hit it off, so she set them up on a blind date.moskovitz, one of zuckerberg’s harvard roommates, had moved out west to become facebook’s third employee and chief technology officer. it was clear from the get-go that he and tuna shared a similar worldview. they were both modest, direct and cared immensely about being good and doing good.raised in evansville, ind., tuna was the eldest of three children born to two doctors. in high school, she was valedictorian (“co-valedictorian,” she corrects), student council president (she notes that she ran unopposed) and founded her school’s amnesty international chapter (it was a small school, she says). at yale, she studied political science and spent much of her time at the college paper. she did some writing for her home-town paper, the evansville courier & press, and interned at the minneapolis star tribune. she spoke some arabic and turkish and thought that maybe she’d like to be a foreign correspondent one day.moskovitz grew up in a small city in inland florida that’s best known as a place where several major highways pass through. his dad was a psychiatrist and his mother was a teacher and artist. as a boy, he dreamed of being an air force pilot, but at harvard he studied economics and decided business was his future.that famed facebook ipo was still a few years away when they met, and tuna said it wasn’t until a few dates into the relationship that it dawned on her that the guy she was seeing was likely to become very wealthy.“i knew he was a co-founder of facebook and i used facebook,” she said, “but i had just moved out to san francisco and wasn’t really all that familiar with the tech world. it was pretty shocking.”in 2011, when moskovitz was 27, forbes named him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. that same year, tuna quit her job at the journal to work on the couple’s charitable giving full-time. they weren’t even engaged, but even then moskovitz talked about tuna as his “partner” in life, and his public comments about the future often included her.“cari and i are stewards of this capital,” moskovitz wrote in a quora chat in 2013 shortly before they married. in response to a question about what it feels like to be a billionaire, he said: “it’s pooled up around us right now, but it belongs to the world. we intend not to have much left when we die.”today, tuna and moskovitz have a reputation for being among silicon valley’s most low-key billionaires. friends and colleagues mention that they prefer to spend their free time doing yoga, meditating and taking walks. they fly coach, share a used car and bike or take public transportation to work.paul brest, a stanford law professor who is the former head of the william and flora hewlett foundation, said their unassuming lifestyle translates to their approach to philanthropy.“there’s nothing wrong with naming a foundation after yourself, but i think it’s indicative about their thinking about philanthropy that they named theirs good ventures,” brest said. “it highlights how the outcomes matter more than themselves.”over the past three years, tuna and moskovitz have quietly given away 61 grants worth nearly $45 million through their foundation. (this is tuna’s first major interview.)“old souls,” is how laura arrillaga-andreessen, a personal friend and mentor, describes the couple.she said tuna herself is “deeply spiritual and has an immense sense of responsibility” for the task she has been given. arrillaga-andreessen, wife of netscape founder marc andreessen and who teaches courses at stanford about philanthropy, has advised numerous tech billionaires — including tuna and moskovitz — about their charitable work.arrillaga-andreessen said tuna’s leadership of the couple’s foundation leverages the “seriousness, due diligence, investigation, level of public transparency and integrity” that tuna embraced in her journalism.tuna herself sometimes wonders if she’s a little too cautious.“dustin has more of a natural appetite for risk than i do,” she said, adding that “for me feeling like a steward of the resources sometimes makes me feel a little risk averse, and i have to consciously work against that.”early in her research, tuna came across peter singer’s “the life you can save” — a book she cites as the catalyst for their approach. an australian philosopher, singer makes the moral case for giving, arguing that many people in the developed world can do so at little cost to themselves.tuna and moskovitz soon found a kindred spirit in a harvard grad named holden karnovsky, now 33, whom they met through a mutual friend.a former hedge fund analyst, karnovsky was frustrated that he could not compare the impact of different charities when he tried to give away $5,000 of his own one year. so he and a colleague, elie hassenfeld, quit their jobs and founded an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator that they dubbed givewell.“there is an infinite amount to do and very little philanthropy, so how do you make good choices?” karnovsky said.tuna and karnovsky approached the challenge like reporter-scientists, partnering to collect data on the universe of possible causes, evaluate them and share their findings online for anyone interested to see. as part of a joint venture between good ventures and givewell that they called the open philanthropy project, they talked to foundation heads, technical experts, historians, biologists, former government officials, political campaign managers and many others.in face-to-face meetings, tuna has a reputation for being a persistent and tough interviewer.“she exhibits a very healthy skepticism,” said susan urahn, executive vice president at pew charitable trusts who has met with tuna several times. “she takes nothing at face value.”karnovsky said that tuna prioritizes “honesty and directness.” “i think she’s often frustrated by people in the nonprofit world who are overly positive, prone to flattery and hesitant to come out and saying what they think and what they want,” he said.when it comes to some of their smaller, early grants, the group has been brutally honest in assessing its disappointments — an openness that has caused some tensions with nonprofits who aren’t used to such scrutiny. they criticized one malaria charity for being too slow to get the money out the door and expressed frustration when one project to model a new kind of health system didn’t work out.“one thing i learned early on is that a well-placed donation can transform someone’s life, but a poorly placed donation can have no impact or even do harm,” tuna said. “but it’s not at all obvious from charities’ marketing which are the best buys.”the centerpiece of the team’s investigation is a giant spreadsheet, the origins of which can be traced to a google doc list tuna began in 2011. she added causes as she thought of them: malaria, microfinance, marijuana policy. the arts. nuclear security, climate change and on and on until there were hundreds of entries.each topic is assigned to one of four researchers who work full-time — which include tuna, karnovsky and two other young whizzes from the country’s top colleges. they conduct “shallow” investigations of the ideas that involve making a few phone calls with experts and reading a few smart papers or journal articles on the subject.they consider three questions when deciding whether a cause has promise. first, importance — how many people’s lives would be affected and by how much? second, could it be solved, in the short-term and long-term? and third, how crowded is the space? if a lot of smart people are already thinking about the issue, the marginal impact could be less than in other areas.if a topic passes this initial test, an in-depth investigation follows. that can take months and includes discussions with as many as 50 people in the field and an attempt to home in on what kind of specific project could make a difference.asteroids, it turned out, were easy to rule out.the team quickly learned that nasa tracks the big ones and the probability of mass destruction by the smaller ones is very small — 1 in 100 million for an extinction-level event like the one that killed the dinosaurs and 1 in 700,000 for one that would be considered a global catastrophe.“basically, nasa has this covered,” they concluded.other contenders seem inspired by old-time science fiction novels, though some are suddenly relevant because of technological advances: super volcanoes (risk of a catastrophe appears low), nuclear security (possible substantial risk of civilization-threatening damage), artificial intelligence (whose responsibility is it to think about what happens if computers become self-aware?), antibiotic resistance (issue gets a moderate amount of attention), climate change (can we geo-engineer our way out of this crisis by manipulating our atmosphere to reflect sunlight and make things cooler — or would that just make things worse?)“we want to think about not only the people alive today but those will be alive in the future,” tuna said.biosecurity — the constellation of issues around pandemics, bioterrorism, biological weapons and biotech research that could be used to inflict great harm, according to the group’s definition — may be among the most ripe for investment.while “natural” pandemics like the flu seemed like the biggest threat right now, the team worried whether new technologies could pose a greater risk in time. the government has heavily invested in solutions, but everyone the team interviewed agreed that more needed to be done to, say, increase disease surveillance and strengthen public health systems in developing countries.another area the team has been exploring aggressively is u.s. policy.a political science major in college, tuna has been interested in what kinds of problems could be solved and which levers could be pulled to speed reform given the complexity of the political system in the country. in november, she organized an invitation-only brainstorming session for about a dozen policy wonks at a hotel in washington where she got feedback on projects she is thinking about funding.one of the topics they zeroed in on was criminal justice reform.tuna and her team were struck by two statistics: the united states incarcerates a larger percentage than almost any other country in the world at great fiscal cost and it has highest rate of criminal homicides in the developed world. clearly something wasn’t working.the team wondered whether there was way to reduce the number of people in prison in a way that is neutral or, better yet, positive for public safety. could the solution lie in policing practices? or other ways of stopping people from entering the system? sentencing reform? or something they haven’t thought of yet?“there is growing interest on both sides of the aisle on reducing incarceration, and you don’t have that kind of opportunity for bipartisanship on a lot of issues right now,” tuna said after the meeting.matt cohler, a general partner at benchmark, one of silicon valley’s most storied venture capital firms and a former colleague of moskovitz at facebook, said tuna’s challenge is to say no to worthy causes because something else may be even more worthy.“there are so many important things that need to be done in the world. people are approaching her all the time for help,” cohler said. “it’s hard to stay focused and be very research-driven and thoughtful, and i admire that she has been able to do that.”tuna said that while she and moskovitz’s approach may be analytical, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any emotion in their work.to the contrary, “we’re really optimistic about the way the world is heading, about humanity’s progress,” she said.“the world is a big, complicated system,” tuna said, “and i feel we need to be as smart as we can be in order to stand a chance of having an impact with the resources we have — which are significant in one sense but really small in comparison to the kinds of the problems we want to work on.”more from the washington post:
 genius, the andreessen horowitz-backed startup that made headlines earlier this week when it poached pop music critic sasha frere-jones from the new yorker and hired new yorker contributor christopher glazek, has quietly made major changes in the last month—bringing on two well-connected millennials to handle p.r. and branding and testing a new feature, currently in beta, that promises to fundamentally transform the service.the company recently hired emily segal as creative director and retained audrey gelman as a spokeswoman. segal is a cofounder of the “trend forecasting group” k-hole, which has among other things the distinction of coining the term “normcore” ( read more here if you must ). gelman, who has been profiled by the new york times and the new york observer , handled the press for scott stringer’s successful comptroller campaign two years ago, and inspired allison williams’ character on hbo’s “girls,” now heads the “millennial strategy” division at strategic communications firm skdknickerbocker, where she is a senior vice president.the company has often received bad press in the past—both as a result of the antics of cofounder mahbod moghadam (who was finally ousted from the company last may) and the site's early reputation as a place where white people mock rap lyrics . genius could certainly use a rebrand and a better media strategy, especially as it prepares to introduce its new web annotation feature to the public—but its next moves could prove much bigger even than that.genius (formerly rap genius, and before that, rap exegesis) started life as a lyrics annotation site that let people upload the lyrics to rap songs and then leave notes explaining their meanings. the site soon expanded to other genres of music and then other types of text, such as poetry, speeches, and the like. in may 2013, it launched news genius , a section of the site in which the text of major news stories could be posted and annotated. last july, it added the ability to embed annotatable text into other websites.earlier this month, though, the company quietly introduced what could become its most significant feature—the ability to annotate any page on the web. currently in beta testing, the new functionality lets users add genius.com/ to the beginning of any url to access a version of the page on genius. the page is fully annotatable, so users can highlight and annotate any text on the page and view others’ annotations.right now, only a small group of beta testers—among them genius employees, longtime users of the platform, andreessen horowitz partners marc andreessen and ben horowitz, cuny journalism professor jeff jarvis, and fusion editor felix salmon—have the ability to actually create annotations on web pages, but anyone can view them.this feature brings genius close to its stated goal to “annotate the world.” when andreessen first invested in genius back in october 2012, he said that he wanted the company to eventually develop technology that could annotate any page on the web. it was a technology he had first thought about building in 1993, when he created the first web browser, mosaic. but the feature was scrapped before mosaic was released.“i often wonder how the internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything … 20 years later, rap genius finally gives us the opportunity to find out,” he wrote in a post on genius .the web page annotation feature that genius introduced earlier this month seems to fulfill andreessen’s vision—with one exception: users are required to go through genius.com to annotate other web sites’ pages. when someone views a nytimes.com article in genius (such as this one ), they are visiting genius rather than nytimes.com, even if much of the content is coming from nytimes.com.in many ways, genius’ web annotation feature is a new form of aggregation, and like older forms of news aggregation, it raises questions about the relationship between content producers and aggregators. just a few years ago, there were serious debates about whether aggregators like the huffington post and gawker were “stealing” traffic and ad revenue from newspapers. in march 2011, the new york times' then-executive editor bill keller memorably compared the huffington post’s business model to that of somali pirates.in the past, genius has been accused of stealing content. back when it was just a lyrics site, it hosted song lyrics uploaded by users without paying to license the lyrics from music publishers. though this is a common practice among free lyrics sites, it is technically illegal since the lyrics are copyrighted. last may, genius finally settled with the music publishers and began licensing lyrics.but genius’ web annotation feature will have a more complex effect on news sites’ revenue models. a source inside the company told capital that visiting a site’s web page in genius will still trigger a hit (and presumably revenue from display ads) for the site being annotated. the source also said that genius cannot be used to bypass online publications’ hard paywalls. unlike google cache, genius is accessing a live version of the page, so attempts to view paywalled content—such as a financial times article or capital pro content—in genius will just show (an annotatable version of) a website’s standard “this article requires a subscription” message.so it seems genius is not taking away traffic and ad revenue from news sites, though it is taking away a measure of control. since genius does not require news sites to implement their technology on the sites themselves—instead routing the annotations through genius.com—there is no way for news sites to opt out of the feature.an annotation left on a vox.com article by timothy lee  about genius’ pitch to news organizations touts this as a feature—and itself provides an example: “even if annotation is a feature that users and website operators want, genius will face a second challenge: convincing sites to use genius' own technology instead of building their own,” lee writes in the article.if you view the article in genius , you can see that a beta tester with the username vesuvius has highlighted the above passage and added an annotation with a message to other websites: “it isn’t the website’s choice. they don’t need to be persuaded. they are being annotated.”
 over the course of 2014, 181 investments were received by nordic startups, totalling $846.44m.the data i collected to track the investments is gathered and cross-checked via a number of sources including mattermark, crunchbase, angel list, international media, press releases and my own network, sources and data intelligence collection.i then crunched the numbers so we can get a greater insight into what the funding and investment landscape currently looks like in the nordics, looking at the individual countries as well as the region as a whole.2014 was the year that the ‘big two’ became a ‘big three’ with denmark (mainly thanks to tradeshift and trustpilot) challenging the notion that sweden and finland are the two powerhouses in the region. denmark still have a way to go in terms of achieving the successes that sweden and finland have already had, but if they can start challenging the original ‘big two’ in terms of investments raised for their startups, then there is no reason why denmark’s pivotal moment won’t be far off, in fact it could be argued that it did already occur in 2014, with  zendesk’s ipo .but, however impressive denmark's fundraising performance was, 2014 was really sweden's year, with over half of the money invested in the region being invested there.klarna's huge private equity round which they subsequently used to  acquire germany's sofort , was the biggest nordic investment of the year. tradeshift’s influence on denmark’s overall total is clear for all to see, while truecaller came third having raised a series b and c in 2014, and were one of 7 swedish startups in the top 10.there were 94 seed investments, 41 series a's, 8 series b's, 4 series c's and a solitary series d.playraven  are a finnish gaming startup focusing on strategy games for touch screens. playraven raised $4.1m in what was described as an 'extended seed round'.rushfiles  are a danish cloud storage solution who raised $3.5m in order to focus on expanding their international sales efforts.adquota  are a denmark based mobile advertising platform providing mobile publishers the tools to monetize their publications. the $3.2m raised will be used to expand further internationally, as well as to aid acquisitions.small giant games , the finnish gaming startup, are yet to release a title (oddwings escape will be released this year) but that didn't stop them from raising $3.1m, with hiring to expand the team high up on the 'shopping list'.volumental  is a swedish cloud-based platform that lets you create an accurate 3d model of yourself so you can customise products and services. volumental plan to use the investment to keep growing the team and launch their first products on the journey towards their vision of individualised manufacturing.fyndiq  raised an impressive series a of $20m despite currently only being present in the swedish market. the money will be used to eventually expand into global markets to achieve their goal of being the 'amazon for bargain products'.kncminer  are a swedish startup who produce miners for cryptocurrencies (predominantly bitcoin). the money will be used to expand operations as well as increase the amount of services they offer.jolla , commonly referred to as 'the next nokia' are a finnish startup producing mobile devices. as well as raising their series a, they also raised $1.8m on indiegogo with the  world's first crowd sourced tablet .novelda , are a norwegian developer and manufacturer of adaptive smart sensors. their $12m series a will help them to secure delivery and further development of its xethru sensor technology.hansoft , despite having earned revenue from day one and being self-funded up until this year, they finally raised money with a $10m series a to help the swedish startup and their agile development tool to expand their sales operations in their san francisco office.truecaller  from sweden helps make your phone smarter by allowing you to connect to who you want, when you want. it has been revolutionary in shielding calls from unwanted numbers. this series b was followed up later in the year with a $60m series c.autobutler  is a danish online marketplace for car repairs. autobutler plans to use the money to expand across europe, with initial focus on germany and the uk – car repair markets worth £1.1bn and €2.5bn respectively.behaviosec  is a swedish startup specialising in verification technology that provides identitification solutions. the investment will be used to accelerate behaviosec’s growth worldwide, expand its permanent presence in the uk & us, and further invest in its products.senseg  is a finland based developer of haptic technology for smartphones. senseg intends to use the funds to add android application developers to help bring its initial product to market.adform  are a danish brand-led media platform that support all aspects of multi-screen brand advertising. the money will be used to increase it's u.s sales efforts and to expand its efforts in outdoor advertising.the size of the average seed round was $1.16m, with the average series a and b rounds (perhaps a little worryingly) were $5.64m and $6.61m respectively. the low average at series b certainly didn't carry over into c rounds (at least not yet) as the average c round levelled off at $55m.unsurprisingly, the three verticals that the nordics are seen as being traditionally strong in received the most number of investments, although perhaps more interesting was the fact that fintech startups threatened to break up the traditional players. perhaps 2015 will be a breakthrough year for fintech in the nordics, and we may see them threaten london as 'europe's fintech capital'.in summary, 2014 was a strong year for the nordics in terms of fundraising,  with 4 of the investments amongst the top 20 biggest investments in european startups in 2014 . the follow on money is fairly healthy from seed to series a, however the infamous 'series b crunch' still appears to be affecting the region, with even those who do manage to raise a b round, raising relatively low amounts. however, the future looks bright, and the nordics continue to establish themselves as one of the world's strongest ecosystems, as well as being a great place to invest, and in 2015 we should see $1b+ invested in nordic startups.
 we are economists writing about economics: karl smith, an assistant professor of economics and government at the school of government at the university of north carolina; and adam ozimek, an associate at an economics consulting firm. as most in our profession are eager to tell you, economics includes just about everything, so we'll be blogging -- with varying degrees of success -- about the economy, markets, politics, science, technology, philosophy and culture. we both come from a similarly vague libertarian ideological perspective, but we've been called neoliberal as well, and idiosyncratic might be the best adjective to use.
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 texas laws that regulate businesses that teach african hair braiding are unconstitutional and do not advance public health and safety or any other legitimate government interest, a federal judge ruled.isis brantley, a dallas woman who runs a hair braiding business inside a dallas community center, sued the state in 2013, saying laws related to her school were unreasonable and unconstitutional.state rules required brantley to convert her small business into a fully equipped barber college, including having at least 10 student workstations that include a chair that reclines and install a sink behind every two workstations.sparks wrote that he found the various rules requiring hair braiding schools to become fully equipped barber colleges "irrational," citing as one example that licensed braiding salons don't need sinks because washing hair is not involved in the braiding process."i fought for my economic liberty because i believe there is a lot of hope for young people who seek to earn an honest living," brantley said in a statement. "this decision means that i will now be able to teach the next generation of african hair braiders at my own school."susan stanford, a spokeswoman for the texas department of licensing and regulation, said in a statement that her agency and brantley had their day in court and her agency "respects judge sparks' decision."
rt @markiteconomics: eurozone #unemployment at 11.5% in december:

de: 5.0%
nl: 6.5%
fr: 10.3%
it: 13.4%
es: 23.9%
gr: 25.7%

 
 what you did is draw a false equivalency between “being in a phase of building infrastructure” and the fact that we have by far the highest regressive taxing burden in the country.  you only have to look as far south as the greater portland area to see that a metro area can build lots of fixed rail assets with no regressive taxing of the people there.  over the past quarter century trimet build out some 54 miles of light rail, dozens of stations, streetcars, and paid for buses and bus stations.  it did so using no new regressive taxes.  the only taxing it did was a modest payroll tax that annually brought in about one-quarter of the revenue those abusive tax harvesting machines sound transit and king county metro employ.this site is weird.  the posters here revel in their ignorance of transit finance best practices.as an occasionally interested observer, i am going to jump in here with a few observations.first, weezy, you have been cautioned before about keeping your comments civil and respecting others. i do not know if sightline has ever shut down a commenter, but by continuing to insult both the sightline staff an other commenters, you have gone beyond pushing the edge.second, i do not quite understand what your positions are. in summary, do you hate taxes, hate government, hate public money spent for public purposes, such as public transit, which by the way is more energy-efficient and likely to ease or reduce global climate change (or are you a climate change denier, to boot?) than either private transit or public subsidies to fossil fuel companies.or, do you stand by an earlier charge that sightline is part of the downtown business community, and therefore a band of apologists for the 1 percent? if so, you do not seem to be paying attention to sightline’s commitment to sustainability, including a more sustainable and inclusive economy. if your gripe is that sales taxes are regressive, i would agree, but you need to be reminded that with tim eyman, the corporate right, and the seattle times, to cite a few, wa state voters have yet to approve an income tax, much less a reduction in tax subsidies for corporate giants. i recall that even j.k. galbraith (maybe in the affluent society) wrote that while he regarded sales taxes as regressive compared to income taxes, when compared to the alternative of no public services in cities and states, he would accept sales taxes to fund such services.in short, i am tempted to call you a jerk, but “that would be wrong,” as nixon said on the watergate tapes, and contrary to polite discourse. so rather than do that, i close by recommending that you to express your positions in a way that is logically consistent, and stop the personal and professional insults.thank you dawn for pointing out weezy’s insane failure of logic.clark: “in this entirely usdot’s fault, though.” come again?wi resident here. the reason the wi dot juked their data was at the time pro-train interests inside the government and uwm wanted to build a line from milwaukee to madison. if built, the line actually would have ended up ending not far from the university. clearly some interests were at play here. absolutely unnecessary, but that’s what the public was told for years. they needed to make it seem like i-94 was a total mess so an alternative was needed, or else!as a tax payer and a person who has seen the quality of uw madison’s research arm decline for years, it makes one wonder why are we forced to finance their “research”, in this case traffic “research”? clearly, it’s more politically oriented than science oriented.the usdot likely just makes a rough guess, which seems to be 2% growth per year (couldn’t tell from the original article for sure), which is likely based on average growth over the last 50 years or so.  in the end, a rough guess is good enough because an over-designed pavement section simply lasts longer than the estimated design life (usually 10 to 25 years).  since pavement doesn’t get rehabbed or replaced until it starts to degrade to a certain degree, you end up not needing as much spending in the future to maintain the pavement.granted, if you can anticipate future interest rates, it is best to do a cost analysis to see if it is advantageous to defer spending later.  however, given the fungibility of tax revenue and the fact government doesn’t “save” money, and the uncertainty in interest rates, it doesn’t make much sense to get too work up about the numbers.  it will all come out in the wash one way or another.a recent post on copenhagenize uses an earlier version of your graph. great to see the sightline messaging in the wild.
 courtesy of flickr user faramarz hashemi , under a creative commons license.i mentioned last week that car travel in america appears to have peaked backed in 2004 . since then, "vehicle miles traveled" per person in the u.s. have been falling or flat-lining, prompting a fascinating debate over whether we're witnessing some fundamental shift in the american relationship to the car, or some economic blip instead.timothy j. garceau, a ph.d. candidate in geography at the university of connecticut, and professors carol atkinson-palombo and norman garrick offer a different way to think about the answer. in research they presented this week at the annual meeting of the transportation research board, they looked at travel data not at the national level, but by state instead.their results further challenge the argument that americans have merely been driving less of late because of the bad economy: washington state experienced "peak car travel" all the way back in 1992, and nevada, idaho, kentucky, oregon, rhode island and virginia all did before the new millennium. by this measure, peak car happened in d.c. in 1996."the longevity of this phenomenon at the state level," the researchers write, "provides evidence that peak car travel in the u.s. is a more permanent phenomenon than previously thought."by 2011, the last year for which they gathered data, 48 of 50 states had peaked in miles traveled per capita. the two outliers: alabama and north dakota, where an energy boom has made the state a national exception on many fronts.the state data garceau, atkinson-palombo and garrick have gathered raise interesting questions about why driving patterns differ from one state to the next and how those patterns are connected to the economy. but first, a quick tour of the data.here are the earliest states to experience peak car, starting with washington in 1992:rural states like wyoming have seen some of the biggest swings, while change in california has been much more modest:even florida peaked before the housing bust and the recession:mississippi has been on the decline since 2008 after a stunning growth in driving over the previous 25 years:over this same time, garceau, atkinson-palombo and garrick also note that car travel has decoupled from economic activity in many parts of the country. for most of the last century, nationwide, personal wealth (in gdp per capita) and car travel (in vmt) have risen in tandem. the relationship between the two has traveled in both directions: our economy has in part been powered by transportation, by the movement of goods, by farmers hauling their produce to market, by logistics. meanwhile, the more wealth we've had, the more we've driven, as families could afford multiples cars, new homes in the outer suburbs, and more family vacations.some of the earliest states above to experience peak car, though, illustrate that car travel can decline even as the economy grows. washington, oregon and utah have experienced this. the below chart illustrates that they are now effectively getting more gdp per mile driven than 20 years ago. alabama, meanwhile, has experienced the reverse:over the 2000s, 30 other states in this data no longer appeared to have any significant relationship between vmt and gdp. why? one potential explanation is that our economy is increasingly powered by sectors, like tech, that rely less on transportation. or maybe we're interested in spending our wealth in different ways today.emily badger is a reporter for wonkblog covering urban policy. she was previously a staff writer at the atlantic cities.
rt @maxcroser: assault deaths per 100k population in us and other oecd countries

 update (december 2012). for answers to some frequently-asked questions about this post, see this follow-up discussion . you can also read more about patterns of assault deaths within the united states .the terrible events in colorado this morning prompted me to update an old post about comparative death rates from assault across different societies. the following figures are from the oecd for deaths due to assault per 100,000 population from 1960 to the present. as before, the most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the u.s. is than other oecd countries (except possibly estonia and mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the u.s. time series considered by itself. note that “assault” as a cause of death does not distinguish the mechanism of death (gunshot, stabbing, etc).here are the individual time series.
 after 3 years of waking up each day, excited to read news about blockchain technology, i've decided to write a book about it. it details the use of it in various fields, getting more and more futuristic as the book progresses: starting at decentralized finance to building a framework for verifiably shared experiences using the blockchain in virtual reality.the book is intended for people who've just heard about bitcoin and the blockchain, and wonders what it can "really" do. i'll try my best to explain complex parts as simple as possible. i won't go too deep into the technical side of things (such as explaining how a slasher consensus algorithm works). a future book will be more technical (thinking of doing a book on all the consensus algorithms). the purpose is to enthuse, excite and explore the possibilities. i have several reasons why i'm writing this, and my biggest goal is, that if done properly, i would like this book to become the de facto recommendation when people want to understand why the blockchain is one of the biggest inventions in history.during the writing proces, leanpub will be used. once done, i will make the book available to be bought in bitcoin (and probably any other reasonably traded altcoin out there). i will also be selling the book on openbazaar at a discount. pre-sale + launch price will be $9.99, after which it will be $15 from there on onwards.the rough outline of the book will follow an exploration of blockchain tech, building upon previous chapters and getting more interesting and complex as it progresses. there's a lot of overlap, so it might change. here's the current planned progress:decentralized ai & agents (simple agents to complex ones. from random darknet shopper to decentralized sensing as a service ai)decentralized law ("state as a service", opt-in consumer protected smart contracts, proof of sacrifice, passports, etc)decentralized alternate reality (blockchain as consensus backbone for metaverses, engi)i'm writing this book in the open, following the lean publishing manifesto . any contributions are welcome. i won't promise that they will be included, but will consider all changes! all contributors will get an honorable mention in the book. if anyone wants to contribute the front-page design of the book, please get in contact!this book is written under creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported . you are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon it, but not for commercial purposes. if you do, appropriate credit is required."the adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself." - steven johnson.
rt @jeffreyatucker: new book! 
bit by bit: how p2p is freeing the world
free at @libertydotme 
 free kindle reading app anybody can read kindle books—even without a kindle device—with the free kindle app for smartphones, tablets and computers.to get the free app, enter your email address or mobile phone number.subscribe to find out about each day's kindle daily deals for adults and young readers. learn more (u.s. customers only)bit by bit: how p2p is freeing the world argues that today's emergent technology is about more than new and cool toys. jeffrey tucker, clo of liberty.me and distinguished fellow of the foundation for economic education, argues that peer-to-peer technology is forging a new and brighter social, economic, and political order.people tend to look at innovations in isolation. here is my new e-reader. here is an app i like. here is my new mobile device and computer. even bitcoin is routinely analyzed and explained in terms of its properties as an alternative to national currencies, as if there were no more than that at stake.but actually there is a historical trajectory at work here, one that we can trace through its logic, implementation, and spread. it’s the same logic that led from the dial phone at the county store, operated by people pulling and plugging in wires, to the wireless smartphone in your pocket that contains the whole store of human knowledge. it’s all about technology in the service of individuation.once you understand the driving ethos — voluntarism, creativity, networks, individual initiative — you can see the outlines of a new social structure emerging within our time, an order that defies a century of top-down planning and nation-state restrictionism.it is coming about not because of political reform. it is not any one person’s creation. it is not happening because a group of elite intellectuals advocated it. the new world is emerging organically, and messily, from the ground up, as an extension of unrelenting creativity and experimentation. in the end, it is emerging out of an anarchist order that no one in particular controls and no one in particular can fully understand."the building of universal prosperity is a process that unfolds bit by bit through decentralized decision making and improvements at the margin through trial-and-error. to continue this process, we need understanding, patience, and dreams. jeffrey tucker’s book is an excellent guide to all three.” ~ patrick byrne, ceo of overstock.com, from the introduction.“in bitcoin’s brief existence jeffrey tucker has become one of its leading proponents. in this book we can see exactly why. many people think of bitcoin as just money, but mr. tucker is able to explain, in a way that is easily understandable by all, the tsunami of innovation that bitcoin is about to release upon the world.” ~ roger ver, bitcoin investor, from the foreword
 historically, if you wanted someone to know what you looked like after you'd died, you hired a portrait artist to work for weeks recreating your face in agonizing detail. with the advent of video conferencing, however, the forward-facing camera went from technological oddity to vital necessity. it wouldn't be long afterward that people rediscovered the art of self-portraiture with a more immediate result. when instagram launched, it enabled everyone on the planet to instantly show the world how good their ass looked. it was only natural, therefore, that someone would fuse the worlds of self-portraiture and personal grooming to form the selfie brush .this is actually the second generation of jd beauty group's styling device-cum-smartphone case, which has been widened to accommodate both the iphone 6 and galaxy s4 . unfortunately, a compromise had to be made with these larger devices, so the strip of reflective plastic that was found on the iphone 5/s version has been abandoned. thankfully, the shift has enabled the price to come down a little, and the selfie brush can now be picked up for as little as $14.99 online.set the hardware down on a table and you'll see a rigid silicone paddle brush that falls down to a fancy handle with a hole in the middle for attaching a strap. looking at the top end, you'll see a wide slot that's around 2.65-inches wide, where you'll slot in your smartphone. there are also access holes cut into both sides of the body for access to your device's volume and display / power buttons.unfortunately, there is one build-quality issue that is readily apparent from our photographs. the bright pink outer coating is, unfortunately, susceptible to dye-run, which meant that when we dropped the brush into a cheap black tote bag, it came out with a significantly tarnished look. otherwise, however, we had no problems with the otherwise solid hardware.each one of the 144 bristles (our review unit is missing one) is tipped with a soft pink dome, and using it to de-tangle my hair is easy and relaxing. in fact, an unstated feature of the selfie brush is that it's almost as good as a stress relieving device as it is to rectify hair-based disasters. unfortunately, it's better designed for long hair, and what you gain in "broad brush" straightening you lose in the sort of pin point accuracy you normally find in a comb. another unstated feature is that the solid construction would enable the brush to pull double duty as a spanking device for an impromptu bdsm party. we assume.the first thing that you'll instantly notice when sliding your iphone into the selfie brush is that the bristles instantly obscure the primary camera. it's a high price to pay for this combination of style and self portraiture, and each prospective buyer will have to weigh this compromise up for themselves. that said, since it's called the selfie brush, it does force you to insert yourself into every image you take: which, you have to agree, is kinda the point. oh, one other issue is that there is a warning on the underside of the case informing you that you should remove your smartphone before brushing wet hair. which does undermine the point of using it somewhat.if you use a purse or bag to transport your smartphone from place to place, then you'll not have any issue with using this as a case. if you, like me, normally keep your smartphone in your pocket, then you will notice a small drop in portability and, without wanting to resort to hyperbole, it can feel a tad uncomfortable.the selfie brush is a solid object, which means that it has an infinite battery life, vulnerable only to time's endless march.there are no other products like this on the market, in fact, i'm not sure about anything any more. will you be my friend? i'm in here on my own and it's starting to get dark.to be a little personal for a moment, i do find the excessive gendering of the selfie brush to be something of a concern. after all, in the same way that the technology industry should be looking to eradicate booth babes , it should also stop assuming that women like devices that are pink. as for if you should make a splash and buy a selfie brush, it all comes down to personal preference. after all, if you struggle with your hair and also own a smartphone, this seems like a slam dunk. still, for $14.99, it's not as if you'll break the bank trying one out.
 i know, right? and there’s more where that came from.broken hearted? maybe you’ll like something over here instead?http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/nerd-venn-diagram this clearly delineates the various subclasses of nerdom.your link was successfully shared!
 © afp/file alexa stankovicrussian citizen and actor gerard depardieu reacts during a press conference after talks with serbian prime minister aleksandar vucic in belgrade on september 4, 2014paris (afp) - once a flagship policy of french president francois hollande, the 75-percent "supertax" on top earners limps into its final weeks this month having sparked plenty of controversy but few economic results. it was no surprise that the policy, which expires on february 1, would be quietly dropped: it was only ever slated to last two years and the socialist government has for months declared it would not be renewed.the tax had also been watered down until it was barely a shadow of the "exceptional contribution to solidarity" proclaimed by hollande when he came to power in 2012.the government came back with a version that made companies pay the 75-percent rate only for the portion of employees' salaries above the million-euro ceiling.but by then, it had already become a symbol of france's opposition to big business and attracted high-profile derision.actor gerard depardieu stormed out of the country in a huff over the tax and took up russian citizenship in 2013. it was reported he only paid six-percent tax in his new home. "i am leaving because you consider that success, creation, talent -- anything different -- must be punished," he wrote at the time.french football clubs were also horrified, saying the tax made it difficult to attract top-flight talent. clubs in ligue 1 and 2 threatened to strike in late 2013 although they found it hard to rally much sympathy for the multi-millionaires at clubs like paris saint-germain, where more than 10 players qualified for the tax. the fate of the supertax mirrored the wider trajectory of the troubled socialist presidency, which was elected in a surge of left-wing enthusiasm but has been forced to temper its initial approach in a desperate bid to escape the country's economic quagmire. even by its own standards, the tax was largely a failure -- the watered-down version brought in minimal revenue and did little to tackle wealth inequalities. still more damaging was the way it added to the perception of france as "anti-business", an image that was gleefully exploited across the channel in britain where prime minister david cameron said he would "roll out the red carpet" for french executives fleeing the supertax.facing record unemployment, a sluggish economy and unable to meet european borrowing limits, hollande has since taken his country in a very different direction. for his socialist party, such efforts lie somewhere between blasphemy and high treason. hollande was forced to dissolve the government in august and fire two leftist ministers who opposed the new direction. but he appears willing to risk a civil war in his ranks to reverse the long cycle of economic disappointment that has helped his popularity ratings plumb unprecedented lows.businesses blame red tape and high taxes for throttling economic activity, leading to a rare protest by business owners last month. "businesses are in danger of dying," said gerard ramond, representing small and medium-sized enterprises at one demonstration. "this year, 70,000 businesses went bankrupt. that's 110,000 jobs gone."hollande appears to be listening, and is pinning his hopes on a package of reforms to boost business activity -- cutting public spending and red tape, opening up "protected" professions and relaxing rules on sunday trading. "everything must be made easier," he said in his new year's address. "it is necessary if we want to become more attractive, more modern, more flexible."but while the measures might strike foreign observers as small-fry, they will still face furious opposition from some members of his own party. and it is far from clear whether these efforts will make much difference to the economy, forecast to eke out growth of just 0.3 percent in the first half of 2015.
 researchers have developed an ultra-thin sensor that sits on the skin like a "rub-on tattoo" and can help patients monitor blood sugar levels without the painful prick of the finger that currently available devices require, according to research published this week.about 80,000 children are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes around the world every year, according to the american diabetes association . several times a day, many of those patients punch a small hole in their fingers and release a drop of blood onto a device that checks their blood glucose levels. the results will tell them whether or not they need to pump themselves with insulin. the pinprick may be necessary, but it can hurt and annoy patients.scientists at the university of california, san diego, developed a thin and flexible patch resembling a temporary tattoo that they say can continuously monitor glucose levels in the blood without puncturing or irritating the skin. the sensor is a clear patch affixed with two small electrodes and an enzyme that reacts with glucose. the researchers ran a mild electrical current through the electrodes to drive glucose to the surface of the skin where it reacted with the enzyme on the patch. measuring the reaction allowed the scientists to accurately take blood glucose measurements in seven healthy volunteers. they published their findings monday in the journal analytical chemistry .read more markets will see gains in 2015: analystthe team is part of the center for wearable sensors at ucsd and is now working with other engineers to develop the other half of the device: a wearable wristband or other similar device that would provide the electrical current and the glucose readouts. the tool could be available in a few years and could have appeal not just to type 1 diabetics, said amay bandodkar, one of the researchers on the team."carbohydrate-rich diets and the related insulin spike is one of the major reasons for several of the modern lifestyle diseases faced by humans, especially in developed countries like the usa," bandodkar told cnbc. a noninvasive glucose monitor might appeal to a broad swath of the population suffering from type 2 diabetes as well, which does not require insulin injections, or other diet-related diseases. bandodkar thinks information about glucose levels could be collected in databases and help scientists understand broad health trends, and the "corrective steps needed to be taken to control the spread of modern lifestyle diseases," he said.apple has filed a new patent that allows it to read users' physical gestures, much like xbox kinect technology.a non-invasive glucose monitor could also be useful in treating conditions such as kidney disease, or appeal to athletes tracking their nutrition or physiological changes. the researchers also noted in their study that this technology could pave the way for other sensors that monitor different chemicals in human bodies, or could even lead to new ways of delivering drugs through the skin.non-invasive glucose monitoring has become something of a hot area. a medical device company called cygnus had previously brought wristband-based glucose monitor to market, but wearers complained of skin irritation, according to the ucsd researchers.as recently as last summer, apple , google and samsung were reported to be trying to add glucose monitoring to their wearable devices, according to reuters .read more which religion holds the largest share of wealth?google also partnered with novartis in 2014 to develop a contact lens that can monitor glucose through fluids in the eye. monitor maker dexcom showed a simulation of what its glucose monitoring app would look like on an apple watch at ces this past week, fueling further speculation about the capabilities of the device.
 the ogre stalking europe’s weak economies isn’t the one people have learned to fear. the monster isn’t inflation but its opposite: falling prices. its name is  deflation  and it appears friendly. why be afraid when the cash in people’s wallets buys more fuel and televisions, not less? because when deflation grabs hold, companies and consumers stop spending. it strangles borrowers because their debts get harder to repay — a menace for countries struggling to exit the worst  recession  in a generation. in this fairy tale, inflation comes dressed in shining armor as policy makers debate how to create just enough of it to keep deflation at bay.six years after the 2008 financial crisis turned the global economy upside down, deflation threatens to drag out the turmoil in europe. the continent’s economies have failed to recover the momentum needed to stimulate slow-but-steady price increases, which most central bankers consider desirable. consumer prices in the euro area fell for the first time in more than five years in december. the slide in oil  is adding to the deflationary pull and prices are expected to drop further in 2015. about a third of the goods that europeans commonly buy are declining in price, including clothes and carpets, according to  jefferies international . in japan, inflation only began showing signs of life in 2013 as the central bank targeted a 2 percent price gain in an all-out bet to shake off more than a  decade of deflation  and stagnation. japan fell back into recession in 2014 and inflation risks slipping anew after an increase in the consumption tax.when prices rise at a slower pace it can help consumers boost their purchasing power. but when they actually drop, economic activity can screech to a halt. households hold off making purchases as they anticipate further price declines; companies postpone investment and hiring as they are forced to cut prices. sliding prices eat into sales and tax receipts, limiting pay raises and profit margins. they add to the  debt burdens  of companies and governments that would otherwise be eroded by inflation. deflation fueled two of the worst economic disasters in modern times — the great depression  of the 1930s, and the less catastrophic but more recent experience of japan’s lost decades with almost no economic growth.  deflation took hold in japan in the 1990s when banks, wounded by a burst real estate  bubble , stopped lending. wages stagnated and consumers reined in spending.  the international monetary fund has studied which economies are vulnerable to deflation, and has raised concern that even a period of  ultra-low  inflation could do damage. “if inflation is the genie,” imf managing director christine lagarde  warned  in january 2014, “then deflation is the ogre that must be fought decisively.”central bankers find it easier to beat inflation than deflation. when prices rise too fast, policy makers raise  interest rates , then pull back when the economy slows. it’s harder to calibrate the right dose of medicine to ward off deflation. interest rates in most large countries are still near zero, and the european central bank even cut a key rate into negative territory in june 2014. in  greece , deflation may be a price worth paying to make the country competitive again after years of living beyond its means. bond-buying programs like those that helped revive the u.s. and japan have also had dangerous side effects. they’ve sent money flowing into stocks and property, boosting the prices of assets rather than products, raising concern that too much easing was creating  bubbles . even so, the ecb has started buying private-sector assets to boost prices, and the slide is bolstering the case for a plan to buy government bonds to add more stimulus. even when the threat of deflation seems small, history tells us that it’s a huge risk.former u.s. federal reserve chairman ben s. bernanke’s 2002  speech on deflation and his 1991 research paper on the great depression.studies from a 2003 symposium on deflation hosted by the federal reserve bank of minneapolis.european central bank president mario draghi’s feb. 6 comments  playing down the risk of deflation.to contact the writer of this quicktake:to contact the editor responsible for this quicktake:
 when the "big bang" of the modern internet exploded more than 20 years ago, the first set of shockwaves impacted macro sectors like shopping, media and travel. and those shockwaves fundamentally altered the landscape for their offline counterparts.fast forward to today, there isn’t a major sector that hasn’t been completed transformed by successive waves of innovation from web 1.0 to the modern mobile app world.what happened along the way is that more than 3 billion people are now on the internet * , and at those numbers, even a small niche represents a very large aggregate community of interest.enter the mega niche and the power of passion.passion brings people together, and passion creates connections within people that share it in very powerful ways. today, 3 billion people are finding each other to share their interests with others — in many cases using crude web 1.0 bulletin boards.these mega niches aren’t small: some are tens, even hundreds of millions of community members strong. the shared interest that brings them together can be literally anything — cooking, cars, clothes , parenthood, watch collecting, tennis , surfing , skateboarding , home design, bird-watching, a popular podcast .giving these groups the power to communicate in the context of their shared interest is tremendously powerful.apps that are well-designed and cater exclusively to a mega niche community, away from other, less relevant content, can be captivating to their users. and there are opportunities to create these apps everywhere you look.car enthusiast mega niche: an app that connects people who share a love for old volkswagens, despite those people spanning continents, would be exceptionally valuable and useful for its community. the bulk of the communication in the app would be centered around the topic of the cars the community members are so passionate about, which would keep users engaged. in such an app, communications features would enable community members to teach each other how to perform maintenance, share knowledge, buy and sell goods, exchange stories.new mother mega niche: an app for new mothers would bring women all over the world together and enable them to share in the experience of motherhood, surely highlighting the similarities in experience regardless of location and also allowing women to benefit from others’ cultural practices. in such an app, communications features would enable community members to exchange experiences with sleep-encouraging practices for newborns, tactics to soothe fussy babies, recommendations about baby products and overall just provide one another support.skateboarder mega niche: an app for skateboarders would have potential to connect as many as 14m skateboarders in the u.s. alone. for app creators seeking to build a viable, sustainable app, that’s 14m people who want to engage around the topic of skateboarding. they want to learn how to do tricks, share commentary on a pro's performance at the x games, chat about their experience with a new deck.watch collector mega niche: an app for watch collectors would allow the small but exceedingly committed group of enthusiasts to share in their passion for watches . in such an app, communications features would allow users to exchange reviews, debate over minute mechanical and stylistic details in watches, discuss watch care and optimization.for app creators, these mega niches are highly engaged and monetizable.the interest within the mega-niche communities is extremely focused, therefore the content in such apps would be exceedingly consistent and on-topic. bringing these like-minded people together, and allowing them to communicate in the context of their shared interest, provides great value and utility to an app’s users.there’s a mega niche of people who like pretty much anything and everything. every subreddit could, and should, be an app.many of these apps currently give their users information/content, but don’t provide them any way to communicate with one another. imagine how much more engaging and useful these apps could be if they allowed their users to connect with one another.apps that serve mega niche communities have the potential to foster extremely meaningful communications, with an exceptionally high signal-to-noise ratio.facebook has 1.3 billion users , which makes it one of the largest online communities in the world. but facebook users’ only shared interest, presumably, is the people they communicate with through the app.we’ve all seen evidence of the need for some sort of segmentation, or proof that some passions and interests would be better shared in a mega-niche community instead of a general one like facebook. take the superbowl, for example. non-football fans quickly become exhausted of mentions of the sport and long for a way to mute them in their feeds. at the same time, however, we see the nfl app’s numbers skyrocket during the superbowl, proving how engaging an app that connects members of the football mega-niche community can be during such a relevant event.layer gives app creators all of the tools necessary to build the right native, in-app communications experiences for mega niches that are centered around any shared interest. we give you open-sourced ui components and features like text chat, video chat and messaging that supports any payload. we give you powerful-out-of-the-box push notifications, and typing indicator and read receipts so you can bring your mega niche together and give them a sense of presence in their conversation.as always, we can’t wait to see what you build with layer.thanks to tomaz stolfa for contributing to this post.
 george osborne, u.k. chancellor of the exchequer, right, and mark carney, governor of the bank of england, arrive to attend the annual bankers and merchants dinner at mansion house in london, u.k., on june 12, 2014. closegeorge osborne, u.k. chancellor of the exchequer, right, and mark carney, governor of the bank of england, arrive to attend the annual bankers and merchants dinner at mansion house in london, u.k., on june 12, 2014.(bloomberg) --- britain’s inflation rate probably fell to the lowest since 2002 in december, forcing governor mark carney to write the bank of england ’s first open letter explaining why prices are rising too slowly.consumer prices rose by less than 1 percent on the year, according to all 37 economists surveyed by bloomberg news . inflation below that threshold will require carney to write to chancellor of the exchequer george osborne explaining the undershoot and how he intends to return it to the 2 percent target. the office for national statistics in london will publish the figures at 9:30 a.m.the plummeting price of oil, which dropped to the lowest level in more than 5 1/2 years yesterday, and supermarket price wars are driving the sharp slowdown in inflation. at the same time, the weak euro-area economy is damping demand in britain’s biggest export market. that’s helping carney and his majority on the monetary policy committee justify keeping the key interest rate at a record-low 0.5 percent. inflation will remain “relatively low” for the next few months, according to deutsche bank ag economist george buckley .“if you do believe that this will generate lower inflation expectations, it may well prompt you to leave interest rates on hold for that little bit longer,” london-based buckley said. “i think there are going to be some members on the mpc who find it difficult to think about the possibility of voting for a rate hike at the same time as they’re writing letters to the chancellor.”buckley predicts a 0.6 percent increase in consumer prices , while the median forecast in the bloomberg survey is for 0.7 percent. predictions range from 0.2 percent at daniel stewart & co to 0.9 percent at 4cast ltd. inflation was 1 percent in november.the pound fell for the first time in five days versus the euro today, weakening 0.2 percent to 78.18 pence as of 8:37 a.m. london time. the u.k. currency dropped 0.3 percent to $1.5132 after sliding to $1.5035 on jan. 8, the lowest level since july 2013.while two members of the nine-person mpc have called for higher interest rates in recent months, investors are all-but ruling out an increase this year, sonia forward contracts show. the two-year gilt yield yesterday fell to its lowest since august 2013.the last letter to the chancellor, which the boe is legally obliged to write if inflation strays more than 1 percentage point in either direction from target, was written by then governor mervyn king in february 2012, when price increases were running above 3 percent. no letter has ever been triggered by inflation falling below the threshold since the boe became independent in 1997.any exchange of letters between carney and osborne will be published on feb. 18 alongside the minutes of the next mpc meeting, in the first operation of a change of policy made by king. under the previous system, letters were published on the same day as the inflation data.a letter would be required every three months if inflation remains below 1 percent.to contact the reporter on this story: scott hamilton in london at shamilton8@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: fergal o’brien at fobrien@bloomberg.net andrew atkinson, craig stirlingpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 the math is the math. global population growth is slowing and so is the working-age population. employment will grow by just 0.3% annually during the next 50 years, forecasts a new report from the mckinsey global institute . and if even if productivity growth matches the rapid rate of the past half century, “the rate of increase in global gdp growth will therefore still fall by 40%, to about 2.1 percent a year.” or to put it another way, the “new normal” would be global growth slower than what it has been during the not-so-great-recovery. global living standards will still rise, but more slowly. not such a big deal for advanced economies versus the impact on developing nations.so productivity needs to accelerate. mckinsey:the world isn’t running out of technological potential for growth. but achieving the increase in productivity required to revitalize the global economy will force business owners, managers, and workers to innovate by adopting new approaches that improve the way they operate.our study found that about three-quarters of the potential productivity growth comes from the broader adoption of existing best practices, or catch-up improvements. the remaining one-quarter—counting only what we can foresee—comes from technological, operational, or business innovations that go beyond today’s best practices and push the frontier of the world’s gdp potential. efforts to improve the traditionally weak productivity performance of the large and growing government and healthcare sectors around the world will be particularly important.business must play a critical role: aggressively upgrading capital and technology, taking risks by investing in r&d and unproven technologies or processes, and mitigating the labor pool’s erosion by providing a more flexible work environment for women and older workers, as well as training and mentorship for young people. in an environment of potentially weaker global economic growth, and definitely evolving growth dynamics, executives need to anticipate where the market opportunities will be and the competitors they will meet in those markets. above all, companies need to be competitive in a world where productivity will increasingly be the arbiter of success or failure.
 magnus sees ecb buying french, german bonds in its qecopy this link and send via email or im:copy this code to embed this video:jan. 7 -- george magnus, ubs group ag independent economic adviser, says the european central bank will buy french and german bonds as part of its quantitative easing program.      he speaks to anna edwards, manus cranny and mark barton on bloomberg television's "countdown." (source: bloomberg)
 a month before the start of the financial crisis, the bank of england was apparently unaware of the impending danger, new documents reveal.in a unique insight into its workings, the bank has published minutes of top-secret meetings of its governing body, the court, between 2007 and 2009.the minutes show that the bank did identify liquidity as a "central concern" in july 2007.however no action was taken as a result.the documents show that the bank also used a series of code names for banks that were in trouble.following publication, andrew tyrie mp, the chairman of the treasury select committee, was highly critical of some of the court's non-executive directors.he said they had failed to challenge senior executive members, like the then governor, mervyn king, whom some accuse of failing to prioritise financial stability."the minutes show that during the crisis the bank of england did not have a board worthy of the name. this mattered. and it still matters," said mr tyrie.john mcfall, chairman of the treasury select committee at the time, told the bbc: "they all missed the wider picture.the minutes show that in july 2007, the court - akin to a company board - spent time discussing staff pensions, open days and new members of the monetary policy committee.members heard that the bank was working on a new model to detect risks to the financial system, but there was little suggestion of any impending trouble.less than a month later, on 9 august, the french bank bnp paribas came clean about its exposure to sub-prime mortgages, in what some believe was the start of the financial crisis.six weeks later, despite some turmoil in financial markets, court members were told to have confidence in the triple oversight of the bank of england, the treasury and the then financial services authority (fsa)."the executive believed that the events of the last month had proven the sense and strength of the tripartite framework," the minutes asserted for the 12th september, 2007.the next day the banking crisis began in earnest.on that day, 13 september, 2007, members of court were called to an emergency meeting, just as the bbc reported that northern rock had applied to the bank of england for a rescue loan.since the news was no longer secret, thousands of customers were in the meantime queuing outside northern rock branches to withdraw their money.by then the minutes show that court members were in no doubt about the risks posed to the economy by the failure of northern rock."both the bank and the fsa were in total agreement that if northern rock was allowed to fail it would create serious economic damage," the minutes record.members expressed concern that if northern rock was not rescued, there could be a "domino effect" on other institutions.by november 2007 the bank was using code words for other banks that were in danger of collapse - in an attempt to maintain confidence in the banking system.in discussing a potential rescue for alliance and leicester - known as "tiger"- it said the bank's offer of ÂŁ3bn of emergency funding should remain confidential."it was emphasised that there needed to be considerable secrecy about this facility," the minutes record.
rt @fmbutt: must resist... must....resist

 platform   description   version   date   author site   windows  fastz80 [ht 1080/z emulator] v1.02 july 18, 2008 kintli lajos site emulator features:small sized single exe program, no external files are neededplatform   description   version   date   author site   windows  ht 1080/z (real pro) v2.5.5 march 8, 2008 zoltán kollár documentation emulator features:1.774 mhz cpu clock, precise z80 cycles times, all z80 op codes including the non defined ones and xf/yf flags.all three ht-1080z series roms and character generators included with selectable 16/48k memory.full ht keyboard with cut and page keys, pause mode.tape recorder, printer, four 5 1/4″ ss sd floppy disk, internal clockmicolor 01 (hungarian expansion board) and lowe electronics le18 graphic board.screen snapshot into bmp or jpeg file.
 chuck tilly had a fascination with the mechanisms of social interaction at all levels.  his 2005 book,  trust and rule , picks up on one particular feature of social organization that is often instrumental in political and social episodes, including especially in the everyday workings of predation and defense.  this is the idea of a trust network: a group of people connected by similar ties and interests whose "collective enterprise is at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, and failures of individual members" (chapter 1, kindle loc 186). here is a definition:trust networks, then, consist of ramified interpersonal connections, consisting mainly of strong ties, within which people set valued, consequential, long-term resources and enterprises at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, or failures of others. (chapter 1, kindle loc 336)a band of pirates, a group of tax resisters, or a village of non-conformists in a period of religious persecution fall in the category of trust networks.  the stakes are high for all participants.  on the other hand, the american medical association, the league of women voters, and the pickpockets who work the gare st lazare train station do not represent trust networks, though they have the properties of social action networks more generally.  there is little real risk for any particular physician even if other members of the ama don't play their parts in a lobbying campaign.  the willingness of members of the extended group to commit their own actions to a risky common effort depends on their level of trust in other members -- trust that they will make their own contributions to the collective enterprise, and trust that they will not betray their comrades.  (french historian marc bloch belonged to a trust network, the french resistance, that led to his death in 1944 by the gestapo; link .)the general idea is that there are numerous examples of networks of people who share substantial interests in common, and who have a high level of trust in one another that permits them to undertake risky joint activities.  here is a more complete statement of tilly's conception:how will we recognize a trust network when we encounter or enter one?  first, we will notice a number of people who are connected, directly or indirectly, by similar ties; they form a network.  second, we will see that the sheer existence of such a tie gives one member significant claims on the attention or aid of another; the network consists of strong ties.  third, we will discover that members of the network are collectively carrying on major long-term enterprises such as procreation, long-distance trade, workers' mutual aid or practice of an underground religion.  finally, we will learn that the configuration of ties within the network sets the collective enterprise at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, and failures of individual members. (chapter 1, kindle loc 186)trust networks are particularly relevant in the context of efforts at violent extraction and domination -- both on the side of predators and prey.  predators -- bandits, pirates, and gangs -- need to establish strong ties within their organizations in order to be able to effectively coerce their targets and to escape repression by others.  and prey -- farmers in ranch country, rural jews in poland, or home owners in central newark -- are advantaged by the existence of strong ties of family, religion, or ethnicity through which they can maintain the collective strategies that provide some degree of protection.  but tilly makes the interesting point that the workings of trust networks cross over both contentious and noncontentious activities.  here is a general statement that frames much of tilly's discussion in the book:noncontentious politics still make up the bulk of all political interaction, since it includes tax collection, census taking, military service, diffusion of political information, processing of government-mediated benefits, internal organizational activity of constituted political actors, and related processes that go on most of the time without discontinous, public, collective claim making.  trust networks and their segments get involved in noncontentious politics more regularly -- and usually more consequently -- than in contentious politics. (chapter 1, kindle loc 208) the idea of a trust network represents a different way of getting a handle on the contrast between self-interested agency and group-oriented agency, which in turn corresponds to "economistic" and "sociological" approaches to social behavior.  is it interests or norms that guide social behavior?  by introducing the idea of a trust network, tilly is able to find a position someplace else on the spectrum -- neither purely self-interested behavior nor routine normative conformance.  instead, agents within trust networks behave as purposive, goal-directed actors; but they have commitments and resources that people in other social settings lack, and they are thereby enabled to achieve forms of collective action that are impossible elsewhere.  we might say that tilly is offering an account of the microfoundations of collective action, or of a certain kind of collective action.in line with tilly's lifelong interest in taxation and state-building, the idea of resource extraction plays a central role in his analysis of trust networks.  a central theme is the struggle between the tax-collecting state and the elusive, tax-evading trust networks that exist in civil society.  "rulers have usually coveted the resources embedded in such networks, have often treated them as obstacles to effective rule, yet have never succeeded in annihilating them and have usually worked out accommodations producing enough resources and compliance to sustain their regimes" (kindle loc 229).it is interesting to connect this dialectic of predation and evasion with the arguments jim scott puts forward in the art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland southeast asia  ( link ).  part of the effectiveness of the highland peoples of burma in scott's account is the density of their social relationships and a consequent ability to sustain a degree of collective resistance that would be impossible in a less dense society.  and, in fact, tilly's analysis of the tactical situation of a trust network subject to the superior coercive power of some other entity is enlightening in scott's story as well.  consider these avenues that tilly advances as collective strategies for protecting a given trust network against the pressures of the surrounding state: concealment, dissimulation, clientage, predation, enlistment into the regime, bargaining, and dissolution (chapter 2, kindle loc 794).  we can find examples of each of these strategies in scott's analysis of burma.  more pointedly, we can see instances of almost all these strategies in the current conflicts between the burmese junta and the cease-fire groups such as the kachin independence organization ( link , link ).so what kind of analysis is tilly offering here?  what is the use of this concept from the point of view of the social sciences, beyond the metaphor and analytical specifics? are there concrete historical or sociological hypotheses in play?  does this concept provide a better basis for explaining some puzzling outcomes than existing theories?  or, possibly, is the concept of a trust network another example of a part of the sociologist's toolkit: an ideal-typical description of a real social mechanism whose workings can be discerned in a variety of contexts?tilly is relatively explicit about several of these questions.  to start: he does not believe that "trust networks" constitute a homogeneous social kind.  we cannot offer a general account of the essential features of a trust network (kindle loc 823).  we can do a certain amount of classification within the group of social configurations that we call "trust networks".  so "trust networks" are socially real, and we can use ordinary methods of social and historical inquiry to map out some of their properties.further, he believes, we can state some mid-level regularities about trust networks and political regimes: for example,trust networks survive and hold off predators when they generate enough resources to reproduce themselves;variations in the kinds of trust networks that exist help explain the variety of the consolidation of rule that occurs in given settings. (loc 1096)trust networks most commonly defend themselves from predation by adopting some combination of the strategies of concealment, clientage, and dissimulation (loc 1724)another important question is the role of evidence in this treatment.  tilly offers dozens of examples of significant historical instances of trust networks at work -- as predators, as prey, and as potential subjects of extractive rule.  and we can ask this question: what is the evidentiary value of the examples?  are they merely illustrative?  do they serve to pinpoint some of the specifics of discrete social mechanisms?  or are they more like suggestive heuristic cases that may point us in the direction of a more developed theory?i think that tilly's view would be something close to the second option here: the examples are valuable and insightful because they provide relatively transparent instances in which the mechanisms are fully exposed. they are a bit like the observations of "animalcules" through van leeuwenhoek's microscope: glimpses of an underlying mechanism that proves to be an important constituent of more macro-level processes.at the same time, the analysis doesn't add up to a "theory" of trust networks; it is more analogous to descriptive ecology than it is to the theory of the gene.  when darwin documents the variety of finches in the galapagos islands, or when wallace painstakingly describes the myriad distinct species of beetles he finds in the jungles of the malay archipelago, each is involved in a kind of scientific work that stands between pure description and explanatory theorizing.  and this seems to be roughly where tilly's dissection of trust networks falls as well.it is also interesting to consider whether there are important examples of trust networks in the world today.  and it seems clear that there are.  the situation of the ethnic movements in contemporary burma is one good example.  domestic terror groups and right-wing militias provide another clear set of examples.  the american civil rights movement, the freedom riders, and sncc's organizing efforts offer another good set of examples as well ( link ).  so the concept of a trust network is in fact a valuable contribution to the study of collective action and social mobilization.
 shocked by the swiss franc? blame europeanyone feeling wrong-footed by the swiss central bank's surprise decision to stop holding down the price of its currency should consider placing part of the blame elsewhere -- on the abject failure of europe's leaders to revive their sinking economy.global financial markets went into gyrations today after the swiss national bank announced that it would end its more than three-year effort to keep the value of the franc from rising above about 0.83 euro. the franc immediately jumped to about 0.96 euro, dealing a blow to the country's export and tourism industries, to traders who had bet against the currency and to foreigners who owe money in francs.switzerland's move is a kind of capitulation. with the european central bank on the verge of extraordinary stimulus measures that will probably weaken the euro, swiss central bankers realized that the franc -- long a haven for investors fleeing the euro -- will come under renewed upward pressure. a voluntary appreciation now, they believe, will be less disruptive than one that's forced on them later.tiny switzerland's travails underline the bigger issue: europe's inability to restore economic growth. after the 2008 financial crisis and amid the subsequent european debt crisis, europe's leaders -- germany's policy makers, especially -- have erred repeatedly. they have forced too much austerity on the weakest members of the currency union, while the strongest have pared back investments needed to boost growth. they have been far too slow in forcing banks to recognize losses, raise capital and get back to business as usual. they have opposed much-needed monetary stimulus. as a result, the euro area has endured serial recessions and is now teetering on the brink of deflation.it's widely believed that the ecb is finally about to start quantitative easing, announcing what could be as much as a trillion euros in bond purchases. a possible legal obstacle fell away this week. whether or not qe works, it will put new pressure on foreign-exchange markets, as the outlook for interest rates in euros increasingly diverges from the rest. switzerland is not alone in feeling the repercussions. the u.s. dollar has gained some 14 percent against major currencies since mid-2014 -- a shift that some economists worry could spell trouble for non-u.s. companies that have trillions in outstanding dollar-denominated debt.europe's leaders -- and particularly german chancellor angela merkel -- can still make a difference by boosting investment, offering relief to embattled countries such as greece and letting the ecb do its job. they should do this for the sake of their own economies. if they fail, the damage won't be confined to the eu.to contact the senior editor responsible for bloomberg view’s editorials: david shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net.editorials are written by the bloomberg view editorial board. read more.
 we think that president mario draghi will announce that the ecb will embark on a large scale asset purchase programme, including government bonds, at next week’s meeting. in this edition of the weekly, we ask eight big questions about the outlook for the monetary policy and the impact on financial markets, the economy and inflation.will the ecb announce qe already this week?yes. for a long time it seemed like a close call between whether the announcement would be in january or march. however, a number of factors appear now to be pointing to a move next week. a number of officials have suggested that the central bank is ‘ready to act’ and that it should not wait too long in acting.in addition, the european court of justice appears to have given the ecb a green light to embark on qe in its early opinion on government bond buys via the omt programme.finally, the sharp fall in oil prices, which has driven inflation into negative territory, seems to have increased the ecb’s urgency to act. of course lower oil prices are great news for economic growth and a central bank usually ignores oil price swings. however, given that inflation is already so far from its goal, the central bank is worried about its credibility.what will the ecb buy?we think that president mario draghi will announce that the ecb will embark on a large scale asset purchase programme, which will mainly consist of sovereign bonds, but could also include other debt securities such nonfinancial corporate bonds and agency debt.there are indications that the ecb will decide to limit its purchases to investment grade bonds. this would exclude a small number of member states, including greece from the main programme. it would be natural for sovereign bond buys to be allocated between countries using the  capital key.an investment grade plan could be convenient for the ecb given the greek elections and the aim of syriza, the main opposition party that is ahead in the polls, to restructure greek debt. an alternative is that the ecb could decide to allow the national central banks of non-investment grade countries to buy their own country’s bonds, but then at their own risk.how big will the programme be?the ecb currently aims to increase its balance sheet by eur 1 trillion, which would take it back to the levels seen early in 2012. there have been media reports that the central bank is considering a government bond programme totalling eur 500bn. this would be large enough to meet the eur 1 trillion target if the central bank also launched corporate bond and agency debt programmes alongside the sovereign bond plan and the already announced measures (covered bonds and abs programmes and tltros).however, if the ecb were to only launch a eur 500bn sovereign bond purchase programme with no other measures, it would probably be a stretch to achieve the eur 1 trillion. in addition, the ecb may well need to increase the balance sheet target going forward, given that the inflation outlook has deteriorated since it announced it.so the risks are tilted towards a larger sovereign bond programme, either next week, or because the ecb follows up eventually with qe-2. we think that the central bank has a strong incentive to surprise positively. however, there is a possibility that the governing council takes a more conservative stance because it does not want to upset the more hawkish officials that are against qe.what will be the impact on financial markets?the lessons from the us, suggest that a convincing qe programme would tend to boost investor sentiment, leading to risk spread compression. that would mean that equities, corporate bonds and peripheral government bonds would tend to do well. although a qe programme is now widely expected, the us experience suggests that risky assets do well during the programme as well, as investors search for yield.the same is true of the exchange rate. during the us qe, the dollar continued to slide during the programmes. we also expect to see ongoing euro weakness, also because monetary policy on either side of the atlantic is heading in different directions.what about the ‘ultra-safe’ government bonds of germany and other core countries? in the us, treasury yields tended to fall sharply in anticipation of the qe programme, but then rebounded strongly shortly after the actual announcement. we think that german government bonds have also gone a long way in factoring in qe, as yields have fallen sharply and they are probably close to the bottom.however, we do not expect a sharp or quick bounce back. unless the programme really beats market expectations, investors will speculate that there may be more to come. in addition, there are forces depressing yields, such as the scarcity of high quality government bonds. we expect yields to remain low in the near term, before rising modestly later in the year.what will be the impact on the economy?the impact of qe on the economy will be positive. the decline in the euro will lift growth. we estimate that a 10% fall in the effective exchange rate can boost gdp by around a percentage point after a year. since the spring of last year, when it became clear that the ecb would ease policy further, the euro effective exchange rate has fallen by around 7%. we expect it to fall further.in addition, the compression of risk premiums leads to an easing of financial conditions. the eurozone is a bank-based rather than a market-based economy, so the impact through this channel will be weaker than in the us. however, there will still be a significant effect, with the fall in peripheral bond yields leading to declines in bank lending rates.will the ecb reach the 2% inflation goal?probably not for a long time. somewhat stronger growth and the fall in the euro will raise inflation over time. however, the low starting point (core inflation is at just 0.8%) means that it would take an economic boom to get underlying inflation back to 2% over the next year or two.does qe have negative side effects?yes. qe can push asset prices away from fundamentals and create the wrong kind of incentives for policymakers. however, balanced out against the positive impulse to demand and inflation, it still looks worth doing. this is especially the case given the risk of deflation, however small.the support to growth from qe could dull the incentives for eurozone policymakers to take badly needed reforms. however, these incentives unfortunately do not look to be that great right now in any case, and it is unlikely that qe will be the swing factor.is qe the answer to europe’s problems?no. there is little doubt that weak demand is an issue in the eurozone and qe will help to support demand. however, arguably the bigger problem is that the eurozone’s trend or potential economic growth rate has declined. to lift economic performance over the long-term, governments need to step up structural reforms.
 shoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern caracas on jan. 9. 2015. closeshoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern... read moreshoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern caracas on jan. 9. 2015.shoppers thronged grocery stores across caracas today as deepening shortages led the government to put venezuela ’s food distribution under military protection.long lines, some stretching for blocks, formed outside grocery stores in the south american country’s capital as residents search for scarce basic items such as detergent and chicken.“i’ve visited six stores already today looking for detergent -- i can’t find it anywhere,” said lisbeth elsa, a 27-year-old janitor, waiting in line outside a supermarket in eastern caracas. “we’re wearing our dirty clothes again because we can’t find it. at this point i’ll buy whatever i can find.”a dearth of foreign currency exacerbated by collapsing oil prices has led to shortages of imports from toilet paper to car batteries , and helped push annual inflation to 64 percent in november. the lines will persist as long as price controls remain in place, luis vicente leon, director of caracas-based polling firm datanalisis, said today in a telephone interview.government officials met with representatives from supermarket chains today to guarantee supplies, state news agency avn reported. interior minister carmen melendez said yesterday that security forces would be sent to food stores and distribution centers to protect shoppers.empty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015. closeempty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015.empty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015.“don’t fall into desperation -- we have the capacity and products for everyone, with calmness and patience. the stores are full,” she said on state television.president nicolas maduro last week vowed to implement an economic “counter-offensive” to steer the country out of recession, including an overhaul of the foreign exchange system. he has yet to provide details. while the main government-controlled exchange sets a rate of 6.3 bolivars per u.s. dollar , the black market rate is as much as 187 per dollar.inside a plan suarez grocery store yesterday in eastern caracas, shelves were mostly bare. customers struggled and fought for items at times, with many trying to skip lines. the most sought-after products included detergent, with customers waiting in line for two to three hours to buy a maximum of two bags. a security guard asked that photos of empty shelves not be taken.police inside a luvebras supermarket in eastern caracas intervened to help staff distribute toilet paper and other products.“you can’t find anything, i’ve spent 15 days looking for diapers,” jean paul mate, a meat vendor, said outside the luvebras store. “you have to take off work to look for products. i go to at least five stores a day.”venezuelan online news outlet vivoplay posted a video of government food security regulator carlos osorio being interrupted by throngs of shoppers searching for products as he broadcast on state television from a bicentenario government-run supermarket in central caracas.“what we’re seeing is worse than usual, it’s not only a seasonal problem,” datanalisis’s leon said. “companies are not sure how they will restock their inventories or find merchandise, with a looming fear of a devaluation.”the price for venezuela’s oil, which accounts for more than 95 percent of the country’s exports, has plunged by more than half from last year’s peak in june to $47 a barrel this month.“this is the worst it has ever been -- i’ve seen lines thousands of people long,” greisly jarpe, a 42-year-old data analyst, said as she waited for dish soap in eastern caracas. “people are so desperate they’re sleeping in the lines.”to contact the reporters on this story: andrew rosati in caracas at arosati3@bloomberg.net ; noris soto in caracas at nsoto9@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: andre soliani at asoliani@bloomberg.net ; philip sanders at psanders@bloomberg.net nathan crooks, randall woodspress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 by wang zhuoqiong/li xiang    (china daily) updated:  2015-01-08 08:01julie bauer, president of panasonic consumer electronics, speaks at a press event during the 2015 international consumer electronics show on jan 5, 2015 at mandalay bay convention center in las vegas, nevada.[photo/ic]panasonic corp plans to transfer most of its domestic appliance production in china back to japan starting in the spring, a response to the weaker yen and a jump in labor costs in china.it is one of several japan-based companies making such a move.panasonic president kazuhiro tsuga said in an interview on tuesday, according to kyodo news, that the company will move its washing machine and other home appliance production back to japan and export products that are made in japan to other markets.panasonic plans to export about 40 types of home appliances made domestically to asian markets.tsuga did not reveal the location of the reshored factories. but microwave ovens and top-loading washing machines, which are almost all made in china now, will be the first products for which production is resumed in japan at factories in shizuoka prefecture and kobe, respectively.panasonic said that a 1 yen drop against the dollar reduces profit by about 1.8 billion yen ($15.1 million) on an annual basis. if the yen stabilizes at 120 to the dollar, this will cause a significant decrease in profit even if the company cuts back on costs, according to the yomiuri shimbun.panasonic china's public relations office said it had not heard of such plans or decisions, and it declined to comment further.it would be the first such large-scale reshoring of the company's foreign production. after 35 years operating in china, panasonic has three plants in hangzhou, guangzhou and shanghai.rising labor costs in china are also driving the relocation of japanese factories, said su liang, branding director of the china home appliance research institute.
 most americans see themselves as "middle class." but in most low-income countries, "middle class" is more likely to describe an aspiration than a sense of belonging. as a result, the economic, sociological, and political role of the "middle class" can be quite different across high-income and low-income countries.at least, this is the case made by alexandre dormeier freire in a boxed commentary appearing in the  global wage report 2014-2015 , from the international labour organization. friere writes (citations omitted):in developed economies, many people define themselves as middle class, and so the idea represents a shared sense of how most people in a society live. in emerging and developing economies, being middle class is typically more of an aspiration, representing how most people would like to live.economists sometimes represent the middle class as an average class located in an interval of 75 per cent to 125 per cent of the median income. but most authors agree that great heterogeneity characterizes the middle class. consequently, notions such as lower middle class, upper middle class and even old vs new middle class have appeared, conveying a certain difficulty in providing an accurate and precise definition. when it comes to emerging and developing economies, authors are confronted with the difficulty of applying a notion that is linked to the western context. ravallion simply considers that “someone is middle class if that person would not be considered poor in any developing country, implying a lower bound of $9 a day.”from an economic point of view, the middle class is considered the driver of modern consumption societies. from a sociological perspective, the formation of a social class includes other factors: a specific economic position (possibly creating conflicts of interest with other social classes) and a consciousness of having similar conditions. today in western societies, relatively high levels of consumption of goods and services define, or are a major attribute of, the middle class. some identify this increasing consumption as consumerism and argue that this profoundly changes traditional social relations within the middle class because people tend to be more individualistic than class-oriented, and social relations are driven by more hedonistic and individualistic patterns. in this view, both factors contribute to the erosion of the class identity in all societies. in emerging and developing economies, such consumption is still perceived more as a privilege of the upper middle class than as a unifying social force, as in western-based societies.to flesh this out a bit, results from a pew foundation survey back in 2012  showed how americans categorized themselves. notice that only 7% of americans identify themselves as "lower class" and only 2% as "upper class." apparently, the "middle class" includes 91% of the u.s. population.how does this differ for lower-income countries? in its  global employment report 2013 , the ilo categorizes the population of low-income countries by the fairly standard measures of "extremely poor," which consumption of less than $1.25 per person per day; "moderately poor," from $1.25 to $2 per day; near-poor, from $2 to $4 per day; "middle class," between $4 and $13 per day; and "above middle class," which is above $13 per day in consumption. by this standard, the "middle class" in the developing world is on the rise, but is not yet more than half the population.the ilo report sums up the patterns this way:as the total share of poor and near poor workers gradually fell, an estimated 41.6 per cent of the developing world’s workers were attaining the middle and upper-middle-classes in 2011. this is a remarkable development given that in 2001, less than 23 per cent of the developing world’s workforce was middle-class versus 53.7 per cent living in poverty. the decade from 2001 to 2011 saw rapid growth in middle-class employment, with an increase of nearly 401 million middle-class workers (above us$4 and below us$13) and an additional increase of 186 million workers above the us$13 a day line. current ilo projections indicate that the number of workers in the middle-class and above in the developing world could grow by an additional 390 million by 2017, with the share of middle-class workers rising to 51.9 per cent.it may be a fool's mission to try to generate a shared idea of "middle class" that reaches across the experience of the u.s., other high-income countries, and also low-income countries around the world. the growth of income inequality in the u.s. and other high-income countries may be eroding the shared sense of "we're almost all middle class," at the the same time that growth in emerging economies is moving toward a situation where a majority fall within at least some definition of teh middle class.but in a rough-and-ready way, i think the key factor in defining the middle class may be a sense of whether your life typically involves living from week-to-week or month-to-month relying on a regular paycheck. for example, i think that the reason many objectively low-income people in the u.s. view themselves as "middle class" is that they are working for livilng. similarly, high-income people in the u.s. view themselves as "middle class" because they have bought into a world of high expenses, and thus they also feel an ongoing pressure that they are working to pay their regular expenses.  in low-income countries, the key step that often moves people up to the "middle class" is a regular job with a paycheck, as opposed to holding a series of ad hoc, temporary, and subsistence jobs.freire makes the interesting suggestion that the "middle class" shares a consumerist mindset, which offers both a kind of shared social identity, support for a set of political institutions, and a functional basis for ongoing economic growth. in low-income economies, building support for institutions, laws, and infrastructure that allow the middle class to grow and flourish may be a delicate political business when the middle class is a minority. but as the middle class moves toward becoming a majority, i wonder if building building support for these institutions, laws, and infrastructure may become easier.obviously, the middle class in lower-income developing countries will not equal the buying power of the middle class in high-income countries any time soon. but that said, the new middle class in low-income countries will in many ways have much more in common with the middle class around the world than did the "absolutely poor" living on less than $1.25 per day.  a certain kind of shared globa consumerism--bolstered by cheap computing power, cellphones, brand names, news, movies music, and the internet--may be on its way.full disclosure: i was an outside reader of the ilo global wage report 2014-15 last summer, and received a modest honorarium for commenting on a draft of the report.
 u.s. consumer prices rose at the slowest annual pace in more than five years in december and are poised to slow further in coming months amid the global plunge in oil prices.the consumer-price index, a broad gauge of inflation that measures what americans pay for everything from coffee to gasoline and airline tickets, rose just 0.8% in december from a year earlier, the labor department said friday. that was sharply slower than the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 during early development of the web, there was a list of webservers edited by tim berners-lee and hosted on the cern webserver. one historical snapshot of the list in 1992 remains, [1] but as more and more webservers went online the central list could no longer keep up. on the ncsa site, new servers were announced under the title "what's new!" [2]the first tool used for searching on the internet was archie . [3] the name stands for "archive" without the "v". it was created in 1990 by alan emtage , bill heelan and j. peter deutsch, computer science students at mcgill university in montreal . the program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous ftp ( file transfer protocol ) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, archie did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually.the rise of gopher (created in 1991 by mark mccahill at the university of minnesota ) led to two new search programs, veronica and jughead . like archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in gopher index systems. veronica (very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives) provided a keyword search of most gopher menu titles in the entire gopher listings. jughead (jonzy's universal gopher hierarchy excavation and display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific gopher servers. while the name of the search engine "archie" was not a reference to the archie comic book series, " veronica " and " jughead " are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.in the summer of 1993, no search engine existed for the web, though numerous specialized catalogues were maintained by hand. oscar nierstrasz at the university of geneva wrote a series of perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format. this formed the basis for w3catalog , the web's first primitive search engine, released on september 2, 1993. [4]in june 1993, matthew gray, then at mit , produced what was probably the first web robot , the perl -based world wide web wanderer , and used it to generate an index called 'wandex'. the purpose of the wanderer was to measure the size of the world wide web, which it did until late 1995. the web's second search engine aliweb appeared in november 1993. aliweb did not use a web robot , but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format.jumpstation (created in december 1993 [5] by jonathon fletcher ) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, and used a web form as the interface to its query program. it was thus the first www resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching) as described below. because of the limited resources available on the platform it ran on, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered.one of the first "all text" crawler-based search engines was webcrawler , which came out in 1994. unlike its predecessors, it allowed users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since. it was also the first one widely known by the public. also in 1994, lycos (which started at carnegie mellon university ) was launched and became a major commercial endeavor.soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. these included magellan , excite , infoseek , inktomi , northern light , and altavista . yahoo! was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory , rather than its full-text copies of web pages. information seekers could also browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search.google adopted the idea of selling search terms in 1998, from a small search engine company named goto.com . this move had a significant effect on the se business, which went from struggling to one of the most profitable businesses in the internet. [6]in 1996, netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal as the featured search engine on netscape's web browser. there was so much interest that instead netscape struck deals with five of the major search engines: for $5 million a year, each search engine would be in rotation on the netscape search engine page. the five engines were yahoo!, magellan, lycos, infoseek, and excite. [7] [8]search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s. [9] several companies entered the market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings . some have taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as northern light. many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble , a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in 1999 and ended in 2001.around 2000, google's search engine rose to prominence. [10] the company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called pagerank , as was explained in the paper anatomy of a search engine written by sergey brin and larry page , the later founders of google. [11] this iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and pagerank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. in contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal . in fact, google search engine became so popular that spoof engines emerged such as mystery seeker .by 2000, yahoo! was providing search services based on inktomi's search engine. yahoo! acquired inktomi in 2002, and overture (which owned alltheweb and altavista) in 2003. yahoo! switched to google's search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions.microsoft first launched msn search in the fall of 1998 using search results from inktomi. in early 1999 the site began to display listings from looksmart , blended with results from inktomi. for a short time in 1999, msn search used results from altavista were instead. in 2004, microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot ).microsoft's rebranded search engine, bing , was launched on june 1, 2009. on july 29, 2009, yahoo! and microsoft finalized a deal in which yahoo! search would be powered by microsoft bing technology.this section possibly contains original research . please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations . statements consisting only of original research should be removed.this article needs additional citations for verification . please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
rt @sub8u: fascinating must-read story of technology transforming a failing school in the uk.
 in 2009 a failing school in bolton provided every one of its students with an    ipod touch; now the essa academy has drastically improved its pupils'    learning experienceson the way into essa academy, in a multi-ethnic suburb on the edge of bolton,    it is easy to believe that the school is a world leader in education    technology. its new slate-grey buildings are topped with an illuminated logo    whose design resembles pixels on a screen. signs attached to what look like    giant glow sticks greet you in dozens of languages as you reach a calm and    colourful reception area that could belong to an internet start-up.five years ago essa academy was a failing school. it became the first in    britain to buy touchscreen devices for all its students. now it has turned    its fortunes around, is judged to be ‘good’ by ofsted and advises schools    from afghanistan to australia on how to teach with technology.but in the classroom i visit i do not find a neat row of students tapping    screens. almost 60 are scattered around, many noisily drawing pictures of    the female reproductive system on the walls.it takes confidence to show a visitor a scene like this, but confounding    expectations and coping with a little chaos are part of the plan. ‘we’re    based on the premise that the future is not what it used to be; that the one    thing we know is that the world our students are going to move into is    something unknown,’ andy peet, the deputy principal, says. ‘there will be    jobs that we don’t know about, there will be ways of living lives that we    don’t know about. we know, with a great deal of certainty, that we will get    things wrong. the intention is to try and get it wrong as little as    possible.’year sevens study in double-sized classes (about 60 children), in a system    intended to encourage independent learning by ipad-equipped students. with    two teachers supervising, there is enough flexibility to give focused    support to those in need of extra help or more challenging work. these    teachers spend 18 hours a week with their students, helping the transition    from primary school, where children are used to knowing their teachers well.the curriculum is customised, making use of the freedom the school gained when    it became an academy in 2009. today’s subject is science and ethics,    with students learning how fertilisation takes place in the womb, turning    their drawings into stop-motion videos using the cameras on their tablets    and recording voice-overs to explain the science. the walls are designed to    be written and drawn on. ‘it looks quite chaotic, but they’re all doing what    they’re supposed to be doing,’ jemma greenwood, a teacher, says.a maths lesson taught by jane taylor. photo: polly bradenjeff ellis, the principal, and his staff are eager to convince visitors that    the school is not defined by science-fiction-style technology. ‘the thing    that tends to draw people in is the technology,’ ellis says. ‘but the    thing they leave with is the impression of the culture of the place and how    well students learn, rather than this tool we’ve chosen.’since essa first offered every student a free ipod touch in 2009, schools    around the world have followed suit with various mobile devices. the results    have ranged from inspirational to catastrophic. in the worst example, a    failed $1.3 billion plan to buy an ipad for every student in los angeles    came under investigation by the fbi last month.but essa remains extraordinary: while other schools have tried issuing mobile    devices, it has done so for the longest, and in difficult circumstances.    before it became an academy (it was formerly hayward school), its reputation    was dire, with only a quarter of students getting five good gcses including    english and maths. the idea of giving expensive electronics to its mostly    poor, ethnic-minority students was derided when the plans were announced in    the local press. ‘people saw it as a gimmick. it’s like a bribe to the kids    to come to the school – that’s how it was seen,’ says abdul chohan, the    inspiration behind the programme and a director of the academy, a title    equivalent to assistant head.the gamble has paid off. four out of five students come from deprived areas,    but last year 54 per cent achieved five gcses including english and maths at    grades a* to c, just above the national average. the neighbouring    500-year-old private school, bolton school, took advice from its    state-sector counterpart and began its own ipad programme.it is one thing to believe that technology can make life more efficient or    provide a richer experience for children who have already learnt the basics,    but it is another to believe that putting computers in the hands of all    students can turn around a failing school. for this essa academy is a test    case: have ipads really transformed students’ chances?the history of computers in schools has been one of grand visions and    disappointing realities. frustration at these limitations prompted chohan to    take a chance on touchscreen devices. ‘seven years ago we didn’t have wi-fi    here, no email. every room had a blocky computer on a trolley. on a hot day,    we would use it to keep the door open.’ his eureka moment came after he    overheard parents discussing how easily their preschool children swiped and    tapped mobile phones. for the price of replacing 150 laptops, he bought 900    ipod touches.at any school this might raise eyebrows, but this was a failing school marred    by racial conflicts, fights and drugs, where one teacher, who has since    left, was notorious for lessons that consisted entirely of screening    episodes of mr bean.‘i remember the principal at the time saying, “abdul, if this doesn’t work,    you’re going to lose your job, i’m going to lose mine, this whole thing is    going to look really bad,” ’ chohan says. ‘what was really interesting was    that some of the comments in the bolton news at the time implied that our    kids in this part of town shouldn’t have these devices. it was ok for the    kids in the more affluent part of town, but our kids would sell them on    ebay.’but when parents flooded to the school to find out what was going on, it    proved an unexpected benefit. ‘it ensured that every parent has been into    the academy on at least one occasion. we couldn’t say that before,’ ellis    says. ‘it has actually involved them in the learning. you’ll know, in    middle-class families, children get home and parents say, “what did you do    at school today?” now we have given parents a reason to ask that question,    when it probably wasn’t being asked before.’far from selling their ipads, which gradually replaced the smaller ipod    touches by 2011, students seem to treasure them. they can take them home,    and only one or two per cent are lost, damaged or stolen. even so, the    devices are protected by cases built to us department of defense    specifications, tested for extremes of temperature and humidity and even    ballistic shocks. if they can survive a mine blast while in an armoured car,    a school day in bolton should pose few problems.the walls at essa academy are designed to be written and drawn on. photo:    polly braden‘there’s like a sense of belonging that you have your own device, that the    school trusts you and you don’t have to share with anyone,’ aadil    pariejwala, 15, says. ‘you have access to everything at the touch of your    hand, literally.’the sense of trust runs deeper than just putting ipads into the care of young    people. the school wanted students to have greater access to their teachers    and constructed its new buildings around this idea. classrooms are    open-plan, the few offices have walls of transparent glass and there is no staffroom    as such, just a work area for teachers that students are free to enter.the    school has added to this accessibility by giving teachers’ email addresses    to students, who can use them to ask for help and advice. ‘quite often when    you talk about technology, people say you’re going to have less of the human    touch from the teachers,’ chohan says. ‘but we find they get    more contact. students who won’t necessarily speak up otherwise can get help    direct from the teacher.’ others can follow up on their ideas and questions    whenever they think of them outside school.but perhaps the biggest change is the spirit of cooperation fostered between    students and staff. as aiman mahmood, 14, puts it, ‘you have these relationships    with teachers, and that’s not what you find in many schools. who would    be prepared to stay after school and devote their time to the students?    that’s really helpful for us.’as a result there is less of a sense of ‘them and us’, which motivates better    behaviour. ‘it helps to show that students and teachers are not all that different,’ sana ismail, the head girl, says. breaking down these kinds of barriers,    which many teachers may see as protective, can create bugs as well as having    positive effects. jenny muter, the assistant head of the english department,    says, ‘i got absolutely spammed the first year i was here because they    needed so much help. but we say that if you need the help, we will give you the    help.’with the school no longer in crisis, the pressure to be always on call has    eased, though it has not disappeared. ‘now i don’t always check my email – if you email after 10pm, you’re not going to get a reply,’ muter says.doubts about the use of technology often centre on the potential for abuse.    essa academy applies some obvious restrictions on games and social networking,    but locking down the devices would miss the point since they are meant to    offer stu-dents greater autonomy, so ‘self-regulation’ is the    school’s buzzword. managing student behaviour where technology is concerned    is less about what is forbidden or allowed and more about teaching children    to judge what is appropriate to the situation. for example, students are not    given rules about emailing staff but are expected to learn sensible ways to    use the technology.sometimes technology is used to promote better work habits, such as giving    feedback on students’ work in voice messages rather than on the page. ‘feedback is generally a nicely written comment. but the first thing they    look at is the grade, and they may or may not read the rest,’ andy peet    says. ‘in a voice message you can hold the grade back until the last minute.’abdul chohan, a director at the school, who spearheaded the    touchscreen-device programme. photo: polly bradenall the material for classes is provided on the ipads through apple’s itunes u    app, a tool for schools and universities to publish and manage courses,    keeping books, videos, handouts, tests and discussions in one place, where    teachers can update them instantly. since last year students have been able    to design their own courses, which they upload to itunes u to show what they    have learnt and help other students. there has been another advantage, too. ‘i think we developed an understanding with the teachers, especially making    the itunes u courses,’ huzaifa moosa, the head boy, who has published a    guide to the characters in to kill a mockingbird, says. ‘we understand how    much effort they go to to provide good lessons for us.’‘they love doing that,’ muter says. ‘it’s like, “wow, i get it, i’m a    mini-teacher.” ’all the student-devised courses published on itunes u are available worldwide. ‘to be able to walk into an interview and say, “i’ve produced a public    course and have 2,000 people who subscribe to my content and they’re using    it” – that’s really powerful for a 16-year-old student,’ chohan says.for teachers it helps answer the question students often have about the    relevance of their learning: publishing work that others will read, use and    may comment on feels like making an impact in the real world. more than 600    visitors a year come to learn about essa academy, and they often find    themselves the audience for mini-presentations by students. teachers say    that although many of the children have never left bolton, since the school    is an educational celebrity, the world comes to them.‘getting them through exams is a key part of what we do, but developing social    capital is more important,’ ellis says. ‘it’s kind of the cement that    enables us to create what we have here, that enables the conditions for    learning.’in some ways the conventional exam regime is holding essa back. preparing for    exam conditions requires that students still use pen and paper instead of    doing all their writing and editing on-screen, while in maths exams they    have to use mental arithmetic and calculators that seem old-fashioned in    comparison with the ipad.but if the school’s message is that teaching matters more than technology,    could it have improved education for the students without ipads?‘i can only tell you what i feel, and i feel we couldn’t,’ ellis says. ‘it’s    hard to disaggregate the parts of what we’ve built, to say which element has    had which impact. what we do know is that they have all combined to produce    good results.’just before i leave, chohan wants to show me one more thing: the holodeck,    named after star trek’s virtual-reality machine, as if to admit that staff    are not immune to the appeal of sci-fi gadgetry. based in the school’s drama    studio, it uses a perspex screen and digital projectors to update an old    special effect that theatres used to create with gauze and lighting. the    projector casts an image of a spectral ballerina on to the transparent    screen, while chohan stands behind it on stage, beaming back from the gloom.    with the stage lights on, the digital image looks like a hologram, almost as    real as the teacher.something similar is true of the school: there is no way to draw a clear line    between a teacher’s human touch and the technology that extends her reach.    perhaps there is no need for one. ‘there is a geeky, techy side to me,    but i like to see things that make technology look like magic,’ chohan says. ‘teachers just want things to work.’
rt @maxcroser: from the atari to the iphone.
the number of computer games released – by platform

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 by robert graboyes   january 9, 2015 at 2:27 pm estphoto by andrew harrer/bloomberg via getty images.editor’s note: our health care debate, robert graboyes says, is trapped. caught in the back-and-forth over insurance coverage, both the proponents and opponents of the affordable care act are missing the point. to graboyes, a senior research fellow at the mercatus center, distribution of health care is not the problem. it’s the creation of better health care that will save more lives and cut costs.and while his thesis resonates with the laissez-faire, pro-market attitude most often heard on the political right, he implicates both sides in holding america’s health care hostage in his recently published paper “fortress and frontier in american health care.” america’s health care has been allowed to languish, denied the opportunities to take the risks — what graboyes and his colleague call “permissionless innovation” — that have allowed the information technology industry to flourish, and with it, all americans. to get health care caught up to it, he argues, we should rethink federal grants for innovation (they’re often counterproductive, he thinks) and decentralize regulatory institutions.but graboyes’ assessment of how and why it has made such strides isn’t universally accepted. “we need to rebalance the story we tell about who the innovators really are,” says mariana mazzucato. author of “the entrepreneurial state,” mazzucato wrote on making sen$e last year that apple didn’t build your iphone ; the government — and your taxes — did. “how is technology fostered,” she asked? far from the “obscure figures in garages” graboyes credits with it success, “more often than not, down through history,” mazzucato argued, innovation has stemmed from “government investment, from the roads of ancient rome to the internet of modern america.”graboyes’ paper, out a year after mazzucato’s essay, sees consumers and producers taking the risks, leading the way toward a changing health care industry. graboyes teaches at the medical centers at virginia commonwealth university and the university of virginia. he produces a twice-a-month health care policy newsletter and is on twitter at @robert_graboyes . read more from him below.health care is the surliest corner of american politics. for decades, a bitterly partisan debate — dueling monologues, really — has hung like smog over public discourse. facts, misconceptions, half-truths and non sequiturs have congealed into conflicting sets of pre-packaged talking points.nearly five years after president barack obama signed the affordable care act (aca) into law, the rancor and accusations still swirl, turbulent but immovable, like the great red spot of jupiter. maddeningly, the perpetual storm barely touches the great issues that actually determine our health and what we spend to acquire that health.why does health care cost so much in america? ask harvard’s david cutlerthis is a pity, but the upside is that it suggests an enormous opportunity to shift the debate, dissipate reflexive partisanship, and in doing so, save lives, ease suffering and cut costs.in short, since world war ii, the health care debate has focused almost exclusively on coverage — the number of people with insurance cards. quality of care and improvements in health have been afterthoughts.the two sides bicker over how to distribute today’s health care rather than empowering others to create tomorrow’s health care. in focusing exclusively on coverage, both sides do much to suppress technological and managerial innovation — delaying the arrival of better, less expensive care.all of this can change in a flash, if only we decide that it should. this requires us to examine health care from a vantage point well outside the pro- and anti-aca talking points.why has health care been so much less innovative than information technology over the past 25 years? my study draws answers from diverse quarters, citing, among others, the high-tech weaponry designed by actress hedy lamarr, the 1910 destruction of african-american medical education, and a carpenter and a puppeteer who in 2013 collaborated to slash the costs of functional prosthetic hands by 99.9 percent.beneath those questions lies a pattern that reveals a philosophical demarcation i label “fortress versus frontier” (defined shortly). for decades, the political left and right ensured that information technology was free to innovate on the frontier while health care was restrained within the confines of the fortress.in those industries, two roads diverged, and that has made all the difference. but the roads are converging once again. innovative technologies are soon likely to render medicine as unrecognizable to our eyes as today’s internet and smartphones  would be to our own eyes as recently as, say, 25 years ago.if we welcome and prepare for the new medical technologies, america can retain (and in certain sectors reclaim) its preeminence in health care innovation. if we resist, america’s position in medical innovation may come to resemble the 1940s steel industry – a powerful force barricading itself against competitors, followed by decline and rust. first mover’s advantage lost.ebola is part of the same story. while many seek individuals to blame for the chaotic response, i would argue that the accusatory headlines are what happens when 20th century institutions, designed for a world of scarce data, confront a tsunami of 21st century data flows. i personally witnessed the new century’s arrival a bit early — in 1993, when a truck contaminated with rodent droppings rolled in from the navajo reservation to the federal reserve bank of richmond. more on that later.since world war ii, the health care debate has been a struggle of left versus right. the left has tended to favor federal solutions, plus increased public provision of care and coverage. the right has favored state-level solutions, plus private provision of care and coverage. the left employs more pro-regulation rhetoric, while the right professes to favor freer markets. (the latter distinction is largely illusory. both sides favor powerful regulation and merely disagree on who regulates what and through which means.) a more meaningful distinction is between worldviews we can call the fortress and the frontier.the fortress has two goals. the first is to imagine every terrible thing that might happen to someone receiving health care and then to focus public policy on preventing any of those things from happening. the second is to protect health care insiders — doctors, hospitals, insurers, drug and device manufacturers — from outside competitors who might threaten their turf.the frontier focuses on innovation. it understands that we cannot obtain great quality improvements and massively reduced costs without allowing consumers and producers to take calculated risks. the frontier also understands that innovation requires constant, uninvited input from unknown dreamers. the it revolution did not emerge from credentialed insiders anointed by public officials or titans of industry. it came from obscure figures in garages who were allowed to challenge and defeat multinationals in skyscrapers.from his garage, steve jobs challenged ibm. jeff bezos sold books from his garage and his business — amazon.com — changed the way the world purchases just about everything. smartphones did not originate with telephone industry giants like western electric; the blackberry came from a couple of engineering students with some venture capital.in the same years that it exploded, changing how billions of people live their daily lives, health care was painfully slow to innovate.step into a time machine and travel back to 1989. gather a group of people and tell them of the advances that medical science has made in 25 years — statins, new vaccines, face transplants, and so forth. the audience will be pleased and gratified by the news, but there is little that will shock them.while camping high in the rockies, efram signed and deposited his paycheck in his bank account. then he purchased the complete works of shakespeare and read macbeth. a bit later, on youtube, he watched the beatles sing “yellow submarine.” using google translate, he converted the lyrics into hindi and then skyped his friend arjun, who is working at mcmurdo station, antarctica. efram sang his translation to arjun, who grimaced, but then commented on the beauty of the towering mountain behind efram. after hanging up, arjun emailed a restaurant in denver (a city he has never visited), and an hour later a drone delivered indian food to efram’s campsite—all paid for with bitcoins. while eating his tikka masala, efram toured mcmurdo station via street view and asked siri for the current temperature there. “brrrr. it’s 10 degrees below zero fahrenheit, efram,” she answered. then he accessed netflix and watched seven samurai before dozing off to a selection of malian jazz, courtesy of itunes radio. the entire cost of this sequence of events was $34.77 — $0.99 for the kindle edition of shakespeare, $2.00 for the film, $26.78 for the food, and $5.00 for the drone delivery service. and the whole set of interactions required only efram’s ipad and arjun’s cell phone — the two devices together costing less than $1,000.now, your audience will assume you are lying or delusional. and yet to our 2014 eyes, every step of this story is mundane and familiar — except for the drone delivering dinner to the mountain. and drone deliveries are perfectly feasible; it’s just that drones are the only part of the story that remain in the fortress.a common response to this comparison is that health care and information technology are different. health care involves life and death, pain and suffering. medical costs can bankrupt a family. computers and cell phones, on the other hand, are just harmless machines on your desk or in your pocket.but that distinction vanishes upon further inspection. the internet and cell phones pose enormous threats to our finances, our happiness, our lives. these omnipresent devices have generated new and devastating forms of financial fraud, identity theft, predation, bullying, loss of privacy, destruction of reputations. cell phones were central to improvised explosive devices in iraq and to the terrorists of 9/11. and since hospital telemetry, airliner controls, and fire and burglar alarms use the same technologies, system failures theoretically mean large-scale injury and loss of life. yet, few of us wish to return to the landlines and encyclopedia-weighted shelves of 1989.in less than a generation, home computers and smartphones went from dreams to toys of the rich to everyday possessions of third world village children. america’s population now has near-universal access to information technology that is blindingly more powerful than anything the central intelligence agency owned a generation ago. to get there, we accepted costs and risks, and we allowed serendipitous genius to arise in the unlikeliest of places.we didn’t need vicious congressional debates, invasive mandates, or a massive bureaucracy to oversee the diffusion of the new technologies. no one had to beg innovators to innovate. and innovators didn’t have to beg bureaucrats for permission to create.just the opposite. the it revolution really began around 1989, when the federal government stepped away from arpanet — the embryonic internet — and announced that the world was free to use it with few restrictions and little oversight.one of the stunning questions for future political scientists to ponder is, “why did we develop a bipartisan consensus that health care should be locked in the fortress while information technology would be free to roam the frontier?”the federal and state regulatory infrastructure that governs health care was constructed in the 20th century for a world in which data was scarce. now, we are overwhelmed with data in the 21st century. as a result, smart, well-intentioned, competent individuals in federal and state agencies cannot accommodate the floods of data that roll over them during a time of crisis. there’s simply too much data flowing through the narrow strictures of antiquated institutional structures.in other words, when information technology moved onto the frontier, the resulting revolution unleashed more data than the 20th century health care institutions, still firmly in the fortress, could handle.if this is correct, it means we cannot simply look for better people to run the cdc or the fda when accusations of ebola mismanagement roar. at the same time, it does not imply that we must abandon the idea of a cdc or fda. it does suggest that we rethink the structure of our regulatory institutions.i personally witnessed an incident that i like to think of as the moment of impact between 20th century medicine and 21st century information technology.in the spring of 1993, the navajo and neighboring tribes in the four corners region suffered an outbreak of hantavirus — a pulmonary illness spread via deer mouse droppings. twenty-four people fell ill, and 12 died.months later, a truckload of antique legal documents from the navajo reservation arrived at the federal reserve bank of richmond, to be stored in the bank’s vault until a federal court case some months later.an alert loading dock employee noted the shipment’s origin, saw some droppings, and remembered the news accounts. a phone call quickly alerted the bank’s physician, dr. victor brugh, to the possibility of a deadly virus circulating through the 24-story tower’s ventilation system.brugh emailed the cdc. questions flew, others joined the conversation, and in an hour or two, the cdc determined there was no danger to the thousands of employees.it is virtually impossible for us today to internalize how remarkable this conventional-sounding story was on that day. the bank had only recently installed an email system, and the technology still seemed other-worldly. brugh shook his head in disbelief at how rapidly he and others had resolved the potential crisis. just a short time earlier, he told me, the incident would have meant hours or days of back-and-forth phone calls, busy signals, and missed connections.perhaps two years later, the internet arrived at the fed, and in a few more years, search engines and social media brought a heretofore unfathomable quantity and quality of data within instantaneous reach.but paradoxically, the very technologies that so accelerated brugh’s answer that day would soon clog other answers in previously unimagined ways. the richmond fed’s hantavirus crisis was resolved before more than a handful of people knew of the threat. in 2014, the single case of ebola in dallas set websites and email systems aflame worldwide in real-time.fingers pointed at the official who allowed the dallas nurse to board an airliner. one of my first thoughts was, “how flooded was that person’s computer with queries and information?” perhaps the official erred—i don’t know—or perhaps it was frontier data colliding with a fortress institution.for a visual analogy, imagine an early 20th century market town, with multiple roads feeding all traffic through the center of town. this works quite well as long as the number of horse-drawn wagons and slow-moving automobiles are few and far-between. but deep into the automobile age, this perfectly well-designed traffic pattern clogs into maddening jams. and when an emergency occurs, traffic draws to a standstill.with the market town, the answer is to reconfigure the hub-and-spoke roads into a more flexible grid of alternative nodes and routes, with commerce dispersed across the landscape. we will ultimately have to restructure the cdc and fda and other institutions in parallel fashion. the european union, for example, assigns drug approvals to multiple private agencies — sort of like competing underwriters laboratories. the internet itself is a remarkable story of autonomous, decentralized regulation; in the 1990s, many feared that online commerce would be impossible on an unregulated internet. safety mechanisms grew organically, and just a few years later, some of us rarely set foot inside a store.health care is about to change, and none of us — perhaps least of all the insiders and experts — can say how. medicine today is where information technology was in 1989. and almost no one in 1989 could have envisioned the efram and arjun story.we can speculate on a few of the megatrends. transplantable organs made of your own cells. drugs tailored to your body’s specific dna. nanobots inside your body, repairing the genes that harm your health and threaten your life. wireless telemetry monitoring your health, with artificial intelligence systems mining the data to warn you of trouble before any doctor would ever catch it.the question is how we unleash these innovations. in information technology, the story over the last 25 years was largely what my colleague adam thierer calls “permissionless innovation.” a rogue’s gallery of tinkerers and dreamers thought up new hardware and software and ways to use both. the vast majority of ideas vanished without a trace. a few turned people you had never heard of into billionaires and changed our lives. and some old, esteemed businesses vanished or withered.apple ceo tim cook (reportedly quoting steve jobs) said, “our whole role in life is to give you something you didn’t know you wanted. and then once you get it, you can’t imagine your life without it.”are we willing to move american health care to the frontier so it can lead the way toward these new technologies? or will we remain in the fortress and let other countries seize the high ground? we have time to choose — but not much. recently, the founders of google, sergey brin and larry page, lamented the stifling burden of regulation for entrepreneurs in health care, and i suspect that the characteristics of the fortress underlie their concerns.one traditional fortress approach — federal grants for innovation — is likely to push innovation in less-than-ideal directions. in the early 1970s, an innovation grant would probably have gone to ibm to build a bigger mainframe, not to steve jobs to produce a tiny desktop computer. and enough innovation grants to ibm might have made it impossible for steve jobs to compete.shifting health care to the frontier opens the possibility of real progress — of better health for more people at lower cost, year after year. this approach also offers alternatives to the all-encompassing aca and its earth-shattering repeal-and-replace alternatives. my paper suggests a few dozen small initiatives to begin the transition. there are hundreds more waiting just behind. if we so choose.
rt @azizonomics: further to our conversation last night: http://t.co/a62jcn5acf

 please enter your email above and we will send you an email with further instructions. sign in?when will europe begin to recover from its epic depression?posted by john aziz on dec 29th 2014,nowadays, that is a relatively uncontroversial idea. beyond the many cultural and structural difficulties of building a currency union in europe that my colleague frances coppola describes , the existence of monetary union without fiscal union is like building a house with no roof. that's because the euro creates a new problem that does not exist for governments with their own currency. it creates the risk of sovereigns running out of money, as within the euro system they are subject to an external monetary authority.those who realized this made some prescient observations. as stephanie kelton (then bell) noted way back in 2002 : "countries that wish to compete for benchmark status, or to improve the terms on which they borrow, will have an incentive to reduce fiscal deficits or strive for budget surpluses. in countries where this becomes the overriding policy objective, we should not be surprised to find relatively little attention paid to the stabilization of output and employment. in contrast, countries that attempt to eschew the principles of “sound” finance may find that they are unable to run large, counter-cyclical deficits, as lenders refuse to provide sufficient credit on desirable terms. until something is done to enable member states to avert these financial constraints (e.g. political union and the establishment of a federal (eu) budget or the establishment of a new lending institution, designed to aid member states in pursuing a broad set of policy objectives), the prospects for stabilization in the eurozone appear grim."of course, while the sun was shining all was well. government borrowing costs across the eurozone converged, and growth was relatively decent . yet it was inevitable that at some point the skies would open up, rain would flood down, and the new structure would be tested.indeed, even the architects of the euro understood this to some degree. romano prodi — the then president of the european commission — conceded in 2001 that the euro system was not fit for purpose when he wrote : "i am sure the euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments. it is politically impossible to propose that now. but some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created."of course, i would argue that building a house with no roof and then constructing the roof at the time of crisis is stupid and self-endangering. but the reality has been far more stupid and dangerous — hence the continued crises — because rather than constructing the necessary roof of a fiscal union, the various policies that have been rolled out during the sovereign debt crises to back the troubled governments and to ease the crisis have consisted of a few ad hoc attempts at stringing up a metaphorical tarpaulin and calling it a roof.so the eurozone is still rolling from crisis to crisis, from botched temporary fix to botched temporary fix, and the outcome of this has been an epic depression and massive unemployment .so what's keeping the problem from being fixed? in my view, cultural and political barriers. as frances coppola argues : "the history of europe is long and blood-spattered. it is nothing like the united states, which is a young country with a common language, clear boundaries and a single political structure. yes, the usa fought a civil war to achieve its current degree of political unity, and there are no doubt still stresses and strains. but europe – if you must regard it as one entity, which is problematic in itself – has fought hundreds of civil wars. we do not have a single language, we still cannot agree where our boundaries should fall and national interests always trump "european" politics. you can’t overturn tribal and cultural identities that go back thousands of years at the stroke of a few politicians’ pens."so while the u.s. federal government redistributes money across state boundaries, from richer states to poorer state, the german public balks at the idea of direct fiscal transfers to prop up the finances of the periphery, and so the e.u. forces self-defeating austerity measures on peripheral governments, compounding the crisis and worsening the unemployment.yet even in this time of self-regurgitating crisis, the concept of european integration remains beloved of the technocratic european elites, as well as most significantly the european public at large (with britain the major exception).undoubtedly there are clear threats to the status quo. the major one is large numbers of unemployed, hungry people. as mass unemployment has been allowed to take hold, the radical nationalist right is ascendant, most prominently in greece and in france , but also across the eurozone in general . and the radical left — some elements of which also seek a breakup of the euro — is also prospering in these harsh times.but for all the blundered policy and mess, i don't think the failure of the euro is imminent. indeed, next year may mark something of an upward turning point for the continent in its long struggle with economic depression. the big story — as it is in much of the rest of the world — is energy markets. in my view, falling energy prices are a boon for the european economy , as europe is a major importer of energy. cheaper energy — which trickles down throughout the economy via transport prices, heating prices, etc — will take the heat off squeezed household, business and government budgets which have been eaten into by high energy prices ever since the financial crisis. that should put some wind into the tattered sails of the european economy and create new desperately-needed jobs.and while i recognize that that may just mean a temporary respite from the long road toward the inevitable breakup of the euro, i also recognize the possibility that the european political elites — who clearly do understand the need for a fiscal union, even if they think it is politically unviable — may use this chance to begin to fix the broken system.sometimes, incompetent policymakers just get lucky. the possibility that next year could mark a bottoming out for the eurozone is real, and growing with the falling oil prices.
 draghi's own words on ecb purchase plan, inflationmario draghi gave his strongest signal yet that the european central bank is likely to start large-scale government-bond purchases by saying he can’t rule out deflation in the euro area.the ecb president seldom gives interviews and his comments to the german newspaper handelsblatt reflect a drive to win over that nation. policy makers there have led criticism of quantitative easing, saying it threatens financial stability, reduces the incentive for governments to restructure their economies, and is legally tricky.“the risk cannot be entirely excluded, but it is limited,” draghi said when asked if the region could enter a spiral of declining prices, falling wages and postponed spending. “we have to act against such risk.”while bundesbank president jens weidmann has argued that more action is unwarranted as slumping oil costs provide an economic stimulus, others have warned that the drop in crude prices could tip the currency bloc into full-fledged deflation. data next week is forecast in a bloomberg survey to show euro-area consumer prices dropped 0.1 percent in december from a year earlier, the first decline since 2009.“traditional hawks who had wanted to stick to standard monetary-policy instruments in the wake of the worst financial crisis in 80 years have been proven wrong and wrong again,” said holger schmieding , chief economist at berenberg bank in london . “instead of inflation and moral hazard as the feared result of some non-standard policies, the euro zone is getting ever closer to deflation.”the single currency dropped to the weakest level in more than four years and bond yields slid to a record low as investors bet that qe will start as soon as this quarter. the euro was down 0.6 percent to $1.2034 at 2:23 p.m. frankfurt time. the yield on 10-year spanish (gspg10yr) government debt fell 7 basis points to 1.54 percent.“we are in technical preparations to alter the size, speed and composition of our measures at the beginning of 2015, should this become necessary, to react to a too-long period of low inflation,” draghi said in the interview. “there’s unanimity in the ecb council on that.”the 25-member governing council will review a qe package at its next monetary-policy meeting on jan. 22. an interim meeting will be held on jan. 7 -- the same day the euro-area inflation data are published.“the risk that we don’t fulfill our mandate of price stability is higher than it was six months ago,” draghi said. asked how much the ecb might spend on government bonds , he answered that “it’s difficult to say.”the qe battle is being fought partly in the pages of german media. peter praet, the ecb’s chief economist, told boersen-zeitung this week that officials can’t look through the drop in oil prices as the risk of second-round effects is “higher than usual.” vice president vitor constancio told wirtschaftswoche last month that the ecb wants to prevent a “dangerous vicious circle of declining prices, rising real wage costs, falling profits, shrinking demand and further declining prices.”weidmann said in an interview with the frankfurter allgemeine sonntagszeitung newspaper on dec. 28 that the ecb mustn’t bow to market pressure to start government-bond purchases.draghi said after the last monetary-policy meeting on dec. 4 that he’s confident a stimulus program can be designed to secure consensus in the governing council, though unanimity isn’t necessary. one stumbling block is how to share the risk of buying bonds, according to governing council member klaas knot.“as long as europe isn’t politically willing to share more risks within the euro zone, it’s not up to us to take such a decision ourselves via the back door,” the dutch central-bank governor told de volkskrant newspaper this week.in the handelsblatt interview, which was published in german, draghi said economic growth in the euro area will remain weak unless european governments press ahead with reforms.“important structural reforms -- more flexible labor markets, less bureaucracy, lower taxes -- are coming too slowly,” he said. “it is very clear that our monetary policy would be more effective if governments implemented structural reforms.”to contact the reporters on this story: jana randow in frankfurt at jrandow@bloomberg.net ; alessandro speciale in frankfurt at aspeciale@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: fergal o’brien at fobrien@bloomberg.net paul gordonpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 consumer-goods companies revise strategy in face of sluggish global economy, waning emerging-market sales growthbangalore, india—a. ragini earns around $130 a month as a nanny in this city of nearly 10 million, just about the average wage in india. after paying for food and shelter, she has little cash to spare.ms. ragini recently noticed the price of her favorite soap, unilever plc’s hamam, had gone up to 24 rupees, or about 39 cents, from 16 rupees. it...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 hayes always pictured texas as a land of larger-than-life belt buckles and oversized pickup trucks. but he kept hearing about the great quality of life from his brother-in-law, pete paule, an insurance professional who left simi valley for texas in 2012.it took one visit to persuade hayes to follow suit. he quickly found a similar teaching job in an affluent school district north of dallas in 2013, and for the first time in years a dream home appears within reach."if we stayed in california to buy a house, in my opinion we would have to settle," said hayes, 47. "now we can be picky and choose the house we want."the large flow of middle- and lower-income workers out of california is a trend that dates to at least the late 1980s, according to demographic expert william frey, a senior fellow at the brookings institution in washington.during the last decade, out-migration from california peaked during the housing boom. the trend continued during and after the great recession, though at a slower pace.the biggest recipients of the state's out-migration have been texas and other western states such as arizona, nevada, washington and oregon."for a while now, the new frontier has not been 'go west, young man,'" frey said. "it's 'go east,' if you're in california."but the influx of higher-income, college-educated migrants from other states to california has been on the upswing since the recession, according to census data.that shift has pros and cons.attracting skilled workers with greater spending power means a boost for tax revenue and helps to retain innovative companies seeking a talented workforce. but it puts pressure on those in the middle — workers who have certificates or associate's degrees that fill crucial positions in industries such as healthcare.according to the census data from 2007 to 2013, one of the largest groups of workers leaving california was those who had more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree."for the people who can afford to go there, get the jobs and do well, the cost of living is not as much a problem," frey said. "it's just difficult to live there in the middle."
 three months ago we announced coin center, and in that time we have been incredibly busy building the new organization. today, as we launch our website, i’d like to tell you a bit more about us, what we’ve been up to, and where we plan to go.coin center is an educational and research institution focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies. think of us as a think tank for blockchain technology. our mission is to build a better understanding of the technology in order to promote a regulatory climate that preserves maximum freedom of action for digital currency innovation. we are not a trade association or an industry group. our job is not to represent any particular company, or industry, or currency, but instead it is to advocate for the freedom to innovate using blockchain technology.success for us is a world in which regulators, the media, and the public understand what cryptocurrency technologies are (and aren’t) and why they’re important. a world in which technologists can continue to enjoy the freedom to tinker. a world in which entrepreneurs can confidently make the promise of cryptocurrency a reality for consumers. yet one of the greatest potential impediments to that world is overburdensome regulation.we are pragmatists and understand that certain uses of cryptocurrency technologies will be regulated. as a result, the key to preserving the freedom to innovate is to make sure regulators take a sensible approach. we can help ensure this by engaging policymakers and regulators in dialog and serving as a useful resource. what we hope to offer them–as well as the media and the public at large–is education and research.education about the technologies and how they work, their challenges and promises, and how their use implicates certain regulations is vital. without a clear understanding of the technology, it’s easy to get the policy wrong. and as we engage in a dialog with regulators, novel policy and legal questions emerge. our research aims to answer these questions and identify the unintended consequences to which some policy choices can lead.to these ends, over the past three months we’ve met with and begun a conversation with policymakers across government–from members of congress and their staff, to regulatory agencies including fincen, the consumer financial protection bureau, and the federal trade commission and the commodity futures trading commission. we have also been a part of the dialogue–providing testimony to the cftc’s first ever hearing on bitcoin, and filing comments in new york’s ongoing bitlicense proceeding. we’ve also spoken on various panels and events hosted by the world bank, cardozo law, new york law school, american banker, and the electronic transactions association. and just before the thanksgiving break bloomberg asked us to moderate a panel of regulators including cftc commissioner mark wetjen, fincen director jennifer shasky calvery, and former sec chairman arthur levitt.in the coming months we plan to continue our engagement and education. for example, later today i’ll be speaking on a panel for the d.c. bar association looking at bitcoin and the cfpb. later this month we’ll begin dipping our toe internationally as our research director, peter van valkenburgh, will be presenting on cryptocurrency and regulation at an emerging technology event for eu parliamentarians . and along with these public events, we’ll continue to meet privately with policymakers.we’ve got an amazing team of dedicated professionals working full time to get the public policy affecting cryptocurrencies right, and we’re incredibly fortunate to have the board, advisors, and contributors that we do. that said, we need your help, too.while some of the leading companies  and venture capitalists in the bitcoin space are generously helping us get off the ground, our aim is to be as broad-based as possible. we hope you’ll consider supporting coin center’s work with a donation. in addition to our gratitude and hard work you will also receive a thank you t-shirt and a regular update memo from me. whether you decide to support us today or not, please sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on twitter to get our latest updates.we think bitcoin and block chain technologies have a bright future, but it’s going to take a lot of work. we’ve been doing that work, we’re going to continue, and we’re excited to start sharing that journey with you.
 the sharp drop in fuel prices is undermining government policies that bet expensive gasoline would prod americans to find alternatives to gas-guzzling automobiles.in recent years, the federal government required passenger cars and trucks to become much more fuel-efficient, with a goal to more than double average miles per gallon by 2025. more than a dozen states ordered auto makers to boost sales of electric vehicles, helped by billions of dollars in federal spending. and president barack obama’s administration...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 the share of people under age 30 who own private businesses has reached a 24-year-low, according to new data, underscoring financial challenges and a low tolerance for risk among young americans.roughly 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned stakes in private companies, according to an analysis by the wall street journal of recently released federal reserve data from 2013. that compares with 10.6% in 1989—when the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 but is the future so grim? a growing number of big companies are bringing capital and management expertise into the area. tata, india’s biggest company, established a division devoted to affordable housing, tata value homes, in 2009. mahindra & mahindra has a similar venture, called lifespaces. other organisations—from ngos to management consultants—are bringing new ideas or rethinking old ones.a report by the mckinsey global institute (mgi) provides a good summary of one approach to the problem: applying economies of scale and scope to a fragmented industry. value & budget housing corporation, a privately owned indian firm, mass-produces aluminium modules that can be slotted together into apartments of various sizes. china’s broad group can build a 30-storey block on a completed foundation in just 15 days, again using many factory-made parts. the mgi report notes that there is still vast scope for cutting the cost of building materials. indian builders are making significant savings by using bricks made from fly ash, a waste product from coal-fired power plants. britain has reduced the cost of raw materials for social housing by up to 30% since 2010 by establishing purchasing consortia.there are some obvious objections to this sort of top-down approach. the rich world’s great post-war experiment with the mass-production of housing was a disaster. much of it soon degenerated into little more than vertical slums. this was partly because of shoddy construction: some blocks of flats from the 1960s and 1970s were so badly built that they were demolished in the 1980s. but it is also because people like their houses to have a human touch: nobody wants to live in something that feels as if it were built by a machine. many of the solutions to the housing problem will need to come from the bottom of the pyramid. slum-dwellers are constantly fixing up their dwellings and many ngos now prefer to work with them to make incremental improvements rather than designing new homes from scratch.however, system-built housing does not have to be shoddy or impersonal. huf haus of germany has been building high-end prefabricated houses since 1912. adaptahaus, a british firm, specialises in homes that can be reconfigured as a family’s needs change. ikea of sweden sells flat-pack houses that can be customised. furthermore, big companies can help people to self-build a personalised home while enjoying economies of scale: cemex of mexico provides self-builders with access to cheap fixtures and fittings, and cheap finance, as well as cement.the report acknowledges that to fix the housing problem one has to solve a lot of others: obtaining land and getting permits; persuading banks to provide mortgages to poorer people; and getting sluggish utility firms to provide electricity and water connections. land is particularly tricky. people want to live where the jobs are, usually in the middle of cities, and once they are entrenched they want to make sure that they are not overlooked or overcrowded. but the report includes several good ideas for improving the supply of land. for instance, governments frequently own large chunks of undeveloped land in city centres, if they only bother to look. turkey’s national housing agency, toki, has assembled 4,120 square kilometres (1,600 square miles), equivalent to 4% of the country’s entire urban area, by buying it from other state bodies. property speculators often sit on chunks of prime city land; to discourage this, china’s government slaps a 20% tax on the value of tracts left undeveloped for a year. giving slum-dwellers formal title to their properties can also encourage them to join in efforts to redevelop run-down districts.however, putting all this together is hard and, particularly in democracies, provides plenty of scope for nimbys and vested interests to block progress. (authoritarian china bulldozes through such opposition—but many of the buildings it has thrown up over the past couple of decades are ageing badly.) even so, this is an argument for advancing on several fronts at once, not a counsel of despair. big firms such as tata can use their muscle to solve problems such as the supply of land and the availability of cheap finance. ngos such as habitat for humanity have become good at persuading governments to provide the small sums that will help slum-dwellers improve their homes with such things as indoor toilets. there is no reason why the “capitalist achievement” cannot be applied to providing people with decent housing, just as it has provided them with a limitless supply of stockings.
 regulation: cures for cancer and ebola having been found, the federal ubernannies have decreed that sprinkles should no longer adorn kids' ice cream because they contain the trans fat that liberal groups once pushed for.come the new year, the food and drug administration, ignoring the principle that in most cases it's the dose that defines the poison, will issue new regulations designed to remove even trace amounts of hydrogenate oils, commonly known as trans fats, from our diets.trans fats have been in our foods since the 1950s to increase shelf life and improve taste. a small amount appears naturally in some foods, but research has determined that large quantities of trans fats in one's diet can be dangerous for long-term health.but so can large quantities of bacon, and no one has proposed banning bacon, at least not yet, but we're sure that thought has occurred to those who want 16-ounce soft drinks banned while forcing our children to eat cardboard school lunches.each american consumes a mere 1.3 grams of trans fats per day. that's roughly 0.6% of our total daily calories, and no research suggests that this poses a health risk. but that's not enough to dissuade the federal nannies from regulating even the most minute aspect of our daily lives.the irony here is that trans fats were once pushed by liberal groups such as the center for science in the public interest. this poster child for the food police in 1988 published a book titled "saturate fat attack" that condemned the use of saturated and polyunsaturated fats then in vogue. food companies soon switched to trans fats, a move for which cspi proudly took credit.in its nutrition action newsletter on march 1, 1988, cspi not only downplayed health risks associated with trans fats but promoted them as a health benefit. it even cited a study that found a "significant positive correlation" between trans fats in animal fats and cancer rates.the nanny state that tells us what cars we should drive, what energy we must use and what health insurance we must buy has told mothers what they can put in their children's school lunches and even whether they can take mom-made lunches to school at all. slurpees and now sprinkles are a health hazard, according to those who mysteriously know what's good for us.we'd suggest that freer societies are healthier societies, and that government can have our sprinkle-covered cupcakes when they can pry them from our cold, dead, frosting-stained hands.
 the science fair "story of electronics" comic books .  within these colorful comic books, a teacher instructs her      students on the history of science, giving lessons on astronomy,      space travel, electricity, electronics, energy, computers, and      new developments in electronics. these educational comic books,      were published by radio shack for elementary school students and      helped tandy/radio shack introduce their brand to the consumers      of tomorrow.some key dates for radio      shack:1963: tandy buys the      radioshack chain.           electronics stores      are acquired.1988: grid systems      corporation is acquired.1991: computer city chain is      launched.1992: incredible universe      retail concept debuts.1995: video concepts is      closed down.1998: computer city chain is      sold to compusa;           radioshack forms      alliance with compaq.
rt @maxcroser: it took #japan a very long time to realise that the decline of fertility wasn't temporary.

 closing remarks by vitor gaspar, director of fiscal affairs departmentas the conference is coming to an end, i want to thank you for coming and participating in fiscal affairs department (fad)’s 50th anniversary conference.my talk will be about fad and public finances for the 21st century.my talk is organized in three parts:first, looking back, i will argue that fad has responded to the challenges of the times.second, looking forward, i will argue—as was clear from today’s conference—that public finances will be at the top of the policy agenda.and third, i will conclude with a claim that fad will build on synergies with stakeholders and across work streams to stay as a center of excellence in public finance and to play a leading role in shaping the policy agenda and capacity building on structural fiscal issues.as we look to fad’s future, we are inspired by fad’s ability over the years to focus on the challenges of the times. today, vito, teresa and carlo have reminded us of the changing emphasis of fiscal policy over time. they also remind us that many fiscal issues are timeless.the imf was created as part of a peacetime system of international organizations to solve disputes through dialogue. international cooperation would substitute for war.at the fund’s inception, fiscal policy was not a matter for international cooperation. instead it was regarded as a centerpiece of national macroeconomic policy making.but in the 1960s, the imf’s membership expanded into newly independent states in africa and asia. these countries called for assistance to establish their fiscal institutions.the imf eventually created fad in 1964. here you see a picture from fad’s first technical assistance report in 1965 on tax administration in liberia. technical assistance and capacity building in imf member countries lies at the root of fad. it is in its dna.since then, fad has continued to respond to the challenges of the times.it extended its coverage of technical assistance to all regions around the world.it expanded its work from tax policy issues into other areas of public finance.it strengthened its research activities, for example on the impact of inflation on tax revenues, which came to be known as the tanzi effect.it provided support to countries seeking financial stability following crisis or countries needing structural reform.it also increased its focus on fiscal sustainability and crisis prevention.going forward, public finances will be at the top of the policy agenda.policy makers need to deal with the legacies from the financial crisis.they also need to deal with new evolutionary dynamics that will transform public finances.i will give you a couple of examples. i could give you many. the presentation that i will make available at the end of this session has some supplementary material. i will start with high public debt, and then cover others more briefly.in history, the build-up of public debt was mostly associated with war.this chart shows debt to gdp ratios for advanced and emerging markets from 1880 to 2014.as you can see, wwi raised debt significantly in several advanced economies. debt in the u.k. climbed to 196 percent of gdp. in france, it reached 237 percent of gdp.debt levels fell somewhat before rising again during the great depression.wwii again brought debt up, this time to 270 percent of gdp in the u.k., and 120 percent of gdp in the united states. the imf started in times of very high public debt.the imf started in times of very high public debt.debt to gdp fell dramatically in the aftermath of the war.real interest rates in many countries were kept low. sometimes even negative.monetary and financial policies were subordinated to the priority to keep treasury financing costs low.strong post-war economic growth also contributed.by the 1960s new pressures emerged.in the u.s., for example, finances were strained by the vietnam war and great society programs.the late 1960s opened the way to the great inflation.the bretton woods system collapsed in 1971.the oil price shocks in the 1970s further impacted finances.general government deficits became high and persistent.by the mid-1970s, public debt was on an upward trajectory.the global financial crisis led public debt to levels not seen since wwii.debt in the u.s., u.k. and several euro area countries approached 100 percent of gdp.how can policymakers bring debt down to safer levels? what are the incentives within political systems that push or resist fiscal reform?we will explore such questions and those of the “political economy of high public debt” at the fiscal forum this coming spring.another major issue is income inequality.in 1944, the main focus was divergence across countries. the main question was “how can poorer countries catch up to richer ones?” since then we have recorded many inspiring stories of successful convergence. in the last few years lidcs have weathered the economic and financial headwinds relatively well.more recently, the focus has turned to inequality within national borders.in his book “capital in the twenty-first century”, piketty documents rising inequality in many countries. his focus on the income share of the top percentile or the top decile caught up as a political slogan. a rare distinction for an academic. this chart shows income inequality in the u.s. from 1910 to 2010. as you can see, income inequality in 2010 is at levels last seen in the 1920s.bank bailouts during the crisis, fiscal adjustment, and high unemployment in many countries have put pressure on governments to address income inequality.fad has done much work on this topic over the years. we explore the issue further in our upcoming book on inequality and the role of fiscal policy, to be released next fall.let me turn to demographic changes.declining fertility rates have significant effects on public finances.this chart shows the fertility rate in japan from 1965 to its forecast for 2060. it has fallen well below the replacement rate. the chart also shows that fertility rate forecasts are highly uncertain, with sizeable revisions. just look at the 1976 forecast. the fertility rate was supposed to recover. it did not. this was repeated in 1986 and 1992. the long run effects on population dynamics are profound.is japan an example of what lies ahead for the rest of the world? will we be dealing with the public finance implications of declining populations?this is the theme of our forthcoming staff discussion note on the “fiscal consequences of shrinking populations”, to be issued mid-next year.gender is another important issue drawing our attention.women make up a little over half the world’s population. however, female labor force participation is sharply below male participation in many countries. this chart shows male labor force participation on the x-axis and female participation on the y-axis. you can see that the distance to the diagonal is remarkably high in many cases.higher female labor force participation can boost growth by mitigating the impact of a shrinking workforce. better opportunities for women can also contribute to broader economic development.how can tax and expenditure policies be designed to effectively boost women’s economic opportunities?we can look to the examples of brazil and sweden.over the past two decades, brazil’s female labor force participation rate increased by 15 percentage points to almost 60 percent. this was achieved through targeted reforms that removed restrictions in access to resources and entitlements for women.in sweden, concerns with population dynamics and the possibility of shrinking population were already present in the 1930s. now sweden has a fertility rate at about the replacement ratio. also, the gap between male and female labor force participation rate is only 6 percent. this is attributed to a generous parental leave policy, child care coverage, and job guarantees.in the coming months, the imf will analyze gender issues in a number of countries.let me now turn to the concluding part of my talk: fad’s strategy going forward.fad aims to play a leading role in setting the global policy agenda on structural fiscal issues.we will build on fad’s success by working better together.we engaged in an extensive consultation process within fad and with external stakeholders to identify the strong points of fad and how to bring fad to the next level.we identified 5 strategic priorities.at the center of the strategy: synergies.we will take advantage of synergies within fad, within the fund, and with its membership.we will take advantage of synergies with donors, academics, and international organizations.synergies will allow us to meet our other strategic priorities.synergies will build on fad’s expertise across a wide and diverse range of issues. we could have listed more but ran out of slide space.fad has the largest concentration of fiscal experts under one roof.we will also build synergies drawing on our insight on “how to” implement fiscal reforms.fad engages with countries across the world through technical assistance advice and policy advice in conjunction with area department country teams. this map shows the countries where fad has provided technical assistance or where an fad fiscal economist participates in country teams.we will continue to serve as the center of interaction on fiscal issues within the fund. this is an emphasis that teresa gave to the department during her tenure. she enhanced significantly fad’s support to country teams. we continue to see this at the core of our work.we want to anticipate policy issues and debates. again we will use synergies inside and outside fad.as you can see from this slide, we have already put in place the adequate analytical tools in order to do so.fad provides important contributions to the global policy debate.this through numerous publications, as noted in this slide.fad has also increased its participation in the global policy debate through the fiscal monitor, established in 2009 under carlo’s leadership.the department also promotes fiscal policy dialogue between our members through the fiscal forum—a network of senior ministry of finance officials who meet every spring.we will advance our research agenda by focusing on 5 analytical priorities. you will notice that these priorities tie in with the challenges that i highlighted earlier in my presentation.as i contemplated on the political economy of fiscal policy, i looked for a reference: public choice analysis in historical perspective by alan peacock. to my amusement, when i received the book from the library, i saw that vito was the first to check the book from what was still the fiscal library.to remain at the frontier of the fiscal policy agenda, we will launch an annual lecture series in honor of richard goode. we will call on top academics to contribute, and invite a broad audience of policy makers, academics, and representatives from international organizations.we want to enrich our policy advice by making use of the wealth of data from our technical assistance work and close links with our members on fiscal issues.let me illustrate with an example of an ongoing project, the revenue administration fiscal information tool, ra-fit.ra-fit provides a single platform for data gathering and dissemination on revenue administration performance at an international level. ra-fit includes data related to tax and customs administration from 86 administrations. we eventually want to cover all 188 imf members.we will continue to develop this priority, including through a dedicated data management team in the department.we aim for the highest effectiveness of our services through a results oriented approach.we have a clear work program in this direction.for example, our reports to donors are adding greater focus on results based management. this included a stronger focus on project results and a clearer assessment of key project risks.we will continue to build an understanding of the links between technical assistance delivery and outcomes. this will increase the impact of advice on the achievement of long-term development goals.let me now give you a flavor of how we see synergies working, using as an example our ongoing work on the efficiency of public investment.growth is lackluster in many countries. the chart shows potential gdp forecasts for 2014 and 2015 across different weo vintages starting in october 2010. as you can see, potential gdp growth has been consistently revised downward.an increase in infrastructure investment could benefit many countries. it can raise output immediately by creating jobs. it can raise output over the medium-term by enhancing productive capacity.however, the benefits of public investment will only come if it is efficiently planned, allocated, and executed. this requires strong public investment management institutions.this chart shows on the x-axis the real public capital stock per capita. on the y-axis, an often-used measure of the quality of infrastructure from the global competiveness report.as you can see, some countries do not achieve the quality of infrastructure they could, given their high public capital stocks. this helps illustrate that in many countries, public investment can be done better. common problems include weak project appraisal, delays in completing projects, and cost overruns.but how, specifically, can government strengthen their public investment management practices?this is precisely the focus of fad’s work. we are carrying out a new analysis of the role of fiscal institutions in promoting efficient public investment. to do so, we are exploiting synergies within fad, bringing together our expertise on public financial management and expenditure policy.our analysis identifies key public investment management institutions for efficient planning, allocation, and execution of investment. it then assesses their impact on a range of indicators of performance (such as the volatility of investment spending and execution of investment budgets).we rely on diverse methodological approaches, including 36 case studies. our analysis will also allow us to build a tool that we can use to provide technical assistance.let me leave you with this last image. it is an image that we often use as our banner in fad: the effects of good government on city life, fresco painted by ambrogio lorenzetti in siena from 1338 to 1339.interestingly, this fresco was painted on the eve of the first true international debt crisis. edward iii of england had borrowed heavily from florentine bankers to finance his wars with france. after a series of military failures, in 1340, edward defaulted on some of his debts. that led to the ruin of the house of bardi and peruzzi.many fiscal issues are timeless.we at fad have an ambitious work plan ahead. we will strive to be a leading center of excellence on public finances in the global economy. we will strive to provide the highest quality advice to promote sustainable and equitable growth.fad will continue to support countries around the world in achieving good government. lorenzetti’s fresco shows early fourteenth-century citizens engaged in diverse economic activities such as constructing new buildings, selling merchandise, teaching, baking, banking. as you can see from lorenzetti’s painting, good government makes happiness and prosperity for the people possible. that is why it is fad’s banner. it shows we care.before i close the conference: thank you!i want to thank vito, teresa and carlo; all speakers and participants that made this event memorable. and i want to express my deep appreciation to all fad for 50 memorable years; and their commitment to excellence going forward.last but not least, i would like to thank the organizers of the event for their excellent job in making this conference a success. in particular, i thank geremia palomba, debra adams, kerstin gerling, muriel jolivert, marina marinkov, jimmy mchugh, carlos mulas granados, masahiro nozaki, juliana peña, and beelan yonas. i also thank laura jaramillo for coordinating this presentation and haoyu wang who helped her in putting it together.
 lab-grown muscle isn't new. in 2013, a group of researchers created enough muscle to make a  burger that they could eat . but until recently, researchers weren't able to grow muscle that could contract in response to an external stimuli. now, researchers at duke university are reporting that they have successfully grown contracting muscle in the lab. the finding, a bioengineering first, means that we may finally be able to engineer muscle that not only looks and feels like real muscle, but that acts like it, too.to grow contracting muscle in the lab, the researchers started out with a sample of human muscle cell precursors. then, they expanded the cells and placed them on 3d scaffolding filled with a nourishing gel. according to the researchers, it took a year to develop the right "recipe," but eventually they figured it out: when the researchers subjected the lab-grown muscle to electrical stimuli, it contracted. moreover, the researchers were able to show that the nerve signaling pathways in the muscle were functional.being able to create muscle in a lab that can mimic normal muscle behavior is a big step for medicine. doctors may soon be able to use this technology to accurately predict the effect of various drugs on the human body, without putting anyone in danger. furthermore, researchers might one day be able to use biopsied cells to grow muscle that can be used to tailor treatments to individual patients.the researchers have already demonstrated that the lab-grown muscle's response to cholesterol and performance enhancement drugs matches that of regular human muscle. they now plan to delve more deeply into the effects of various drugs on the muscle. eventually, they would like to find a way to grow the muscle from stem cells, instead of biopsied cells."there are a some diseases, like duchenne muscular dystrophy for example, that make taking muscle biopsies difficult," nenad bursac, study co-author and duke university biomedical engineer, said in a press release . "if we could grow working, testable muscles from induced pluripotent stem cells, we could take one skin or blood sample and never have to bother the patient again."verge video archives: biohacking: growing bones in a lab (top shelf, season 3)
 washington — on friday, the supreme court announced that it will be deciding the question of same-sex couples’ marriage rights this year.left unsaid, however, was the fact that the outcome is almost certain: nationwide marriage equality by july of this year.since the supreme court struck down the defense of marriage act’s ban on federal marriage recognition in 2013, the nation’s lower courts have created significant momentum toward this moment.but it is the supreme court’s actions over the past 15 weeks, and the broad set of cases the court agreed on friday to hear this spring , that makes the coming ruling practically preordained.by issuing several orders in recent months allowing for more and more same-sex couples to be marrying in more and more states, the supreme court has made nationwide marriage equality a far less radical decision. it also has made it so that a decision upholding state marriage bans as constitutional would cause significant, difficult problems.the supreme court has, in fact, played the key role in creating the national landscape that now exists: same-sex couples are marrying in, at least parts of, 37 states and washington, d.c.on oct. 5, 2014, that number was 19 states and d.c.and though there have been no opinions explaining why the supreme court has done what it has done since then and though the decisions do not, technically, bind the court, there is at least a majority of the court comfortable creating this landscape, which would be difficult and extraordinarily painful to undo.in that time, the supreme court’s actions have directly or indirectly led to same-sex couples being allowed to marry in 14 of the additional states with same-sex couples marrying now.the justices, on oct. 6, 2014, denied five states’ requests for the court to hear their cases and reverse the appeals court decisions that struck down marriage bans. that decision to deny those writs of certiorari meant same-sex couples began marrying in those states, as well as in six other states within those appeals court circuits.then, the supreme court refused to issue stays (or holds) of lower court rulings in idaho and later alaska while the states attempted to appeal the rulings. those orders, which came with no reasoning, followed the decision of the 9th circuit court of appeals to strike down idaho and nevada’s bans. because there already was an appeals court ruling in favor of marriage equality that applied to those states, the orders were seen as being similar to the court’s oct. 6 decision.but then, on dec. 19, 2014, the supreme court denied a stay during florida’s appeal of the federal marriage case challenging its ban. in florida, unlike in any of the other states where the justices allowed same-sex couples to begin marrying, the appeals court for that circuit had not ruled on the issue.this decision by a majority of the justices to allow same-sex couples to marry while appeals are ongoing — and before the supreme court has resolved the issue itself — means that a majority of the court is comfortable with that reality becoming the default.more than that, the decision to allow same-sex couples to marry before the supreme court has decided the issue creates more legitimacy for an eventual decision striking down the bans by increasing the number of states where same-sex couples already can marry. at this point, a decision striking down such bans nationwide only changes the situation in 15 states. before the justices started down this path on oct. 6, 2014, it would have meant changing the law of more than 30 states.additionally though, and perhaps making the outcome of this spring’s supreme court showdown even more certain, the supreme court would be opening up an unprecedented mess if it upheld the bans now as being constitutional.april deboer, right, speaks as her partner jayne rowse, left, looks on during a news conference in ferndale, mich., friday, jan. 16, 2015. the couple is challenging michigan’s ban on same-sex couples’ marriages. ap paul sancyaif the justices rule that kentucky, michigan, ohio, and tennessee’s bans are constitutional, that means that questions are going to be raised — and litigation is going to be filed — over the legitimacy of the now-closed cases in which review was denied in october 2014. in fact, the same thing would happen as to any state in which marriage equality was the result of a court decision that the ban was unconstitutional under the u.s. constitution.more striking, there would be questions raised — as already have been raised in michigan — about the validity of marriages entered into by same-sex couples during the times when the respective state bans were declared unconstitutional.it is almost incomprehensible to imagine the majority that created this landscape would turn around and force the rest of the country to take these painful steps to tear it apart.but all actions suggest there is a majority of the court that does not wish to see that and plans, after april’s arguments, to craft a ruling striking down those remaining bans and bringing nationwide uniformity to the issue.the clearest indication that the court seeks uniformity: they took cases involving both marriage itself and recognition of same-sex couples’ marriages entered into out-of-state.although some have suggested that this means the court could consider ruling in favor of same-sex couples on the recognition issue while deciding against them on the marriage issue, such a decision would still create complex problems in states where same-sex couples have legally married. taking both issues is an “all in” approach that will require an “all in” decision.the past 15 weeks have shown, time and time again, that a majority of the supreme court is not only ready for, but has been preparing the country for, a decision enforcing nationwide protection of same-sex couples’ right to marry.chris geidner is the legal editor for buzzfeed news and is based in washington, d.c. in 2014, geidner won the national lesbian & gay journalists association award for journalist of the year.
rt @carlminzner: china's problematic use of performance targets, by @economist and @gadyepstein. http://t.co/blyptcof3q
 china’s central government relies on a wide range of targets to fulfil its policies, and those targets determine local officials’ prospects. two—keeping protests down and ensuring that the one-child policy is implemented—are almost always “veto” targets: an official who fails to meet them will in theory not get promoted. another, keeping gdp growth up, has long been seen as crucial to advancement.target-setting has contributed to china’s astonishing economic achievements. local governments have bent over backwards to boost growth. but targets have also contributed to vastly wasteful overinvestment and environmental disaster. the target of preventing public expressions of discontent has led to the incarceration of hundreds of dissidents in labour camps and psychiatric institutions, and the use of illegal “black jails” to lock up people who take their grievances to beijing. and the weight placed on the one-child target has led directly to the illegal barbarism of forced abortions.the central government admits that the system needs fixing. president xi jinping has insisted that gdp-attainment should no longer determine local leaders’ job prospects. in many places, environmental targets have been elevated to the position that the one-child policy has enjoyed, or so officials say. mr xi has abolished the “re-education through labour” camps in which dissenters were often interred without trial, and said officials should no longer be judged according to the number of petitioners from their areas who travel to beijing. “happiness indices”, based on surveys of public opinion, are sometimes used as a way of gauging performance. but that is hardly a remedy as the officials get to choose whom they survey.some places are still issuing new rules that reinforce incentives for local officials to misbehave. one township, for example, has threatened to fine the leaders of villages whose residents petition higher-level governments. black jails remain common. birth quotas have been relaxed, but not abolished—human-rights groups say forced abortions still occur. efforts by officials in shanghai to silence criticism of their handling of a deadly stampede on new year’s eve show how readily local governments brush off complaints (see article ).tweaking the rules will not solve the problem, which goes to the heart of the chinese system. the government does not have a methodology for getting officials to run their patches in a way which is effective, legal and commands the consent of the people. targets can increase government’s effectiveness, but they do so at the cost of legality and popularity.the only way of combining the three is to make officials accountable to the people, through elections. this would not be as radical a move as it sounds. the constitution, whose importance mr xi has extolled, entitles people to vote freely for local legislators, who have the theoretical power to dismiss officials. in practice only communist party stooges are allowed to stand. but if mr xi really wants officials to stop abusing citizens, he should introduce a system that makes them genuinely accountable. that would be a better way of discouraging protests than issuing targets to suppress them.
 
 a terrible threat stalks the streets of washington, dc: unlicensed tour guides. these brazen lawbreakers imperil the public by showing them around the nation’s capital without a permit. your correspondent went undercover to observe at first hand the dangers tourists face in their clutches. it was harrowing. first, your correspondent had to balance on a segway, a two-wheeled vehicle from which she could have fallen several inches to the cold, hard pavement. “just try to relax,” purred bill main, the outlaw guide, “it’s easy.” with white knuckles and a pink helmet, the tour began.mr main never took the exam to become a tour guide, so your correspondent braced herself to hear a torrent of errors. would he claim that the white house was once destroyed by aliens, as in the film “independence day”? no. actually, he was pretty good. yet he could be jailed for 90 days if caught. washington requires all guides to pay $200 and take an exam. that adds up: segs in the city, the firm mr main runs with his wife, tonia edwards, employs a dozen guides.
 this drone tech could lead you to a parking space, so kick and scream no morelate for a meeting and worried you won’t find parking? don’t worry: that drone flying above your car has got your back.it may be some time before that wonderful vision of the future comes to pass, but siemens thought enough of university of massachusetts dartmouth student amir ehsani zonouz’s concept for “intelligent parking drone technology” to name it the winner of the company’s first-ever mobility idea contest .the idea is pretty simple: a set of quadcopters could fly over parking-impacted urban areas, keeping track of available spaces. when someone drives into the area, the drones could signal to the driver — perhaps through a mobile app or the vehicle’s onboard communications system, or by flying ahead of the car — where to go to park.if you can resist the urge to think of the downsides (people crashing into the back of buses while trying to follow the drones, drivers shooting down the drones so they can swoop in on open spaces), it’s a fun idea. after all, we’ve all screamed and ranted at how hard it can be to find parking, and while there have been plenty of companies that have come along with systems that promise to make it easy, nobody has yet solved the problem. maybe that’s because they’re relying on data rather than being able to actually see open spaces from above.siemens was impressed enough by zonouz’s idea that it has committed to giving him access to a team of r&d experts. the company will also hold an innovation workshop aimed at building a fleshed-out prototype of his parking drone project.for now, however, you’re going to have to keep on parking the way you always have: circling the neighborhood, and hoping like crazy that person in front of you doesn’t grab the one spot that’s opening up down the block.
 jan. 7 (bloomberg) -- david woo of bank of america merrill lynch discusses falling oil prices and possible deflation in europe. he speaks on “bloomberg surveillance.”the plummeting price of oil means no more trout ice cream.coromoto, a parlor in merida, venezuela , famous for its 900 flavors, closed during its busiest season in november because of a milk shortage caused by the country’s 64 percent inflation rate, the world’s fastest.that’s the plight of an oil-producing nation. at the same time, consuming countries like the u.s. are taking advantage. trucks, which burn more gasoline, outsold cars in december by the most since 2005, according to data from ward’s automotive group.the biggest collapse in energy prices since the 2008 global recession is shifting wealth and power from autocratic petro-states to industrialized consumers, which could make the world safer, according to a berenberg bank ag report. surging u.s. shale supply, weakening asian and european demand and a stronger dollar are pushing oil past threshold after threshold to a five-and-half-year low, with a dip below $40 a barrel “not out of the question,” said rob haworth, a seattle-based senior investment strategist at u.s. bank wealth management, which oversees about $120 billion.“oil prices are the big story for 2015,” said kenneth rogoff, a harvard university economics professor. “they are a once-in-a-generation shock and will have huge reverberations.”travis simmons, a driver for yo-mac transport, stores a filling hose after delivering 7,500 gallons of unleaded gasoline to a shell station in peoria, illinois. closetravis simmons, a driver for yo-mac transport, stores a filling hose after delivering... read moretravis simmons, a driver for yo-mac transport, stores a filling hose after delivering 7,500 gallons of unleaded gasoline to a shell station in peoria, illinois.brent crude, the international benchmark, fell as low as $49.66 a barrel today, dropping below $50 for first time since 2009. prices dropped 48 percent in 2014 after three years of the highest average prices in history. west texas intermediate, the u.s. benchmark, plunged to as low as $46.83 today, about a 56 percent decline from its june high.“we see prices remaining weak for the whole of the first half” of 2015, said gareth lewis-davies, an analyst at bnp paribas in london.if the price falls past $39 a barrel, we could see it go as low as $30 a barrel, said walter zimmerman, chief technical strategist for united-icap in jersey city, new jersey, who projected the 2014 drop.“where prices bottom will be based on an emotional decision,” zimmerman said. “it won’t be based on the supply-demand fundamentals, so it’s guaranteed to be overdone to the downside.”the biggest winner would be the philippines , whose economic growth would accelerate to 7.6 percent on average over the next two years if oil fell to $40, while russia would contract 2.5 percent over the same period, according to an oxford economics ltd.’s december analysis of 45 national economies.among advanced economies, hong kong is the biggest winner, while saudi arabia, russia and the united arab emirates fare the worst, according to oxford economics.one concern of central bankers is the effect of falling oil prices on inflation. if crude remains below $60 per barrel this quarter, global inflation will reach levels not seen since the worldwide recession ended in 2009, according to jp morgan securities llc economists led by bruce kasman in new york.kasman and his team are already predicting global inflation to reach 1.5 percent in the first half of this year, while sustained weakness in oil suggest a decline to 1 percent, they said.the euro area would probably witness negative inflation, while rates in the u.s., u.k. and japan also would weaken to about 0.5 percent. for what it calls price stability, the federal reserve’s inflation target is 2 percent. emerging-market inflation would also fade although lower currencies and policies aimed at slowing the effects on retail prices may limit the fall.as for growth, a long-lasting price of $60 would add 0.5 percentage point to global gross domestic product, they estimate.even as cheaper fuel stimulates the global economy, it could aggravate political tension by squeezing government revenue and social benefits, citigroup inc. analysts said in a jan. 5 report.either way, previously unthinkable events now look more likely. byron wien, a blackstone group lp vice chairman, predicting that russian president vladimir putin will resign in 2015 and iran will agree to stop its nuclear program.iran is already missing tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue due to western sanctions and years of economic mismanagement under former president mahmoud ahmadinejad.president hassan rouhani, elected on a pledge of prosperity to be achieved by ending iran’s global isolation, is facing a falling stock market and weakening currency. iranian officials are warning of spending and investment cuts in next year’s budget, which will be based on $72-a-barrel crude. even that forecast is proving too optimistic.“iran will stumble along with less growth and development,” said djavad salehi-isfahani, a professor of economics at virginia tech in blacksburg, virginia, who specializes in iran’s economy. “the oil price fall is not reason enough for iran to compromise.”the russian economy may shrink 4.7 percent this year if oil averages $60 a barrel under a “stress scenario,” the central bank said in december. the plunge in crude prices prompted a selloff in the ruble with the russian currency falling to a record low against the dollar last month and tumbling 46 percent last year, its worst performance since 1998, when russia defaulted on local debt.“the risk is that, as a badly-wounded and cornered bear, russia may turn more aggressive in its increasing desperation, threatening global peace and the european economic outlook,” said holger schmieding, berenberg bank’s london-based chief economist. however, “the massive blow to russia’s economic capabilities should –- over time –- make it less likely that russia will wage another war.”russian oil production rose to a post-soviet record last month, showing how pumping of the nation’s biggest source of revenue has so far been unaffected by u.s. and european sanctions or a price collapse. the nation increased output to 10.667 million barrels a day, according to preliminary data from the energy ministry on jan. 2. that compares with global consumption of 93.3 million barrels a day, based on the international energy agency’s estimate for 2015.venezuela, which relies on oil for 95 percent of its export revenue, risks insolvency, jefferies llc said in a jan. 6 note. the cost of insuring the country’s five-year debt has tripled since july, citigroup said. president nicolas maduro is visiting china to discuss financing and expects to travel to other opec nations to work out a pricing strategy.the u.s., still a net oil importer, would accelerate economic growth to 3.8 percent in the next two years with oil at $40 a barrel, compared with 3 percent at $84, the oxford economics study found. the boost to consumers could be offset by oil companies’ scaling back investments, according to kate moore, chief investment strategist at jpmorgan private bank. producers are cutting spending by 20 percent to 40 percent, according to fadel gheit, an analyst at oppenheimer & co.the mixed picture is confounding investors. the standard & poor’s 500 index of u.s. equities fell 1.9 percent on jan. 5, the biggest decline since october, as oil brought down energy shares and stoked concerns that global growth is slowing.while cheaper oil helps consumers, business spending has a bigger effect on equities, and oil companies are set to cut investments. oil at $50 a barrel could trim $6 a share off earnings in the s&p 500 index this year, according to savita subramanian and dan suzuki, new york-based strategists at bank of america corp.bets on high energy prices have mashed share prices of companies such as ford motor co., tesla motors inc. and boeing co.fifth third bancorp (fitb) , one of the regional lenders that tried to chase the fracking boom, is down 12 percent since june 20.caterpillar inc., joy global inc., allegheny technologies inc., dover corp., jacobs engineering group and quanta services inc. are all down more than 20 percent since oil peaked at almost $108.despite those losses, morgan stanley last month concluded cheaper fuel is a net benefit for the u.s. economy.“any massive redistribution of income can raise political tensions,” schmieding of berenberg bank said in the jan. 6 report. “but, net/net, strengthening the u.s., europe, japan, china and india , while weakening russia, iran, saudi arabia and venezuela, is likely to make the world a safer place in the end.”brent traded at $50.88 a barrel and wti at $48.03 as of 12:03 p.m. london time.to contact the reporters on this story: isaac arnsdorf in new york at iarnsdorf@bloomberg.net ; simon kennedy in london at skennedy4@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: bob ivry at bivry@bloomberg.net bruce stanley, rachel grahampress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 is america’s economic boom(let) as good as it gets?call it what you  want — the new normal or secular stagnation or the not-so-great recovery — but is america’s extended bout of subpar economic performance over? while the “obama boom” may be more like a boomlet –we’re talking about a shift from a 2% economy to a 3% economy, not reagan-clinton era hypergrowth of 4% or 5% — acceleration is not stagnation. so, yay us. still, some cautionary notes from the ft’s ed luce :the us recovery is already mature — there is no clinton-style middle class boom around the corner. in spite of seven years of zero interest rates, the us has yet to clear the 3 per cent growth milestone. free money does not go far nowadays. long run trend growth has fallen from above 3 per cent to about 2 per cent. the us middle class has yet to regain its pre-2008 median income levels. it would take several years of 3 per cent growth for that to occur. the chances are this business cycle will come to an end in 2016 or 2017 without that having happened. … most americans are worse off than they were at the beginning of the 21st century, while the top sliver are dramatically richer. there is no reason to believe the us has found the answer to that. relative to most of europe, america’s middle class have better prospects, particularly in the short term. but in the long run, we are all subject to the same grand squeeze.just one little supporting data point from the wsj’s nick timiraos : from 2010 through 2013, median incomes rose for only the wealthiest 10% of households, according to a federal reserve survey. that looks like stagnation to me. so, too, the decline in labor force participation. another stagnation sign — assuming you think the data is measuring what it purports to — the  productivity of non-farm business workers has risen an average  of just 1% annually since the start of 2010, less than half the rate over the previous 15 years, according to bloomberg and data from the labor department.  yes, gdp and job growth have shifted into a higher gear — at least for a little while.as i wrote recently in the week , “policymakers need to build on this recent economic upturn with policies to reform k-12 education , improve college access and completion , repair our infrastructure , and lower barriers to business startups .” sure, i wouldn’t trade america’s economy for that of any other big, advanced economy. but that’s not really the point. we can and must do better. now is no time for a victory lap.
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 us attorney general eric holder talks to press. mark wilson/getty imagesget vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.the department of justice on friday curtailed a federal program that allowed police to seize and keep  cash, cars, and other private property without evidence of a crime, the washington post reported.local and state police will no longer be able to seize and keep private assets through the federal program unless they're working with federal authorities or the assets are directly linked to public safety concerns.items that can still be "adopted" by local and state departments working alone include firearms, ammunition, explosives, and property associated with child pornography.police have been heavily criticized for using the program to seize people's assets without evidence of a crime and pocketing the proceeds to fund their own departments.the federal program, expanded through the war on drugs , allowed local and state police departments to seize private property allegedly used for criminal purposes, even without evidence of a crime, and share the proceeds with federal agencies. police would keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds, while federal agencies claimed the rest.states still allow police to seize private assets, but  some of the state laws are more limited and force at least some of the proceeds to go to a state's general fund — instead of the police departments themselves.critics of the federal program said it created an incentive for police to unnecessarily stop and search people, since the seizures could be used to fund their own departments. a previous washington post investigation found police routinely seized property without any evidence of wrongdoing.the libertarian institute for justice praised holder's decision in a statement. but the group also criticized what the change leaves out: "[s]tate and local law enforcement can still partner with federal agents through joint task forces for forfeitures not permitted under state law, and state and local law enforcement can use such task forces to claim forfeiture proceeds they would not be entitled to under state law. moreover, the federal government can still pursue its own civil forfeiture actions, where property owners face very significant burdens. and the policy does not change state forfeiture laws, many of which burden property owners and permit policing for profit."
rt @erikbryn: 80% of consumers want mandatory labels on any food containing dna. http://t.co/p4xlkl0kja http://t.co/d6ppxgrehj
 the latest edition of the food demand survey (foods) is now out.we saw falls in consumer willingness-to-pay (wtp) for beef and pork products this month, and a slight uptick in wtp for chicken.  expected prices and spending patterns remained similar to last month.concern for all food issues rose, notably for bird flu and swine flu.  consumers noticed fewer stories about gmos in the news this month compared to last.we also added three new ad hoc questions this month.  86.5% of respondents support mandatory country of origin labels for meat. a large majority (82%) support mandatory labels on gmos, but curiously about the same amount (80%) also support mandatory labels on foods containing dna. the least popular policies were bans on transfats, bans on sales of marijuana, and a tax on sugared sodas. only about 39% of respondents supported a sugared soda tax. secondly, participants were asked “did you read any books about food and agriculture in the past year?”   just over 16% of participants stated that they had read a book related to food and agriculture in the past year.  about 81% answered “no”, and 3% answered “i don’t know”.those who answered “yes” were asked: “what is the title of the most recent book you read about food and agriculture?” the vast majority of responses were of the form “i don’t remember” or “cannot recall”. fast food nation, food inc., and omnivore’s dilemma were each mentioned about three times. the farmer’s almanac and skinny bitch were mentioned twice. one respondent mentioned the bible. addendum:  given the interest in this survey, i've added a subsequent post with more detail and discussion.
 casey muratori has been creating tools for games for well over a decade. he worked on bink 2, the ubiquitous video compression technology, as well as the granny animation sdk, way back in 1999. he's also done a fair amount of work on jonathan blow's upcoming the witness, rewriting the movement system and helping to extend the world editor. it's a surprise, then, that someone who has spent most of their career creating tools to help developers do the things they need to has decided to help people circumvent them.  handmade hero , muratori's latest project, is chronicling the development of a game made entirely from low-level programming.everything, from the basic game engine, to the rendering and audio, to the high-level game systems themselves, will be coded from scratch, and filmed while he's doing it. muratori hosts a regular twitch stream (weekdays, 8pm pst) of his work, explaining what he's doing as he's doing it, as well as putting the whole thing up on youtube.i talked to muratori about his motivations to make handmade hero, as well as the state of game engines in the industry today, and what the future might look like as they become more commonly used.can you explain what handmade hero is, as well as the intent behind it?sure! handmade hero is a combination of two things i've always wanted to do: 1) record 100% of the coding for an entire game, and 2) make a game where i wrote all of the code involved. and by "all of the code" i literally mean all of it. we're going to try to have a raspberry pi version at some point where it boots straight into the game -- no operating system, no graphics driver -- just like the old days. the intent is similarly half educational and half personal. the educational part is about showing how real, low-level game programming happens, minute-to-minute, in a way that people new to the discipline can watch and learn from. it's a much more direct, in-person way to learn programming than what you get form reading a book or a blog. i feel like it's a good way to teach programming, because at least personally, i've always learned the most from programming alongside more experienced programmers. there's something about watching someone program that you can't get from a book or a lecture. the personal part of the intent is about recapturing a little bit of game development history that i was born too late to be part of. i got into the industry just a few years after people stopped writing games, where, you know, you booted directly off the game disk and the game was the only thing running. those were the types of games i played as a kid, but i never got to make one like that commercially. this is also my chance to go back in time a little bit! so it's a personal goal for the project for me to make sure that, when it's done, it runs on at least one homebrew platform where we can take over the whole machine.the amount of time you've promised to invest in the development of handmade hero is not insignificant, and when you see it on paper it actually seems a little insane. what made you decide to commit so much time to it?well, i'm not getting any younger! so i decided if i was going to finally do a project where everything was recorded, i would have to do it pretty soon. i enjoy programming and i also enjoy explaining things, so really, an extra 10 hours a week of doing those things isn't too bad. plus, it's a project i really believe in, and it's always easier to make time for something you believe is important to do. it almost seems like handmade hero is a reaction to the ubiquity of game engines like unity and unreal, which have made it so easy for small developers to get a foot in the door of game development. do you think that ubiquity is a bad thing?no, on the whole i think it's a good thing. i think we want to have tools that allow people to make games quickly. we've undoubtedly already seen good games come about because of unity, unreal, flash, game maker etc., that never would have happened without them. but i do think there are two downsides to this trend, and they are downsides we can (and should) be taking steps to correct. the first problem is that if everyone in the next generation of game developers decides to use a pre-fab engine, who will be left to make the new engines? it may sound like a silly thing to say, but i think it's a real concern. game engines are extremely complex things that require a tremendous amount of knowledge to create and maintain. and that goes double for engines like unity and unreal that are meant to be generic and handle a wide variety of game types.so if we look down the road and say, who will be making the big additions to unity in 2030? who will be developing unreal engine 12? as an industry, we'd better have a good answer to that question, because eventually all the developers who are working on them now will retire, and there will have to be talented, experienced programmers ready to step into those roles.when creating a game required difficult programming, we naturally had a system where people who wanted to make games would have to learn engine programming and develop those skills. but the ubiquity you describe has removed that natural system, so we need to make sure we have a culture in place that will continue to cultivate engine programming excellence in its absence. "if everyone in the next generation of game developers decides to use a pre-fab engine, who will be left to make the new engines?"the second problem is that we have not yet succeeded in creating game engines that truly remove the low-level programming component entirely. you cannot just arbitrarily make whatever you want with these tools and forget about the limitations of the hardware, and perhaps more commonly, the limitations of the tools themselves. you constantly bump into those limitations in a number of ways.we see this sort of thing happen in practice all the time. to pick just one example, the binding of isaac -- a game i greatly enjoyed -- recently had to be re-coded in its entirety because flash proved to be such a limitation for the developers. they couldn't add more content to it, and they couldn't get the frame rate up, they couldn't add proper joypad support -- the list goes on and on .when i think about that, i think about how incredibly frustrating it must be for the developers to end up in this position where they literally cannot move their game forward because of the tools. they know what they want to achieve, and they are being throttled by their tools. there's a temptation to blame the developers in these scenarios, and say "you should have used x instead of y" or "you shouldn't have coded it like that" but really the developers are doing exactly what they were supposed to do: use a game development tool to make a game! they weren't supposed to have to know about any of this stuff, right?so i think we want to try and fix this problem culturally, too. i think we can do a lot more to provide good teaching materials for all skill levels of game developer. i think we can make it so that it's fun to learn about low-level programming. if high-level developers have easy ways to learn and understand how all the parts of an engine work, even just at a basic level, then they will be better equipped to deal with performance problems and systemic problems as they arise, because they'll have a better understanding of what's going on under the hood. and perhaps most importantly, they'll know what's possible, so they'll know what to demand from tool vendors, which will drive the tools forward in the right directions.what are the advantages of coding your own engine?the most obvious advantage is that your only limitations are the physical limitations of the hardware, and that can be very empowering, certainly. you know what game you're making, and so you don't have to pay the cost for the generic nature of a licensed, one-size-fits-all game engine. you can tune everything to be in line with the needs of the game, which allows you to be more efficient than an engine that was written without having any idea what kind of game would be built on top of it. but there are other advantages, such as the psychological benefit of everything working the way you think is most natural, so that you don't feel like you are fighting the engine architecture all the time. sometimes it's easy to underestimate the degree to which that wears programmers out and makes them unproductive. feeling like you're spending all your time learning and working around someone else's code can be very demoralizing, and it can take all the fun out of programming. that being said, the reason to make an engine from scratch for handmade hero was not because i want to encourage everyone to make their own engine. we're making an engine because it is educational to do so and is an important part of the learning process for future game engine developers. yes, we will get benefits from making our own engine -- in fact, we already have looped live code editing, a feature i don't think exists in any commercial engine right now -- but that is not the primary reason for doing it on this project. in your mission statement for handmade hero you've said that you're aiming to have it be as complex, systems wise, as you can manage, to properly demonstrate how to code those systems. that seems like a pretty daunting task, with a lot of moving parts potentially colliding. do you worry that you've bitten off more than you can chew?from the perspective of how long it will take to explain everything on the livestream, it's actually not the game systems that scare me. they are often straightforward to explain, even when they get complicated, because people can directly relate the operations back to things they already understand. if you've ever played magic: the gathering with a rules lawyer, you understand the basic process that a complex game system goes through to compute what happens on every event, because you've lived it!"we already have looped live code editing, a feature i don't think exists in any commercial engine right now"so honestly, i'm more worried about explaining some aspects of the renderer, like pixel centers and fill rules, barycentric coordinates and interpolated values, or the lighting equation. sometimes it's hard to bring those to life in an understandable way because they are so abstract and are very different from anything that people have experienced before if they're not graphics programmers.and it's definitely the case that i have good days and bad days in terms of my ability to explain things on the stream. sometimes i feel like i did a good job putting something out there, and other days i finish the stream and just think, "that was absolutely terrible, nobody is ever going to understand that!" but i do the best i can, and my hope is that for the times when i fail to explain things in a coherent way, we can make supplemental materials to the stream that will pick up the slack.what has the reaction to handmade hero been like so far? do you have a dialog with your audience?the reaction has been way, way beyond what i ever could have predicted. i figured this would be a niche project for a long time. my hope was that once i got to the point where there was a renderer and a sound system and a little character walking around levels with monsters -- you know, 10 months into the project or something -- people would see the game in that alpha state and think it looked interesting, then go back and look at the video series to learn how it was made. but much to my surprise, it turned out that there was a huge audience for the project right from day one. "i think programming should be very fluid, and that's one of the things i constantly emphasize on the stream."there's also tons of people who have been contributing to the project in a number of ways beyond just watching the show. people have created an online episode guide with time-based links to each segment of the videos. people have ported the game to mac. they've ported it to linux. they've ported it to qt and swift, even! somebody even said they were working on a compiler -- from scratch -- to compile handmade hero! it's fantastic.i'm so happy to see all these people getting excited about low-level programming. for some, it's their first introduction to low-level programming, and i am delighted that they're finding it so rewarding. for other people, they already knew how to do low-level programming, but they just didn't have a rallying point for it. these are people who work in other industries, perhaps, who use java and other high-level languages in their daily work, and handmade hero is this nice excuse for them to start doing some fun low-level stuff. and that's just plain great. i never anticipated that part of it, but it's possibly one of the best aspects of the project so far.i can't tell you how many people have written in to me and said something along the lines of "this makes programming fun again!" and that's exactly how low-level programming feels to me, too. it's just a ton of fun! and it's been tremendously rewarding sharing that experience with other people. you've been supplying tools to the games industry for over a decade now. it handmade hero a reaction to a specific problem you've observed in that time?no, i've never really observed any specific problems as a tools author. i always worked on pretty low-level tools, so anyone who was using the tools i was writing was usually also a low-level coder like me. since you've started, have you found the development of handmade hero has taught you anything you didn't know before?in the large, perhaps not yet, but in the small, definitely. one of the surprising things about handmade hero is that there are a lot of experts who watch the show just because they enjoying having a show about the kind of programming they do. so every now and then i'll get clarifications from an expert during the q&a. if i muse about something on the stream like "i don't know how wide the simd instructions are on the playstation 4 cpu but..." it's often the case that during the q&a an expert will write in and answer. it's pretty great!do you have a pre-planned "lesson play" for the things you want to teach?i have a plan for what i want in the game, but i don't have a lesson plan. i think programming should be very fluid, and that's one of the things i constantly emphasize on the stream. programming can, and should, be fun. a lot of time the best code is the code that you enjoyed writing. and there's no question that you get a lot more code done when you're having fun than when it feels like a grind. so i try not to make things overly formal, or force what we code to fit into some procrustean bed like a lot of programming methodologies encourage today. we don't have a schedule, just a feature list, really, and we start each day by figuring out what we can do to drive us forwards. bandai namco studios singapore pte. ltd. — singapore,                                                                                                 singapore
 people are completely misunderstanding this nypd slowdown. here’s the key bit:citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.drug arrests by cops assigned to the nypd’s organized crime control bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.all of these, except maybe the drug arrests — and probably including those too — are basically revenue offenses.  by not arresting here, the cops are starving the city for revenue.  the knoxville police do the same thing when they’re crosswise with the city; they stop writing tickets.  the real scandal isn’t that nyc is being denied law enforcement now, it’s that much of that “law enforcement” is really just a system designed to squeeze money out of the citizenry.
 oil falls to 5 1/2-year low as russia, iraq boost outputan employee inspects a circuit board in a manufacturing facility in the nanshan district of shenzhen, china. a manufacturing gauge in china, the world’s second-largest oil consumer, fell to the weakest level in 18 months, government data showed yesterday.futures capped a sixth weekly loss in new york and london. oil output in russia and iraq surged to the highest levels in decades in december, according to data from both countries’ governments. euro-area factory output expanded less than initially estimated in december. a manufacturing gauge in china, the world’s second-largest oil consumer, fell to the weakest level in 18 months, government data showed yesterday.prices slumped 46 percent in new york in 2014, the steepest drop in six years and second-worst since trading began in 1983, as u.s. producers and the organization of petroleum exporting countries ceded no ground in their battle for market share. opec pumped above its quota for a seventh month in december even as u.s. output expanded to the highest in more than three decades, according to data compiled by bloomberg.“we’re seeing more of the same,” john kilduff, a partner at again capital llc, a new york-based hedge fund that focuses on energy, said by phone. “the chinese and european pmi figures signal weaker demand, while there’s ever-increasing supply. nobody is cutting back on output and now the russians are posting post-soviet production highs.”west texas intermediate for february delivery fell 58 cents, or 1.1 percent, to $52.69 a barrel on the new york mercantile exchange, the lowest close since april 30, 2009. volume for all futures traded was 29 percent below the 100-day average at 2:57 p.m.brent for february settlement dropped 91 cents, or 1.6 percent, to close at $56.42 a barrel on the london-based ice futures europe. it’s the lowest settlement since april 30, 2009. volume for all futures traded was 34 percent below the 100-day average. the european oil fell 48 percent last year, the second-biggest annual loss on record behind a 51 percent tumble in the 2008 financial crisis. brent closed at a $3.73 premium to wti.“there’s a lack of market participants,” tom finlon, jupiter, florida-based director of energy analytics group llc. “ i wouldn’t read much into today’s moves because volume is particularly low. it’s as dead as a dodo bird in london.”a final reading of a purchasing managers’ index for the euro area’s manufacturing stood at 50.6 in december, london-based markit economics said today. the euro lost as much as 0.8 percent to 1.2003 per dollar. a stronger u.s. currency usually reduces the appeal of commodities as a store of value.in china, the official purchasing managers’ index dropped to 50.1 in december from 50.3 the previous month, according to data from the statistics bureau and the china federation of logistics and purchasing. a separate manufacturing reading from hsbc holdings plc (hsba) and markit economics on dec. 31 also fell.manufacturing in the u.s. also cooled in december. the institute for supply management’s factory index dropped to a six-month low of 55.5 from 58.7 in november, a report from the tempe, arizona-based group showed today.the surge in supplies in iraq and russia signaled no respite in early 2015 from the glut. russian output rose 0.3 percent in december to a post-soviet record of 10.667 million barrels a day, preliminary data e-mailed today by cdu-tek, part of the energy ministry, showed. iraq exported 2.94 million barrels a day in december, the most since the 1980s, oil ministry spokesman asim jihad said.the final two burning crude-storage tanks were extinguished at es sider, libya’s biggest oil port, national oil corp. spokesman mohammed elharari said by phone from tripoli. the fires started dec. 25, when islamist militants shot rockets at the port in a second attempt to capture it.opec’s production slid by 122,000 barrels a day from november to 30.24 million last month, a bloomberg survey of companies, producers and analysts shows. the 12-member group has a collective target of 30 million a day.u.s. oil production averaged 9.12 million barrels a day in the week ended dec. 26, according to the energy information administration. output increased to 9.14 million a day through dec. 12, the most in weekly data that started in january 1983.crude inventories at cushing, oklahoma , the delivery point for wti traded in new york, climbed 6.9 percent to 30.8 million in the week ended dec. 26, eia data showed. the gain left supplies at the highest level since february.the new seaway twin pipeline is done and crude was delivered to jones creek in texas on dec. 21, enterprise products partners (epd) said dec. 31. it more than doubles capacity from cushing to the gulf coast.“the overall fundamentals are negative,” bob yawger, director of the futures division at mizuho securities usa inc. in new york, said by phone. “we could be getting a bit of strength in wti because of the seaway opening. we should start seeing inventories fall at cushing.”inventories of gasoline surged in the week ended dec. 26 as production climbed to a record, eia data showed.gasoline futures declined 3.87 cents, or 2.6 percent, to close at $1.4334 a gallon. it was the lowest settlement since april 28, 2009. diesel decreased 3.79 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $1.7957, the lowest settle since oct. 7, 2011.regular gasoline at u.s. pumps fell to the lowest level since may 2010. the average retail price slipped 0.9 cent to $2.231 a gallon yesterday, according to heathrow, florida-based aaa, the nation’s biggest motoring group.wti may drop next week, a bloomberg survey showed. eighteen of 32 analysts and traders, or 56 percent, predicted a decrease, eight respondents forecast gains and six saw little change.to contact the reporters on this story: grant smith in london at gsmith52@bloomberg.net ; mark shenk in new york at mshenk1@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: bill banker at bbanker@bloomberg.net richard stubbe
 after 19 years in brooklyn, galapagos art space is moving to detroit , where you can still buy a romantically cast-off industrial building for cheap, just like you used to be able to do in the gritty old new york, before it turned into a polished bauble of global capitalism and everyone in the world decided they wanted to live here. whether or not you’ll miss galapagos, cared much for its programming, or ever saw anything there in the first place, its executive director declared to the new york times that its leaving town was symptomatic of how “a white-hot real estate market is burning through the affordable cultural habitat.” in detroit — which is just a two-hour flight away — galapagos could afford to buy up an entire ruin-porn campus of nine buildings in corktown, and is thinking of expanding it mission to start a detroit biennial in 2016.and why not? the detroit area might be home to two good art schools, the century-old cranbrook academy of art and the college for creative studies, but the artists they produced often left town for opportunities and like-minded people in places like new york. and there weren't many reasons for people to move to detroit. sure, the detroit institute of arts is a world-class museum, but like so much of what is so impressive there, it’s a relic of an imperial industrial capital that no longer exists, and for a while there was a plan considered to sell its collection to pay off the city’s debt.but hey, things looked pretty bad here in new york in the '70s, too, when it was an “affordable cultural habitat.” it had the mystique of a place where you could make something new happen, which detroit is also starting to be known for. i recently spent a couple of days there, witnessing the intense little pockets of recognizable brooklyn-ish-ness that have sprung up, where the just-so work of creating another twee urban utopia is being done. these are also places where the racial demographics of the city are noticeably reversed. (in the 2010 census, detroit was made up of 83 percent black people.) the new shops and restaurants often feel alienating to many who didn’t flee for the suburbs when things got rough, and who think of detroit as theirs. that struggle continues, but these new urban migrants are good for the city’s tax base.i also got to meet some of the artists who live and work here: elysia borowy-reeder, the director of the museum of contemporary art in detroit, wrote up my itinerary, and introduced me to people. i started the day at the review gallery, which is in an old building not far from the detroit institute of arts, and run by simone desousa, a brazilian woman who lives in one of the perfect loft condos upstairs (many of which haven’t yet been built out, since the market’s not quite there yet) and who started the gallery because she felt that detroit didn’t have enough galleries to support the artists who live there.borowy-reeder is married to scott reeder, a successful artist who shows all over the world.  the pair live in a mies van der rohe–designed housing complex (detroit is littered with what was once the cutting edge in urban planning) on the edge of downtown, and i visited reeder in his studio in the mammoth russell industrial center. actually he has two — one with a closet-size space he’s turned into a tiny comedy-club-and-disco called “club nutz,” and another with a door that opens out into the open air many floors up. i drove around and met up with greg fadell, whose studio is on the top floor of an old schoolhouse, and james collins, who lives in a sunny old arts-and-crafts house, and adam lee miller and nicola kuperus, who also operate as the band adult, and who live in a perfect old near-mansion in a neighborhood called new center, which for years was the headquarters of general motors. gm paid to have the area gussied up and preserved during the white-flight days of the 1960s, but the house was still cheap enough for a couple of bohemians to buy it.at the end of the day, a bunch of us convened at antietam, a just-opened restaurant in an art deco storefront run by gregory holm, a detroiter who lived in new york for nine years. the interior is a stridently tasteful concoction of retro-glamour elements, some of which holm salvaged himself, indiana jones–style, from detroit’s many grand old buildings gone to seed. there aren’t too many places like this here, at least not yet. here's why these nine artists live in detroit.why he came: "my wife is the new director of mocad. we are both originally from michigan so it was an easy transition."why he stays: "i like being in a place that still has a lot of possibilities. detroit has an amazing cultural history, but it's also always changing,, especially recently, and it's exciting to be part of that energy."what he does there: "i'm mostly known as a painter, but i also do performance, help run the worlds smallest comedy club, and just completed my first feature film moon dust." ( website , instagram )why he stays: "what detroit lacks in quantity of artists and makers it makes up for in the quality and commitment of its creative class. the strength of the maker here is measured by their physicality and creation of a proof of concept, less in the theoretical inquiry of the comfortable cosmopolitan conceptualist.  "why she stays: "same reasons as above. i grew up in saginaw, but i've lived in l.a., chicago, manhattan, frankfurt. actually, living in frankfurt inspired me to move back to michigan. it has a similar climate and provincial, small-city vibe. and living here allows me to see my family more often, which is nice."what she does there: "i'm an artist and i make paintings and videos. i run what pipeline, an artist-run gallery in southwest detroit, with daniel sperry. i also run aa records, an experiment art and music label specializing in editions of lathe records and sound objects, with musician nate young (wolf eyes). i'd say my practice is somewhat holistic, often collaborative, and generally about observing, referencing, and creating context."( website , instagram )why he stayed: "detroit is like skateboarding in the early 1980s. the mainstream had already chewed it up and spat it out. very few recognized skateboarding’s unrealized potential and those of us who did picked up the remains and ended up creating our own universe. similarly, i’ve always seen detroit as a throwaway city of unimagined possibilities."what he does there: "i’ve been painting mostly as of late, but i am a multidisciplinary artist. painting, sculpture, video, installation — whatever my ideas call for." ( website , instagram )why she came: "i'm originally from the netherlands and received a scholarship to obtain a masters degree in photography at the cranbrook academy of art, just outside of detroit. after graduation in 2004 i moved back to amsterdam, but i couldn't get detroit out of my head and strongly felt i should continue my practice there and not in amsterdam. so in early 2006 i decided to move back to detroit for an indefinite period of time and that is now almost nine years ago."why she stays: "i thought about this a lot, but it really comes down to some pretty basic things: great people and the luxury of time and space."why she stays: "after ten years in a place, you wake up and realize you’ve created a life, that you’ve become invested in the history, politics, and predicament of a place, that you’ve made friends and new family. the act of staying has been so nourishing that it has complicated the argument for leaving, no matter how appealing that seems at times. my husband and i talk about the city constantly, the city talks about the city incessantly, it has shaped our direction and our interests. we’ve come to understand staying as a quiet act of preventing further erosion and contributing to re-stabilization, and that has lent purpose. and i fell in love here — big love. for all of these reasons, i (we) stay."what she does there: "drawing was my mother tongue, then fabrics, architecture, and ceramics. painting allows me to hold them all in my head at once. in a recent brief conversation with sarah thornton after her compelling detroit institute of arts lecture, she asked why i identified as 'painter,' not 'artist.' it’s existential." ( website )why he stays: "in 1993, i left detroit for san francisco. in less than a month i moved back. there is an honesty and an edge here that i feel particularly at home with. the early detroit techno scene mirrors that and it was a big inspiration for me to stay and try to be a part of it. i started a record label, ersatz audio, in 1995 and one of the last remaining pressing plants, archer record pressing co., is ten minutes from my home. i used to love the road warrior quality of living here (it weeded out most insincere people), but i fear that is changing. nicola and i also travel a lot, between the visual arts and touring. i'm not sure if detroit would drive us crazy if we were here 365 days a year? our cost of living also keeps us here; our home is 4,000 square feet and our mortgage is $445 a month."what he does there: paints, and with his wife nicola kuperus, below, sculpture, installation, video, and the band adult (since 1997). ( website , facebook , instagram )why she stays: "space. cost of living. isolation when you want it. unpredictability. and most important, there's a tremendous amount of heart and soul in this place. once while taking a drive on belle isle [an island between detroit and canada], i passed by a guy playing a synth on the shore. it looked as if he were giving a performance to the city. magical moments. that's detroit."what brought him there: "we initially moved from minneapolis to battle creek, michigan, when my partner, nicole, took a job with the kellogg foundation. i kept a studio in kalamazoo during that time. i managed to win a grand prize for the west michigan area show at the kalamazoo institute of arts. marlborough artist vincent desiderio was the juror. i started showing in detroit while still living there. nicole eventually accepted a job with a nonprofit called excellent schools detroit and that's what brought us to detroit."what keeps him there: "we like detroit and all the people we've gotten to know here and we're sticking around to see where things go. the city seems to be picking up momentum in regards to turning things around. the art scene is seems to be picking up as well. i meet new artists all the time. a few have come from new york recently. i keep my studio in my home. i guess you would say i am a process-based artist. i look for ways in which to make a painting where the process in part dictates the outcome. i'll cut and paste something ..."painting for me is as much about technique and process as it is about the final artwork. each painting embodies an element of chance and little in regard to predetermined outcome. my goal is not solely to create new imagery, but to coax the painting to life through the gestures of its making. chemistry plays a big role. with most of my oil and acrylic paintings i rely on the fact that oil and water do not mix. therefore the oil and acrylic repel one another while still in their fluid state. it is a catalytic event as the different mediums repel each other momentarily. there is no room for error. if the chemistry is off, the painting does not work and has to be destroyed and i start over. once it's finished it's finished. there is no going back to edit. this is not the only way i work, however; there is almost always a recipe of sorts involved for the making of a painting. there is also a sculptural aspect with just about every type of painting i make. by this, in the removal and shaping of the paint on the surface of the canvas, the painting takes on a more three-dimensional quality with textural elements."note: as many commenters have pointed out, this story, which focuses on artists who have chosen to make detroit their home, missed an opportunity to highlight artists of color. the list does not fully reflect the diversity of voices and experiences in the city, for which we apologize.these links are a mix of vulture and sponsored (paid) links. we work hard to ensure that our recommendations produce high-quality content. to find out more about installing our widget or distributing sponsored content, please visit us at www.nrelate.com . view our privacy policy .photos: courtesy of galapagos art space; courtesy of the artist; greg fadell/greg fadell 2014; courtesy of the artist; courtesy of the artist; courtesy of the artist
 you can swipe to read the next article.mark leslie ran three silicon valley startups, including veritas software where he was also a founder, and has been involved in technology in silicon valley for more than 30 years.in his retirement, he invests in infrastructure startups like pure storage, big switch networks, nutanix and pernixdata that are challenging the titans of computing, networking and storage.he also teaches a semester a year at stanford, coaching up-and-coming entrepreneurs.we spoke recently about what he teaches, what he invests in and why he thinks symantec's decision to spin out his old company was a foregone conclusion. our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.from your broad tech experience, what do you think is different about the problems and opportunities that startups face today?i believe that opportunity comes from discontinuity and discontinuity comes from essentially underlying sources, in the most macro sense. the discontinuity in our industry has been created by the falling prices of compute, storage and networking.if you look at those areas, what you get for your dollar doubles every 18 months for compute, and storage doubles every 12 months. networking doubles every six months. that has been what has been driving the valley for many years.now, you lay on top of that the cloud. what the cloud did was it put all of the investments of emc and hewlett-packard and cisco and dell at risk. all of this stuff now is going to be reconstructed. most of the big guys have some form or another of "innovator's dilemma" and that creates an opportunity for new companies to start.so that's kind of the mega trend. it then expresses itself in startups i have invested in, like in software defined networking with big switch networks. it expresses itself in storage, with pernixdata and pure storage, and it expresses itself in compute in companies like nutanix. all this stuff is just brand new.the velocity of this change is amazing. i mean, vmware was a revolution with virtualization and now we have docker as a revolution in that space. it's going to be bigger and faster than vmware ever was. i mean it's just an amazing place. and every time one of those things happens it creates opportunity.by the way, i was on the board of vmware before it was acquired by emc and a long, long, long time ago i was actually the guy who did a hack and wrote the first ever hypervisor on an ibm machine. i mean, go figure, i didn't tell anybody about it for 25 years because nobody knew what a hypervisor was.a lot of established companies are breaking up into smaller companies or reorganizing to be more competitive and innovative. one of those is symantec, which is spinning out your old company, veritas. what do you make of that?i'll make a couple of comments there but i'm not sure i want to go too far into it.i think symantec and veritas was a poorly conceived merger. i don't think my successor at veritas did that merger for the best business reasons and i don't think it ever really fit together. i think there was always friction there. i think that there has been about 10 years wasted with the veritas asset that they acquired in 2005. i don't think it is nearly as competitive and forward in the market as it was then.i think splitting it up is certainly sensible because they never belonged together to begin with. but i have no idea what the future holds for either of the two companies that come out of it.marc andreessen recently speculated something to the effect that any company that was started before the cloud is probably going to be broken up because they don't have it in their genes to know how to compete today. what do you think about that statement?well, when i left veritas we were very strategically driven and i left in place with the new executive team a plan of what we hoped we could do over the next few years. there were two big pieces. one was to acquire vmware, which was a perfect company for us. the second was we were going to roll up the linux enterprise properties red hat, sql, jboss, etc and convert veritas from a storage management company to a three-pillar company: storage management, virtualization and linux enterprise servers.so i think we had the dna at that time to see the future and to do something about it. i think we were kind of on it at the time.it's very interesting to see so much break up and reorganization happening all at once. it seems to be in reaction at least in part to what's happening with the companies that you're investing in.yeah. you know, the big companies who are suffering now, their shares are being held by growth funds but they are no longer growing. cisco, red hat, emc, dell, ibm — there is kind of a long list of these guys, right? but if you go look at the landscape you find out that the sectors they are in are actually growing at the same rate as always, like storage is growing at 6 percent.all of the growth in these industries now is going to the young companies who are growing at 50 percent to 100 percent a year. the big companies are growing at plus or minus 3 percent and all the growth is moving into the small companies.are you still also teaching at stanford?i am. i teach in the fall quarter and i just finished that up on december 8 . so i'm free until later this year.what's the most important thing that you try to teach the students that you work with at stanford?i have two things that i teach them that are very important.so the first thing i teach them is the concept of authenticity. i think that if you want to go create a company, the best thing you can do is look into yourself, to your own experience, to look at the problems that you have seen as a working professional in whatever are you are in. find those problems that are unsolved that have meaning to the customers and go work on those. the idea of sitting around and doing a study of an industry and figuring out from a distance what's wrong with it and coming up with ideas is a wrong idea. you'll never know what the people in the industry actually know in terms of attention to detail and you really start off with a disadvantage that way.then the second thing i teach them is that cash is oxygen and oxygen is life.happiness is when you have cash on hand and you don't have to raise any more money. you must never run out of cash. if you run out of cash you are out of business. so preserve cash. think about cash. cash has to be on your mind everyday. when you're raising money, if there's more on the table, take it off the table, even if it makes ownership a little more diluted. that doesn't matter.but one of the things i say about what's happening in silicon valley these days is that everybody is running around kind of pounding their chest about how big their valuation is in venture deals. but i'm a big believer that just doesn't have a lot of meaning.the only valuation that has meaning is the one you get when you sell your personal shares. when a company is successful, everybody walks away happy, no matter what they had. when a company is not successful, nobody walks away happy, no matter what they had.all this discussion about shares and dilutions and valuations really have no meaning. it's building a great company that has meaning.tell me about leslie ventures.leslie ventures is an umbrella that i use for my personal investing. it's not really a venture firm. i have no limited partners. my model is that i generally invest in companies in which i am interested enough to spend time with as well as writing a check. i'm usually on the board of the company. i basically do what's personally interesting to me and what's personally interesting to me is all the stuff that's going on in infrastructure.it's not like i have a a fund of x million dollars or something like that. it's just personal investments. some of it is turning out well and some of it just goes to zero.i know a couple of the companies that you're involved in are in the storage business. has that been a particular part of the infrastructure sector that you're interested in or does it go beyond there?i'm in some storage companies – pure storage, nutanix and pernixdata. but nutanix is also beyond that in the converged computing business. i'm also on the board of a company called big switch networks, which is in the software defined networking business. and i'm on the board of a company called stratoscale out of israel, which is really building a cloud data center operating system for converged computing. i was also on the board of a company called seamicro, which is a hardware systems server manufacturer.so generally speaking i'm involved in a lot of broad-based infrastructure companies. it's an interesting time to be doing that. there is a wholesale transformation going on with companies that previously built vertical stacks of solutions-oriented systems trying to reconstruct their infrastructure to look like google and facebook. the stacks of those two companies are basically very flat. they are built on very high performance, very low cost commodity products that are very scalable and in the cloud. that's what's going on in the infrastructure world today and i like being part of it.it seems like you have invested in a mix of companies that are applying software to get the most out of hardware.well, basically all of the companies that do hardware are software companies.look at pure storage. they are a hardware company, right? they deliver all flash arrays. but if you look at their engineering team it was like a total of 60 people, one of which was a hardware guy and 59 of which were software guys. so it was all software.nutanix is a software company even though they deliver hardware. the way to analyze this is to look at where they add value and look at where their gross margins come from? it's all in their software.are there any other connecting themes in the companies that you're interested in?yes, personal themes. i try to do things that are personally interesting to me, intellectually interesting and i like the team and i'm pretty excited about the prospect.i was on the board of directors of skybox imaging, which was sold to google six months ago or so. the people who founded that company were my students at stanford. i helped them kind of get started and it was a fascinating thing.i'm on the board of a company called liquid robotics, which is building autonomous ocean-going drones, a pretty far out kind of activity.i kind of just do what makes me happy. one of my rules is that i don't do anything requires me to be at a meeting every monday morning at 8 o'clock.let's get into a little more detail with some of your investments. how about pernixdata, which just recently moved into a new headquarters in san jose?sure. you know, it is interesting. often when you meet these companies it's at a very, very early stage. it's actually very hard to decipher what they're doing because they haven't figured out how to articulate it yet. so there is usually some leap of faith involved. but i really like these guys, i think they're extraordinarily smart.the product they built is virtualized storage software that you can bring up in five minutes without having to go and reconstruct anything. it's a frictionless instillation and it's all software, so it is 100 percent gross margin.it is extraordinarily clever to go take a resource that's sitting there in dedicated machines, completely fragment it, and then make it into a broad-based system cache that can be reapplied to any server at any time, as needed.it's just an amazingly clever idea. they had with their insight coming out of vmware and i just thought it was brilliant and i still think it is brilliant. i have a pretty good idea of the roadmap and i think we're going to see more brilliant things from them. there is just a world-class team there.the guy who started that company used to work for me at veritas. he was the guy at veritas who was the senior thinker and architect relative to disk virtualization. he was one of the founders of the company at veritas. if you think about what disk virtualization is all about, you have these rotating spindles and heads that are moving back and forth. it creates a geometry and what virtualization does is hide the geometry and convert it into something that has utility for other people.so he had been thinking about this for 20 years and he looked at flash and he said, you know, it's a whole new geometry. it's not just you take flash and make it look like disk. he started to look at what you could do differently with flash.when the world went from tape to disk and, unfortunately, i'm old enough to remember that, the original disk drives were basically organized like they were tape drives on disk. over time, of course, it was developed beyond that. that's what he did with flash, develop it beyond what disk can do.he came and said, early on, we believe we can build 10 times the performance with one-tenth the power and space and the same price as disk. they explained to me how they were going to do that and i said, that's a brilliant idea. today they are a super hot company.that's coz (john colgrave) you're talking about, right?he and his co-founder, john hayes, struck me as an odd couple when i first met them, with coz a seasoned older veteran and hayes a hot shot kid. but that's silicon valley, right?coz is a teddy bear. i just love that guy. i remember when he was a programmer at veritas. he would sit there with the other programmers and all they talked about was technology. i don't they knew what a girl looked like in those days. they were sleeping under their desks. it was a real hardcore silicon valley engineering team and, you know, look at them today, right?it's the miracle of the valley. i've always been a valley optimist. i just look at what we do here and i stand in awe of it. i just love it.click here to subscribe to techflash silicon valley, the free daily email newsletter about founders and funders in the region.poll: who are you betting will win the super bowl?
 viewers of the mtv reality show 16 and pregnant often tweet that it's an excellent form of birth control.  a preliminary new study suggests they just might be right.study: mtv's '16 and pregnant' works as birth control viewers of the mtv reality show 16 and pregnant often tweet that it's an excellent form of birth control.  a preliminary new study suggests they just might be right. check out this story on usatoday.com: http://usat.ly/1eppz2za link has been sent to your friend's email address.a link has been posted to your facebook feed.study says mtv's '16 and pregnant' has helped reduce teen pregnancies. the study claims to have an impact on teens nationwide, but especially in san antonio, texas. vpckim painter , special for usa today 7:10 a.m. est january 16, 2014teen births began dropping long before show, but it may deserve some credit, experts say.stars of mtv show teen moms and 16 and pregnant. featured on popular magazines: life & style, us weekly, people and intouch weekly.teen birth rates dropped more sharply after show started, in areas where mtv is most popularother factors have contributed to long-running decline, researchers agreeviewers of the mtv reality show 16 and pregnant often tweet that it's an excellent form of birth control.  a preliminary new study suggests they might be right.at a time of sustained, long-term declines in teen birth rates nationwide, those rates fell especially fast soon after the show launched in june 2009, in the geographic areas where mtv programming is most popular, researchers say in the paper released monday by the national bureau of economic research.the show and its teen mom spinoffs, in which real pregnant teens are followed for months and shown giving birth and caring for infants, were responsible for an estimated 5.7% drop in teen births that would have been conceived in the 18 months after the franchise premiered, says the working paper written by two economists, melissa kearney of the university of maryland and phillip levine of wellesley college.if true, that would explain about one-third of the nationwide decline in teen pregnancies during that period, they say.the finding is "absolutely plausible," says bill albert, program director at the national campaign to prevent teen and unplanned pregnancy, washington, d.c.  "the conventional wisdom is that these shows glamorize teen pregnancy and parenting. what we've seen in the past, though, is that for teens who watch these shows, the message is more sobering than salacious."among those who have criticized the show is the parents television council.  in a commentary for cnn in 2011, the council's melissa henson said some teens might even see "getting pregnant and earning a spot on the show as her ticket to fame and fortune."on monday henson said the study "is very interesting, and if it's true, if this show did contribute to declining birth rates, that's not a bad thing. but i'm a bit skeptical."  she says the show and other reality programs on mtv play up "staged drama," not "responsible teen sex."levine says "plausible arguments can be made in both directions," but the study suggests the show deters teen parenthood.among supporting evidence gathered in the study: tweets about and searches for information on birth control and abortion spiked at the same time tweets and searches about the show spiked, when episodes aired.among the typical tweets that mentioned the show, according to the researchers: "watching 16 and pregnant reminds me to take my birth control" and "16 & pregnant is a great form of birth control. these girls go through hell and hot water while (some) guys get away scar free. i'll pass!"the researchers believe the birth declines were due to fewer pregnancies, not more abortions, because teen abortion rates have been falling nationwide, levine says. but, he says, they can't rule out bumps in abortion rates in areas where the show is popular, because that kind of detailed geographic data is not available.teen birth rates have been falling since 1991, and the declines accelerated between 2008 and 2012, according to the national center for health statistics. in 2012, 29.4 per 1,000 teen girls gave birth, down from 61.8 per 1,000 in 1991.factors including better sex education and greater access to birth control deserve a lot of credit, albert says. levine says the tanking economy after 2007 also played a role in the accelerating decline.important to note: the paper released today has not yet been formally reviewed by other researchers in the field or published in an economics journal.  it has been submitted to a journal, levine says.the next season of teen mom debuts jan. 21.read or share this story: http://usat.ly/1eppz2z
rt @cimmerian999: my latest on the controversy over "maximizing shareholder value." 
 the idea that corporate management should focus on maximizing shareholder value is under attack, often in hyperbolic terms, with this idea blamed for great and varied harm (e.g., underinvestment, inefficiency, inequality and the failure of people to appreciate the film ishtar). recently, james montier of the esteemed, including by me, money manager grantham, mayo, van otterloo & co., voicing the views of many, wrote a piece calling it “ the world’s dumbest idea .” [1] in addition, attacks have appeared in the new york times and in the wall street journal .  a simple web search shows this to be a concept with many prominent learned detractors and few public defenders. [2]luckily for markets and the economy, this is not the world’s dumbest idea — not close. it’s imperfect, as all things are, but it’s not even a little bit “dumb.”alas, many who think they are attacking “maximize shareholder value” have misidentified their target. instead they oppose some practices and ideas that often get mistakenly jumbled together. there are debates to be had about all of these disputes, but few touch on the core issue of maximizing shareholder value. some attacks are by authors genuinely concerned about, and looking to improve, markets; while others are thinly veiled anticapitalist screeds. either way, they are pointing their fire in the wrong direction.basically, if capital markets price things well (with few ex ante errors, or put differently, the market is close to “efficient”) then maximizing shareholder value is a very good idea. believing that markets make common and giant predictable errors is the only legitimate beef one can have with maximizing shareholder value, and it’s absolutely fair to debate this tenet.but instead of confining the debate to this central point, or even realizing that this is the central point, critics attack shareholder value for many ancillary reasons. for instance, they laugh off the concept as vacuous, the absence of a strategy. they attack share‑based and particularly options‑based compensation. they attack markets and managers for being too “short-term.” [3] they attack the titular idea as inducing the “expectations game,” something they hold in great contempt. finally, they attack — and at least this salvo is on the core concept — the idea that the firm should be run for its owners, instead of for a diffuse and sometimes amorphous set of stakeholders. some critics have valid and important points about these things. however, as i will explain, with little exception, they are not actually criticizing the shareholder value idea at all.first, let’s step back and examine what the idea of “maximizing shareholder value” is and why it’s intimately tied up in how “efficiently” the market prices shares. [4] put simply, it’s the idea that management’s efforts should go into maximizing today’s stock price. gee, that does sound very short‑term doesn’t it? i mean, it has the word “today’s” in it and that’s pretty darn short-term! maybe the critics are onto something?well, it really isn’t and they really aren’t. why? because today’s stock price is itself the market’s forecast of what the firm is worth considering the rest of eternity (only the first few millennia really matter). the market values apple higher than commodore international not on a current whim, but because the expected future cash flows to apple’s owners (shareholders) are ridiculously higher than those to commodore international’s (ok, i may have gilded the lily by choosing a foil that went bankrupt a long time ago, but i’m a bitter former amiga owner).when management takes action today, in principle and mostly (yes, just mostly, i’ll get to that) in fact, the price today moves based on the market’s collective assessment of that action’s effect on the long-term value of the company. it only looks short-term to those who don’t understand this, don’t want to understand this, or keep hearing about this “martin gale” fellow and dismiss him as some british or canadian crank. of course, this is all only if the market is working reasonably “efficiently.”so how “efficient” is the market?alas, markets aren’t perfect. few things are perfect. markets get things wrong every day (certainly clear after the fact, which is often mistaken for the point, but sometimes clear even before the fact) and sometimes do so rather spectacularly. for instance, i am more than willing to call the technology episode of 1999-2000 a “bubble,” and shared the trenches with gmo and others in doing so real-time. now, going the other way, i also think the term “bubble” is grossly overused these days. that is, there is a bubble in saying “bubble.” in other words, i think bubbles do occur, just rarely.in particular, as one type of imperfection, the market may be too “short-term.” earlier i discussed how today’s stock price is not actually a “short-term” measure but our best guess of long-term value. but that doesn’t make it a perfect guess, and, at the risk of overusing this term, one way it may be imperfect is for price to move too much based on “short-term” not “long-term” events. i have written elsewhere that truth probably lies somewhere in between those who assert markets are wildly inefficient and those who assert they are nearly perfectly efficient. thankfully, “imperfect” markets can be pretty darn useful. anyway, if the problem one has with the concept of maximizing shareholder value is that markets are too short-term, then it seems exhorting, cajoling and educating us all to be more long-term in setting prices would be a better solution than attacking the goal of maximizing shareholder value. indeed, some take this tack , pointing out where they think management is focusing too much on the short-term, and recommending reforms, particularly accounting reforms, that they feel will better deliver shareholder value, as opposed to bizarrely scuttling the concept because, perhaps, we can do better. frankly, if critics are not urging that we work on better delivering true shareholder value, then i’m not really sure what their solutions are, so i’m a little scared!stepping back, one must admit that the market’s long-term record, warts and all, is superb. if markets priced things as poorly as the critics assert, directly or by implication, we’d expect to see societies that adopted them floundering, while societies that adopted the opposite — and please pause and consider for a moment what the opposite really is — flourish. more mundanely, if the critics were right in their stridency,  we’d expect to see an abundance of consistently successful active stock pickers regularly beating the market by taking the money of rubes who bought into short-term stories spun by venal management (though the truism that the average can’t beat the average would still hold). rather, over the long term, we see few such outrageously successful active managers with the total number a lot closer to that expected from random chance (though probably exceeding it by a bit).considering all the evidence, we must conclude that markets are imperfect. but actually we knew that going in, as nothing is perfect. more specifically, the market makes ex ante errors and very rarely it makes large predictable ones. but overall, it has proven a highly effective way of setting prices and close enough to “efficient” that few have consistently beaten markets.  furthermore, other means of setting prices, or worse, allocating resources without prices, have been utter tragic failures compared to the market’s success.focusing on the stock price is not a strategy: yes, but duh…one common refrain among critics is the true statement “maximize shareholder value is not a strategy but the result of a strategy.” indeed they are correct, one does not enhance shareholder value by meditating on the stock price, stalking it or covering the walls with pictures of it all connected by push-pins and string. one maximizes it by creating value, the most you can. the practical details of this vary tremendously from company to company, but usually entail having some combination of great products, perhaps a mission that is truly beneficial to the world, satisfied customers or clients, and a team of employees that is motivated to deliver. those who think they’ve made a trenchant telling critique by pointing out that “maximize shareholder value is not a strategy” are not wrong, but they must tell us what and who exactly they are criticizing. who thinks it’s a strategy unto itself and not the result of a good strategy? maximizing shareholder value is an objective. of course you still need a strategy to get there!the critics’ most common target is probably management compensation that is tied to share price, and particularly options-based compensation. tying management compensation to share price might be, on net, a bad idea; particularly when the plan is one‑sided options-based (i’m not arguing this point here, or conceding it, just admitting it’s possible). [5] options-based compensation may indeed often, though for no necessary reason, be used by those waving the shareholder-value banner, but the critics fall here for the post hoc fallacy.there are legitimate causes for concern with stock-based compensation. first, if, as discussed above, the market has any tendency to be too “short-term,” admittedly so will the price of shares or options given to management. but, again, the accusations of “too short-term” are hurled with way too much confidence. [6]second, the “one sided” part of options-based compensation may matter as it gives management an incentive to maximize the value of its options which, a bit ironically given this is exactly what we’re arguing about, is not the same as the value of the common shares. [7] how can they be at odds? well, options on shares are a somewhat different beast than shares themselves and this difference carries over to when they’re used as compensation. you can increase option value by, all-else-equal, raising volatility and that’s not necessarily in the shareholders’ best interest. now, in the presence of debt, shares are also an option on the value of the company but options of a lesser gamma (sorry for the brief geekdom) and don’t have nearly the same bias. in fact, while perhaps they have a point in isolation (perhaps!), much of the criticism of maximizing shareholder value has been more about one‑sided options‑based compensation [8] than the more basic notion of management maximizing share price. those raising this argument should be clear they are criticizing a specific practice — options-based compensation — and not the idea of maximizing shareholder value.some rail against management playing the “expectations game” where, to move the stock price, new information must come out that exceeds, or falls short of, that already inherent in the current stock price. [9] the critics blame this “game,” which they hold to be very harmful, on the idea of maximizing shareholder value. but the critics are again confused. their gripe is not with the idea of “maximizing shareholder value” but with the very idea and function of a market price itself. indeed, it’s precisely this characteristic — that of only responding to new information, or to use the critics’ vernacular, winning or losing the “expectations game” — that is the defining characteristic of a highly efficient market that already incorporates existing information. critics must decide from which direction they wish to attack. either markets are so bad (short-term!) at setting prices that “maximizing shareholder value” is a disaster, or so good that we’re all reduced to playing the “expectations game.” at the very least it would be nice if they didn’t hurl both criticisms in the same printed volley.some argue that maximizing shareholder value is a bad idea because corporate managers have responsibilities to a far broader set of stakeholders than just those who own the company. first, let’s be clear, of course having happy satisfied stakeholders is important. if the stock price is indeed the long-term value of the company, then things like treating customers well, compensating employees fairly, etc., are likely vital parts of maximizing the stock price. so the much-maligned effort to maximize price can, and most likely does, entail consideration of both the very long-term future and how stakeholders are doing.it’s possible that corporate managers currently don’t do those things as well as they could. remember, i concede that on average, or at times, markets might indeed be “too short-term” but think the prescription is addressing this directly­­ ­­— not making up brand new amorphous mission statements. in addition, nothing about maximizing shareholder value means that management has a pass to do illegal or unethical things, or that society cannot impose a cost on companies for creating externalities. it only means that within these bounds, and subject to these costs, it makes sense for management to maximize stock price. indeed it may even make sense, and often does, for a firm to voluntarily try to do even better than society insists upon. but again, if that’s the right thing for maximizing long-term value then it’s a very odd world where this action is wildly unrewarded in the current stock price. if the market is indeed that inefficient, and prices fail to reflect things like deeply unsatisfied customers, employees about to leave for better treatment elsewhere, elected officials working to outlaw the company’s business practices etc., then it’s unfortunately true that maximizing shareholder value won’t give very satisfactory results. but again we are back to the assertion that we have a very serious problem with markets setting prices. also, simply finding this concept lacking does not automatically lead to a better alternative (and having management, separately, firm‑by‑firm, decide what’s best for all stakeholders, in a highly political process, is not the likely answer).the key point of this essay is not that the critics are wrong in their specifics. they certainly raise some fair points for debate and should be praised for doing so. but these are not the key points regarding maximizing shareholder value. rather these critiques address ancillary related points.the key point is the near equivalence of the idea that management should “maximize shareholder value” and the belief that markets price things reasonably accurately, not perfectly, most of the time. belief or scorn for "maximize shareholder value" is essentially belief or scorn for the idea that market prices are anywhere near “efficient,” even if this is often expressed in confused roundabout ways. [10]again, one certainly does not need to believe markets are perfectly efficient. there is lots of room between perfection and scorn as the “worst idea ever.” i, for one, certainly don’t believe markets are perfect! in fact, not even the most ardent efficient marketers believe in perfection, although this straw man has been used to attack them over and over.  to believe in maximizing shareholder value we do not need to believe much beyond observing that markets are tough to beat, are better than all the alternatives we’ve observed (like committees setting prices!), and that the financial landscape is littered with the wreckage of those whose scorn for the market’s judgment was too extreme.those who say maximizing shareholder value is something like “the worst idea ever” are essentially saying markets are wildly inefficient — disastrously and obviously so — at setting prices. now, one is free to believe this extreme hypothesis. one can believe that markets are horrifically bad no matter how much i, and the legion of evidence, may disagree. one is free to cite the handful of exceptions that actually prove the rule here (exceptional managers and exceptional times for markets) and believe market prices consistently have no toehold on reality. but one must acknowledge that the trendy denunciation of "maximize shareholder value" is exactly this self-same extreme radical denunciation of markets themselves. if you believe maximize shareholder value is the “worst idea ever” you aren’t simply cynical about how well markets function. no, you go much further. you directly claim they are utter disasters and that you have a better way. good luck with that. of course, you could temper your view, perhaps rephrase as “maximizing shareholder value is a pretty good though imperfect idea and here are a few suggestions for improvement,” but those articles are way less exciting...[1] he cribs this title from jack welch on the same topic, a person whom i disagree with rarely and, if absolutely necessary, with great trepidation. though in this case i don’t think i’m disagreeing with jack head-on as i believe he was mostly reminding us that truly maximizing shareholder value means thinking long-term, a point actually very close to mine.[2] one exception being an excellent recent piece by holman jenkins, also of the wall street journal, with surprisingly little overlap to this essay, perhaps showing how many different ways there are to defend this idea![3] this is fair if seen as part of the debate about market efficiency, the only debate we should be having, but turns to unfair if “perfection” is the standard as this is an impossible straw man. moreover, the accusation of being “short-term” is totally misguided when the attackers simply do not realize how “long-term” today’s price can and should be in a well-functioning market.[4] these ideas were developed by people like jensen, meckling and friedman, names that are often invoked by the critics as if they were one rider short of the equine harbingers of the apocalypse.[5] if you want management to maximize shareholder value, logically you should reward the team based on the difference between the current stock price and what the stock price would be without their efforts (stealing a concept from baseball quants, shareholder value above replacement management). while that is unobservable, the current stock price is probably a useful input in assessing that, as is the performance of the stock relative to an industry benchmark. but a board of directors has access to a lot of nonpublic information about management skill that is also relevant. also, measuring contribution is only one part of the compensation decision, the other major part is what the management team is worth on the open market and what it would cost to replace them. so, even in a world where market prices were very accurate, pure stock-based compensation is probably not a great idea, but neither is ignoring the stock price in setting compensation.[6] see the earlier discussion of market efficiency. also, as an aside, management compensation of this sort typically comes with lock ups, short-term trading restrictions, sometimes clawbacks and often prices averaged over intervals. moreover, the grants are revisited annually. so even if raw stock prices have short-term noise, management compensation is based on at least a somewhat longer-term version. and critics who think such compensation is still too short-term can argue for longer option and vesting terms and longer lock ups, rather than for throwing out the whole shareholder-value concept.[7] in addition, accounting rules may make options, and how the “strike” price of options is adjusted for corporate actions, cause some actions (e.g., buybacks) to be favored over others (e.g., dividends). if this is the case, and they think it is important, critics would do better to focus on the accounting rules and the specific terms of the options awards than the basic idea of maximizing shareholder value.[8] to take the opposite side for the moment, proponents of one-sided options based compensation point out that undiversified managers have natural incentives to fear downsides more than diversified shareholders do, and options might offset this to align interests better. a risky new business initiative might have positive risk-adjusted present value for shareholders, but management may avoid it because failure could cost them their jobs and reputations, while success would bring only a small increase to their incomes.[9] to the extent the “expectations game” is an attempt to manipulate expectations before-the-fact, then some reforms may be helpful . but, again, this would be for the purpose of better maximizing shareholder value, not for discarding the concept.[10] of course, one might believe some markets are more efficient than others. for instance, if you believe private and venture markets are less efficient than public markets, then attempting to maximize what the firm could be sold for now will yield a worse result in these markets than when this principle is applied elsewhere. this is, in fact, a subset of my point, that your belief in maximizing shareholder value must be consistent with your belief in the efficiency/accuracy of market prices.this material contains the opinions of the manager and such opinions are subject to change without notice. this material has been distributed for informational purposes only and should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product. the investment strategy and themes discussed herein may be unsuitable for investors depending on their specific investment objectives and financial situation. please note that changes in the rate of exchange of a currency may affect the value, price or income of an investment adversely.information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but not guaranteed. forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results. they involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, there can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from expectations. past performance is no guarantee of future results. no part of this material may be reproduced in any form, or referred to in any other publication, without express written permission from aqr.information contained on third party websites that aqr capital management, llc, (“aqr”) may link to is not reviewed in its entirety for accuracy and aqr assumes no liability for the information contained on these websites.
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rt @pdacosta: ubs stock tumbles 14%
 zurich—the market value of switzerland’s biggest banks crumbled after a surprise decision by the central bank to do away with a cap on the country’s currency.the swiss national bank’s move thursday to ditch a long-standing policy of maintaining a limit of 1.20 swiss francs per euro suddenly exposed the country’s big banks to relative declines in the value of both the euro and u.s. dollar—currencies in which lenders including ubs ag and credit suisse group ag derive much of their earnings. as european trading ended...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 can entrepreneurship save the american dream?that's the central question that the latest milstein commission report, out wednesday, hopes to answer.the commission, a multi-year collaboration of high-voltage business experts, politicians, and policy experts at the university of virginia's miller center , has proposed some bipartisan solutions for ensuring the solvency of the american dream, and its promise of a strong middle class.while the report takes a high-level, often academic approach to solving the problems faced by u.s. business owners, the solutions proposed are generally laudable and worth considering."too few people have focused on this connection between entrepreneurship and the middle class," says karen mills , former head of the small business administration  and a member of the milstein commission, which was co-chaired by aol co-founder steve case and former hewlett-packard chief executive carly fiorina. "and we all believe in a shared hypothesis, that you want to encourage entrepreneurship as a pathway to the middle class."although there is little concrete data to support the hypothesis, mills says, broader access to starting a business is likely to create greater economic resilience and a stronger economy in general.in many ways, the paper is a direct response to the finding of a  brookings institution  report, out last may, which describes the destruction and decline of u.s. entrepreneurship as seen through the lens of business starts, which have been dissipating for more than three decades. currently, half as many new small businesses start each year than in 1978."we have a problem," says fiorina, the former hp exec who is expected to make a run at the presidency in 2016. "small business is the engine of economic growth and innovation in the nation, but small businesses are suffering and fewer are starting and more are failing now than in the last 40 years."given those facts, the commission proposes five solutions for unlocking entrepreneurial power.these include increasing access to capital, teaching entrepreneurship as a profession, creating stronger entrepreneurial ecosystems, and helping small businesses navigate the welter of regulations that, according to many, constrain economic growth.when it comes to increasing access to capital, for example, the commission proposes reformulating the bank credit and reinvestment act (cra)criteria to allow financial institutions to invest in businesses, as opposed to banks' traditional mainstay, real estate, mills says.similarly, program related investments (pris), or so-called impact investing in entrepreneurship, could be increased from large foundations, if irs regulations surrounding such grants could be streamlined."[pris] are a targeted way of getting money to small businesses, just like the credit and reinvestment act is," fiorina says.even more pressing, fiorina and mills say, is streamlining regulations and making them easily understandable and transparent to new business owners. (as it stands now, the commission reports, small businesses currently pay 36 percent more in compliance costs than large businesses.)to do that, the commission proposes building a regulatory roadmap, including a website to centralize all state, local, and federal regulations. the data would be searchable by zip code to give entrepreneurs targeted information. the website would also serve as a forum for complaints about overly burdensome regulations, providing transparency with the hope of weeding out particularly onerous compliance."the purpose of this recommendation is to take the kind of regulations that small businesses need to know and understand and make them easily accessible," mills says.existing businesses aside, the commission further proposes making the u.s. more entrepreneurial again by teaching entrepreneurship as a path to would-be business creators through various curricula, starting as early as grade school.development of "plug-and-play" entrepreneurial ecosystems, with civic leaders versed in the latest research about business creation and new toolkits available for them, would be vital in building new business clusters. that way the nation can expand beyond existing clusters like silicon valley, boston's route 128 corridor, and durham's triangle park.certainly the stakes are high, and it's important to dream big.or, as case said in statement about the milstein commission's findings, "entrepreneurs must again be at the heart of rebuilding the american economy."
rt @aparanjape: a us suburb just got the fastest internet connection in the world ... 10 gbps?! http://t.co/jrxwmtxk4w
 this week, a us internet provider called, erm, us internet, gave 30,000 residents in the minnesotan city of minneapolis access to the fastest home internet speed in the world.according to eric mack at gizmag , the provider has started rolling out 10 gigabit per second connections in the minneapolis suburb of minnetonka, which means it would take you less than a second to download a feature film. it’s also 10 times faster than google fibre’s recent effort, and a mind-blowing 200 times faster than the average home connection across the us and in australia.right now, the average us and australian connection speeds are just over 30 megabits per second , which means they're ranked 31st and 42nd in the world, respectively, in terms of average download speeds.this connection is even faster than those in hong kong, south korea, and japan - previously touted as being the fastest in the world, and us internet says it plans to expand the service to other parts of the country throughout 2015.the downside? having access to the fastest internet in the world doesn’t come cheap - right now, it’ll set you back $399 a month for matching upload and download speeds, which means it’s more suited to small businesses and people with home offices.this two-metre-long shark has 26 rows of teeth and belongs to a species that's 80 million years old, and it was just found off the southeast coast of australia. hello, nightmare fuel.this extremely rare  frilled shark has unfortunately been pulled out of the water by a fishing trawler near lakes entrance in victoria’s gippsland region.once you get over the fact it looks just like the chest-buster from alien, it's actually quite a fascinating and rare discovery - and the first time the species has been seen in the region in living memory.scientists from australia's national science agency, the csiro, have confirmed that the specimen is a frilled shark, chlamydoselachus anguineus, a rare species that is 80 million years old.“we couldn't find a fisherman who had ever seen one before," a representative from the south east trawl fishing industry association (seftia), who caught the shark, told abc news.  "it looks prehistoric, it looks like it's from another time!"this specimen is only 2 metres long, but frilled sharks can grow up to 5 metres long. they're found in a handful of scattered locations in the pacific and atlantic oceans, including off the coast of morocco, scotland and japan.the species gets its name from its six pairs of gill slits, which have a fringed appearance, and although it looks more like an eel, it has the fins and tail of a shark.and the teeth - fringed sharks have 300 needle-like teeth over 26 rows, which they use to swallow prey, such as cephalopods and bony fish, whole. “once you're in that mouth, you're not coming out," boag told abc.while it's unfortunate that this individual got caught up in a fishing net, it's not something the species is normally at risk of. although the sharks can live as deep as 1,500 metres below the ocean, they're most commonly found around at depths of 1,200 metres. this one was found at around 700 metres - which is generally the limit for trawling - so, apparently, it was just unlucky.you can see more images of the find below, as well as some footage of a frilled shark filmed in japan back in 2007.india is home to 70 percent of the world’s wild tiger population, and they’ve just reported an increase of 30 percent since 2010, thanks to concerted efforts by the local government and conservationist groups to fight poachers.india’s tiger population has risen from 1,706 individuals to 2,226 over the past four years, officials reported yesterday. with estimates last year that the global wild population is teetering just over 3,000 individuals, an increase like this crucial for the survival of this beleaguered species.this four-year increase is part of an even longer-term upwards trend - the population was at 1,411 individuals in 2007, which represents an increase of 60 percent over the past seven years."while the tiger population is falling in the world, it is rising in india,” environment minister prakash javadekar told journalists in new delhi yesterday . “this is great news.”the growth of the poaching industry over the past hundred years has seen the world's wild tiger population drop from around 100,000 individuals spread over 30 nations during the early 20th century to a mere 3,000 , confined to 11 countries, only eight of which contain breeding pairs . wild tigers now appear in just 7 percent of their former global range, and over the past 80 years, three subspecies - the javan, caspian, and bali tigers - have gone extinct.there’s a whole lot to be concerned about when it comes to wild tigers, but the good news coming out of india is that conservation efforts can actually work, but to do so, they need the whole-hearted support (and finances) of local governments. while the details of india’s conversation program are yet to be published - likely next month in the upcoming government report entitled status of tigers in india, 2014 - brian clark howard at national geographic says the biggest gains for the country’s wild population have been large, protected parks. severe penalties for poaching - some regions around the country have declared it legal for poachers to be shot and killed on sight - and more sophisticated tracking methods have also contributed to india’s conservation success. they’ve reportedly installed a network of 9,700 cameras throughout known tiger habitats, and they’re now using a more scientific method of identifying each individual they find."india has had trouble reporting on its tigers in the past because game managers relied on outdated methods of tracking, such as looking at footprints,” says howard . "but over the past few years, those managers have upgraded to using camera traps to record tigers and to identify them individually based on their unique stripe patterns, which are akin to human fingerprints.”another major threat to the wild tiger population is a loss of habitat due to the continued expansion of the local human populations, which is something that the indian government has had to deal with very sensitively.becky ferreira reports at motherboard:“[it] raises the thorny political issue of whether villagers or tigers should be given priority over reserved land. indian officials have confronted this problem by investing millions of rupees into compensating settlers who agree to clear out of key tiger habitats. 'it is a long-drawn process because the villagers have to agree to move out,' said forest conservation chief ps somasekhar in a 2012 bbc article . 'we can't force them to leave. we can only persuade.’”ferreira says that the success of this relocation program has seen entire villages abandoned to make way for wild tiger reserves. it’s a big cost to the locals who had made their homes there, but the real growth seen in india's wild tiger population today has undeniably justifed the move.and as a testament to what a single, determined individual can do, a man named jadav payeng has single-handedly built a 550-hectare forest on majuli island in northeast india, which happens to be home to population of wild indian tigers. incredible.unfortunately, that viral vine video of guitar strings up close is misleading. but the reality is even more interesting.at the end of last year, viner logan gendizzle created this short loop of his guitar strings up close while he plays weezer’s “say it ain’t so”. the result is pretty spectacular-looking, and it’s recently been doing the rounds online again for obvious reasons.but, unfortunately, however interesting it is to look at, the video isn’t actually showing the real vibration of the strings, as joe wolfe , physics and acoustics expert from unsw science in sydney, australia, explained to sciencealert when we contacted him about it.instead, what you’re seeing is “almost certainly an artefact of a moderately slow camera,” says wolfe. say it ain’t so…“from the two frets in view, we can see that the whole field of view of the camera is only a few centimetres in the foreground. from this and the movie, we would naively deduce that the largest amplitude waves on the strings had wavelengths of only a centimetre or so. in reality, the waves with these wavelengths will have very small amplitudes, and the large amplitude vibrations will have wavelengths of tens of centimetres,” he explains.so why does it look like this in the movie? wolfe explains:a more familiar example: have you ever taken a movie from a high speed train or car window? nearby objects like electricity posts seem to be leaning. of course they are not, it's just that the camera has recorded the top of the post first and, when it gets to the bottom of the post, the train has moved on. it's more complicated when the object (like these strings) are vibrating."but that doesn’t mean that close-up guitar strings aren’t equally fascinating. the reality is that they don’t move nearly as much as the strings in that video, but there is still a very clear sine wave that travels along them, as you can see in the slow-motion footage below."ultimately, these vibrations create a travelling sound wave, and the pitch of the sound you hear depends on the frequency of the string's vibrations," says wolfe.a string can only vibrate so often , depending on the length of the standing wave that its vibration cause. so, generally, heavier strings will vibrate more slowly and have a longer wavelength, creating lower pitch, and finer strings will vibrate more frequently with shorter wavelengths, creating higher notes. the length of the string that's available to move also determines the pitch of the note it creates, which is why placing your fingers down in different chord patterns will vary the sound you hear. pitch is also affected by the tension in the string - which is controlled when you tune your instrument - and to a lesser extent, the way in which you pluck, as wolfe explains .some of the energy of these vibrations is transmitted to the air by the body of an acoustic guitar, and spread out until they eventually hit your eardrum, transmitting the notes of your favourite song.find out more about how instruments produce sound, and how standing waves travel across strings, at wolfe’s pages here and here . you can also read about how his team solved a long-standing musical mystery on the twisting motion produced by a bow.and enjoy some more amazing footage of strings really moving in all their sinous glory. as wolfe explains, "the reality is more interesting but less amazing".for the first time, scientists have found that an active ingredient in curries can impair the formation and storage of fear-related memories in mice, suggesting that it could be used to treat ptsd in humans.a new study involving lab animals has found that curcumin, the naturally occurring, bright yellow compound used in curries, can actively impair the formation of fear-related memories in the brain, making it an intriguing new candidate for possible treatments for psychological disorders such as ptsd.extracted from the root of the turmeric plant (curcuma longa), a species native to southeast india and related to ginger, curcumin has been used as a food additive and dye by indian and east asian cultures for many hundreds of years. and studies suggest that it doesn’t just offer a distinct, slightly bitter, peppery taste - preclinical research has found that could also have several beneficial effects on the body , including anti-inflammatory , antioxidant , and neuroprotective properties (which means it actively preserves the structure or function of your neurons).the compound is being studied as a potential treatment for everything from cancer and alzheimer’s disease to arthritis and heart disease , and now researchers are suggesting that it could also be used to treat people living with post-traumatic stress disorder, or ptsd.this debilitating disorder currently affects as much as 8 percent of the us population, with returned military personnel being particularly susceptible. and despite its devastating effects, there aren’t a lot of options for the treatment of ptsd. the only medications that have made it to market are antidepressants and sedatives, which can effectively mask the pain, but don’t get to the heart of the problem - how fear-related memories are formed and stored in the brain. and that’s if they work. research has found that for up to 50 percent of the patients who have been prescribed these treatments, they don’t actually work.so the race is on to find something else to treat ptsd, and psychologists at the city university of new york in the us have been focussing on the potential of curcumin to do just that. they picked the popular root extract because it’s already been shown  to reduce symptoms of depression in both lab animals and people.the team, led by psychologist glenn e. schafe, used a widely studied animal model of traumatic memory formation in ptsd, called the pavlovian fear conditioning, to test the effects of curcumin. the pavlovian fear conditioning model involves creating a negative association in an animal’s memory with a particular object, place, smell, or sound. for example, you inflict a mild electric shock on a rat every time it explores a designated corner of its enclosure, and pretty soon it’s going to start avoiding that spot like the plague.the team’s rats were split into three groups - two got regular food, and the third got food made with 1.5 percent curcumin added. the curcumin group ended up eating about 270 milligrams of the colourful extract each day, on average. five days later, the fear conditioning began. of the two groups fed on normal food, one was subjected to fear conditioning, and the other wasn't, so it could remain a control group.the first experiment involved studying the effects of curcumin on the actual physical structure of the rats' brains. the team found that the spice was making its way to the lateral amygdala region of the brain, which is  said to be an essential place for fear memory storage , in high enough amounts to actively stop the formation of these memories from being completed.the second experiment backed up this find, as curcumin appeared to mess with the fear conditioning process. the rats were conditioned to be frightened of a particular sound, because when they heard it, they received an electric shock. once the conditioning process was over, the model states that the rats will only have to hear the sound to make them freeze in fear, long after the electric shocks have stopped. the team found this to be true in the rats that fed on regular chow, but the rats on the curcumin diet? they didn’t freeze in fear following the conditioning experiment.the researchers report in the paper, published in neuropsychopharmacology :“the curcumin-enriched diet was observed to effectively impair the reconsolidation of both a recently formed (within 24 hrs) as well as an older, well-consolidated (two week old) fear memory, suggesting that even older fear memories are susceptible to reconsolidation impairment using this compound. this latter finding adds to a growing body of evidence that amygdala-dependent memories are susceptible to reconsolidation interference regardless of their age, and has important implications for the use of reconsolidation-based approaches in a clinical setting given that many patients may not seek help immediately following a traumatic experience.finally, and perhaps most important from a clinical perspective, we show that fear memories that fail to reconsolidate under the influence of dietary curcumin are impaired in an enduring manner; we found no evidence that they are subject to reinstatement following an unsignalled foot-shock or to renewal following a shift in the testing context, both of which are trademark characteristics of fear memories that are lost due to fear extinction procedures.”of course, rat brains are very different from human brains, so we can’t jump to any conclusions just yet, but it sure is an intriguing result. one thing's for sure, if the body of research surrounding curcumin can tell us anything, it's that it's probably better to have this humble, yellow spice in your life, than not. 
 brazil ’s government will raise taxes on fuel, imports, credit and cosmetics as part of efforts to restore confidence in its fiscal discipline, finance minister joaquim levy said.the measures will increase revenue by more than 20 billion reais ($7.5 billion), he told reporters monday in brasilia after markets closed. as part of the new policy, brazil will resume collection of the so-called cide tax on fuel and raise taxes on loans to individuals and imports. president dilma rousseff also vetoed tuesday a tax break on income tax approved by congress that would cost the government about 7 billion reais.“this is a series of actions being taken to re-balance the economy, particularly from a fiscal perspective with the aim of improving confidence,” levy said. brazil is “making changes step by step so it can reach, with as little sacrifice as possible, what’s needed to resume the path to growth.”policies adopted byrousseff’s administration during her first four years in office widened the country’s budget deficit, slowed growth and fanned above-target inflation. levy, who took office this month, is undoing those policies to prevent latin america’s biggest economy from losing its investment-grade status.swap rates on the contract due in january 2017 fell 4 basis points, or 0.04 percentage point, to 12.37 percent at 9:09 a.m. local time. the real was little changed at 2.6510 per u.s. dollar.higher fuel taxes will increase revenue by 12.2 billion reais this year, the finance ministry said in a statement distributed to reporters. the government will bring in an additional 7.4 billion reais from higher taxes on personal loans, 694 million reais from imports and 381 million reais on cosmetics, it said. the tax increases will start taking effect next month.petroleo brasileiro sa will pass the tax on to refineries, meaning the net price for the oil producer will remain unchanged, the state-run company said in a statement late monday. prices at the pump will increase by an estimated 5 percent to 7 percent, o globo newspaper reported on its website.“they’re really trying” to raise revenue to meet fiscal goals, andre perfeito , chief economist at gradual cctvm, said by phone. “the problem for me as an economist is that we’re going to have more inflation in the short term.”the inflation rate will surge to 6.67 percent in 2015 from 6.42 percent in december, according to a central bank survey of economists published monday. consumer prices have increased above the midpoint of the 2.5 percent to 6.5 percent target band since rousseff entered office in 2011.a trained economist, rousseff has vowed to better contain inflation in her second term. the central bank raised borrowing costs in the past two meetings and the government has capped monthly spending and boosted interest rates on loans from state development bank bndes since her re-election in october.the central bank will raise borrowing costs this week to 12.25 percent from 11.75 percent, according to the median estimate in a bloomberg survey of 56 analysts.the higher cost of living has eroded the economy. analysts in the central bank survey cut their 2015 growth forecast in the past three weeks to 0.38 percent. that would be the fifth consecutive year the country would grow less than latin america, according to a bloomberg survey.standard & poor’s in march last year downgraded brazil’s credit rating to one level above junk, citing the economic slowdown and deteriorating fiscal accounts. moody’s investors service in september lowered its outlook on the baa2 rating to negative. that is the second-lowest investment grade.the government’s objective is to increase the primary budget surplus target, which excludes interest payments, to 1.2 percent of gross domestic product this year from a deficit of 0.2 percent in the 12 months through november.“the measures announced today are within the realm of what the government needs to do to meet its fiscal target,” carlos kawall, chief economist at banco safra, said in a phone interview from sao paulo.to contact the reporters on this story: mario sergio lima in brasilia newsroom at mlima11@bloomberg.net ; rachel gamarski in em brasilia at rgamarski@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: andre soliani at asoliani@bloomberg.net randall woodspress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 kahara village, kenya —the wife of a cow herder recently switched on a light in her home for the first time ever, all thanks to a mobile phone.rokoine tipanoi used the mobile phone in november to make a tiny down payment on a solar panel on her roof that provides electricity to her home. the payment was so small, in fact, that it’s cheaper to...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 nine months later, not much has changed in the federal government's underground paperwork mine.    read the full update.in boyers, pa. — the trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an american flag.above: illustration by the washington post. officials would not allow photography inside the facility. view the full graphic.first in a series examining the failures at the heart of troubled federal systems.behind the door, a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file cabinets and people in business casual. about 230 feet below the surface, there is easy-listening music playing at somebody’s desk.this is one of the weirdest workplaces in the u.s. government — both for where it is and for what it does.here, inside the caverns of an old pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the office of personnel management. their task is nothing top-secret. it is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.but that system has a spectacular flaw. it still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.the employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. they work underground not for secrecy but for space. the old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.this odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system.held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977.“the need for automation was clear — in 1981,” said james w. morrison jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under president ronald reagan. in a telephone interview this year, morrison recalled his horror upon learning that the system was all run on paper: “after a year, i thought, ‘god, my reputation will be ruined if we don’t fix this,’ ” he said.morrison was told the system still relies on paper files.the existence of a mine full of federal paperwork is not well known: even within the federal workforce, it is often treated as an urban legend, mythic and half-believed­. “that crazy cave,” said aneesh chopra, who served as president obama’s chief technology officer.an aerial view taken in 2007 shows the center’s parking lot and the entrance to the mine, near boyers, pa., about 45 miles north of pittsburgh.                                                                            (aerial photo by pictometry international)but the mine is real, and the process inside it belongs to a stubborn class of government problem: old breaking points, built-in mistakes that require vital bureaucracies to waste money and busy workers to waste time.in some cases, the breaking point is caused by a vague or overcomplicated law.in new jersey, for instance, one researcher found that the approval process for a bridge project dragged on for years, in part because officials were required to do a historic survey of all buildings within two miles and  to seek comment from indian tribes  as far away as oklahoma.in other places, what breaks is the government’s technology.the rollout of healthcare.gov, of course, was  ruined by glitches in the web site , but there are other examples: the census bureau had a failed experiment with hand-held computers, then reverted to paper,  which cost up to $3 billion extra . the department of veterans affairs  had trouble with an online  records system and, while they struggled with it, accumulated so much paperwork  in one office  that auditors feared the floor might collapse.obama took office with the hope that these hang-ups could be separated from washington’s endless wars over the size of government. in theory, these are problems everybody wants to fix.“the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works,” obama said in his first inaugural address.in many places, however, these federal systems still don’t work well. some of the explanation can be found here, in this baroque underground bureaucracy.during the past 30 years, administrations have spent more than $100 million trying to automate the old-fashioned process in the mine and make it run at the speed of computers.so now the mine continues to run at the speed of human fingers and feet. that failure imposes costs on federal retirees, who have to wait months for their full benefit checks. and it has imposed costs on the taxpayer: the obama administration has now made the mine run faster, but mainly by paying for more fingers and feet.the staff working in the mine has increased by at least 200 people in the past five years. and the cost of processing each claim has increased from $82 to $108, as total spending on the retirement system reached $55.8 million.in a statement issued saturday, opm director katherine archuleta said: “i do not believe that the current level of service is acceptable.” she added that modernizing the system is a priority for her.in an interview inside the mine this month, another federal official called the operation “very successful.”but that official balked when asked if it was modern. “what does ‘modern’ mean?” the official said. the office of personnel management allowed a reporter in the mine on the condition that interviews with some officials there would not be conducted on the record.this is how the mine works:step 1 begins when a federal employee submits retirement paperwork to his or her own agency. that happens at least 100,000 times a year. within a few days, the government starts sending “interim payments” to the retirees — checks worth about 80 percent of their full pensions. this is meant to tide them over while the mine works on the case.then, the paper begins to move. the retiree’s agency assembles a paper file of personnel records and ships it off at rush speed.most agencies send these files using fedex, and their packages arrive the next day. the postal service, however, ships its own retirees’ paperwork by u.s. mail.its packages arrive in two days, officials in the mine said.nearly all of those packages come here — over the winding roads, into the tunnel and through the door with the american flag.“you don’t forget that it’s a cave,” said ashley weber, a former temp who worked on the mine’s incoming files. “but they try to make it look as not-cave-like as you can.”but why is it in a cave at all?the answer to that question is that, back in 1958, the u.s. government was in the market for storage space. it needed 30,000 square feet to hold personnel files that were being relocated from a building in washington. officials looked at buildings in richmond, va., and syracuse, n.y., before choosing this place, an underground complex where 1,000 workers had once cut limestone to feed the steel mills.a private company had turned the place into an enormous safe-deposit box: safe from the weather and the soviets, kept naturally cool as a cave. today, the complex is owned by the company iron mountain, which leases out other caverns to store old hollywood movie reels and photo archives.boyers, pa., a small rural town about an hour north of pittsburgh, is home to the underground u.s. office of personnel management’s retirement operations center. there are few other office jobs available in this rural area, so workers there tend to stay. “people don’t leave boyers,” said patty decaria, who retired last year after 38 years at the center.                                                                            (ricky carioti/the washington post)the government moved its old records here in 1960. at first, it was just a file room. records were shipped to washington for processing. but over time, the government began to hire more people to work in the mine itself.they worked hard. and since there were few other office jobs available in this rural area, they tended to stay.“nobody up there goes on to another job. you can work monday through friday, 8 to 5. . . . there’s mostly overtime, if you want it. they’re really flexible about using leave,” said patty decaria, 57, who retired last year after 38 years in the mine. decaria said she also enjoyed the sense that she was helping people who deserved it. “people don’t leave boyers,” she said.still, at best, it’s a good job in a bad place.in the winter, employees enter the mine in the dark and leave in the dark. food must be brought in from outside, because you can’t have an open flame in a mine. so there is a pizza guy, with a security clearance, who arrives every day at 11:30 a.m. another vendor, randy armagost, trucks in hot lunches and an assortment of at least four deep-fried items every day.“people are crabby. they’re miserable. i mean, you can’t blame them. they never see any sunlight,” armagost said. “i’m only down there for 2 ½ hours a day, and i can’t stand it.”for workers inside the mine, step 2 in the paperwork process is to take the retiree’s newly arrived file and match it up with any records already stored in the mine.in about 15 percent of the cases, that means a long walk into the mine’s eight massive file caverns. inside, they are empty enough to be spooky.“i heard rumors of ghosts, out in the files,” decaria said. “they just pull drawers open.”above left: mike deal of the annandale country store loads his truck with food for delivery at the u.s. office of personnel management’s retirement operations center. food must be brought in from outside, because you can’t have an open flame in a mine. above right: patty decaria worked at the retirement operations center for 38 years and said she enjoyed the sense that she was helping people who deserved it. (ricky carioti/the washington post)in most cases, however, step 2 can be completed without a walk. the retiree’s files have been scanned into a digital archive and can be looked up on a computer.but there’s a problem: all the information must go in the retiree’s manila folder.and you can’t put a computer file in a manila folder.“we do print them out, right now. but we won’t in the future,” said doug berger, who supervises this operation. the printed-out documents are put in the folder, and it continues.now, step 3: the file moves around the corner to an adjacent cavern. the workers there have a vital but frustrating job. they must call, e-mail, fax, badger and harass workers in other federal agencies to find paperwork that has been left out of the file.“i used to chase people for months — literally — for one signature on one piece of paper. you want to talk about an egregious waste of taxpayer money?” recalled one worker who left the mine recently and declined to be named because of fears of retribution.this step usually takes a few days to a few weeks. but if anybody’s file is misplaced along the way, it slows everybody’s work down.“on a daily basis, we would get from five to 50 e-mails, asking everybody to take time out of their day to search their desks for case files,” the former worker said. that worker said the experience of hunting down lost paperwork and lost files inside an underground cavern had been bad enough to force a career change.“i’m handling live ordnance on a daily basis, just to get out of there,” said the worker, whose company blasts holes in the ground for oil and gas wells. “one of the five worst jobs in the world was a great alternative to being down there.”finally, when all the file’s missing papers are found, the file moves on to a new set of workers in a new set of caverns.—linda m. springer, then-director of the office of personnel management, in 2006now that all the retiree’s digital data have been turned into paperwork, these workers turn that paperwork into digital data again. they type all the pertinent information into a computer, by hand.“you can do a case in as little as an hour,” said bonnie mccandless, the president of the center’s local labor union, whose job is entering this data. “or you can do a case as long as eight hours, or two days.”the task takes so much time in part because congress has made the federal retirement rules extremely complex. the center’s workers must verify and key in information that answers a huge range of questions: what were the retiree’s three years of highest salary? was the retiree a firefighter? a military veteran? a cafeteria worker at the u.s. capitol? what about part-time service?all those answers can change the final pension payment. “one hundred years of bad laws,” mccandless said.the nightmare cases are the “reemployed annuitants.” a government worker retires. then un-retires. then gets another job with the government. then retires again.the law allows that. but it is a heck of a mess to deal with.“i’m working on one, and it’s going on three weeks,” said an employee sitting near mccandless.when all the data are entered into the computer, it is onto step 5. another employee reviews the case to be sure the data were entered correctly. then, at last, the case is “triggered.” the retiree gets the full check.that process now takes, on average, at least 61 days. that’s the same amount of time it took in 1977, according  to a federal audit from that time . many state retirement systems, which also handle large loads of employees, do it much faster. florida takes 47 days. the california teachers’ retirement system takes 23. texas takes two.those three process their files digitally, not on paper. since the 1980s, the u.s. government has been trying — and failing — to do the same thing here.the first time, work began in 1987. years passed. about $25 million was spent, according to the government accountability office.  but within the government, officials started to worry that it wasn’t working.“the reports [from the contractor] just asserted that they had written x lines of code. . . . for an executive, that’s just invisible; you don’t know what it means,” said curtis smith, who oversaw retirement processing from 1989 to 1994. he was a longtime federal employee with a phd in english literature, supervising a massive technology project.“i had no idea [if] they were making progress from month to month. and i just sort of took it on faith that they could make it work,” smith said. “and they never did.”in 1996, two years after smith left the government, officials finally pulled the plug on that project. then, in 1997, the government tried again.first it tried revamping the system in-house. then it scrapped that plan and hired contractors. after years of work, the system the contractors built was supposed to be ready by early 2008.“they’re still doing a lot of stuff, by hand, with paper. . . . that’s crazy.”but by 2007, there  were concrete warnings  that it again wasn’t going to work.“every time we would do what i would call a stress test, we would come up with abysmal numbers — like an 18 percent success rate,” said robert danbeck, who was overseeing the project. the root of the problem, he said, was that the system had trouble synthesizing information from so many sources and calculations based on so many laws. “we would go back and look at what caused it, and it was always just so many pieces, trying to tie things together.”then  it broke and was eventually scrapped, after  more than $106 million had been spent . in the mine, the files continued to move on paper.contained in all those failures, experts say, is a very brief history of the federal government’s recent troubles with information technology.a recent study by the standish group, a firm in boston that researches failures, found that only 5 percent of large federal it projects in the last decade fully succeeded.of the rest, 41 percent were failures, canceled before they were turned on. the reasons often echoed the problems in the mine: federal officials either tried to buy a technology they didn’t fully understand because they lacked the technical skill, or they didn’t test what they were getting until it was too late.at the low point, in the first years of obama’s presidency, the processing time dragged out to 156 days. in response, officials did not try to eliminate the glitch. instead, they hired more people to wrestle with it and rearranged the old process so that the paperwork moved more quickly.jonathan may, a recent retiree from the justice department, was pleasantly surprised that his case only took three months to process. he’d expected far worse.“i was actually bracing for it. i had saved up all my annual leave . . . went out with about 440 hours [of stored-up leave], just in case i had to live off of that for a while,” may, who lives on long island, said in a telephone interview. “i was just amazed at how smoothly everything went.”inside the mine, officials said they were gradually increasing the number of records that are stored digitally. eventually, they said, the entire operation would run on computers. they had faith in the government’s ability to eliminate this breaking point.“there’s a rover on mars, mister,” one opm official said.in the meantime, the workers who make this old-fashioned system work get a special — if unofficial — benefit.when they retire, they don’t have to wait on it.“opm employees get special treatment,” said decaria, the recently retired mine worker. the agency said this is not its official policy. but when decaria retired, a colleague spotted the file and moved it to the front of the line.alice crites contributed to this report.
 by emily badger december 26, 2014 follow @emilymbadgerimage courtesy of flickr user tony webster , under a creative commons license.in a year full of distressing stories — especially about race, crime and violence in urban neighborhoods — this one points to some hope. earlier this december, we covered a summer jobs program in chicago that appeared to lead to fewer teenage arrests for violent crime. our original story , republished below, also reminds us that policy solutions are possible — and possibly even inexpensive.a couple of years ago, the city of chicago started a summer jobs program for teenagers attending high schools in some of the city's high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. the program was meant, of course, to connect students to work. but officials also hoped that it might curb the kinds of problems — like higher crime — that arise when there's no work to be found.research on the program conducted by the university of chicago crime lab and just published in the journal science suggests that these summer jobs have actually had such an effect: students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program had 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests over 16 months, compared to students in a control group.that number is striking for a couple of reasons: it implies that a relatively short (and inexpensive) intervention like an eight-week summer jobs program can have a lasting effect on teenage behavior. and it lends empirical support to a popular refrain by advocates: "nothing stops a bullet like a job."researcher sara heller conducted a randomized control trial with the program, in partnership with the city. the study included 1,634 teens at 13 high schools. they were, on average, c students, almost all of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. twenty percent of the group had already been arrested, and 20 percent had already been victims of crime.some of the students were given part-time jobs through the program, working 25 hours a week at minimum wage ($8.25 in illinois) with government or non-profit employers. they worked as camp counselors, office assistants, or in community gardens, among other places. other students in the treatment group worked 15 hours a week at similar jobs, but also received 10 hours a week of "social-emotional learning" time, where they learned skills to manage their emotions or behavior that might get in the way of employment. all of the students in the program received mentors as well. the teenagers in the control group participated in neither part of the program.heller used chicago police department data to follow what happened to all of the students in the 16 months after the program began. in the crime data, there was no difference between the students who got the counseling and those who did not, suggesting that the group working 25 hours a week may have acquired some of the same social-emotional skills on the job. there was a big difference, though, in the violent crime arrest data between the teenagers who got jobs and those who did not:"summer jobs reduce violence among disadvantaged youth" by s. heller in sciencea lot of things could be going on here. teenagers who might have committed crime to get money would no longer need to when they have a job. if their added income allowed parents to work less, they may also have gotten more adult supervision. it's also possible that students who were busy working simply didn't have idle time over the summer to commit crime — but that theory doesn't explain the long-term declines in violent arrests that occurred well after the summer program was over.heller, in fact, found that most of the decline came a few months later:that long-term benefit suggests that students who had access to jobs may have then found crime a less attractive alternative to work. or perhaps their time on the job taught them how the labor market values education. or maybe the work experience may have given them skills that enabled them to be more successful — and less prone to getting in trouble — back in school.this one study can't identify exactly why a summer jobs program might change the trajectory of teens at risk of becoming violent. it also raises the possibility that teenagers with summer jobs might have more money to spend on drugs (drug arrests for the treatment group were slightly higher than for the control). these results do suggest that cities could get a lot of payoff for the minimal cost of a summer-jobs program — particularly if it targets teens before they drop out of school. as heller writes:the results echo a common conclusion in education and health research: that public programs might do more with less by shifting from remediation to prevention. the findings make clear that such programs need not be hugely costly to improve outcomes for disadvantaged youth; well-targeted, low-cost employment policies can make a substantial difference, even for a problem as destructive and complex as youth violence.emily badger is a reporter for wonkblog covering urban policy. she was previously a staff writer at the atlantic cities.
 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.you're probably aware that  heart disease and cancer are far and away the leading causes of death in america. but globally the picture is more complicated:the above map shows the leading cause of lost years of life by country (click to see a larger version). the data comes from the global burden of disease study , whose 2013 installment was released just a few weeks ago.it's worth stressing that "cause of lost years of life" and "cause of death" aren't identical. for example, deaths from preterm births may cause more lost years of life in a country than deaths from heart disease even if heart disease is the leading cause of death. deaths from preterm births amount to many decades of lost life, whereas heart disease tends to develop much later on.but that makes the fact that heart disease is the leading cause of lost life in so many countries all the more striking, and indicative of those countries' successes in reducing childhood mortality. by contrast, in many lower-income countries, the leading cause is something like malaria, diarrhea, preterm birth, hiv/aids, or violence, which all typically afflict people earlier in life than heart disease or stroke. we've made considerable  progress in fighting childhood mortality across the globe in recent decades, but there's still much work left to be done.on the flipside, the world is getting better in a great number of ways:
rt @lindayueh: “@telegraph: is this the most powerful woman in china? http://t.co/afn5shdgz0 http://t.co/kiessi9cs3”
 let’s start with the second question. unlike her compatriots gong li, jackie    chan and fan    bing bing , yao has never made a hollywood film and speaks almost no    english.“of, course if the right script came along i would love to do a hollywood    film,” she says when we meet in a bustling café on the east side of beijing.    she’s also a fan of british cinema, and becomes giggly at the mention of benedict    cumberbatch , an actor she admires. “for now, though, i would just be    happy if my current body of work in china got some recognition overseas.”after studying at the prestigious beijing film academy, she scored a role in a    martial-arts sitcom, my own swordsman. what followed was a mixture of    romantic comedies and action films, with yao often cast as the girl next    door. one of her most popular – color me love (2010) – sees her play the    lead in a devil    wears prada -ish tale of a girl moving to the big city to work for a    hard-boiled magazine editor.it’s hard to imagine anyone else fitting the role so perfectly, not least    because she cuts such an accessible figure both on screen and off. evidently    comfortable in her own skin, she arrives for our interview completely    make-up free, her hair drawn back into a simple ponytail, wearing a white    t-shirt tucked into a black leather skirt, and brogues.yao doesn’t have a “look-at-me” beauty – nor is she classically beautiful by    chinese standards – but her appeal is obvious. the first things you notice    are her striking, cara    delevingne- esque eyebrows, which arch above enormous, almond-shaped    eyes.the next thing you notice is her heart-shaped face, tapering to her wide    mouth.her beauty might best be described as extraterrestrial. “she’s certainly not    your cookie-cutter leading lady,” says alexi tan, who directed her in color    me love. “i think people like her so much because she’s always herself. she    doesn’t put on a persona.”a glance at a typical chinese internet message board would seem to prove his    point. “she really speaks from the heart!” read one comment after yao posted    a message about her 2011 divorce from the actor ling xiao su. (she is now    married to the cinematographer cao yu, and the couple have a baby son whose    name is kept secret for security reasons.) “she’s the least fake of allthe    celebrities,” reads another. “not a hypocrite like the others…”does yao agree that it’s her down- to-earth nature that has endeared her to so    many? “well, i’m a middle-class girl,” she says. “so i’m more suited to leading a normal life.    what’s familiar to me makes me feel safe.” which of course would make    perfect sense, if it weren’t for the fact that so many stars don’t manage to    retain such levels of normality.the only child of a train driver and a postal worker, she says that her father    was “a very humble person” who had a great influence on her. “i would always    overhear him and my mum discussing how they could help others,” she says. “because he worked on the railway, his friends assumed he could get them    tickets for their chinese    new year train journeys home before everyone else. in fact, he    couldn’t, but he didn’t want to let them all down, so he’d wake up at the    crack of dawn and queue up with everyone else.“for me one of life’s great joys is still being able to go out and buy my own    food,” she continues. “i bargain for vegetables in the market, spend time    with my family, cook for them. i’m very lucky.”i’m not sure luck comes into it, i say. there are plenty of stars who wouldn’t    want to continue with such a mundane life once they’d made their millions. “yes,” she acknowledges. “of course, this is every individual’s personal    choice.”modesty always goes down well in china, where corruption is rife, the gap between rich and poor widens every year and the showiness    of the nouveau riche has become reviled. so it’s no surprise that the    unassuming yao has become a national heroine. it’s also perhaps no surprise    that four years ago she was approached by the united nations high    commissioner for refugees ( unhcr )    to be its goodwill ambassador in china, à la angelina    jolie (who yao says was one of the reasons she was inspired to    accept the role).yao is obviously passionate about her work for the agency. when she talks    about her visits to countries such as ethiopia and lebanon, she speaks with    the directness and fervour of someone who has witnessed suffering    first-hand, not just put their name to a charity for the kudos it brings.this hasn’t gone unnoticed by her fellow countrymen, who regularly criticise    actors for what they perceive to be a more cynical championing of charities.    yao says that she enjoys her trips with the unhcr, and has learnt much from    the collaboration, sharing stories and online diaries after every trip.“so i feel a big responsibility to tell others what i have seen.” the results    speak for themselves: the unhcr saw the number of donations from mainland    china triple between 2012 and 2013.yao is proud of one success story in particular, and relates it with great    gusto. “after i posted my africa diary i heard from the unhcr office in    beijing that there was an elderly woman who kept visiting again and again,” she says. “on one occasion she came in to donate 800 renminbi [about £80].    she said she’d read my diary and realised that there were people who needed    it more than she did.the touching part is that every time she came to the office she would take the    bus. one day they asked her where she lived and she said she was way out in    the suburbs, so they asked her why she wasn’t taking the subway. her reply    was that the 2rmb (20p) fare was too expensive, so 800rmb must have been all    her savings.“sometimes i feel like i really can’t change enough,” she concludes. “i can    become quite depressed about it all. but then this kind of story gives me    the encouragement to carry on.”once in a while yao’s weibo posts touch upon subjects that are politically    sensitive. in january last year she subtly passed comment on the censorship    of a domestic newspaper, the southern weekly, by quoting a russian proverb – “one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world” – and copy-and-pasting    the newspaper’s logo.on another occasion, referring to beijing’ s    dreadful pollution, she joked that her son wouldn’t recognise a blue sky    unless he saw one in a history book.but when asked why she thinks she can get away with comments that would get    others in hot water, she brushes off their significance. “i’m not interested    in politics,” she says, matter of factly. “i just focus on the people in the    society i live in. i only comment on things that touch me directly.”“does that include your faith?” i ask –yao is reported to have discovered    christianity when she was 25. this is another sensitive topic in a country    where only two state-sanctioned christian groups are allowed to exist.“oh yes,” she says without hesitation. “i often quote from the bible. i think    i don’t need to worry too much about that.” she even admits to attending a “house church”, rather than a government-approved one. such a gathering is    deemed to be “unregistered” and therefore technically illegal.“when i was younger a family member shared the gospel with me,” she explains. “and over the course of that summer i read the bible and it just answered    all of the questions i had about life, so very soon after i was baptised.”when someone is as frank about their personal life as yao is, it is inevitable    that they will also have their detractors. she admits that she has taken    hurtful comments to heart in the past, especially those relating to her    private life. she came under scrutiny following her divorce – she got    together with her current partner soon afterwards. “sometimes people’s    comments really hurt when i look back,” she says, her voice small for the    first time. “but in the end this is normal for someone in the public    spotlight. whatever people said, when it comes to divorce there are no    winners or losers – everybody loses.”so what’s next for yao chen? rom-com queen, social-media queen… fashion queen? her fans go crazy over her outfits, even on    the rare occasions when she is snapped looking groggy at beijing airport.her model-like frame does lend itself well to being photographed, and she    already has collaborations with chanel ,    adidas and lanvin under her belt.for now, though, she is happy just to have time to spend with her son, known    affectionately as xiao tudou (“little potato”), before her next project. “i’m happiest when i’m cooking and have the chance to stay in with my    husband,” she says. “he loves to play with his cameras and of course we love    spending time with the baby. even though he’s so young we can really    understand each other. god is really the greatest creator.”for more information about the unhcr’s current campaigns, visit unhcr.org.uk
 american health care has no steve jobs or bill gates. no jeff bezos, elon musk, burt rutan, or henry ford. no innovator whose genius and sweat deliver the twin lightning bolts of cost-reduction and quality improvement across the broad landscape of health care. why not? either we answer that question soon and uncork the genie, or we consign our health care to a prolonged, unaffordable stagnation.america leads the world in health-care innovation — but not the innovation that sends costs plunging and unleashes previously undreamed-of quality improvements. that kind of innovation occurs only in isolated pockets of health care. in the aggregate, health care spending rises rapidly and relentlessly.if implemented as planned, the affordable care act ensures the health-care industry will never have the flexibility it needs to generate a steve jobs. tightly constricted, top-down micromanagement will deprive health care of the oxygen essential to attract and incentivize cost-cutting innovators. this suffocating environment predated the aca, but the law worsens things considerably by tightly controlling providers, patients, and employers.unfortunately, advocates of decentralized, market-oriented approaches have never offered the electorate convincing alternatives to centralized, bureaucratic command and control.if the aca crumbles, market-oriented health care reformers have one more chance to articulate a vision. a quick internet search already churns up chatter (some gleeful, some mournful) about replacing a failed aca with a single-payer system. decentralizers will need to formulate and articulate — quickly — why american health care never produces a steve jobs and how markets could usher in cost-cutting innovation. importantly, their narratives would need to ring true to people who are not already persuaded that markets can function in health care.to illustrate the conceptual and rhetorical rut we are in, imagine if people in early 1964 had discussed computers the way we in 2013 discuss health care. (at that time, computers were mostly room-size mainframes costing millions in 2013 dollars, at least). discussing computers as we today discuss health care, all the parties in 1964 would agree there is a “computer crisis” — out-of-control prices, a widening gap between haves and have-nots. only rich companies, they fret, can afford computers.some would offer an array of solutions: the government could become the sole manufacturer of mainframes. alternatively, the government could become the sole purchaser of mainframes — using its great market clout to force ibm to sell its mainframes for, say, $950,000 rather than $1 million. or the government could tightly regulate mainframe manufacturers — prohibiting them, say, from charging more than $900,000 for a computer.others, conversely, would argue that the answer to the hypothetical computer crisis is a more open market. we need more stores, they say, in which to buy mainframes. mainframe stores in every shopping mall — and a greater capacity to buy and sell mainframes across state lines.apolitical business end-users would seek to band together in purchasing cooperatives — demanding as one that ibm moderate its mainframe prices.meanwhile, the industry would still be mainframes, mainframes, mainframes all the way down. no minis, micros, laptops, or smartphones. in fact, in our allegorical world of 1964, everyone would agree to laws and regulations and institutions that virtually forbid the emergence of a steve jobs or bill gates.let’s return, now, to 2013 and health care. to unleash innovators, we have to recognize what leashes them in the first place. consider some candidates: medicare’s reimbursement formula muffles prices and distorts resource allocation in ways that impact private insurance. tax laws effectively bind employees to their employers’ health plans. state regulations protect insiders through scope-of-practice regulations, protectionist licensing, and certificate-of-need requirements. the structure of medical education (heavily influenced by state regulations) locks obsolete management practices in place. tort law discourages heterodox innovation. even more challenging, fixing one of these at a time may not do the trick.building the case for market solutions in health care, then, demands that market advocates think large. for inspiration, they should look beyond their usual array of reading sources. cost-cutting innovation, also known as “disruptive innovation” is brilliantly described in “the innovator’s prescription” by clayton christensen, jerome grossman, and jason hwang.a key insight from that literature is that cost-cutting innovation almost always comes from the supply side, not the demand side. it emerges from the protean genius of previously unknown people who see our wishes and hopes before we ourselves do. tellingly, most of today’s policy prescriptions from the left, right, and center focus on the demand-side incentives. but the problem is that consumers can’t visualize what the disruptive innovations in health care will be — any more than they could have known in 1964 how the laptop, smartphone, and internet would soon restructure their lives.message to market enthusiasts: the clock is ticking. one more chance to get health care right may be in the offing. there’s no time to waste. and you had best learn to persuade those who don’t already agree with you.
 after decades of high growth, japan’s economy slowed down in the early 1990s and has never really returned to old growth rates. many people have proposed explanations for this, and one of them is shown in the graph above: an unusual drop in the employed population, which has to do with japan’s substantial demographic changes. the working-age population has actually been declining since 1997, with no sign of reverting soon. for economic growth to occur in this environment, productivity improvements must increase faster than the workforce decreases. these data come from the penn world tables , which provides main economic aggregates for almost every economy of the world, while attempting to make them comparable in definition and in measurement units.how this graph was created: search the penn world table for the “japan” tag. select the series and add to a graph. select the right axis for one of the series.
 africa's ever-changing lifestyle...rise of snooty wine experts, tech snobs and the beautiful peoplemore africans can tell their single malts from blends. (photo, afp)in november, the kenya-headquartered regional beverages giant east african breweries limited (eabl) launched an online drinks portal, allowing consumers to have their orders home-delivered.the menu offering is an eclectic mix, ranging from single malts and blended scotch whiskies to beers, rums and liqueurs.  in media interviews, a spokesman termed the uptake as robust, suggesting they had benefited from a holiday bump.  if it takes hold, and there is no reason to suspect that it will not, it would be a welcome boost to the firm’s flatlining revenue by focusing more on spirits. it is a shrewd move: the portal in many ways is a microcosm of africa’s changing lifestyle trends.eabl, majority held by the uk’s diageo, is not your average african brewer: in its full year financial results reported in august, it turned in a gross profit of $335 million, at current rates. when the dominant but flat south african market is shunted from the equation, export values in the rest of africa actually grew 6% to £81.7 million ($127 million) in 2013, from £77 million in 2012. this translated to 23.25 million litres of pure alcohol (lpa—the industry’s chosen unit of measurement) in 2013, from 21.25 million litres the year before.additionally, emerging markets such as kenya nearly doubled their exports volume while nigeria grew 30%. the data is only from the uk-based association, suggesting stouter growth from the region when numbers from other major spirit distillers, such as the irish and canadians, are captured.given scotch whisky is a non-essential purchase, the brisk growth in african numbers would mirror not only the rise of a social class with disposable income, but also marketers’ efforts in shifting perception from that of an old man’s drink into something more trendy, including for snooty types able to distinguish their single malts from the blends using drams and “notes”. eabl’s portal is also betting on increased internet connectivity and the growth of smartphone penetration for uptake, with both pc and mobile options purchase options available. figures from gartner show that while worldwide sales of mobile phones remained flat in the third quarter of 2014, the sales of smartphones in that period grew 20.3% to breach the 300 million mark, with sales seen reaching 1.2 billion units in 2014.  by 2018, nine of ten phones are projected to be smartphones.africa, along with the middle east and eastern europe, saw the highest increase of such sales, growing nearly 50% year-on-year. the average african market now has about 40% smartphone penetration, and double that for the more advanced ones, while in south africa some 91% of internet users are owners of a smartphone. this would also mean more downloads of applications for africa, with the major players apple store and google play having an excess of 2 million apps listed, while  data shows more africans are buying things digitally and getting comfortable at it, as cyber-criminals thrive.these apps have mutated from the pioneer types: you can now request and track couriers for a metered fee in south africa, watch movie trailers and videos in nigeria, or buy your morning coffee via an app that you scanned your bank card into.the growth of the african middle class and the battering down of cultural barriers has had a lot to do with it. airline cabin crew we talked to report the ubiquitous across-generation use of tablets on board, where more and more african children struggle to speak native languages.colourful bourgeoisie events like blankets and wine are now becoming a regional franchise, where audiences are encouraged to drive in with blankets, a picnic chair and some wine to listen to mellow music, while french-inspired “secret” diner en blanc parties are now a regular fixture in kigali, which two years ago provided the setting for the first such event in africa.it is in the food too: “made in africa sushi” exports are be found from lesotho to banjul, but foodies report more africans taking to such restaurants in regional capitals. there is even space for that rare african breed, the vegetarian. international fast food and ice cream parlours are sprouting all over the continent, from domino’s pizza and cold stone creamery to the subway’s and kfc, while concepts such as food drive-ins are also taking root, feeding into a runaway fast food culture.lifestyle gains also demand that you spend to look good: french cosmetics giant l’oreal  estimates the value of the african beauty and cosmetics care market, quantified at $8.4 billion in 2012 will grow at an annual rate of 8%-10%, well ahead of the global 4% rate. in 2017, the sub-saharan beauty market is expected to reach $12 billion in 2017.middle class estates continue to sprout in accra and lagos, schools offering western curriculum continue to have waiting lists, art markets thrive, weaves the norm, domestic airlines are packed, malls the byword and shiny new cars chock-a-block on chinese-built highways, as dealers like porsche unpack showrooms all over.for many lucky to be in this veritable band, held as africa’s growth driver, living on the continent has never been so good.but with all this comes a downside: non-communicable diseases (ncd) such as cancers and diabetes are now on the rise in africa, no longer the “rich man’s” affliction.   the world health organisation (who) projects that by the end of this year, chronic diseases will account for a quarter of deaths in africa. by 2020, the largest increases in ncd deaths will occur in africa, surpassing by far any of the developed countries. africa can’t have it all its own way, it seems.
 here is what i said:the key challenge for britain in the coming decades is the deficit in international governance.i want you to imagine a country somewhere in the world in which there was no rule of law, with no institutions to set or enforce rules, and no way to agree and enforce contracts.  imagine that this country had no mechanism to raise money for, or to deliver effectively, public goods such as clean air, law and order, financial stability, public infrastructure, research and development or disease surveillance.  imagine a winner-takes-all economy, in which the most successful firms are allowed to set rules of the game which stifle competition and reinforce their own economic and political power.  imagine that every time you travelled from the countryside to the city you were stopped at a roadblock and required to pay a tariff to protect traders in the city from competition from rural areas.  imagine a country in which arms manufacturers could sell weapons to whoever they want. imagine a country with no collective insurance for its citizens against natural disasters, and in which inequality is allowed to grow to the extent that that the rich have to wall themselves off from the poor.if we encountered a country like that, we would declare it a failed state. in fact, we might persuade ourselves that we should intervene, because such a state would not protect the interests of most of its people, and it would be a breeding ground for violence and disease.but that is an almost exact description of the state of our global institutions.look at the ebola crisis in west africa.  it isn’t just that it took too long to pass round the hat to raise money to respond to the crisis. it isn’t just that we still haven’t raised either enough money, nor enough doctors and nurses and logistics to tackle the crisis as it has unfolded – that we are always behind the epidemic when we need to be ahead of it.  the real lesson of ebola is not our failed response but our lack of preparedness. we should have invested in a well-functioning world health organisation. it needs to be led by staff from the director general down who are appointed on merit, not quotas.  it needs to be properly resourced to play its proper role in disease surveillance and control – for example, it has an annual budget for dealing with an influenza epidemic of just $7.5 million – which is less than the budget for flu of new york city.  even more importantly we should have mechanisms to invest in the global public goods of research and development into vaccines and drugs which would prevent the spread of disease and enable us to treat them. candidate vaccines against ebola produced a decade ago have been left unresearched and untested, because the international community does not have sufficient resources to invest in global public goods.and it isn’t just the who that has suffered from jobs for the boys. if the press are to be believed, number 10 is floating the idea that andrew lansley should be nominated to succeed baroness amos as united nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. whatever mr lansley’s qualities, he is manifestly unqualified to become the head of the world’s main emergency relief organisation.  this is a position which fell to the british when a former british diplomat was not given a un job for which he was well qualified, because of some broader geopolitical manoeuvrings, and the uk was given this post as a consolation prize.because we lack mechanisms for collective action: -we don’t have effective institutions to promote financial stability, to maintain liquidity, regulate financial institutionswe suffer massive economic losses from restrictions on the movement across borders of goods, services, capital and labourwe do not have institutions to protect our peace and security – for example, which country in the future will agree to give up nuclear weapons in return for a guarantee of its borders, after the failure of our commitment to ukraine;we don’t have the institutions we need to respond to natural disasters with money, people and logisticswe don’t invest enough in global public goods such as r&d in new medicines, or clean energy;we don’t have effective mechanisms to set fair tax rates on global businesses, or to collect the taxes that are duewe don’t do enough to protect the sea lanes against pirates, we don’t prevent the trafficking of drugs and peoplewe don’t prevent overfishing of the waters of west africa by european and japanese trawlers, or protect biodiversity, or fresh water, or the other limited natural resources we all sharewe don’t have mechanisms to limit growing inequality and share the benefits of a global economy, or to protect the weakest and most vulnerable.the most striking consequence of this institutional deficit is of course our collective failure to tackle climate change.  there is no significant disagreement about the need to limit global carbon emissions, nor indeed much contest about the extent of carbon emissions that we can, collectively, afford to emit in the coming years.  all that we disagree about is how to share the costs of adjustment.  because we have no institutions that can resolve these competing interests, to make credible commitments for each nation to play their part, to find ways to compensate the losers – we end up paralysed, unable to make any kind of progress towards solving this shared global problem.so in my view the greatest threat to british national interests in the coming decades is a combination of the economically illiterate idea that we engaged in some sort of great race, in which the success of rising powers such as china and india is somehow detrimental to us, and the nineteenth century idea of diplomacy in which it is both legitimate and inevitable that each nation will pursue what it perceives to be in its own interests. as a small nation, our national interest is in helping to build legitimate, effective, rules based institutions which build shared global prosperity, and so addressing the deficit in global governance which is increasingly damaging our economy and threatening our security.the other participants in the discussion – whom i cannot name because the discussion was under the chatham house rule – took a more conventional approach to foreign policy. they were concerned about the strategic implications for the uk for the rise of asian powers, and the likely shift in us attention to the pacific. the uk would have to reach a decision about its relationship with the rest of europe. they were vaguely concerned about the digital revolution, and disagreed about the extent to which the uk should be concerned about the rise of islamic fundamentalism.  they argued that it was not sustainable for defence and diplomacy budgets to be cut while development spending increased, and thought it unlikely that dfid would continue to operate as a separate government department.my concluding point was that we should distinguish between the economic rise of asian powers, which is win-win, and their political rise which is inevitably a zero-sum game.  while the uk continues to enjoy some political power on the global stage, we should invest our foreign policy efforts in nurturing a legitimate, effective rules-based international system from which we will benefit as our relative economic and political power decline in the coming decade.
 as the world’s first decentralized digital currency, bitcoin has the potential to revolutionize online payments systems in a way that benefits consumers and businesses. instead of using an intermediary such as paypal or submitting credit card information to a third party for verification—both of which often include transaction fees and other restrictions—bitcoin allows individuals to pay each other directly for goods or services.the characteristics that make bitcoin so innovative have also made it a target for regulators, who fear that the cryptocurrency will aid tax evasion, money laundering, and other crimes. while it is true that it can be used for nefarious purposes, the same can be said of cash. but, unlike cash, bitcoin transactions are recorded in an online ledger.in this new primer, jerry brito and andrea castillo describe how the digital currency works and address many of the common misconceptions about it. they also analyze current laws and regulations that may already cover digital currencies and warn against preemptively placing regulatory restrictions on bitcoin that could stifle the new technology before it has a chance to evolve. in addition, they give several recommendations about how to treat bitcoin going forward.here, at the forefront of the debate, brito and castillo both support innovation and provide much-needed clarity for policymakers and law enforcement.
 leon wieseltier has a provocative essay, “ among the disrupted ,” in the new york times’s sunday book review. it begins with some compelling observations:amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us praise and honor the disrupted. the streets of american cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture of industry. writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” what does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. as the frequency of expression diminishes: digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. it was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business … economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: economists are our experts on happiness! where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary american understanding of, well, everything.despite having spent substantially all of my career in public finance, i share wieseltier’s distaste for the “idolatry of data.” and i have previously written about (albeit in less delicious prose) how the new media business model is recklessly creating a colossal digital landfill . but somehow my sentiments have never expanded into a fear of technology or criticism of disruption as a cultural phenomenon.what is it about technology that threatens intellectuals? wieseltier’s remark that “the character of our society cannot be determined by engineers” isn't all that different than heidegger’s 1954 rant the question concerning technology . (wieseltier also invokes heidegger in his piece.)it seems odd that progress should ever require a defense against sentimentality.isn't it possible both to resent living in a universe of content-driven drones, mindlessly copying and pasting articles and co-opting narratives, but still be excited about the democratization of ideas?i still frequent local bookstores, but i feel less compelled to purchase anything each time. except for eccentric used bookstores, most neighborhood bookstores are stocked with commodities, not literature. they’ll sell me 50 shades of grey, when what i really want to read is the remembered present. and who will sell me the remembered present? amazon. the venues i find romantic have shifted.do we see ourselves in the things we build? isn't that simultaneously a hopeful and uncomfortable thought?a recurring theme in heidegger’s work is the experience of the uncanny— unheimlich, or “not at home” in the world. it makes sense that heidegger would be skeptical of technology. the experience of using new technology could also be construed as losing one’s anchor. as wieseltier puts it, “there is no greater disgrace than being a thing of the past.”i have the deepest respect for wieseltier as a critic and philosopher. but this strikes me an an unnecessarily pessimistic worldview, regardless of his appeals to humanism throughout.first, innovation presents new opportunities to define oneself for those that are willing to invest the time and effort. the same is true for society as a whole. that wieseltier doesn't want the character of society to be determined by engineers overlooks history. feats of engineering have been a conduit for conversations about the public good and the ambitions of civilization from ancient rome to nasa. i don’t understand the temptation to hold art or poetry above these endeavors. i would trade all the jeff koons in the world for a better understanding of what lies outside our solar system.second, most criticisms of technology are highly selective. why is it that garbage media is the first thing people think of when they lament the invention of the smartphone? this is the same device that allows a trauma surgeon to know a patient’s statistics as he sprints to the operating room. where’s the angst in that?wieseltier speaks of innovators as a cult, as have many before him:and even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science. the notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university, where humanities are disparaged as soft and impractical and insufficiently new.it probably isn't an accident that ezra klein works in washington dc and not sunnyvale. why is the rest of this a criticism of anything outside of academia? the identity/moral crises that are playing out on university campuses belong on university campuses. colleges and universities have made a conscious slide from cloistered institutions to corporate machines. this was not a subtle intellectual transition.the introduction of new technology will inevitably produce a period lacking in context. but disruption is not the same thing as nihilism. moreover, nihilism wasn't invented in the 21st century.
 losing a limb is tragic and traumatic, but a bevy of companies are using the power of 3-d printers to bring high design to a backwater of medical devices. bespoke innovation treats artificial limbs like works of art and the e-nable project uses low-cost 3-d printers to create high-power hands. now william root , a recent graduate from the pratt institute in new york city, has developed a system to 3-d print super-lightweight prosthetic legs with stealth styling.called exo , root’s prosthetic concept combines his interests in aesthetics and biomechatronics, as well as inquiries into the preferences of amputees. “in my research it became clear to me that there is a lot wrong with how designers typically try to approach a prosthetic limb and how the industry goes about making prostheses,” says root. “prostheses are not aesthetically pleasing, extremely expensive, and difficult to produce.”using mit’s fitsocket technology designers can produce prosthetics that suit a patient’s height, weight, and muscle mass. illustration: mit mechatronics labroot’s improved process starts by making a scan of the patient’s anatomy. he envisions using a technology from mit’s biomechatronics lab called fitsocket which uses an array of pressure sensors to gauge the softness or stiffness of a patient’s remaining tissue. with this data, a nearly perfect “socket,” the term for the interface between the patient’s body and prosthetic, can be manufactured.using the same data, root extrapolates a 3-d model of patient’s full leg which is turned into a triangulated mesh. “it has the maximum strength for the least amount of material with the added benefit of looking really slick,” says root. a stress analysis tool helps determine weak-points on the model and software increases the mesh density of the structure to compensate. though root notes further analysis of the weight distribution and point loads will be needed to create a fully functioning limb.the result is a jet black prosthetic made from sintered titanium powder or high-strength plastic that makes the wearer look as if they’re materializing from a video game. “prosthetic limbs are stigmatized because they are so inhuman; most aftermarket companies that try to address this problem attempt to create a realistic-looking leg, which crosses into the uncanny valley,” says root.to root, legs made from flesh-colored rubber are a symptom of a thought process where prosthetics are considered mass produced products rather than the ultimate form of wearable. “with prostheses you are essentially designing a person, their body already dictates the form,” he says. “each leg needs to be as unique as its owner.” he envisions future iterations of exo where colors or patterns of the mesh could be modified to suit the wearer’s personal sense of style.there are a couple major roadblocks before exo can hit the market, finances and the fda.traditional prosthetics can cost tens of thousands of dollars, making them inaccessible to many. root says that the 3-d printed elements of his leg cost just $1,800, but the knee and ankle joints used in his design are specialized components that come with high-price tags. joints that provide mechanical assistance can drive the price higher. also, the prototype isn’t yet capable of supporting the wearer’s full weight and gaining clearance from the fda could lead to compromises in the design that could add cost or make the design clunkier.these costs are balanced by the theoretical elimination of manual fittings and the benefits of a better looking, lighter limb. and as 3-d printers become more widespread it’s possible patient’s might just bootleg, well, legs.“with the exo, the cost of the limb would be reduced almost to just the cost of printing it,” says root. “as 3-d printing technology advances and becomes more mainstream those costs have nowhere to go but down.”
 over the past decade, smartphones have radically changed many aspects of our everyday lives, from banking to shopping to entertainment. medicine is next. with innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. and the end result will be that you, the patient, are about to take center stage for the first time.with the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients. digital avatars won’t replace physicians: you will still be seeing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically altered. (i consult for several companies on many of the issues discussed here.)all of this raises serious issues about hacking and personal privacy that haven’t yet been addressed—and the accuracy of all of these tools needs to be tested. people are also right to worry that the patient-doctor relationship could be eroded, diminishing the human touch in medicine. but the transformation is already under way.let’s say you have a rash that you need examined. today, you can snap a picture of it with your smartphone and download an app to process the image. within minutes, a dedicated computer algorithm can text you your diagnosis. that message could include next steps, such as recommending a topical ointment or a visit to a dermatologist for further assessment.smartphones already can be used to take blood-pressure readings or even do an electrocardiogram. ecg apps have been approved by the u.s. food and drug administration for consumers and validated in many clinical studies. the apps’ data are immediately analyzed, graphed, displayed on-screen updated with new measurements, stored and (at an individual’s discretion) shared. i thought i’d seen it all in my decadeslong practice as a cardiologist, but recently, for the first time, i had an ecg emailed to me by a patient, with the subject line, “i’m in atrial fib, now what do i do?” i immediately knew that the world had changed. the patient’s phone hadn’t just recorded the data; it had interpreted it.now, at any time of day or night, you can demand and get a secure video consultation with a doctor via smartphone at the same cost (about $30-$40) as the typical copay charge through employer health plans. this may seem exotic now, but several large consulting firms—including deloitte and pricewaterhousecoopers—have forecast that virtual physician visits (replacing physical office visits) will soon become the norm. deloitte says that as many as one in six doctor visits were already virtual in 2014. in many u.s. cities, you can even use a mobile app to request a doctor’s house call during which a physician would not only provide a consultation but could even perform procedures, such as suturing a wound, which would have usually required an expensive emergency room visit.with innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. agence france-presse/getty imagesmany surveys show that most consumers want to get information about the actual costs of their care from their doctors but can’t get it. going forward, what things cost will no longer be the great unmentionable hanging over medicine: cost-transparency apps for your smartphone already exist and are quickly being expanded to cover lab tests, scans, procedures, hospitals and doctor visits.even bigger changes are in the works. using wearable wireless sensors, you can use your smartphone to generate your own medical data, including measuring your blood-oxygen and glucose levels, blood pressure and heart rhythm. and if you’re worried that your child may have an ear infection, a smartphone attachment will let you perform an easy eardrum exam that can rapidly diagnose the problem without a trip to the pediatrician.these innovations are just the start. in the next year or two (depending on approval by the fda), many americans will probably start sporting wristwatches that continuously and passively capture their blood pressure and vital signs with every heartbeat, without even having to press a start button.such wristwatch sensors could do enormous good. by having the equivalent of intensive care unit monitoring on your wrist, hospital rooms—those $4,500-a-night risk zones for serious infections and other complications—can be replaced by our bedrooms. as a result, except for icus, operating rooms and emergency rooms, hospitals of the future are likely to be roomless data surveillance centers for remote patient monitoring.other wearable sensor tools now being developed include necklaces that can monitor your heart function and check the amount of fluid in your lungs, contact lenses that can track your glucose levels or your eye pressure (to help manage glaucoma), and head bands that can capture your brain waves. someday, socks and shoes might analyze the human gait to, for instance, tell a parkinson’s patient whether his or her medications are working or tell a caregiver whether an elderly family member is unsteady and at risk of falling.we know that our health is highly influenced by our environment, which has been difficult to quantify. but smartphone sensors under development will be able to monitor your exposure to radiation, air pollution or pesticides in foods. and your medications could soon be digitized to provide you with reminders to ensure that you’ve taken them as prescribed.it isn’t just hospitals’ rooms that are on their way out; so are their labs. smartphone attachments will soon enable you to perform an array of routine lab tests via your phone. blood electrolytes; liver, kidney and thyroid function; analysis of breath, sweat and urine—all can be checked with small fluid samples in little labs that plug directly into smartphones. and you can do your own routine labs at a fraction of the current cost.smartphone selfies are all the rage, but smartphone physical exams are just taking off. the ability to make a definitive diy diagnosis of an ear infection with a phone is just the first step. apps are now being developed to handle all aspects of the eye, the throat and oral cavity, and the lungs and heart. meanwhile, nearly all sophisticated medical imaging devices are being miniaturized: hand-held ultrasound devices are already available, and some medical schools have begun issuing them in the place of the old-school stethoscope. hand-held mri (magnetic resonance imaging) machines aren’t far behind, and engineers at ucla have come up with a smartphone-sized device that can generate x-rays. it won’t be long before you can take a smartphone x-ray selfie if you’re worried that you might have broken a bone.in the next decade, you—under select circumstances, involving high risk or major medical need—will be able to monitor almost every organ system, no matter how difficult to access, as firms start to produce nanosensors to be embedded in your bloodstream. these microscopic sensors within your body can float in blood or be fixed to a microstent in a tiny blood vessel. you’ll then be able to keep your blood under constant surveillance for the first appearance of cancer, autoimmune attacks on vital tissues or the tiny cracks in artery walls that can lead to heart attacks or strokes.with all these new tools, it is no surprise that we’re talking about the possibility of “doctorless” medicine. let’s not get too carried away. you’ll still be seeing doctors—but you’ll have a lot more control.that change is badly overdue. medicine has long been dominated by a priestly class, beginning with imhotep, the first physician (and a priest), in egypt some 4,600 years ago. things had hardly changed two millennia later when hippocrates, widely considered the father of medicine, held that most medical information should be concealed from patients.hippocrates’s paternalistic sentiments survive today in our culture’s pervasive sense that “doctor knows best.” physicians obviously tend to think so, but that sentiment is also powerfully reinforced by the top-down way medical information flows (or clogs). the vast majority of doctors are unwilling to email patients or share their office notes. getting a copy of a report after lab tests or medical scans seems impossible—and don’t even think about getting the results or images themselves. that is all about to change.we’re often told that the u.s. faces a big looming shortage of physicians. the expansion of diy medical capabilities certainly challenges that notion: we may end up not having a physician shortage at all.but one discipline already has an unequivocal dearth of health-care professionals: mental health, which is also the leading cause of disability in the u.s. and many other developed countries. smartphones can be particularly helpful here. new apps aim to quantify your state of mind by a composite of real-time data: tone and inflection of voice, facial expression, breathing pattern, heart rate, galvanic skin response, blood pressure, even the frequency and content of your emails and texts.we may soon take an even bigger step forward, thanks to the unexpected advantages of virtual psychiatrists. recent studies, including a paper by gale lucas and others published last year in the journal of computers in human behavior, have demonstrated that people are more willing to disclose their inner thoughts to a computer avatar or “virtual human” than a real one. with machines working to quantify moods and even offering virtual counseling to help make up for our current profound shortage of mental health professionals, we can glimpse a new approach to improving mental health.
 copper prices suffered their biggest one-day decline in over three years wednesday, reflecting mounting concerns among investors about the health of the world economy.the bulk of wednesday’s losses occurred during asian trading hours after the world bank cited concerns over a “disorderly slowdown” in china and cut its outlook for global growth in 2015.the red flags in the world bank’s report hit copper hard because the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 just weeks after announcing a new strategic plan with a commitment to public engagement and transparency, the city of miami announced today a new financial data platform powered by opengov.com that provides residents and city officials unprecedented access to the city’s budget information. the user-friendly platform transforms volumes of raw spreadsheet budget data into highly-visual, interactive charts and graphs that enable better analysis and understanding of the city’s budget. the tool is accessed at www.miamigov.com/financialtransparency .miami residents and staff can now view long-term budget trends and quickly drill down into specific financial detail through the opengov platform. residents can answer questions such as: “what are the city’s revenues for this year;” “what was the parks and recreation department budget over the past five years;” or “what are the city’s general fund expenditures by department?”users can access the city’s current year budget (fiscal year 2014-2015), compare it to previous years dating to 2011, and instantly view revenues and expenses by fund, department and expense type on interactive graphs. city officials and staff also have better access to financial data, which will increase efficiency in analyzing and reporting financial information.the opengov platform is part of a broader transparency initiative to make the city’s financial, operating and performance information available and easily accessible to the public.“taxpayers now have unprecedented access to the budget and the city’s financial data in an intuitive format that clearly shows how their money is collected and spent,” said city manager daniel j. alfonso. “we are acting upon our strategic plan to make the city of miami more accessible, efficient and transparent.”“miami is a world-class city that is leading the way in financial transparency and access,” says zachary bookman, ceo and co-founder of opengov.  “by making its budget data easily accessible to residents and staff, the city demonstrates its commitment to efficient, responsive and transparent government.”   with today’s release, the city of miami is the largest municipality in south florida to leverage the opengov platform. the city joins a growing list of over 250 leading cities, counties, state agencies, school systems and special districts across the country that leverage the opengov platform.
 
 i’m professor and chair of the department of economics at liu post in new york. i’ve published several articles in professional journals and magazines, including barron’s, the new york times, japan times, newsday, plain dealer, edge singapore, european management review, management international review, and journal of risk and insurance. i’ve have also published several books, including collective entrepreneurship, the ten golden rules, wom and buzz marketing, business strategy in a semiglobal economy, china’s challenge: imitation or innovation in international business, and new emerging japanese economy: opportunity and strategy for world business. i’ve traveled extensively throughout the world giving lectures and seminars for private and government organizations, including beijing academy of social science, nagoya university, tokyo science university, keimung university, university of adelaide, saint gallen university, duisburg university, university of edinburgh, and athens university of economics and business. interests: global markets, business, investment strategy, personal success.the author is a forbes contributor. the opinions expressed are those of the writer.
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 a bp gas station in romford,  u.k. closea bp gas station in romford,  u.k.a bp gas station in romford,  u.k.halfway down a muddy, secluded road on marshland in suburban essex sits wharf pool , a lake stocked with some of the biggest freshwater fish you will ever see.a white sign with red lettering reads: “private syndicate: strictly members only.” a metal gate, a barbed-wire fence and two cctv cameras bar the way. anglers hoping to spend time on the lake’s carefully tended banks must join a waiting list. those who make it to the top pay a membership fee that buys them the chance to catch a carp that weighs more than a jack russell. there are hundreds of them swimming beneath the surface. it’s close to shooting fish in a barrel.an hour away by train, in london’s financial district, the lake’s owners ply their trade. wharf pool was purchased for about 250,000 pounds ($388,000) in 2012 by richard usher, the former jpmorgan chase & co. (jpm) trader at the center of a global investigation into corruption in the foreign-exchange market, and andrew white, a currency trader at oil company bp plc. (bp/)with revenue of almost $400 billion last year and operations in about 80 countries, bp trades large quantities of currency each day. traders at the company regularly received valuable information from counterparts at some of the world’s biggest banks -- including tips about forthcoming trades, details of confidential client business and discussions of stop-losses, the trigger points for a flurry of buying or selling -- according to four traders with direct knowledge of the practice.those who make it to the top of the waiting list for membership of the wharf pool syndicate pay a fee that buys them the chance to catch a carp that weighs more than a jack russell. closethose who make it to the top of the waiting list for membership of the wharf pool... read morethose who make it to the top of the waiting list for membership of the wharf pool syndicate pay a fee that buys them the chance to catch a carp that weighs more than a jack russell.copies of messages sent to bp traders over the course of a year were provided to bloomberg news by a person with access to the online conversations. the person, who redacted the names of banks sending the messages and dates of conversations, said they came from firms whose senior foreign-exchange traders belonged to a chat room called “the cartel” that was set up by usher and included dealers at jpmorgan, citigroup inc. (c) , barclays plc and ubs group ag. (ubsn)the information offered an insight into currency moves minutes, sometimes hours before they happened. the messages could drag the u.k.’s biggest energy company into a scandal that has enveloped 11 banks and led to more than 30 traders from london to singapore losing or being suspended from their jobs. last month six banks were fined $4.3 billion for passing along information about their clients and working together to rig foreign-exchange markets.while there’s no evidence that any bp traders were members of the cartel, usher participated in at least one chat room with white, according to a person who has examined conversations that included both men. it couldn’t be determined from the messages reviewed by bloomberg news who sent the information to bp or whether bp employees acted on any of the tips.in the clubby, lightly regulated world of foreign exchange, traders passed around tips to their circle of trusted contacts like candy. the victims: mutual-fund investors, pensioners and day traders who took the other side of a transaction at a lower price than they would have if they had the same information.“the authorities have made it clear in the enforcement notices accompanying the recent fines that irrespective of whether specific markets are regulated, banks cannot have pockets of business where traders behave as if they’re dealing in the wild west,” said janine alexander, a partner at law firm collyer bristow llp in london who specializes in financial-services litigation. “banks have a responsibility to preserve market integrity, and traders must consider the effect of their behavior on clients and the market as a whole.”traders at bp haven’t been accused of any wrongdoing. last year, within hours of regulators announcing probes, the chats between bp and the banks were shut down, people with knowledge of the matter said. soon after, a compliance officer was placed on the desk for the first time, one of them said.bp said in a statement that it conducted an internal review after regulators began probing currency markets.“bp’s fx desk has relationships as a customer with 26 relationship banks, including jpmorgan, citibank and barclays (barc) ,” the london-based company said. “bp has a robust framework of compliance requirements and internal controls which are constantly reviewed, and maintains an open dialogue with the appropriate regulators.”the firm, the third-largest publicly traded company in the u.k., hasn’t been investigated by regulators looking into currency manipulation, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. chris hamilton, a spokesman for the u.k. financial conduct authority, declined to comment, as did representatives of jpmorgan, barclays, citigroup and ubs.usher declined to comment through his lawyer. white directed calls to bp’s press office.“bp’s code of conduct includes mandatory requirements for employees to disclose potential conflicts of interests internally,” the company said in response to a question about the commercial relationship between usher and white through the fishing lake. “following such disclosure, steps are taken to manage and monitor these appropriately. it is our policy not to comment on individuals.”the two dozen traders in bp’s treasury trading unit are housed above a porsche showroom on the second and third floors of the company’s office in canary wharf, an area of reclaimed docklands three miles east of the city of london, the historic financial district. the building, two blocks from jpmorgan’s, was completed in 2003 on the cusp of an oil boom. lights in meeting rooms flick from green to white when someone enters, in keeping with the company’s corporate colors.as a company with global operations, bp is a major user of the $5.3-trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market. dollars earned from the sale of crude oil are converted into local currencies to pay the salaries of employees and fund infrastructure projects from azerbaijan to trinidad. refined products such as liquefied natural gas and kerosene are sold for yuan and reais.the trading unit’s primary role is to manage the firm’s exposure to financial risks, including fluctuations in interest rates and foreign exchange, according to the company’s website. unlike at most corporations, it also is run as a profit center , which means that in addition to hedging risks, traders can place their own bets on the direction of markets. the company doesn’t break out how much money the treasury unit makes.white, who’s known in the market as tubby, is one of half a dozen spot currency traders working for bp in london. he and his colleagues, most of them ex-bankers, decide which firms will carry out their foreign-exchange transactions. that makes them prized clients for banks seeking a slice of the business and a glimpse into potentially market-moving trades. passing on information was a way to curry favor, according to the four traders, who asked not to be identified because they still work in the business.in an undated message seen by bloomberg news, a trader at a bank told bp he would be buying u.s. dollars against australian dollars at the wm/reuters fix at 4 p.m. in london, the one-minute window during which traders around the world exchange billions of dollars of currency on behalf of pension funds and asset managers. the message was received at bp about 30 minutes before the fix. by tipping his hand, the sender was telling bp about a potential fall in the australian currency.at about 3 p.m. in london on a different afternoon, bp traders were informed that banks were selling dollars against the yen at 4 p.m. in a third message, this one arriving as the oil company’s traders drank their first coffee of the morning, a trader at a bank said he had just sold a quantity of an emerging-market currency, to whom and the price he received.the four banks in the cartel controlled about 45 percent of the global spot-currency market, according to a survey by euromoney institutional investor plc, so information about their plans was valuable. some days they worked together to push around the 4 p.m. fix, settlements with the banks show.the cartel chat room was started by usher as early as 2009, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. usher had risen quickly to the top of his profession. after joining hbos plc in 2001, he was hired by royal bank of scotland group plc in 2003 and a year later collected an industry award on his employer’s behalf. he joined jpmorgan as head of spot foreign exchange in 2010, where he became a member of the now-defunct bank of england’s chief dealers sub group, a collection of about a dozen currency traders and central bank officials who met at restaurants and bank offices to discuss industry developments.the four members of the chat room ribbed each other like high school buddies. usher was referred to as feston because he resembled an overweight version of british chef heston blumenthal, according to people who have seen the chats. matt gardiner, a ubs trader based in zurich, was called fossil because he was a few years older than the others. rohan ramchandani, citigroup’s cricket-loving head of spot trading, was called ruggy, while chris ashton, the last one to join, was dubbed robocop.lawyers for ramchandani, gardiner and ashton declined to comment.the settlements the banks reached with regulators reveal that in the minutes before 4 p.m. the traders would meet on chat rooms to discuss their positions and how they planned to execute them. sometimes they also agreed to work together to push exchange rates around to boost their profits –- something they called “double-teaming.”the collateral damage of their actions and those of other traders was the $30 trillion held in investment funds around the world whose daily value is calculated based on the 4 p.m. wm/reuters benchmark. passive funds managing $3 trillion transact at the fix, so their investors lost or gained depending on how much the rates were manipulated.the party came to an end in october 2013, when regulators around the world announced they were investigating allegations of abuses in the currency market. the four members of the cartel have left their firms, and jpmorgan, citigroup and ubs were among banks fined in november. individuals could face criminal charges when the u.s. department of justice and the u.k.’s serious fraud office conclude their own investigations.to contact the reporter on this story: liam vaughan in london at lvaughan6@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: heather smith at hsmith26@bloomberg.net robert friedman, david scheerpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 give up sex or your mobile phone? third of americans forgo sexalmost a third of americans would rather give up sex for a year than part with their mobile phone for that long, according to a survey by the boston consulting group .in other signs of americans’ love affair with their mobile devices, more than 55 percent said they would forgo dining out for 12 months rather than give up their phone, while 45 percent said they would put off going on vacation. more than three in 10 would stop seeing their friends in person, while 46 percent would be willing to give up a day off per week.the survey of 1,003 americans, released today in washington, was conducted from september through november of last year and is part of a broader boston consulting study of mobile technology that was commissioned and partly paid for by semiconductor maker qualcomm inc. (qcom)as part of the study, the group also surveyed consumers in germany, brazil, south korea , china and india , contacting about 7,500 people in all, including those in the u.s.germans are about as willing as americans to give up sex for their phones, while only a quarter of brazilians said they would make such a choice. more than three in five south koreans reported they’d give up sex for their mobile phones.consumers in china and india weren’t asked about the sex versus phone trade-off. about two-thirds of indians and more than 55 percent of chinese said they’d prefer to give up a day off per week for a year than lose their mobile phone for that period.to contact the reporter on this story: rich miller in washington at rmiller28@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: chris wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net alister bullpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 a major policy shift from switzerland’s central bank on thursday sent ripples through the global markets, pushing many yields in the developed world to fresh lows.in the u.s., the yield on the benchmark 10-year u.s. treasury note settled at the lowest level in 20 months. the yield on the 30-year treasury bond closed at a record low for a second...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 researchers have made great strides in improving  our understanding of the effects of unconventional monetary policy. although further  study is needed, the evidence from the past few years demonstrates that both  forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases are useful policy tools when  short-term interest rates are constrained by the zero bound.the following is adapted from a presentation made by the  president and ceo of the federal reserve bank of san francisco to the swiss  national bank research conference on september 23, 2011. the full text is  available at http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2011/john-williams-0923.htmlthank you for the kind introduction and for giving me the opportunity to address this very distinguished group in the beautiful city of zurich.  the swiss national bank’s annual research conference has established itself as one of the world’s most substantive forums for discussion of monetary policy issues.  the theme selected for this year’s conference, “policy challenges and developments in monetary economics,” is particularly timely and relevant.  in the past three years, there has certainly been no shortage of policy challenges and developments in the field of monetary economics.chairman bernanke (2009) said, “extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.” well, extraordinary measures have been taken. in the face of severe dislocations in financial markets and deep declines in economic activity, several central banks have lowered short-term policy rates essentially to their zero lower bound. a number of central banks—including the federal reserve—have also used nonstandard or “unconventional” monetary policies. by that i mean efforts to influence interest rates and economic activity using tools other than the short-term policy rate.before the financial crisis, most everything we knew about unconventional monetary policy came from studies of japan’s lost decade and a few scattered episodes in the united states. now, as a result of the events of the past three years, we have numerous examples of unconventional monetary policy to study. tonight i’d like to review some of the lessons gleaned from these experiences. i also want to highlight some of the key remaining questions regarding the implementation of such policies and their effectiveness as monetary stimulus.in my remarks, i’ll focus on two of these unconventional monetary policy tools—forward policy guidance and large-scale asset purchases, or lsaps in fedspeak. there are two reasons for this focus. first, these are the policies that the federal reserve and other central banks have relied on most heavily over the past three years. as a result, they are also the policies that we’ve learned the most about. and second, these policies are ongoing, and therefore likely to be the most relevant for thinking about future policy. i suppose this is an opportune time to add that my remarks represent my own views and not necessarily those of others in the federal reserve system.prior to the crisis, the theoretical literature on the zero lower bound was virtually unanimous on one point: a central bank with the ability to credibly commit to a future path of short-term interest rates could, except in the most extreme cases, circumvent the effects of the zero lower bound (see, for example, reifschneider and williams 2000 and eggertsson and woodford 2003, 2006). this conclusion stemmed from two insights. first, the output gap and inflation rate in standard textbook new keynesian models are completely determined by long-term interest rates. they do not depend on the short-term rate, except to the extent that the long-term rate is equal to the expected path of future short-term rates. second, if a central bank can credibly commit to future policy actions, it can continue to control longer-term interest rates, even when the short-term rate is at the zero lower bound. it can do so by managing expectations about the future path of short-term rates. thus, in theory, forward guidance about the future path of policy is a potentially powerful tool that can almost completely solve a central bank’s problems at the zero lower bound.however, there are reasons to be skeptical that forward guidance would be such a panacea in practice. one of these caveats is implicit in the theory itself. the optimal forward guidance policy is not time-consistent. according to the theory, for this policy to have the desired effects, the central bank must commit to two things: keeping the short-term policy rate lower than it otherwise would in the future, and allowing inflation to rise higher than it otherwise would. however, when the time comes for the central bank to fulfill this commitment, it may not want to do so. it might find it hard to resist the temptation to raise rates earlier than promised to avoid the rise in inflation (see adam and billi 2007). indeed, policymakers have generally shied away from policies that promise temporarily high inflation in the future, such as price level targeting, that are in theory effective at circumventing the zero bound. this reluctance arises in part out of a concern that such an approach could unmoor inflation expectations (evans 2010 is an exception; see walsh 2009).a second caveat to the power of forward guidance is that the public may have different expectations of the future course of the economy and monetary policy than the central bank. the expectations channel is crucial for the effectiveness of optimal forward guidance policy. if the public has an imperfect understanding of the central bank’s intended policy path, then forward guidance may not work as well as advertised (see reifschneider and roberts 2006 and williams 2006). therefore, a key challenge for forward guidance is communicating the intended policy path to the public. complicating this communication challenge further, optimal forward guidance is inherently state-contingent and depends on myriad factors and risk assessments. these are inherently difficult to convey to the public. moreover, the public and the media tend to gloss over such nuances and take away simple sound bites.there are a number of examples of central banks using forward guidance on monetary policy. a few central banks—those in new zealand, norway, and sweden—provide explicit forward guidance in the form of policy rate projections. other central banks providing guidance have limited themselves to short statements indicating the direction and time frame of future policy actions, rather than full descriptions of an intended policy path (rudebusch and williams 2008 provide a discussion). the federal reserve’s public use of phrases such as “considerable period,” “measured pace,” and “extended period” falls into this category. the bank of canada and the bank of japan have also used forward guidance regarding the timing of and conditions for rate increases.note: trading data from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. edt, at five-minute intervals.let me conclude my discussion of forward guidance by summarizing the evidence of its effectiveness. several studies have examined the effects of central bank communication more generally (see gurkaynak et al. 2005, kohn and sack 2004, and bernanke et al. 2004). they found that the federal reserve’s policy statements have significant effects on financial market expectations of future policy actions and on treasury yields. only a few studies have looked at the effectiveness of forward guidance policies at the zero lower bound. one example was the bank of canada’s april 2009 statement that it expected to hold the policy rate constant until the second quarter of 2010, which had an immediate effect on financial market expectations regarding short-term interest rates. the conditionality of the guidance worked as well. when the canadian economy appeared to be recovering from the recession more quickly than anticipated, market participants began to expect interest rates to rise ahead of the previously announced date (see chehal and trehan 2009).of course, we at the fed have our own recent case study that speaks to the effectiveness of forward guidance. the federal open market committee’s statement issued following our august meeting said, “the committee currently anticipates that economic conditions—including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run—are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013.” as figure 1 shows, two-year treasury yields fell by about 0.1 percentage point and ten-year treasury yields fell by about 0.2 percentage point following the announcement. this provides prima facie evidence of the powerful effects of forward guidance at the zero bound.let me turn now to large-scale asset purchases, or lsaps, the main alternative to forward guidance in the unconventional monetary policy arena today. lsaps are central bank purchases of securities funded by an increase in reserves. their history is older than forward guidance. it goes back at least to operation twist, the 1961 joint initiative of the kennedy administration and the federal reserve to purchase longer-term treasury securities. more recently, the bank of japan began its so-called quantitative easing policy in 2001. it ultimately resulted in bank purchases of almost ¥35 trillion of japanese government bonds. in march 2009, the bank of england announced it would purchase £75 billion of u.k. gilts, which was subsequently expanded to £200 billion. and the federal reserve carried out three rounds of large-scale asset purchases during the great recession. two rounds of “qe1” took place in november 2008 and march 2009, during the financial crisis. the third round followed the “qe2” announcement in november 2010.a number of theories consider the channels by which lsaps affect treasury yields and financial conditions more broadly (see krishnamurthy and vissing-jorgensen 2011 for a thorough discussion). i will highlight two: signaling and portfolio. the signaling channel works through the effects asset purchases have on public expectations of future short-term interest rates. the portfolio channel works through the effects on factors that affect yields other than expectations of future short-term interest rates.the basic idea of the signaling channel is that, when the central bank conducts asset purchases, it is signaling its strong intention to add monetary stimulus by other means as well. such signaling may lower longer-term yields in two ways. first, it could lower the expected future path of short-term rates. second, it could reduce the uncertainty around this path, which may reduce the interest rate risk associated with holding longer-term securities.the theories underlying the portfolio channel are more diverse. in part, this is because the workhorse models of asset pricing—the representative-agent consumption capm model and the affine arbitrage-free model—generally do not allow the supply of a security to affect its price. in those frameworks, the supply of the asset is irrelevant for asset pricing (see piazzesi and schneider 2007). instead, one has to go back to older, more eclectic theories of asset pricing, such as tobin’s “portfolio balance” model or modigliani and sutch’s “preferred habitat” theory. these assume that a range of heterogeneous investors have different preferences for different asset classes and that arbitrage across these asset classes is limited. this approach has been integrated into a modern, no-arbitrage, asset-pricing framework and has been used to guide empirical analysis of lsap effects. (see vayanos and vila 2009 for a recent theoretical model, and greenwood and vayanos 2008 and hamilton and wu 2011 for empirical applications.)there has been a profusion of studies estimating the effects of lsaps on asset prices. table 1 summarizes a number of these studies. in order to facilitate comparison, the estimated effects in each analysis have been renormalized to correspond to the estimated effect on longer-term bond yields of a $600 billion lsap operation. that, of course, was the size of the federal reserve’s asset purchase program completed earlier this year.sources: modigliani-sutch (1966, sections 3-4), bernanke-reinhart-sack (2004, table 7, figure 6, and author´s calculations), greenwood-vayanos (2008, table 2), krishnamurthy-vissing-jorgensen (2011, section 4), gagnon et al. (2011, tables 1-2), d´amico-king (2010, figure 3), hamilton-wu (2011, figure 11), hancock-passmore (2011, table 5), swanson (2011, table 3), chung et al. (figure 10), joyce et al. (2011, figure 9), neely (2011, table 2). almost all of these estimates involve author´s calculations to renormalize the effect to a $600 billion u.s. lsap.except for a few outliers, the estimated effects on treasury yields are remarkably close, especially when you consider the wide variety of sample periods and methods employed. specifically, the estimated effects typically lie in the neighborhood of 0. 15 to 0.20 percentage point. generally, the estimates are reasonably precise. although some might argue that 0.15 to 0.20 percentage point is small, keep in mind that the typical response of the 10-year treasury yield to a 0.75 percentage point cut in the federal funds rate is also about 0.15 to 0.20 percentage point (see chung et al. 2011). i’ve never heard anyone argue that a 0.75 percentage point cut in the funds rate is small potatoes!although there is general agreement regarding the magnitude of lsap effects on treasury yields, there is less agreement regarding the channels lsaps work through, as discussed in the paper by bauer and rudebusch (2011) presented at this conference. one way to distinguish between the signaling and portfolio channels is to examine the responses of a variety of yields and asset prices to lsaps. if the main effect is through signaling, then we would expect a strong co-movement among all classes of longer-term yields. in contrast, a relatively muted response of assets that are not close substitutes for treasury securities would be evidence of a portfolio effect.the evidence is far from conclusive, but it does tentatively support some role for the portfolio channel. first, by some measures, expected short rates fell by less than government securities of equivalent maturity (see gagnon et al. 2011 and joyce et al. 2011). second, there is some evidence in the literature that the pass-through from purchases of treasury securities to private borrowing rates, such as corporate bond rates, may be relatively low (swanson 2011, krishnamurthy and vissing-jorgensen 2011, joyce et al. 2011, wright 2011, and neely 2011). to the extent that this is true, it would argue against a strong signaling effect. that said, there remains a great deal of uncertainty regarding the relative importance of these channels.moreover, there is also uncertainty regarding how the portfolio channel actually works. in particular, to what extent is it the size or the composition of the central bank’s balance sheet that matters? this question is no mere theoretical curiosity, but has very real practical relevance. for example, it is critical for gauging the efficacy of a maturity extension program that lengthens the maturity of securities holding with no change in the quantity of holdings, such as the policy announced earlier this week by the fomc. this program contrasts with a policy that simply increases the holdings of treasury securities, such as the fed’s second asset purchase program initiated late last year. the size-versus-composition question bears directly on the relative effectiveness of the two policy variants. in addition, the question is relevant for comparing the effects of a policy of purchasing treasury securities with one of buying mortgage-backed securities.as i have discussed, researchers have made great strides in improving our understanding of the effects of unconventional policies. the evidence from the experiences of the past few years convincingly demonstrates that both forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases are useful policy tools when short-term interest rates are constrained by the zero bound. despite this progress, i see at least four important issues that are in need of further study. first, what are the effects of lsaps on the overall economy? specifically, does lowering treasury yields through lsaps have the same effect on the economy as an equivalent movement in the federal funds rate? or, are the effects of lsaps attenuated owing to limited pass-through to other asset prices or limited duration of lsap effects? (see baumeister and benati 2010, chung et al. 2011, and wright 2011.)second, what approach should central banks take in formulating and communicating unconventional policies, whether forward guidance or lsap programs? for example, what are the advantages of targeting a specific quantity of lsaps as opposed to targeting a level or ceiling on interest rates at a particular point on the yield curve? this question is, of course, a new take on poole’s (1970) analysis of the choice of a monetary policy instrument. and, if a quantity approach is preferable, should lsap programs be formulated more like a policy rule rather than discrete lump-sum announcements (frb st. louis 2009)?third, should unconventional policies be a regular part of our toolkit or should they be reserved only for extraordinary times? that is, should forward guidance and lsaps complement standard short-rate policies at all times or only at the zero lower bound? these policies are still relatively unfamiliar to the public. consequently, their effects on the public’s inflation expectations, appetite for risk, and so forth are difficult to predict. this adds an element of uncertainty and raises concern about unintended consequences. in addition, lsaps may create distortions to asset prices or financial market functioning. these negative effects have received scant attention in the research literature and are not well understood. of course, these costs must be weighed against the value of asset purchases for macroeconomic stabilization.finally, how do these policies change our thinking about the optimal rate of inflation? in particular, if unconventional monetary policies can effectively circumvent the zero lower bound, then there is less of a need for an inflation cushion. but, if these policies cannot in practice be used as substitutes for reducing the short-term rate, then there is greater need for an inflation cushion.these questions offer a wealth of important topics for researchers to explore. the lessons we learn from this research will be critically important when central bankers consider unconventional policies in the future. on that note, let me end with a little forward guidance: i expect we will have an extended period of policy challenges, and that developments in monetary economics will be crucial to the future success of monetary policy.john c. williams is president and chief executive officer of the federal reserve bank of san francisco.adam, klaus, and roberto m. billi. 2007. “discretionary monetary policy and the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.” journal of monetary economics 54(3), pp. 728–752.
 we are blessed so far this decade with an amazing crop of new science fiction novelists.writing in a variety of styles, this crew is arguably more insightful, more interesting, higher intensity, and bolder than many (but not all!) of their predecessors -- and in my view revitalizing the genre at a time when more new technologies that will radically reshape all our lives are incubating and percolating than ever before.so, taking nothing away from authors like david brin who have long been established and continue to produce top-notch work, here are my nominations for the top 10 new science fiction novelists of -- more or less -- the decade, plus one bonus.stross, in my opinion, is first among equals -- the single best emerging talent with several outstanding novels in various styles under his belt and hopefully many more to come."one of us" in the sense that his career includes a stint as -- not kidding -- linux columnist for computer shopper magazine, stross is equally adept at both near-future and radically-extrapolated timeframes, and both hyper-serious and humorous moods.glasshouse is stross's latest book and perhaps the best introduction to his work.  a paranoid journey into a world of intergalactic teleportation and arbitrary physical body reshaping will have you thinking twice about who you are, and how you know who you are.singularity sky and iron sunrise are top-notch post- singularity space opera featuring perhaps the most inventive alien opponent ever created for science fiction -- "the festival".  you'll never look at telephones that drop out of the sky the same way again.accelerando is the best envisioning of the singularity committed to paper so far.  this book is really cool, both in the sense of how the kids mean it, and also in tone -- the plot, which spans about 100 years, is emotionally cold but amazingly inventive and highly likely to keep you up nights thinking hard about where we're all headed in the long run.the atrocity archives and the jennifer morgue , in contrast, are highly entertaining shaggy dog stories about an it guy named bob who gets drafted into mankind's fight against forces of evil from another dimension -- james bond meets call of cthulhu meets the office.finally, stross is also an active blogger with, let's say, strong points of view.morgan writes outstanding, page-turning, highly inventive military- and detective-flavored hard science fiction set in turbulent worlds where hard men are faced with hard challenges.altered carbon is definitely the place to start, morgan's first and perhaps most inventive novel, robert heinlein meets raymond chandler -- and first of a trio.broken angels is a strong followup that tilts more towards military fiction while still occupying the same universe.woken furies completes the trilogy with more hard-boiled action featuring a protagonist who has to fight a younger, and really mean, version of himself, which he does not enjoy.thirteen is undoubtedly morgan's best-written novel so far -- this is an author whose skills are growing rapidly, and this book shows it.  not officially released in the us yet (i just read the british version, black man, renamed for us consumption), thirteen is a near-future story of genetic engineering gone badly wrong -- a future version of all those classic paranoid political thrillers of the 70's but with a much harder edge.  highly recommended.  also very helpful re advising on things to think about before booking your next trip back from mars.reynolds is the real deal -- doctorate in astrophysics and former staff scientist at the european space agency -- and writes as if robert heinlein knew a thousand times more about science and completely lost his ability to write for warm characters.  while reynolds' work is cold and dark -- almost sterile -- in human terms, he operates on a scale and scope seldom seen, and everything he writes is grounded in real advanced theoretical physics.  highly recommended for anyone who likes large-scale space opera and big ideas.revelation space , redemption ark , and absolution gap -- together, reynolds' flagship trilogy -- are three of the darkest, largest-scale, and most scientifically complex hard science fiction novels ever written.  highly recommended to anyone who thinks that sounds like a good idea (i did!).century rain is reynolds' most approachable novel so far -- a trippy far-future expedition to an apparently inexplicable complete clone of earth and all its inhabitants from our year 1959.  like morgan's work, strong overtones here of raymond chandler -- in a good way (in a great way).chasm city has more overshades of richard morgan -- lots of combat, science, and intrigue.  are you sure you know who you are?the prefect is just out and i haven't read it yet, but it's next on the stack.macleod is incredibly creative -- his imagination is second to none -- and he's a superb writer.  many of his books have political overtones that may or may not interfere with your ability to enjoy them.  sometimes macleod seems to think that socialism is going to work a lot better in the future than it did in the past.  but if you can get through that, his novels certainly qualify as dizzyingly inventive and frequently rewarding.the star fraction , the stone canal , the cassini division , and the sky road form the fall revolution sequence, macleod's first major body of work.  cyberpunk, political revolution, high-tech combat, love-slave androids, cloning, wormholes, artificial intelligence, and nuclear deterrence for hire -- oh my!  join the felix dzerzhinsky workers' defense collective today.the execution channel , macleod's latest, takes a left turn into a paranoid post-9/11 near future featuring war with iran, flu pandemics, nuclear terrorist attacks, government conspiracies, and the execution channel, broadcasting actual footage of murders and executions around the clock.  haven't read it yet, but sounds like fun.hamilton is the clear heir to heinlein in my view.  large-scale space opera told through a shifting and interlinked cast of people from various walks of life, and amazing storytelling -- or, as (accurately) blurbed by richard morgan, "flat-out huge widescreen all-engines-at-full i-dare-you-not-to-believe-it space opera".it's taken hamilton a little while to find his talent, but he's definitely found it.  his two latest novels are superb: pandora's star and its sequel judas unchained .  plain on staying up late, you'll roll straight from the first into the second -- and they are not short (in the best way!).another post-cyberpunk heinlein heir, scalzi writes strong, highly characterized, inventive novels that have been racking up tremendous review after tremendous review for the past few years.start with old man's war (don't worry, they put the old dude in a young body, so you don't need to find out what it's like to fight aliens after hip replacement surgery).  progress directly to sequel the ghost brigades (sci fi essential books) and triquel the last colony .scalzi is also an active blogger , turns out!this way lie dragons... literally, and not like you've ever met before.  asher is an incredidly strong author of science fiction with a distinctive horror overlay.  not for the squeamish, but highly inventive.asher's primary work is the polity series -- gridlinked , the line of polity , brass man , and polity agent .  the extended story of an enigmatic agent for the all-powerful artificial intelligences who rule the whole of human space, the polity, these novels blend ian fleming with large-scale military combat, advanced theoretical xenobiology, nanotechnology gone badly wrong, and war drones with bad attitudes.  most definitely entertaining.follow those up with the skinner and the voyage of the sable keech , and then the delectable standalone novella prador moon .  one of the most distinctively imagined "bad bug" alien races, one of the most creative and lethal new worlds, and a historical scandal of horrific proportions combine in a whirlwind of violence and battle.asher is blogging as well!gibson meets heinlein (can you tell i was a heinlein fan growing up?) in a melange of science fiction themes, most particularly artificial intelligence, filtered through a distinctly female point of view.  a rapidly developing talent worth reading, and watching for future advances.watts' fifth novel, blindsight , has put him on the map -- a new tale of alien contact, as conducted by a team of entitites from a future earth that will send a chill down your spine without even getting to the alien part.my last and final entry of the top 10 is the one i am least certain about.  marusek is off the charts in terms of creativity and inventiveness -- in his debut novel, counting heads , he extrapolates with incredible verve and detail an earth circa 2134 that is a near-utopia.  i frankly need to read it again.  i think it may be a failure as a novel, but if so, it's an amazing failure.  well worth keeping an eye on at the very least -- has to win the award for highest potential.vinge, a retired san diego state univeristy professor of mathematics and computer science, is one of the most important science fiction authors ever -- with arthur c. clarke one of the best forecasters in the world.first, if you haven't had the pleasure, be sure to read true names , vinge's 1981 novella that forecast the modern internet with shocking clarity.  (ignore the essays, just read the story.)  fans of gibson and stephenson will be amazed to see how much more accurately vinge called it, and before neuromancer's first page cleared gibson's manual typewriter.  quoting a reviewer on amazon:when i was starting out as a phd student in artificial intelligence at carnegie mellon, it was made known to us first-year students that an unofficial but necessary part of our education was to locate and read a copy of an obscure science-fiction novella called true names. since you couldn't find it in bookstores, older grad students and professors would directly mail order sets of ten and set up informal lending libraries -- you would go, for example, to hans moravec's office, and sign one out from a little cardboard box over in the corner of his office. this was 1983 -- the internet was a toy reserved for american academics, "virtual reality" was not a popular topic, and the term "cyberpunk" had not been coined. one by one, we all tracked down copies, and all had the tops of our heads blown off by vinge's incredible book.true names remains to this day one of the four or five most seminal science-fiction novels ever written, just in terms of the ideas it presents, and the world it paints. it laid out the ideas that have been subsequently worked over so successfully by william gibson and neal stephenson. and it's well written. and it's fun.so what?  well, he's done it again.  vinge's new novel, rainbows end (yes, the apostrophe is deliberately absent), is the clearest and most plausible extrapolation of modern technology trends forward to the year 2025 that you can imagine.stop reading this blog right now.  go get it.  read it, and then come back.we'll see how things turn out, but i would not be the least bit surprised if we look back from 2025 and say, "i'll be damned, vinge called it", just like we look back today on 1981's true names and say the same thing.he better write a sequel.this article was written by marc andreessen and originally published on his blog, blog.pmarca.com . these articles are probably some of the best writings on business and startups anywhere but they were taken down years ago. they live here now in this static archive.
rt @markmuro1: out of all the companies in the united states, only 4% are exporters.
 out of all the companies in the united states, only 4 percent are exporters.this statistic is surprising given the outsized role that exports played in helping the united states recover from the great recession. during the initial recovery period, nearly 40 percent of u.s. gdp growth came from exports.today, almost 80 percent of global purchasing power resides outside the united states. rising global demand—especially in emerging markets, with their expanding middle-class consumer bases—has heightened u.s. firms’ interest in exporting.becoming an exporter requires investments of time and money. international marketing and sales, order fulfillment and distribution, and trade compliance all add up. harder still can be securing longer-term loans and equity finance to fuel a company’s international growth. for small- and medium-sized enterprises (smes)—those employing fewer than 500 workers—the cost of entering new markets poses a sizable challenge. without access to capital, many of these smaller firms forego lucrative export opportunities that would enable them to grow and create jobs in the united states.  smes typically have a harder time securing export financing than large firms do. their smaller size and limited assets, along with elevated loan processing costs, make banks less interested in working with them. meanwhile, most smes are unaware of the export financing programs offered by the export-import bank, the small business administration, and other institutions.there is an opportunity for state governments to take steps to improve smes’ access to export financing. by incorporating export support into their broader economic development strategies, states can increase the number of exporters, which in turn will boost job creation and strengthen their metropolitan areas’ economies.our new brief—“ bridging trade finance gaps: state-led innovations to bolster exports by small and medium-sized firms ”—offers three complementary approaches that states can adopt in their efforts to address the sme export financing shortfall.first, states can work to raise awareness among smes and financial institutions about existing federal and private instruments and sources of export financing. this action will encourage greater numbers of firms and banks to take advantage of proven solutions to the export finance challenge.second, states can offer additional financial instruments to help reduce smes’ barriers to exporting. direct loans and loan guarantees, royalty-based financing, and accounts receivable financing, among other interventions, make it easier for potential sme exporters to expand into new markets. and in addition to banks, states can work with a broader set of actors—such as with factoring companies and equity funds—to meet sme’s diverse export finance needs.third, states can set up new finance entities that provide direct export finance support exclusively targeted to smes. a state-level export-import bank—perhaps akin to the california export finance office (cefo), which offered a variety of guarantees for smaller export-related loans from its inception in 1985 until 2003, when state budget problems forced its closure—  could be able to offer flexible, tailored solutions to the challenges facing these smaller firms.state-level efforts are no replacement for federal programs like the export-import bank, which plays a critical role in helping u.s. companies compete in the global marketplace. but state strategies can provide a much needed supplement to federal export finance programs by bridging the gaps in the current system. by implementing innovation solutions to the challenges facing potential and current sme exporters, states can help smes expand into new markets and bolster economic growth in the process.senior policy analyst and associate fellow, metropolitan policy programfounder and ceo, tradeup capital fund and nextrade group, llc
 the new year is a time for reflecting on one's past, preparing for one's future, and moaning over one's ride-hailing charges in the here and now. as it happens, this year, uber telegraphed its stratospheric surge-pricing plans so far in advance of new year's eve that it curbed demand for uber services while attracting many more uber drivers than usually appear on the road.sure, some passengers never got the memo . in the final balance, though, it may have been the uber drivers who lost out. despite the way the additional transparency measures "backfired" on uber (and lyft), critics are nevertheless still asking whether surge pricing is ethical. san diego state university law professor dan eaton even wonders whether surge pricing on new year's eve compares to price gouging during a state of emergency .so as a counter-balance to the conversation, here's one handy reminder of how darkly, how utterly poorly, taxi regimes sometimes behaved in the years before the emergence of real competition. the map below—an artifact known to and despised by any longtime d.c. resident—emblematizes what was once the iron rule of the district of columbia taxicab commission: the dread "zone system."  note that the map looks nothing at all like any conventional map of the familiar d.c. diamond. here, the north–south axis is tilted about 45 degrees, so as to make the district's three smooth borders fit inside a box-shaped graphic—and to render it completely unreadable. per regulation, this map could be found hanging from the back seat of every d.c. taxi cab, where it did nobody any good at all. for passengers, the map was a nightmare, an off-kilter jumble of zones with no real correspondence to d.c. neighborhoods.at a glance, it was hard to tell even roughly where one's destination might be located. the street borders were hard to read by day, impossible at night. passengers simply needed to know them. the rules of the zone system were such that if a taxi driver crossed a zone border, the passenger owed a higher fare—even if the driver only nicked a border. and there were endless means and ways for a cab driving from one zone 1 destination to another zone 1 destination (for example) to skip briefly over into another zone. (chances were, a route neared close enough to one of the five zones along the border.)sometimes, these diversions made sense, in terms of time or traffic flow. but passengers had to watch out constantly for a rogue zip across a zone. tourists were totally at the mercy of drivers: visitors had no realistic way of knowing whether they were being quoted a fair figure or not. many informed residents had it just as bad, if not worse. drivers refused fares to low-density neighborhoods all the time. plenty of drivers refused to pick up black passengers altogether.d.c. blogger james barrett was one of the many residents who protested this state of affairs. he proposed a fairer map back in 2005, one that implemented the absurdly reasonable suggestion that a d.c. taxicab map feature a normal north–south alignment. yet common sense never prevailed during the zone system's lifetime.former d.c. mayor adrian fenty went to war to push d.c. cabs to ditch the zone system and adopt the time-and-distance meter standard in every other city. six years ago , fenty finally won. (but not at no cost : "did cab drivers oust fenty?" asked a story for the atlantic .) victory notwithstanding, as recently as 2012, josh barro wrote a user's guide for navigating d.c.'s "notably and unusually unpleasant" taxicab system. (while i have always admired the largely independent nature of d.c.'s mostly immigrant taxi operators, all of barro's complaints rang true for me. some of them still do.)in more recent years, barro's guide to d.c. cabs could have been trimmed down to three words: "take an uber." in 2015, though, i'm not so sure. drivers for the popular uberx service, hailing from far and wide, never seem to know where they're heading in the district. once again, it's up to passengers to watch their drivers' route vigilantly—not because they're getting ripped off, but because they might never get where they're going. plus, uber keeps doing its damnedest to convince everyone that uber is evil .there are things that d.c. could do—things that any city could do—to tilt the map, as it were, back in riders' favor. in a post about reforms that would encourage more predictable pricing, steve randy waldman describes two specific steps municipalities can take:in particular, public policy should focus on encouraging “multihoming”, where drivers advertise availability over several competing platforms (uber, lyft, sidecar, etc.) simultaneously. municipalities might also consider requiring that ride-sharing platforms support standard apis that would enable kayak-like metaplatforms to emerge. or municipalities might offer such applications to the public directly. as usual, the question here is not “regulation” vs. “deregulation,” but smart regulation to ensure a high-quality competitive marketplace. fortunately, the right of municipalities to regulate transportation services is well established, so it should be straightforward for cities to impose conditions like nonexclusivity and publication of fares in standardized formats.it goes without saying that district taxi drivers resisted uber bitterly . one day, uber will resist changes that encourage competition in the ride-hailing sector just as fiercely as it has resisted regulations that favor incumbent local taxi monopolies. how felix salmon sees uber as a one-size-fits-all app for the entire world escapes me.uber could stand to be a whole lot less evil going forward. still, i'll take this devil over the one i used to know—the d.c. zone system—any day of the week. getting ride-hailing right this time around will be a boon to both drivers and passengers.
 this fellow's retirement is supposed to be prefunded. that's hurting the usps. getty imagesget vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.the us postal service does a staggering amount of work, when you sit down and really think about it: it delivers 158 billion pieces of mail per year, the vast majority of them on time. and it also has some staggering financial problems: the gao  reported earlier this year that the usps has $100 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities related to retirees' pensions and health benefits.all of those troubles have a lot to do with digital communications — it's quicker to send grandma an email or even a text than a card — but there are plenty of other moving parts. here are 9 charts that explain what's going on with the us postal service.the us post office underwent some fantastic growth in its early years. in this video from data visualization pro  derek watkins , you can watch the post office grow from 75 offices in 1789 to nearly  77,000 in 1900. the number of offices would peak in 1901, at 76,945, then start to decline after that with the advent of rural free delivery, which eliminated the need for many offices.so while the usps closes post offices today due to shrinking revenues and postal service usage, the decline in post offices has been going on for a century. as of 2013, the total number of post offices stood at 26,670. since 2012, the postal service  has closed 141 facilities as part of a cost-cutting strategy it calls a "network rationalization plan." while the usps had planned on cutting more than 3,600 offices as of 2011, it eventually decided to instead  slash hours at rural offices.of course, as the usps grew, so did its ranks of employees. the number of workers skyrocketed as the population (and therefore number of customers) likewise grew, but in the last decade the postal service has aggressively cut back on workers. today, there are just under 500,000 workers, down by around 300,000 from the nearly 800,000 there were in 1999.the postal service has been cutting its workforce through attrition — simply not hiring people to replace its retiring workers, as government executive reports — and is also offering buyouts to some postmasters, hoping they'll retire early. but the agency could cut some of those workers through layoffs, if they do not accept buyouts or get other postal jobs. postmaster general patrick donahoe has said he wants ultimately to shrink the workforce down to 400,000 workers by 2017.starting in 1886, the first year for which continuous data starts to be available (though data doesn't exist for most of 1914-1925), the amount of mail the usps handled took off, growing exponentially until around 2000. but then email and online bill pay helped drag mail volume down sharply starting in the mid-2000s.the number of postal workers may be shrinking, but the efficiency of the usps has grown relatively steadily since 1926. today, the usps is handling nearly 325,000 pieces of mail per worker, compared to around 104,000 in 1926. and the trend is still upward, so even as the postal service has shrunk in the last few years, it has grown more efficient by this measure.the usps (through congress) keeps ramping up the cost of postage, and with each hike, there is some degree of backlash. but when you adjust it for inflation, the cost of postage has been relatively stable since the 1980s and is in fact cheap today compared to the mid-1970s. the above chart from 2013 shows how much today's 49-cent stamp (then the "proposed" rate) would cost in comparison to the past. while it continued the upswing in the cost to send a first-class letter, it really didn't raise prices out of the ordinary.starting in 1971, the usps stopped receiving taxpayer dollars and became an independent agency of the us government. and in the last decade or so, the usps's finances have gone from the black to the red. in 2012, the postal service lost a record $16 billion.the internet certainly helped kill postal revenues, but the question of whether the usps should have to undertake the costly step of prefunding retirement benefits is very controversial (see chart 8 for more). congress in 2006 passed a law mandating that the usps prefund pensions and health benefits for its retirees. the postal service and many of its supporters argue that it's silly to require the usps to do this — no other government agency is required to do so, nor is any business. but proponents  say it's necessary to keep taxpayers from eventually having to bail out the postal service.what all of this really highlights is the odd no-man's-land that the usps occupies, somewhere between being a business and a government entity. congress has made it "independent" but still maintains heavy control over it. for example, congress has nixed usps plans to cut costs by cutting saturday delivery. but then as the usps cuts costs other ways and shrinks, it reduces service to many americans, like those in rural areas. that raises the question of what sort of a postal service americans have a right to.the postal service isn't hurting on all fronts; in fact, its package business has been one bright spot for the agency. according to data from the usps's 2013 annual  report , package revenue grew by around 8 percent from 2012 to 2013. partnerships with amazon, fedex, and ups all are helping the usps keep its parcel business thriving.but it will take a lot of amazon and ebay purchases to solve the postal service's fiscal problems. as the wall street journal's laura stevens  reported earlier this year, the postal service was designed for letters, not packages. first-class mail is simply more profitable than packages; currently, it takes around $3 in package revenue to make up for $1 in lost first-class letter revenue.the us postal service has long railed against the requirement that it prefund employees' pensions and health benefits. this chart shows exactly how big those liabilities are (i.e., huge). as of 2013, the postal service owed nearly 1.5 times its annual revenues in retiree benefit funding.one plan the usps has to boost its income is postal banking. in a proposal released earlier this year, the usps inspector general pointed out that around one-quarter of all americans are unbanked or underbanked — that is, they either have little or no access to financial tools like bank accounts or loans. that's a huge potential customer base, and the plan could benefit both the post office and poor americans who rely on expensive payday loans. the above chart is an example from the proposal of what loans from a post office would look like — i.e., much less predatory than those from a payday lender.
 people follow the development of courses in zurich after the turbulence at  the stock exchange on jan. 15, 2015. closepeople follow the development of courses in zurich after the turbulence at  the stock... read morepeople follow the development of courses in zurich after the turbulence at  the stock exchange on jan. 15, 2015.investors will think twice about the franc: nomuralosses mounted from the swiss currency shock as the largest u.s. retail foreign-exchange brokerage said client debts threatened its compliance with capital rules and a new zealand-based dealer went out of business.fxcm inc. (fxcm) , which handled a record $1.4 trillion of trades by individuals last quarter, said clients owe $225 million on their accounts after the swiss national bank ’s decision to abandon the franc’s cap against the euro roiled markets worldwide. global brokers nz ltd. said losses from the franc’s surge are forcing it to shut down. ig group holdings plc (igg) estimated an impact of as much as 30 million british pounds ($45.5 million) and swissquote group holdings sa set aside 25 million francs ($28.4 million).“i would be astonished if we did not see more casualties,” nick parsons, the london-based head of research for the u.k. and europe at national australia bank ltd., said by phone from sydney. “this was a 180-degree about turn by the snb. people feel hurt and betrayed.”the franc surged as much as 41 percent versus the euro on thursday, the biggest gain on record, and climbed more than 15 percent against all of the more than 150 currencies tracked by bloomberg. dealers in london at banks including deutsche bank ag, ubs group ag and goldman sachs group inc. battled to process orders yesterday when the snb surprised markets with its announcement in zurich.a electronic board of a securities firm in tokyo on jan. 16, 2015. asian stocks were sharply lower friday after a surprise move by the swiss national bank to abandon its efforts to keep its currency artificially cheap shocked the market. japan's nikkei 225 dropped 1.43 percent to 16,864.16. closea electronic board of a securities firm in tokyo on jan. 16, 2015. asian stocks were... read morea electronic board of a securities firm in tokyo on jan. 16, 2015. asian stocks were sharply lower friday after a surprise move by the swiss national bank to abandon its efforts to keep its currency artificially cheap shocked the market. japan's nikkei 225 dropped 1.43 percent to 16,864.16.market turmoil from the move extended into a second day as asian shares dropped with u.s. index futures, while japanese and australian government bond yields plunged to records as investors sought haven assets.“clients experienced significant losses” after the franc’s surge, fxcm said in a statement dated jan. 15. that “generated negative equity balances owed to fxcm of approximately $225 million.”the brokerage dropped 15 percent in new york trading yesterday to an almost two-year low of $12.63, leaving the company valued at about $596 million. the shares were cut to sell from neutral by citigroup inc., which lowered its price target to $5 from $17.spokeswoman jaclyn klein didn’t immediately respond to calls to her mobile and office phones.the u.s. commodity futures trading commission allows investors to put down as little as 2 percent of the value of their foreign-exchange bets. brokers may get stuck with the balance of losses suffered by clients who used leverage, borrowed on credit cards, or did both to bet against the franc.fxcm’s chief executive officer drew niv. “clients experienced significant losses” after the franc’s surge, fxcm said in a statement dated jan. 15. that “generated negative equity balances owed to fxcm of approximately $225 million.” photographer ben hider/nyse euronext via bloomberg closefxcm’s chief executive officer drew niv. “clients experienced significant losses” after... read morefxcm’s chief executive officer drew niv. “clients experienced significant losses” after the franc’s surge, fxcm said in a statement dated jan. 15. that “generated negative equity balances owed to fxcm of approximately $225 million.” photographer ben hider/nyse euronext via bloombergdrew niv, fxcm’s chief executive officer, said that individual currency traders are enticed by the chance to control large positions with little money down, in remarks that were published in bloomberg markets magazine’s december issue.“currencies don’t move that much,” he said. “so if you had no leverage, nobody would trade.”the company warned investors in a regulatory filing last march that its risk controls were imperfect. fxcm had 230,579 retail customers on dec. 31. they traded $439 billion of currency in december, with an average of 595,126 trades a day.“some of our methods for managing risk are discretionary by nature and are based on internally developed controls and observed historical market behavior,” the company said in the regulatory filing. “these methods may not adequately prevent losses, particularly as they relate to extreme market movements.”most of fxcm’s retail clients lost money in 2014, according to the company’s disclosures mandated by the cftc. the percentage of losing accounts climbed from 67 percent in the first and second quarters to 68 percent in the third quarter and 70 percent in the fourth quarter.the snb ended its three-year policy of capping the franc at 1.20 per euro a week before the european central bank meets to discuss government bond purchases to boost the euro-area economy. such a policy, known as quantitative easing, could spur pressure on the franc to appreciate against the euro. the snb spent billions defending the currency cap after introducing it in september 2011.deutsche bank was among dealers to suffer disruptions to electronic trading, with its autobahn platform temporarily ceasing to provide quotes, according to a dealer from outside the bank. auckland-based global brokers nz said the market for francs was disrupted for hours.“the majority of clients in a franc position were on the losing side and sustained losses amounting to far greater than their account equity,” global brokers nz director david johnson said in a statement dated jan. 15 and posted on the website of affiliated company excel markets. all of the firm’s client funds are in segregated accounts and “100 percent of positive client equity or balance is safe and withdrawable immediately,” johnson said.hsbc holdings plc is investigating reports that customers in hong kong bought the swiss franc below market rates when an online banking system failed to keep up with the currency’s gains after the removal of the cap.apple daily and the hong kong economic journal cited unidentified bank customers as saying that they took advantage of the mistake yesterday evening. hsbc spokeswoman maggie cheung said in an e-mail that the lender was looking into the reports.ig group shares fell 4.4 percent yesterday. the u.k. spread-betting firm said the financial impact from the surge in the swiss franc was partially dependent on its ability to recover client debts.the market turmoil turned the $1.9 billion john hancock absolute return currency fund (jcuax) into the biggest loser among u.s. peers. it tumbled 8.7 percent yesterday, the steepest drop on record and the most among more than 2,000 u.s.-domiciled funds tracked by bloomberg with at least $1 billion under management. the fund had its second-biggest short position in the franc at the end of november, according to the latest fact sheet on john hancock’s website.“when they pulled the rug under the market, the swiss franc rallied against everything,” said chris weston , chief market strategist at ig markets ltd. in melbourne . many funds “would have been in a lot of pain last night,” weston said.to contact the reporters on this story: david evans in los angeles at davidevans@bloomberg.net ; kevin buckland in tokyo at kbuckland1@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: garfield reynolds at greynolds1@bloomberg.net michael pattersonpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 2division of general internal medicine, department of medicine, university of washington, seattle3center for health services research in primary care, durham veterans affairs medical center, durham, north carolina4department of biostatistics and bioinformatics, duke university, durham, north carolina5veterans administration north texas health care system, dallas6division of gastrointestinal and endocrine surgery, university of texas southwestern medical center, dallas9division of general internal medicine, department of medicine, duke university, durham, north carolina10pittsburgh veterans affairs medical center, pittsburgh, pennsylvania11division of minimally invasive surgery, department of surgery, allegheny health network, temple university, philadelphia, pennsylvaniaimportance  accumulating evidence suggests that bariatric surgery improves survival among patients with severe obesity, but research among veterans has shown no evidence of benefit.objective  to examine long-term survival in a large multisite cohort of  patients who underwent bariatric surgery compared with matched control patients.design, setting, and participants  in a retrospective cohort study, we identified 2500 patients (74% men) who underwent bariatric surgery in veterans affairs (va) bariatric centers from 2000-2011 and matched them to 7462 control patients using sequential stratification and an algorithm that included age, sex, geographic region, body mass index, diabetes, and diagnostic cost group. survival was compared across patients who underwent bariatric surgery and matched controls using kaplan-meier estimators and stratified, adjusted cox regression analyses.exposures  bariatric procedures, which included 74% gastric bypass, 15% sleeve gastrectomy, 10% adjustable gastric banding, and 1% other.main outcomes and measures  all-cause mortality through december 2013.results  surgical patients (n = 2500) had a mean age of 52 years and a mean bmi of 47. matched control patients (n = 7462) had a mean age of 53 years and a mean bmi of 46. at the end of the 14-year study period, there were a total of 263 deaths in the surgical group (mean follow-up, 6.9 years) and 1277 deaths in the matched control group (mean follow-up, 6.6 years). kaplan-meier estimated mortality rates were 2.4% at 1 year, 6.4% at 5 years, and 13.8% at 10 years for surgical patients; for matched control patients, 1.7% at 1 year, 10.4% at 5 years, and 23.9% at 10 years. adjusted analysis showed no significant association between bariatric surgery and all-cause mortality in the first year of follow-up (adjusted hazard ratio [hr], 1.28 [95% ci, 0.98-1.68]), but significantly lower mortality after 1 to 5 years (hr, 0.45 [95% ci, 0.36-0.56]) and 5 to 14 years (hr, 0.47 [95% ci, 0.39-0.58]). the midterm (>1-5 years) and long-term (>5 years) relationships between surgery and survival were not significantly different across subgroups defined by diabetes diagnosis, sex, and period of surgery.conclusions and relevance  among obese patients receiving care in the va health system, those who underwent bariatric surgery compared with matched control patients who did not have surgery had lower all-cause mortality at 5 years and up to 10 years following the procedure. these results provide further evidence for the beneficial relationship between surgery and survival that has been demonstrated in younger, predominantly female populations.
 euro floored as snb decision puts spotlight on ecb, franc surgesu.s. dollar, euro and swiss franc bank notes are seen in a bank in budapest august 8, 2011.sydney (reuters) - the euro hovered above an 11-year trough early on friday as investors wagered the swiss move to abandon its currency cap meant it was almost certain the european central bank would launch large-scale bond buying next week.the euro suffered its biggest one-day drop against the swiss franc in history after the swiss national bank (snb) stunned markets by suddenly abandoning its long-held pledge to keep the franc above 1.20 per euro.after falling 30 percent in a matter of minutes, the euro has since clawed back to 0.9828 swiss francs eurchf=r, but that still left it down 19 percent.the loss of swiss support for the euro saw the single currency slide across the board to reach as low as $1.15675 eur= , a trough not seen since november 2003, before recovering a bit of ground to last stand at $1.1636.dealers assumed the swiss had moved with the knowledge that the ecb would take the plunge into full scale quantitative easing at its policy meeting on jan. 22."no doubt the market will be expecting big stimulatory action from the ecb next week if the swiss fear a much weaker euro," said david de garis, senior economist at national australia bank."in fact, the move unleashed a spate of currency volatility, including the euro, major currency pairs whipsawing significantly."indeed, the franc also soared 18 percent against the greenback, which last traded at 0.8650 francs chf= , having fallen as far as 0.7360.the euro was hammered against the other major currencies. it fell to a three-month low of 135.00 yen eurjpy=r and hit a four-month low of a$1.4152 euraud=r.dealers suspected many banks, hedge funds and day traders would be nursing painful losses from the surge in the franc which could lead to sales of other currencies and assets to cover their positions - and thus more volatility.with the euro under pressure, the dollar index .dxy reached an 11-year high of 92.752. it last stood at 92.203.traders said the ecb bond-buying program would inject fresh euros into the market, some of which would ultimately flow into the safe-haven swiss franc.that would render the task of maintaining the 1.20 per euro cap all the more difficult and expensive for the snb, hence its decision to abandon the pledge.still, the market reaction was nothing short of panic and that helped lift the safe-haven japanese currency broadly.the dollar hit a fresh one-month low of 115.90 yen jpy= , while the australian dollar dipped to 95.35 yen audjpy=r from thursday's high near 97.00.amid the frenzied trade, the aussie managed to reach a one-month high of $0.8295 aud=d4 only to fall back to $0.8186 in early asian hours.there is nothing in the way of market-moving data out in asia, giving the market room to digest the snb's announcement.
 
  “it was like walking into a nightmare,” says matsuda, 42, a former transportation adviser to the late democratic senator frank lautenberg. “i looked around and said, ‘guys, what’s happening?’”the bush administration’s last marad loan guarantee, a $140 million deal to help a politically connected firm build two “superferries” to shuttle passengers around hawaii, imploded shortly after matsuda arrived. marad got stuck with the ferries, which it eventually offloaded to the navy. then a marine services outfit with a marad loan went bankrupt, prompting panicky meetings about whether seizing its collateral—a supply boat at work in nigeria’s offshore oil industry—would spark an international incident. then another dying shipping company missed a payment on a loan secured by four double-hulled oil tankers. after weeks of confusion, marad’s lawyers informed matsuda he needed to arrest the four football-field sized ships.“honestly, i didn’t even know you could arrest ships,” he recalls.marad struggled just to locate the tankers, which were scattered around the gulf of mexico and the eastern seaboard. one captain apparently turned off his transponders to evade detection. “they were moving from port to port to avoid us,” an official recalls. “we’d go looking for a ship, they’d be gone before we got there.” the four ships were finally tracked down in three states; federal marshals had to board them, place them under arrest and claim them for the government. marad ended up selling them for scrap, recovering just $7 million of the $88 million it was owed.this is what can happen, matsuda says, when a little marine agency like marad is assigned to evaluate big-money credit deals. “it’s never going to lure financial talent away from wall street,” says matsuda, who left the government in 2013 and is now a transportation consultant in washington. “it’s not a bank.”no, marad is not a bank. it’s more accurate to say it runs the shipbuilding-loan division of a much larger bank—in fact, america’s largest bank.that bank currently has a portfolio of more than $3 trillion in loans, the bulk of them to about 8 million homeowners and 40 million students, the rest to a motley collection of farmers and fishermen, small businesses and giant exporters, clean-energy firms and fuel-efficient automakers, managed-care networks and historically black colleges, even countries like israel and tunisia. it has about 120 different credit programs but no consistent credit policy, requiring some borrowers to demonstrate credit-worthiness and others to demonstrate need, while giving student loans to just about anyone who wants one. it runs a dozen unconnected mortgage programs, including separate ones targeting borrowers in need, native americans in need, veterans in need and, yes, native american veteran borrowers in need. its problems extend well beyond deadbeat shipbuilders.that bank, of course, is the united states government—the real bank of america—and it’s unlike any other bank.for starters, its goal is not profit, although it is profitable on paper, and its loans are supposed to help its borrowers rather than its shareholders, better known as taxpayers. its lending programs sprawl across 30 agencies at a dozen cabinet departments, with no one responsible for managing its overall portfolio, evaluating its performance or worrying about its risks. the closest it gets to coordination is an overwhelmed group of four midlevel office of management and budget employees known as “the credit crew.” they’re literally “non-essential” employees—they were sent home during the 2013 government shutdown—and they’re now down to three, because their leader is on loan to the department of housing and urban development. when i suggested to omb officials that the crew seemed understaffed to oversee a credit portfolio 25 percent larger than jpmorgan chase’s, someone pointed out that it’s hiring an intern.these unregulated and virtually unsupervised federal credit programs are now the fastest-growing chunk of the united states government, ballooning over the past decade from about $1.3 trillion in outstanding loans to nearly $3.2 trillion today. that’s largely because the financial crisis sparked explosive growth of student loans and federal housing administration mortgage guarantees, which together compose two-thirds of the bank of america. but even after the crisis, as a washington austerity push has restrained direct spending, many credit programs have kept expanding, in part because they help politicians dole out money without looking like they’re spending. in 2012, congress boosted funding for a transportation loan program called tifia eightfold, while launching a similar initiative for water projects called wifia. there’s now talk of a new credit program for public buildings—naturally, bifia.data: office of management and budget (housing includes fha, department of veterans' affairs, usda rural housing service); illustration by oliver mundayone reason for the bank’s explosive growth is old-fashioned special-interest politics, as beneficiaries of credit programs—the real estate industry, for-profit schools, the farm lobby, small-business groups, even shipbuilders—push aggressively to grow them. a washington money spigot, once opened, is almost never turned off. since fishermen in the northwest halibut/sablefish and alaska king crab fisheries got their own $24 million loan program, it’s a good bet that nobody’s paid closer attention to it on capitol hill than their lobbyists. but the federal credit boom has just as much to do with arcane budget politics. critics believe the unorthodox government accounting system for credit programs dramatically understates their costs, encouraging congress to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in expected savings that might never materialize. it’s not just a theoretical risk: the fha has already received a series of unpublicized quasi-bailouts since the financial crisis, amounting to more than the $45 billion government bailout the corporate bank of america received in 2008. some critics believe student loans, budgeted as a government moneymaker, could be heading for a far worse fiscal disaster.but the financial and political risks associated with federal credit have not yet registered with most policymakers, much less the public, even after credit controversies like the solar manufacturer solyndra’s default on its clean-energy loan, the escalating student debt crisis and the high-profile effort by congressional republicans to kill the low-profile export-import bank. “the depth of ignorance is stunning,” says brookings institution fellow douglas elliott, a former investment banker who wrote a book called uncle sam in pinstripes about the government as a financial institution.some of the federal government’s credit operations produce failure rates no private bank would tolerate. the department of agriculture’s loan programs promoting biofuel refineries, rural broadband and renovations of rural apartment buildings have all performed even worse than marad’s, recovering less than 40 cents per dollar, the kind of return you might expect lending to your brother-in-law. the average default rate for private bank loans is about 3 percent; by contrast, the state department’s “repatriation” loans to americans who get stuck without cash abroad have a 95 percent default rate. usda’s main mortgage program for rural families retrieves just 3 cents on the dollar from borrowers who default, suggesting it barely tries to collect when loans go bad.michael grunwald is a senior staff writer for politico magazine.
 i'm a fellow at the adam smith institute in london, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. an odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe i am. i have written for the times, daily telegraph, express, independent, city am, wall street journal, philadelphia inquirer and online for the asi, iea, social affairs unit, spectator, the guardian, the register and techcentralstation. i've also ghosted pieces for several uk politicians in many of the uk papers, including the daily sport.the author is a forbes contributor. the opinions expressed are those of the writer.
 obesity device cleared in u.s. tricks brain with electrodesenteromedics inc.'s weight-loss device uses implantable electrodes to trick the brain into thinking the stomach is full. closeenteromedics inc.'s weight-loss device uses implantable electrodes to trick the brain... read moreenteromedics inc.'s weight-loss device uses implantable electrodes to trick the brain into thinking the stomach is full.a first-of-its-kind weight-loss device from enteromedics inc. (etrm) , which uses implantable electrodes to trick the brain into thinking the stomach is full, was approved in the u.s.the food and drug administration cleared the maestro rechargeable system today, the first weight-loss device that targets the pathway between the brain and the stomach that controls feelings of hunger and fullness.the system, approved for obese patients 18 and older who have at least one other weight-related condition such as type 2 diabetes , is also the first obesity device approved in the u.s. since 2007, the fda said in a statement .enteromedics, which has been publicly traded since 2007, rose 21 percent to $1.42 at 12:30 p.m. in new york , bringing its market value to almost $100 million. the shares had declined 50 percent in the past year through yesterday.products to help americans lose weight have been a hot category in the last few years, though one that has had some trouble producing major revenue. the fda has approved four weight-loss drugs since 2012, three pills and one injection.st. paul , minnesota-based enteromedics’ system uses electrodes implanted in the abdomen to send electrical pulses to nerves, the fda said. patients use external controllers to charge the device and allow doctors to adjust its settings.enteromedics’ system uses electrodes implanted in the abdomen to send electrical pulses to nerves, the fda said. closeenteromedics’ system uses electrodes implanted in the abdomen to send electrical pulses... read moreenteromedics’ system uses electrodes implanted in the abdomen to send electrical pulses to nerves, the fda said.how exactly the system helps people lose weight is unknown, the fda said.“obesity and its related medical conditions are major public health problems,” william maisel , deputy director for science and chief scientist in the fda’s center for devices and radiological health, said in the statement. “medical devices can help physicians and patients to develop comprehensive obesity treatment plans.”serious adverse events for enteromedics’ system included nausea, pain at the neuroregulator site, vomiting and surgical complications. other side effects included heartburn, problems swallowing, belching and chest pain.a clinical trial of the maestro didn’t achieve its primary objective of getting patients to lose 10 percent more excess weight than the control group, the fda said. still, an agency advisory panel found that data from the trial provided evidence of sustained weight loss and that the device’s benefits outweighed its risks for some patients.even with the fda ruling, the maestro faces a tough road for wide adoption. many insurers and government health programs have refused to cover weight-loss treatments since belviq, from arena pharmaceuticals inc. and eisai co. (4523) , and qsymia, by vivus inc. (vvus) , were approved in 2012.to contact the reporter on this story: anna edney in washington at aedney@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: crayton harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net andrew pollackpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 there were 2.3 million prisoners in the u.s. as of the 2010 census. it's often been remarked that our national incarceration rate of 707 adults per every 100,000 residents is the highest in the world, by a huge margin.we tend to focus less on where we're putting all those people. but the 2010 census tallied the location of every adult and juvenile prisoner in the united states. if we were to put them all on a map, this is what they would look like:the map shows the raw number of prisoners in each u.s. county as of the 2010 census. much of the discussion of regional prison population only centers around inmates in our 1,800 state and federal correctional facilities . but at any given time, hundreds of thousands more individuals are locked up in the nation's 3,200 local and county jails . this map includes these individuals as well.to put these figures in context, we have slightly more jails and prisons in the u.s. -- 5,000 plus -- than we do degree-granting colleges and universities . in many parts of america, particularly the south, there are more people living in prisons than on college campuses .as you can see in the map, states differ in the extent to which they spread their correctional populations out geographically. florida, arizona and california stand out as states with sizeable corrections populations in just about every county. states in the midwest, on the other hand, tend to have concentrated populations in just a handful of counties. prisons tend to leave an unmistakeable mark on the landscape, as artist josh begley has documented .because of the mix of state, federal and local correctional facilities in each county, it doesn't make sense to express these numbers as a rate -- x prisoners per y number of adults. the presence of a federal or state facility in a given county will greatly inflate that county's prisoner count relative to the general population. and in many instances, large correctional facilities are located in sparsely populated regions, like northern new york. in some of these counties, prisons account for 10, 20 or 30 percent of the total population.in recent years criminal justice reform has risen to prominence in the national conversation, with both democrats and republicans looking for ways to dial back the incarceration-focused policies of the '80s and '90s. this map shows one reason why the issue is gaining traction: prisoners are literally every where you look in the u.s. nearly 85 percent of u.s. counties are home to some number of incarcerated individuals. localities spend tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner each year -- and often much more than that -- to house, feed and provide them with medical care. most counties would doubtless prefer to spend this money elsewhere.correction: an earlier version of this piece included incorrect counts of correctional facilities for cumberland county, pa and lexington county, sc.christopher ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. he previously worked at the brookings institution and the pew research center.
rt @sub8u: science fiction sounds tame in face of what some companies are trying to do!
“the company is literally printing life"
 photo: liz hafalia / the chronicle austen heinz, far left, of cambrian genomics, grows genetically engineered plants, including a rose, left, that glows in the dark. cambrian is working with the rose’s creator, glowing plant, which raised funds on kick star ter before the platform banned such organisms.photo: liz hafalia / the chronicle austen heinz, ceo of cambrian genomics, grows genetically engineered plants at a san franciscco greenhouse. cambrian delivers dna dequences to pharmaceutical companies.photo: liz hafalia / the chronicle scientist sean hacking prepares emulsion at cambrian genomics in san francisco on dec. 11.scientist sean hacking prepares emulsion at cambrian genomics in...in austen heinz’s vision of the future, customers tinker with the genetic codes of plants and animals and even design new creatures on a computer. then his startup, cambrian genomics, prints that dna quickly, accurately and cheaply.“anyone in the world that has a few dollars can make a creature, and that changes the game,” heinz said. “and that creates a whole new world.”the 31-year-old ceo has a deadpan demeanor that can be hard to read, but he is not kidding. in a makeshift laboratory in san francisco, his synthetic biology company uses lasers to create custom dna for major pharmaceutical companies. its mission, to “democratize creation” with minimal to no regulation, frightens bioethicists as deeply as it thrills silicon valley venture capitalists.with the latest technology and generous funding, a growing number of startups are taking science and medicine to the edge of science fiction. in the works or on the market are color-changing flowers, cow-free milk, animal-free meat, tests that detect diseases from one drop of blood and pills that tell doctors whether you have taken your medicine.but few founders are pushing the technical and ethical boundaries of science as far as heinz, who told the wall street journal , “i can’t believe that after 10 or 20 years people will not design their children digitally.” at a recent conference in vienna , he said, “we want to make totally new organisms that have never existed.”his 11-person team has raised $10 million from more than 120 investors, including peter thiel’s venture firm founders fund. “it’s a fundamentally new technology that can open up a whole new industry,” said partner scott nolan.“i love cambrian,” he wrote in an e-mail. “the company is literally printing life. can’t wait to see all the great things that come of it.”to be clear, cambrian isn’t printing designer babies or dinosaurs — yet. still, its rhetoric alarms critics. marcy darnovsky, executive director of the center for genetics and society, a bioethics watchdog group in berkeley, sums up heinz’s belief that “every problem can be solved by engineering” as as a kind of “techno-libertarianism.”“we have to take seriously people like austen heinz who say they want to modify future generations of human beings and upgrade the human species,” she said. “i think that technical project is far more complicated than they acknowledge. nonetheless, their story about what we should be striving for as human beings, as a society, i think is very troubling.”scientists modify the dna of living organisms for many reasons: to make plants resistant to herbicides and pests, for example, or to make research animals mimic human conditions and diseases.editing dna has become significantly less costly over the last decade, and cambrian has modified or built machines that make the process even cheaper and faster. traditionally, heinz said, machines create dna strands one at a time and many of them contain errors. his method makes millions of strands at once, errors and all, to also generate a few correct ones.“it is the most powerful technology humans have ever created,” heinz said. “hydrogen bombs can destroy whole planets, but this is a technology that can create planets. this is the greatest human achievement of all time — the ability to read and write life, because that’s who we are.”dna is made up of four chemicals represented by the letters a, c, t and g. when cambrian receives an order for specific genes, it adds dna chemicals millions of times onto tiny beads that are then layered onto a glass slide. a machine assigns a color to each dna chemical. the next step is the key one: a laser programmed to analyze the color combinations ignores the erroneous strands and “prints” the correct ones by pushing them apart from the rest. the final product arrives on a small plastic plate as a powder that customers put inside the cells of an organism.right now, employees check each order to make sure that a customer isn’t printing, say, base pairs of ebola. but staff won’t have time to do that if, as heinz predicts, orders dramatically increase in the next two years. in that case, he said, cambrian might first ship the plates to an independent facility where experts would put the dna inside cells, film and analyze it, and make sure that it is safe before releasing it.this facility, he envisions, could be run by another company, not necessarily the government. because cambrian wants to keep government interference to an absolute minimum, its ceo insists that behaving well is in the company’s best interest.“it’s pretty obvious why we wouldn’t want to do something bad,” said heinz on a recent afternoon in his south of market office. “we wouldn’t want the industry to be regulated. so, 'how do we democratize creation without killing everyone?’ is basically the question.”the federal government already regulates forms of genetic modification. the food and drug administration oversees gene therapies for humans, and another agency has indicated it will not approve proposals to change parents’ sperm and eggs with the goal of passing genetic changes to their offspring. but darnovsky, the bioethicist, said that it’s less clear what rules would apply to heinz, who isn’t proposing to design modified humans himself, but to someday provide the dna to a third-party designer.“there does need to be a public discussion, and public policy about when and who and under what circumstances and how new life forms can be created,” she said.heinz and other scientists have years of technical hurdles to clear before they can create living, breathing humans from a plate of printed dna. such an act is not possible right now. but he doesn’t hide his enthusiasm about the possibility.is he essentially enabling eugenics? he rejects that term, which to him means government interference with reproductive rights. he insists that it differs from his approach, which he describes as allowing individuals to eliminate future suffering in a more humane way than abortion, “which is pretty barbaric.” “a decent percentage of people have really nasty mutations that cause really bad, horrible things,” like down syndrome and cystic fibrosis, he said. “these are basically like hell on earth, and i think it’s smart to be able to avoid those things.”the technology could also be used for more superficial means, like printing desired eye and hair colors, and heinz has no problem with that. “people are already trying to make those decisions by deciding who they’re going to breed with.”then there is the potential matter of creating living things that are now the stuff of science fiction. “if you could take a chicken and make it the size of my building,” heinz mused, “you would probably learn a lot about genetics, which could be useful for human applications.”heinz  became interested in genetics as a student at duke university in north carolina, his home state. in 2008, he moved to south korea for a doctoral program in electrical engineering and computer science, where he built the dna laser printer used today. in 2011, after giving a talk about the technology at stanford university, he dropped out of school and returned to the united states to incorporate cambrian.cambrian currently prints dna for roche, glaxosmithkline and thermo fisher scientific at 5 to 6 cents per dna letter, heinz said. next year, the company wants to open a pilot version of the service to academics at a steep discount: $50 for 20 distinct 500-letter strands of dna.to succeed, cambrian is investing in and working with companies that share its vision. it made an early investment in glowing plant, which raised more than $480,000 on kickstarter to create genetically modified glow-in-the-dark plants. in response, the crowdfunding platform banned projects involving genetically engineered organisms. glowing plant plans to use cambrian’s technology as it makes more plants.cambrian will also share its technology with startups in which it holds a 10 percent equity stake. one is petomics, which is making a probiotic for cats and dogs that makes their feces smell like bananas. another is sweetpeach , which hopes to take samples of users’ vaginal microorganisms and send back personalized probiotics to promote vaginal health. (contrary to  heinz’s description of sweetpeach at a recent conference, the products will not make vaginas smell like peaches.)heinz seeks to help create “thousands” more startups in this vein. on top of that, he wants to replace lost limbs, fight viruses and develop alternatives to antibiotics. maybe someday, he said, scientists will even print dna on mars. “it’s going to be an amazing next few hundred years.”san francisco chronicle staff writer. e-mail:
 work on your own schedule.this nanodegree program is the most efficient curriculum to prepare you for a job as a front-end web developer. participants in the program will learn to build beautiful, responsive websites optimized for security and performance. they will work with their peers and advisors on projects approved by leading employers as the critical indicators of job-readiness. we designed these projects with expert web developers and hiring managers. in addition to building your project portfolio, you’ll advance your career prospects by learning how to ace a technical job interview and by participating in code reviews.a nanodegree is a new type of credential, designed to prepare you for a job.it is project-based: you'll complete several projects, supported by our community of         coaches and your fellow students, to learn and show off your skills.it's flexible: take only the courses you need to ace projects!the front-end web developer nanodegree is designed to prepare you for a career in web development. as a front-end web developer, you’ll see the efforts of your work with each click of the browser’s refresh button. with our industry partners, we’ve carefully crafted the most efficient set of projects and skills training to guide you along the way.in this nanodegree you will learn the fundamentals of how the web works, and gain a working knowledge of the three foundational languages that power each and every website: html, css and javascript.in order to determine if the front-end web developer nanodegree is a good fit for you, please take the readiness assessment . this will help you determine if you are ready to start.you are self-driven and motivated to learn. participation in this program requires consistently meeting the deadlines for your cohort and devoting at least 10 hours per week to your work.you can communicate fluently and professionally in written and spoken english.you have access to a computer with a broadband connection, on which you’ll install a professional code/text editor (ie. sublime text or atom ).you can independently solve and describe your solution to a math or programming problem and are familiar with basic programming concepts such as variables, conditions and loops.you are willing to contribute to the success of the program, including collaborating with fellow students and giving us feedback on how we can improve.you’ve completed an online programming course. you’ve explored the options for learning html, css, and javascript online and you want something more. you’ve tried to build web pages and you want to learn how to do it like a pro.see the technology requirements for using udacity.these are the projects you'll build and the classes that will prepare you to build each of the projects. you'll have access to all these in the nanodegree:you will be provided with a design mockup as a pdf-file and must replicate that design in html and css. you will develop a responsive website that will display images, descriptions and links to each of the portfolio projects you will complete throughout the course of the front-end web developer nanodegree.prepare for this project with: intro to html and cssyou will develop an interactive resume application that reads your resume content from a json file and dynamically displays that content within a provided template. you will use objects, functions, conditionals, and control structures to compose the content that will display on the resume.prepare for this project with: javascript basics and intro to jqueryyou will be provided with visual assets and a game loop engine; using these tools you must add a number of entities to the game including the player characters and enemies to recreate the classic arcade game frogger.prepare for this project with: object-oriented javascript and html5 canvasyou will optimize a provided website with a number of optimization- and performance-related issues so that it achieves a target pagespeed score and runs at 60 frames per second.prepare for this project with: website performance optimizationyou will develop a single-page application featuring a map of your neighborhood or a neighborhood you would like to visit. you will then add additional functionality to this application, including: map markers to identify popular locations or places you’d like to visit, a search function to easily discover these locations, and a listview to support simple browsing of all locations. you will then research and implement third-party apis that provide additional information about each of these locations (such as streetview images, wikipedia articles, yelp reviews, etc).prepare for this project with: intro to ajax and javascript design patternsin this project you are given a web-based application that reads rss feeds. the original developer of this application clearly saw the value in testing, they've already included jasmine and even started writing their first test suite! unfortunately, they decided to move on to start their own company and we're now left with an application with an incomplete test suite. that's where you come in.prepare for this project with: javascript testing coming soon!you’ll host all your projects on github and make regular commits. if you haven’t learned version control yet, use our latest course on the topic: how to use git and githubwe will be periodically reviewing the front-end nanodegree curriculum--both classes and projects--and making adjustments based on student and industry feedback. we will notify active students working toward the nanodegree about effects this may have on the degree requirements.michael is a self-taught full-stack web developer and open source advocate. before joining udacity, he spent over 10 years developing classified applications for some of the most demanding intelligence organizations in the world. he has an active top secret clearance and, unless you have one as well, that's all you're allowed to know. in his spare time he enjoys playing paintball, video games, and spending time with his 3 wonderful children.miriam has had the privilege to contribute to student experience at udacity from multiple angles. from creating new courses to working one-on-one with students to helping lead our team of coaches, she’s loved it all and has only grown more passionate about changing education. outside of work, she enjoys singing, baking, and teaching yoga. miriam attended stanford university, where she earned a b.s. in physics, a b.a. in philosophy and religious studies, and an m.a. in religious studies.
 obamacare isn't innovative enough. and neither is the republican alternative.our great and eternal national health care debate calls to mind h.l. mencken’s description of the prose stylings of warren g. harding, america’s much-maligned 29th president: “it reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. it is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. it drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. it is rumble and bumble. it is flap and doodle. it is balder and dash. … but i grow lyrical.”the great debate, you see, is not a debate but, rather, dueling monologues, spoken in mutually unintelligible languages that use the same words, grammar and syntax.if the issue were transportation, rather than health care, we would have the affordablecar act: “every american will have access to a car that is astonishingly quiet, comfortable, stylish, fuel-efficient, low-maintenance and nonpolluting. affordablecar will save every family $2,500 per year. but if you like your old car, you can keep your old car … period. best of all, affordablecar also flies effortlessly up to an altitude of 20,000 feet.” crowds across america cheer, the applause growing louder with each sentence.opponents wail, “affordablecar will be horrifically expensive, impractical, unworkable and ugly. it won’t fly. it’s all a fraud.” when asked for their alternative plan, opponents respond, with furrowed brow, “we propose a consumer-empowering, driver-centered plan, based on individual choice. it includes a six-speed paddle-shift gearbox. front brakes will feature opposed six-piston, monoblock calipers with differential bores. choice is essential, so consumers can pick from among 15 colors, eight seat fabrics and six hubcap styles. safety is critical, so cup holders will be deep enough to prevent hot coffee from spilling.” crowds at anti-affordablecar think tanks applaud politely, with audience members drifting gradually into slumber throughout the speech — or toward the refreshment table.the law passes, but for three years plus, manufacturers drop features and promises. the 2014 model rolls out on oct. 1, 2013. when the key turns, however, affordablecar grinds like a dentist’s drill, gurgles like a backed-up sink and then stops altogether. for months, mechanics sequentially cart in jumper cables, fluids, belts, batteries, ouija boards and replacement ignition systems.finally, six months later, the starter turns over and the engine growls, punctuated by backfires and hiccups. affordablecar supporters are jubilant: “the doubters said we could never get it started, but we did.”opponents protest: “we never said the car couldn’t start; we just said it wouldn’t work once it did start. and you still haven’t driven out of the garage yet. plus, one of the wheels is missing.” but members of the press have already pounded out their leads: “affordablecar is working! opponents need to move on.”the only remaining reporter asks opponents what they plan to do now. their response? “we propose a consumer-empowering, driver-centered plan, based on individual choice. it includes a six-speed paddle-shift gearbox. front brakes will feature opposed six-piston, monoblock calipers with differential bores. choice is essential, so consumers can pick from among 15 colors, eight seat fabrics and six hubcap styles. safety is critical, so cup holders will be deep enough to prevent hot coffee from spilling.”coherent vision, incoherent tools: like affordablecar, the affordable care act is an unworkable vision, but a vision nevertheless, brimming with applause lines: insurance for those with pre-existing conditions, 25-year-old children on parents’ plans, no dropping cancer victims’ coverage, women paying the same as men, more people with coverage. unfortunately, vision alone can’t overcome the law’s conflicting incentives, unintended consequences and logistical overreach.robert f. graboyes is senior research fellow with the mercatus center at george mason university, professor of health economics at virginia commonwealth university, the university of virginia, george mason university and the george washington university, and co-author of the new mercatus center book “the economics of medicaid: assessing the costs and consequences.”
 marine infantry officer course students stand by before a helicopter drill in arizona. us marine corps photo by cpl. james marchettithe cost of us war-making in the 13 years since the september 11 terrorist attacks reached a whopping $1.6 trillion in 2014, according to a recent report by the congressional research service (crs).the $1.6 trillion in war spending over that time span includes the cost of military operations, the training of security forces in afghanistan and iraq, weapons maintenance, base support, reconstruction, embassy maintenance, foreign aid, and veterans' medical care, as well as war-related intelligence operations not tracked by the pentagon. the report tracks expenses through september, the end of the government's 2014 fiscal year. here's a breakdown of where most of that money went:the key factor determining the cost of war during a given period over the last 13 years has been the number of us troops deployed, according to the report. the number of troops in afghanistan peaked in 2011, when 100,000 americans were stationed there. the number of us armed forces in iraq reached a high of about 170,000 in 2007.although congress enacted across-the-board spending cuts in march 2013, the pentagon's war-making money was left untouched. the minimal cuts, known as sequestration, came from the defense department's regular peacetime budget. the pentagon gets a separate budget for fighting wars.in the spending bill that congress approved earlier this month, lawmakers doled out $73.7 billion for war-related activities in 2015— $2.3 billion more than president barack obama had requested. as mother jones' dave gilson reported last year, us military spending is on pace to taper far less dramatically in the wake of the iraq and afghanistan wars than it did after the end of the vietnam war or the cold war.other reports have estimated the cost of us wars since 9/11 to be far higher than $1.6 trillion. a report by neta crawford, a political science professor at boston university, estimated the total cost of the wars in iraq and afghanistan—as well as post-2001 assistance to pakistan—to be roughly $4.4 trillion. the crs estimate is lower because it does not include additional costs including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt.
 the big debate in global macroeconomics over the past week has been in response to larry summer’s imf speech on ‘secular stagnation’ , the idea that western economies are set  for years of low growth.summers asked if the us and other advanced economies could suffer the fate of japan. as miles kimball has noted, the japanese economy of 2013 is roughly half the size that economists of the 1990s would have predicted it to be.the theory behind summers’ concerns about secular stagnation revolves around the a declining natural rate of interest.   as paul krugman has explained:…[summers] works from the understanding that we are an economy in which monetary policy is de facto constrained by the zero lower bound (even if you think central banks could be doing more), and that this corresponds to a situation in which the “natural” rate of interest – the rate at which desired savings and desired investment would be equal at full employment – is negative.as summers argued in the speech:suppose that the short-term real interest rate that was consistent with full employment had fallen to negative 2% or negative 3% sometime in the middle of the last decade.the evidence for this fear, as shown in this chart from gavyn davies, is the performance of the g4 (uk, usa, japan and euro-area) economies since 2008.not only has gdp stagnated in absolute terms, it has of course fallen about 13 per cent below the long term extrapolated trendline, shown in red.it is worth noting at this point that in the uk, we have become very used to pointing to us performance since 2008 (and the fact that gdp is some 5.5% above pre-crisis peak) as an example of a better economic performance. whilst the us’s performance has no doubt been better than the uk’s own abysmal experience, it has been far from good.the second part of summers’ argument was on the role of bubbles as a way of growing the economy.we now know that the economic expansion of 2003-2007 was driven by a bubble. you can say the same about the latter part of the 90s expansion; and you can in fact say the same about the later years of the reagan expansion, which was driven at that point by runaway thrift institutions and a large bubble in commercial real estate.so you might be tempted to say that monetary policy has consistently been too loose. after all, haven’t low interest rates been encouraging repeated bubbles?but as larry emphasizes, there’s a big problem with the claim that monetary policy has been too loose: where’s the inflation? where has the overheated economy been visible?so how can you reconcile repeated bubbles with an economy showing no sign of inflationary pressures? summers’s answer is that we may be an economy that needs bubbles just to achieve something near full employment – that in the absence of bubbles the economy has a negative natural rate of interest. and this hasn’t just been true since the 2008 financial crisis; it has arguably been true, although perhaps with increasing severity, since the 1980s.i think a similar point can be made about the uk economy over the last few decades. to use an old  favourite, i’ve long argued that if one wants to understand the uk’s macroeconomic performance in one chart, then the place to look is the household savings ratio:as we know, since i made that chart, the ratio has begun to fall and growth has picked up . the relationship still holds.indeed when one looks at the uk’s recovery over the past 12 months (falling household saving station, rise in household debt, a frothy london property market) then one can see further evidence for the summers thesis around bubbles and growth.various explanations can e offered as to the drivers of secular stagnation from martin wolf in today’s ft on the savings glut/dearth of investment, to chris dillow’s long running argument on a dearth of investment opportunities, izabella kaminska  &   pieria on abundance , krugman on  demographic factors and ryan avent  on the policy failure from (or rather the wrong targets for) central banks  ( that list link should be read in conjunction with this from brad delong ).there may well be something in all of these explanations. but i also wonder if there is a need to look deeper.if we assume that that many western economies have been plagued by some form of secular stagnation since the 1980s and that growth has increasingly relied on leverage and bubbles (in different sectors at different times) then it is worth asking what else has happened during this time?a huge rise in inequality with the incomes of the top 1% detaching themselves from the rest , a falling share of investment in gdp, big rises in household debt and a slowing of wage growth for median earners and below.the factors linking all of these outcomes is change in corporate behaviour since the 1970s. as reuters’ james saft wrote this week :on one side stand households and investors who are responding to the very strong liquor which the federal reserve is putting in the punch. by buying up bonds and keeping rates low, the fed encourages risk taking and drives prices for assets – real and financial – higher.that’s leading to record prices for everything from art to social media companies to manhattan real estate. this isn’t just a phenomenon for the rich, though the rich do get the cream. real estate is going up fairly strongly in a wide variety of markets, as are the stocks owned in so many people’s retirement funds and accounts.on the other side are corporate executives, who don’t seem to have read their economics textbooks. rather than responding to high profit margins by investing and competing, they seem happy to milk their cows without adding much to their herds.he does on to quote research from andrew smithers.smithers contrasts the early 1970s with today. then companies invested about 15 times more in new equipment and ventures than they returned to shareholders via dividends. now the ratio is less than two. as recently as the 1990s, this number was as high as six.why? the change toward ever greater executive pay, doled out in share options which are highly sensitive to short-term stock price movements, has changed how ceos behave.that, in combination with the market obsession with making quarterly earnings targets, has resulted in a corporate landscape in which legitimate long-term projects can’t get a hearing because they are not in the best interest of those making the decisions. why fund a project which will only bear fruit when you, the ceo, are out of office and no longer getting huge yearly allocations of shares?we have stumbled into a system whereby corporations are often run not for their own long term benefit but for the benefit of top staff. as mariana  mazzucato has argued with are all too often rewarding value extraction rather than value creation .corporations are incentivised to focus on the short term leading to lower investment and weaker growth than would otherwise be the case.  a greater share of the wage packet is grabbed by those at the very top and, as ranciere & kumphoff have convincingly argued there is an causual link between this rising inequality and the propensity for bubbles.as they argued the decline in the bargaining power of labour seen in the 1980s allowed the large rise in inequality of the 1980s and 1990s. this has, in the authors’ model, two impacts. first, it creates a demand for credit from those lower down the income scale to sustain their standard of living. second, and just as important, it creates a supply of credit to meet that demand. those at the top of the income scale accumulate wealth, as they are more likely to save rather than spend additional income. in effect they build up financial assets, increasing the size of the financial sector and then boosting the availability of credit. as inequality rises, so too does the size of the financial sector and the amount of personal debt in the economy. this leaves the economy more vulnerable to financial crisis and makes recovery from recession harder as households have debt to service.take together the declining bargaining power of labour and the rising short termism of corporate run for their managers and you have a model that explains rising inequality, the propensity for bubbles, the declining investment share of gdp, the wage stagnation that has hit many and the rise in leverage.explaining the drivers of secular stagnation (broadly defined) helps get you towards a solution. this solution is firstly, as krugman and other argue, a much larger role for public investment (which given interest rate is eminently affordable). but the real solution goes beyond this – it means tackling the route causes of short termism and rising inequality that have afflicted the economy since the 1980s. for me that means changes in corporate governance, banking, industrial policy and wage setting of the type i’ve long argued for .larry summers’ speech is very important and reminds us yet again why we shouldn’t be so quick to think that the recent return of growth to the uk economy has made the underlying problems go away.duncan weldon was a senior policy officer in the economic and social affairs department covering macroeconomics and regional policy. before joining the tuc he had a fairly varied career taking in the bank of england, fund management, the labour party…
 the lazy ceiling fan spun in the humid louisiana night. it was weighted poorly, letting out a loud squeak every fifth revolution. annoying, but fixing it would have been more annoying.i pushed myself up from the pleather sofa, navigated around a coffee table overrun with beer bottles, and shuffled to the entertainment center we had found on the street corner. with one hand i hit eject on the laser disc player and plucked out “star wars,” with the other slipped “dazed and confused” from its cardboard sleeve.as it was probably the most prized possession in the apartment, i laid it into the player’s drawer like a newborn. hit the button, grabbed another beer from the cooler, and threw myself back onto the couch between the dudes.our stomachs all tingled as those sensations we’d lived through a million times before once again kicked in: the black screen broken by the gramercy pictures logo, then the snake-charmer opening tones of aerosmith’s “sweet emotion.”“dude, fuckin’ aerosmith,” came the call from under a pulled-down baseball cap.“you know it.” the clinking of two bottles.“hey, you know…” a pause while rick searched for the words. “you know, fuckin’… steven tyler and mary tyler moore are brother and sister.”the song played uninterrupted while those words hovered in the air. five seconds, six seconds, seven seconds. then four dudes erupted.“what a load of crap. and is someone going to pack this?”the movie took a backseat to controversy.“absolutely.” rick stood up, a bit unsteady, but ready to defend his declaration to the death. he stood between the couches and the tv, which meant business.“first off, i’ve heard that before somewhere. my buddy told me i think.” like a politician, he pumped his uplifted thumb with every point. “second, same name. thirdly, they look exactly alike.”“i’ve never been more impressed with how wrong someone can be,” said tony, a beer cap snapping off his fingers, narrowly missing rick’s head.“it’s the truth.” rick pointed back at us. “and it’s the 100% truth, so believe that.”“well,” came tentatively from matt. “that sounds kinda familiar.”“alright. phone. settling.” i leaned forward and dug the cordless out from the empties. from memory i punched in the number of the local record store, and it started ringing.“you know who might know,” pondered chris. “those girls downstairs.”he jumped up and ran out the door.the other end of the phone picked up. “mushroomrecordsthisismikecanihelpyou.”“hey man!” i yelled. it was loud in the apartment now. the movie had been paused, an aerosmith cd retrieved, and “sweet emotion” put on repeat. “hey, are steven tyler and mary tyler moore brother and sister?”“wow man. i don’t know…hold on.” i heard the phone hit the counter. “tim! are steven tyler and mary tyler moore brother and sister?”from the background i heard tim yell, “i don’t fucking care!”record store mike came back on the phone. “we don’t know. but we have a bunch of like, tv trivia books and shit. maybe it says it in there.”“ok, cool. thanks man.” i hung up the phone just as the girls walked in and were handed beers.“welcome ladies,” said matt. “before you can drink those beers, one quick question: are steven tyler and mary tyler moore brother and sister?”“who and who?” replied the blonde one.a collective “aaaah shit!” from the dudes, as rick moved in to explain and teach, gesturing at the tv and the stereo.chris grabbed the phone. “my buddy j.d. is dj tonight at the radio station. total music nerd. he’d know.”“we’re going to need some more beer,” said tony with a slight panic.“yep,” i said. “we gotta get this answered.” by now everyone was standing up, pacing the room, tossing out ideas.chris put the phone down. “j.d. gave a definitive ‘maybe.’ and they have every aerosmith record at the station.”“uhm, can i just take this moment to point out how much i hate aerosmith?” interjected matt. he was promptly instructed to shut up, and that no one cared what he thought. this was bigger than that.“alright. the plan.” i pounded my fist into my open palm for emphasis. “we split up. half of us go to the record store and try to find that book. the others go to the radio station and…do something. we meet up at the boot after and compare notes. this shit gets settled now!”“hey, can we pick up our friends on the way?” asked one of the girls.whoosh. the apartment emptied out, the front door left wide open. details get hazy, but highlights include:the record store didn’t have the book, but had sunglasses for $3. a round were purchased.the radio station had nothing about mary tyler moore, but our group got to intro “sweet emotion” live on air and played it twice in a row. people called in and complained.we mistimed the rendezvous at the first bar, but luckily all ran in to each other at the second bar, where rebirth brass band was playing. we danced.we asked every single person we met that night if they knew whether steven tyler and mary tyler moore were brother and sister. no one knew, and the split was 50–50ish.and we never, ever found out the right answer.i used my roku app to start streaming dazed and confused on the flat-screen.our stomachs all tingled as those sensations we’d lived through two million times before once again kicked in: the black screen broken by the gramercy pictures logo, then the snake-charmer opening tones of aerosmith’s “sweet emotion.”a bottle of ipa dropped from rick’s lips as he made the declaration:
 create your own data transformation: [+]use a formula to modify and combine data series into a single line. for example, invert an exchange rate a by using formula 1/a, or calculate the spread between 2 interest rates a and b by using formula a - b.use the assigned data series variables above (e.g. a, b, ...) together with operators {+, -, *, /, ^}, braces {(,)}, and constants {e.g. 2, 1.5} to create your own formula {e.g. 1/a, a-b, (a+b)/2, (a/(a+b+c))*100}. the default formula 'a' displays only the first data series added to this line. you may also add data series to this line before entering a formula.
 patrick gibbons, left, and aaron vargas attend a rally to show support in in wilton manors, fla., for a judge’s ruling allowing gay people to marry on thursday, july 17, 2014.the federal judge overseeing the challenge to florida’s marriage equality ban ruled on thursday that his current injunction applies only to the couples who sued to be able to marry — but noted that any other couples who are refused licenses beginning on jan. 6 could ask to be added to the case.the “clarification” order came about when the clerk of washington county asked u.s. district court judge robert hinkle whether the current injunction requires licenses be issued to all same-sex couples who seek them or just the plaintiffs in the case.“[n]o plaintiff now in this case has standing to seek a preliminary injunction requiring the clerk to issue other licenses. the preliminary injunction now in effect thus does not require the clerk to issue licenses to other applicants,” hinkle wrote. “but as set out in the order that announced issuance of the preliminary injunction, the constitution requires the clerk to issue such licenses.”such a ruling would leave things very much in the air when the stay on hinkle’s injunction ends jan. 5, but the judge went further, writing, “a clerk who chooses not to follow the ruling should take note: the governing statutes and rules of procedure allow individuals to intervene as plaintiffs in pending actions, allow certification of plaintiff and defendant classes, allow issuance of successive preliminary injunctions, and allow successful plaintiffs to recover costs and attorney’s fees.”in other words, if a clerk refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples on jan. 6, hinkle has put them on notice that he is ready, willing, and able to order them to issue licenses.lgbt legal groups who argued to hinkle that the ruling should apply statewide to all same-sex couples are declaring victory.“today’s ruling confirms that all florida county clerks must comply with the federal constitution by issuing marriage licenses to qualified same-sex couples beginning on january 6, 2015,” shannon minter, legal director of the national center for lesbian rights, said in a statement.tallahassee, fla— following significant public confusion about the federal-court injunction, the court today granted the clerk of court’s request for clarification. in the order, the court specified that the injunction does not require a clerk to issue licenses to same-sex couples other than the plaintiffs, but the court stated that “a clerk of court may follow the ruling, even for marriage-license applicants who are not parties to this case.” attorney general bondi’s statement is as follows:“this office has sought to minimize confusion and uncertainty, and we are glad the court has provided additional guidance. my office will not stand in the way as clerks of court determine how to proceed.”4. update, jan. 2, 2:04 p.m. et: the law firm that had written a memo questioning the authority of clerks to issue licenses, after hinkle’s jan. 1 ruling, reversed its position:“we are pleased that judge hinkle has clarified his original order and the responsibilities of the clerks around the state,” said hilarie bass, greenberg traurig’s co-president. “although judge hinkle recognizes that only the washington county clerk is compelled to issue a marriage license to the plaintiff in the case before him, the order states that the constitution requires all clerks to issue marriage licenses to all applicants, regardless of gender.“judge hinkle’s order states that any clerk refusing to issue a license could be subject to civil damages and liability for the plaintiffs’ fees and costs,” bass said. “greenberg traurig has advised the florida association of court clerks and comptrollers that clerks should follow the judge’s ruling for all marriage-license applications or face the consequences identified by judge hinkle.”
rt @vivekanands: it was a court order. the official release says  'action has been initiated to unblock' http://t.co/linaunia4l
 additional director general of police, anti terrorism squad, m.s., mumbai on 15/11/2014 requested blocking of 32 number of websites / pages which were being used for jihadi propaganda.  it was stated that anti national group are using social media for mentoring indian youths to join the jihadi activities.these websites work on page hosting concept.  many of these wbsites does not require any authentication for pasting any material on them.  other upload articles, videos or photos or to download the contents which helps to hide the identities.  these websites were being used frequently for pasting, communicating such content by just changing page name even blocking the earlier one. additional chief metropolitan magistrate also issued the order on 10.11.2014 for blocking of these 32 websites on urgent basis. blocking of the websites was ordered in compliance with court order. contact has also been made with some of the websites.  these websites have undertaken not to allow pasting of such propaganda information on their website and also work with the govt. to remove such material as per the compliance with the laws of land.  the action has been initiated to unblock the following sites:
rt @sub8u: using tech to encourage healthy habits &amp; sell insurance. this insurance company uses wearables &amp; pays you to walk!
 if you don't walk enough, you don't get paid. but if you do? expect an amazon gift card in the mail.if you're having trouble getting off the couch to go for a walk, maybe some cash will help.oscar insurance , a new york-based startup, now sends members a free misfit wristband to track their steps, and whenever someone reaches a daily goal for a certain number of steps, the company pays them."we were fascinated with the u.s. surgeon general's recommendation that if you walk around 10,000 steps a day, you will have a real impact on almost all the top killers in the u.s., like obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure," says mario schlosser , co-founder of oscar insurance. "if you just get a bit more physically active, you can avoid those conditions getting worse, or make them better."members of the insurance plan download an app, and then get a wristband in the mail that automatically syncs up as soon as someone puts it on. each day, someone can earn a dollar for reaching their goal, and at the end of the month, oscar insurance sends them a $20 amazon gift card.since someone with a sedentary lifestyle probably wouldn't walk 10,000 steps immediately, the company adjusts goals based on fitness. " we want to get you up to 10,000 steps, that's the far goal, but we start you off much more slowly," schlosser says. "we start you off with about 2,000 steps per day. and then we look at your weeks of activity and how active you really are, and try to push you a little bit further, and slowly push you up a couple thousand steps."unlike similar apps like pact health, which raises or lowers your insurance deductible based on how much you exercise , oscar's new program doesn't have a built-in financial punishment; if you don't reach your goal, you just don't get paid."if you choose to stay healthy, if you choose to move around, that's when you can get this," schlosser says. "but you don't have to."for the startup, founded by tech entrepreneurs who want to drag the insurance industry into the modern world, the program is only a first step with wearables. "we can start using some of this fitness data and health data to help you plan your health better," says schlosser. "if you're diabetic, you probably might see a doctor once a quarter or so, and talk with our nurse a couple of times on the phone. but now, suddenly, if you let us share your data with the doctor, they can see the activity you have in the meantime."future programs may use more sophisticated wearables that track sleep, blood pressure, or blood sugar levels. "when we started oscar, there was the fitness tracker, and there was the world of health insurance, and the two rarely spoke," schlosser says. "so it's exciting to be in the middle of a sea of new information for providers that hopefully can contribute to better care."
rt @maxcroser: the rising number of equations per paper shows the increasing mathematization of #economics,

 anderson, g., go, b. & tollison, r. (1986), `the rise and (recent) decline of mathematical economics', history of economics society bulletin 8, 44-48.association, a. e. (1948), papers and proceedings of the sixtieth annual meeting of the american economic association.backus, d. k. & kehoe, p. j. (1992), `international evidence of the historical properties of business cycles', american economic review 82(4), 864-88.bai, j. (1997), `estimating multiple breaks one at a time', econometric theory 13(01), 315-352.bai, j. & perron, p. (1998), `estimating and testing linear models with multiple structural changes', econometrica 66(1), 47-78.bai, j. & perron, p. (2003), `computation and analysis of multiple structural change models', journal of applied econometrics 18(1), 1-22.bell, j. w. (1953), handbook of the american economic association., the american economic review.blaug, m. & vane, h. r., eds (2003), who's who in economics, edward elgar publishing; 4 edition.colander, d. (2005), the making of an economist redux, middlebury college working paper series 0531, middlebury college, department of economics.colander, d., ed. (2000), complexity and the history of economic thought (perspectives on the history of economic thought), routledge.colander, d. & klamer, a. (1987), `the making of an economist', the journal of economic perspectives pp. 95-111.debreu, g. (1984), `economic theory in mathematical mode', the american economic review 74(3), 267-278.debreu, g. (1986), `theoretic models: mathematical form and economic content', econometrica 54(6), 1259-1270.debreu, g. (1991), `the mathematization of economic theory', the american economic review 81(1), 1-7.ekwurzel, d. & mcmillan, j. (2001), `economics online', journal of economic literature (1), 39.goe, w. l. & parks, r. p. (1997), `the future information infrastructure in economics', the journal of economic perspectives 11(3), 75-94.gordon, r. (1997), `what is the econometric society? history, organization, and basic procedures', econometrica 65(5), 1443-1451.group, p. i. i. a. e. (n.d.), `nasar, sylvia', the new york times, january 4, 1992, pg. 135.grubel, h. g. & boland, l. a. (1986), `on the ecient use of mathematics in economics: some theory, facts and results of an opinion survey', kyklos 39(3), 419-42.hamermesh, d. s. & schmidt, p. (2003), `the determinants of the econometric society fellows elections', econometrica 71(1), 399-407.hodrick, r. prescott, e. (2007), `journal of money, credit and banking', post u.s. business cycles: an empirical investigation 29(1), 1-16.krugman, p. (1998), `two cheers for formalism', the economic journal 108(451), 1829-1836.kuttner, r. (1985), `the poverty of economics', the atlantic monthly. 74-84.lawson, t. (2001), `two responses to the failings of modern economics: the instrumentalist and the realist', review of population and social policy 10, 155-181.lindbeck, a. (2001), the sverigs riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of alfred nobel 1969-2007 in the nobel prize: the first 100 years, imperial college press and world scientic publishing co. pte. ltd.mccloskey, d., katzner, d., leamer, e. & solow, r. (1991), `has formalization in economics gone too far?', methodus 3(1), 6-31.mirkowski, p. (1991), `the when, the how and the why of mathematical expression in the history of economics analysis', the journal of economic perspectives 5(1), 145-157.rampell, c. (2009), `prize deflation', the new york times, economix. accessed on december 18, 2009 http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/prize-de ation/.samuelson, p. (1954), `introduction: mathematics in economics|no, no or yes, yes, yes?', the review of economics and statistics 36(4), 359.taylor, j. (2001), `jstor: an electronic archive from 1665', notes and records of the royal society of london 55(1), 179{ 181.varian, h. (1997), `the aea's electronic publishing plans: a progress report', the journal of economic perspectives 11(3), 95{104.the use of mathematics in economics and its effect on a scholar's academic career. (deposited 16. sep 2012 09:13) [currently displayed]all papers reproduced by permission. reproduction and distribution subject to the approval of the copyright owners.
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 inventor helen greiner sits for a portrait monday, jan. 5, 2015, at her house, in wayland, mass. greiner, one of the inventors behind the roomba, the robotic vacuum that can clean your house, is now turning her attention to drones. (ap photo/steven senne)  ( steven senne )danvers, mass. -- to see the future of drones, head up the hill at the intersection of industrial drive and electronics avenue. inside a bland brick office building, the team at cyphy is working on tethered machines that can fly nonstop for days and pocket-sized drones for search-and-rescue missions.it's not a fancy building. there's no giant aerospace or defense company here in danvers, north of boston. just small teams of computer scientists and mechanical engineers working in spaces called "the playpen," "the den" and "the department of failed good intentions."in many ways, the nascent drone industry looks a lot like the personal computer industry did in its infancy. the money to fuel development is coming largely from entrepreneurs' own checkbooks.file - in this may 10, 2005 file photo, helen greiner, chairman and co-founder irobot corporation, poses for photo with an irobot packbot eod in front of her booth during robobusiness conference and exposition in cambridge, mass. greiner, one of the inventors behind the roomba, the robotic vacuum that can clean your house, is now turning her attention to drones with cyphy works, the company she founded in 2008. (ap photo/chitose suzuki, file)  ( chitose suzuki )"they get just enough money to make a prototype, get it out the door and get a couple of clients," says maryanna saenko, an analyst with the science and technology consulting firm lux research.when the federal aviation administration announces rules opening u.s. airspace to some commercial drones, more investors are expected to get on board. but until then, many venture capitalists say, drones remain too risky and too expensive to bet on.cyphy works is one of the few manufactures to attract deep pockets. it raised $10 million in venture capital, but that's probably because founder helen greiner has a proven track record with robotics. she was one of the co-founders of irobot, the company behind the roomba vacuuming robot as well as military robots that helped u.s. troops in iraq and afghanistan remotely detonate bombs.even with that money, cyphy -- pronounced "sci-fi" -- is still a small company that often uses greiner's house for staff barbeques and meetings over pizza.the largest recipient of investor dollars in the drone world -- at $40 million -- has been airware of san francisco, which is building an operating system to let drones and their added components work together.the industry for small drones is potentially larger than the defense industry "and certainly more interesting and beneficial to society," says airware ceo johnathan downey.venture capital firms generally prefer investing in industries with low infrastructure costs, such as developers of smartphone apps or security software. they want a quick return, and the government's prohibition on most drones means the drone industry can't offer that.but the company has grabbed the attention of big-name investors like ge ventures and kleiner perkins caufield & byers. it helps that airware is one of the few companies not actually building drones or drone cameras.mike abbott, a general partner at kleiner perkins, says the real power of drones is the large amount of data they can collect. even so, he hedges his enthusiasm."i'd like to think it will be life-altering," abbott says. "but time will tell."for greiner and cyphy, there's a deeper, philosophical approach. she talks about the ability of robots to empower humans and make their lives better. drones are the next logical step. they can fly in an "unobstructed highway" just above the trees and power lines."you can solve a mobility problem easier because they don't have to deal with all that stuff on the ground," says greiner, who wears a tiny toy robot, dangling from her necklace. "it's almost like you are cheating. drones will come before fully automated cars."she's a true believer. greiner grew up taking computer classes at radio shack. but the real childhood influence for her was seeing "star wars" at age 11 and being introduced to r2d2, the loveable robot out to save the universe."i was never into princess leia or han solo. it really was r2d2," she says. "i think it's because they made him a hopeful robot with a personality."almost on cue, she gets a call. her ringtone: the "imperial march" from "star wars." the call goes to voicemail and, to signal a new message, the phone beeps and chirps just like r2d2.greiner is enough of a realist to recognize that not everybody loves robots the ways she does. but she has no doubt the public will learn to accept them."when we first started talking about the roomba to people, they imagined a female robot following around a vacuum," she says. "women would say: 'no way, i don't want that in my house.'"that quickly changed. today, more than 10 million roombas have been sold. and more than 60 percent are so loved by their owners that they have names.
 i spend far too long replying to emails. perhaps some standardised replies might save time and trouble on both sidesthe break over christmas and new year has given me the opportunity to reflect  upon my work and consider how i might do things more efficiently. and the  more i thought about it, the more i realised how much time i spend on  individual replies to emails. surely it must be possible to develop a system  for responding?the american journalist hl mencken used to respond to all argumentative  correspondence with a letter that read: “dear sir or madam, you may be  right. sincerely yours, hl mencken.”
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 spain's 'xnet' corruption fighters expose graft associated press friday, december 12, 2014barcelona, spain (ap) — from the street, where passers-by can see only a falling-down sign saying "canned food," the building looks like an abandoned grocery store in one of barcelona's seediest downtown neighborhoods.but hidden away inside is a group of cyber activists who, equipped with the internet and a hope of bringing change, are bent on stamping out spanish corruption that many feel has spiraled out of control.and the secretive members of xnet want others outside spain to follow their lead.xnet invites leakers to pass on documents that provide evidence of possible corruption, inspired by the wikileaks site. but xnet has gone further, working not just through activism but also in spanish politics and in the courts.more than 200 volunteers are involved. the online drop box for citizens' complaints they set up just three months ago has already paid off, exposing some of spain's biggest corruption scandals."xnet is a peaceful guerrilla movement," said simona levi, its spokeswoman and one of its founders. "we're an evolution and a domestic adaptation of what we learned from wikileaks."xnet's biggest coup came in october, when it made public documents helping prove that senior officials at spain's bailed-out bankia bank used undeclared credit cards from the bank to spend some 15 million euros ($18.6 million) on luxury goods, vacations across spain and abroad, and even regular supermarket purchases.the public outcry over the bankia revelations, which are now under official investigation, forced prime minister mariano rajoy to apologize for the country's mounting corruption scandals in an unprecedented speech in parliament. it also ruined the reputation of rodrigo rato, bankia's former chairman, ex-chief of the international monetary fund and former spanish economy minister.at a time when numerous official investigations are underway into corruption cases affecting spain's main political parties, businesses and members of the monarchy, many government workers outraged over the excesses amid years of painful austerity measures have turned to xnet as a safe way of divulging irregularities they encounter in official documents."citizens have a clear need to feel that their voice is being heard," said eva moya, an expert in cyber security and intelligence for spanish company s21sec.xnet's barcelona base is deserted during the day while its volunteers work their day jobs, but comes alive at night when members devote their free time for the cause. they meet in a sparse, high-ceilinged, white-walled room furnished with fold-out tables where they open their laptops and down coffee while working mostly in silence.the electronic mailbox they run on two internet networks receives about 60 allegations of wrongdoing each week. it is set up to ensure anonymity in the simplest and safest way possible: the informer accesses the tor network to conceal his or her ip address. the xnet staff say they don't fear police surveillance, but encrypted communications systems are used for all work-related online exchanges.only those activists registered as journalists can read the emails in the drop box because spanish law protects their professional right to withhold the informer's identity in court.the journalist activists filter the messages and usually discount 90 percent of the material sent in — gossip, complaints not backed up by evidence, personal information sent by separated couples or jilted lovers. reports are drawn up on the remaining 10 percent considered worthy of follow-up, which are sent to a second mailbox that other xnet members can access without seeing the original sender's identity."all this stuff about hackers getting into a company's systems and stealing information is a hollywood myth. it's not how it works in reality," explained sergio salgado, an xnet activist. "we know systems are watched now, after the (edward) snowden case. we have to take precautions, but what we do is public."most of the information xnet activists gather is fed to spanish media as a kind of tip service so journalists can probe deeper. the original informer can choose whether to give their name or stay anonymous.in a move that sets xnet apart from wikileaks, a quirk of spanish law allows citizens or groups to file criminal complaints for consideration by judges — and xnet uses it to the fullest extent possible. the group's legal arm sued rato over the bankia case thanks to crowdfunding that collected 20,000 euros ($24,800) in a single day. the government started its investigation only after xnet acted."we act through the media but also through the courts," levi said. "it's crucial for us that the xnet tools are used to achieve concrete, focused and swift victories and that people can see it's worth their while exposing corruption."levi, a 48-year-old born in italy, was a theater director but has always been interested in activism and the fight for new forms of democracy. she followed the birth of wikileaks closely and met its chief, julian assange, at the computer chaos congress in berlin, the largest forum for such ideas. she launched xnet in 2008 with a plan to protect cultural freedom.the project changed radically on may 15, 2011, referred to colloquially as 15-m, when the economic crisis gripping spain gave birth to the "indignados" movement. tens of thousands of people, most of them young, took to the streets to demand more official transparency and changes to the way institutions work. in assemblies held in public squares, people who surfed the same web pages and shared the same concerns signed up for the xnet project.pau lopez is an interior designer by day and social media activist by night. he asked to work shorter hours at his job so he could dedicate more time to xnet."we have all made big personal sacrifices," lopez said. "over the past three years i've moved five times and broken up a relationship twice."xnet's political aims are assembled in a manifesto called "democracy, period." it calls for more institutional transparency, "wikilegislation" — which would grant the general public the power to take part in drawing up laws — and the so-called "permanent vote" that would ensure referendums are held on lawmakers' positions and important laws. to push their aims, the activists created partido x, a political party that collected just over 100,000 votes in may's elections to the european parliament.xnet is a member of pila, an international project due to be launched in the coming weeks.two of the driving forces behind the project are herve falciani, who allegedly stole information between 2006 and 2007 relating to 24,000 customers of the swiss division of hsbc and distributed it, and stephanie gibaud, who revealed suspected money-laundering and tax fraud at ubs in france.the goal is to bring together activists and organizations like xnet from a variety of countries and create an international database of anonymous leaks that would help expose corruption worldwide."we want to gather all these common experiences, together with people of proven credibility, so we can process information more quickly on a global level," salgado said.corrects the translation of the simona levi quote in the 6th paragraph, corrects that xnet is a member of pila, not planning to join, adds lopez's first name.
 'what we are seeing is the "japanification" trade. the eurozone is sinking    into corrosive deflation,' warns rbsboa said the economic outlook in the eurozone will 'deteriorate substantially' if the ecb is prevented from carrying out qe for political reasons photo: rex featuresbond yields have plummeted to record lows across the eurozone as deflation    becomes lodged in the system and markets bet on a blitz of asset purchases    by the european central bank this month.german five-year yields dropped below zero for the first time ever, touching    -0.007pc on the first day of new year trading, implying that investors are    willing to pay the german government to store their money for the rest of    this decade.italian, spanish and portuguese yields have seen spectacular drops over the    past two trading days. the french state can borrow for five years at a rate    of 0.13pc, and ireland can do so at 0.32pc.nothing like this has been seen in european history since the 14th century,    after the depletion of silver mines set off a slow monetary contraction, followed    by edward iii's default on debts to italian banks and the black death soon    after, compounding a deflationary collapse.“what we are seeing is the 'japanification' trade,” said andrew roberts,    credit chief at rbs. “the eurozone is sinking into corrosive deflation and    it is too late to stop. we think the inflation rate in december may already    have been negative. the ecb are in trouble, and they know it.”mario draghi, the ecb’s president, told germany’s handelsblatt that a slip    into deflation “cannot be ruled out completely” and admitted that the bank    is at mounting risk of breaching its price stability mandate.mr draghi said the ecb is “making technical preparations” to boost its balance    sheet in early 2015, but offered no fresh clues on how much it will be or    whether the measures will include full quantitative easing in the form of    sovereign bond purchases.investors have taken his comments as a strong hint of qe as soon as this    month, even though he repeated his usual caveat that new measures will be    undertaken only “should it become necessary to further address risks of a    too prolonged period of low inflation”.his interview may have been the trigger for the latest dash for emu sovereign    debt. there are not enough bonds to buy from certain countries if the ecb    sweeps into the market on a grand scale.bank of america said there would be an acute shortage of german debt since    berlin plans to run a budget surplus this year and will therefore be    retiring bonds gradually instead of issuing them. the ecb would quickly run    out of latvian or greek bonds trading on the open market.the us bank predicted bond purchases of between €180bn and €360bn a year,    warning that the economic outlook will “deteriorate substantially” if the    ecb is prevented from carrying out qe for political reasons.mr draghi is clearly walking through a political minefield. the bundesbank    continues to resist qe, arguing that lower oil prices are a shot in the arm    for the real economy and therefore make monetary stimulus less necessary -    even if it depresses headline inflation.michael fuchs, a leader of the ruling christian democrats and a close advisor    to chancellor angela merkel, warned mr draghi on friday that qe would merely    take pressure off the crisis states and allow them to delay reforms. he    stated pointedly that a greek withdrawal from the euro might actually    strengthen monetary union, adding that the ecb should not be in the business    of propping up peripheral debt markets.“the situation has completely changed. it was far more critical three or four    years ago. greece is hardly more than 1pc of the eurozone gdp, which shows    that it really isn’t a big risk at all,” he said. the risk for asset markets    is that they are already taking full qe for granted and ignoring persistent    warning signals from berlin.mr draghi may be forced to accept a compromise on qe, either by scaling back    his plans or by accepting a formula where the national central bank of each    emu state buys only the bonds of its own government, with no pooling of    risk.critics say this would be highly risky. it would further fragment the euro    system, and might cause markets to have second thoughts about the stimulus    effects of qe. yet germany remains adamant that there must be no fiscal    union by the back door.mr draghi’s comments also had the intended effect of driving down the euro to    $1.2034 against the dollar, the lowest since the greek crisis in june 2010.    fresh “cofer” data from the international monetary fund show that central    banks from the g10 rich states and emerging markets became net sellers of    eurozone bonds in the third quarter of 2014 – even when adjusted for    currency valuation effects.jens nordvig, from nomura, said the euro share of global foreign reserves has    fallen from 26pc to 22.6pc over the past four years. the dollar share has    surged to 62.3pc and is continuing to rise – breaking normal patterns - even    as the dollar strengthens.“this is extraordinary. normally central banks counter the moves by the    private sector and smooth out some of the fluctuations as they replenish    reserves, but this time they are not doing so. i think we could see the euro    fall to $1.15 within one or two months,” he said.
rt @michikokakutani: sorry, subscriber content link on last tweet. use this "the end of power" by moises naim. 
 over the course of his protean career, moises naim has oscillated between being a student and practitioner of power. at the precocious age of 36, he was appointed venezuela’s minister of trade and industry and subsequently served as a director of venezuela’s central bank and executive director of the world bank. he has been a professor of economics, a prolific columnist, an author of multiple books on international affairs and an editor of foreign policy magazine. a frequent speaker at elite gatherings from davos to bilderberg to sun valley, naim exerts the sort of intellectual influence that shapes opinion among the powerful in the worlds of government, finance and media.over time, naim arrived at an arresting and provocative thesis, captured in his analytically sophisticated new work, “the end of power.” the observation that “power is shifting from one continent or country to another, or that it is dispersing among many new players, is not enough,” he asserts. “power is undergoing a far more fundamental mutation that has not been sufficiently recognized and understood.” naim renders an original and ultimately well-substantiated conclusion: “power is decaying,” he insists. “from boardrooms and combat zones to cyberspace, battles for power are as intense as ever, but they are yielding diminishing returns. their fierceness masks the increasingly evanescent nature of power itself. understanding how power is losing its value — and facing up to the hard challenges this poses — is the key to making sense of one of the most important trends reshaping the world in the twenty-first century.”wherever naim trains his eye along the global horizon, he observes a discernible erosion of power. in the political arena, he sees power progressively declining in national governments and among political parties around the world, no more so than in washington, where he is a senior associate at the carnegie endowment for international peace. “voters gave the republicans control of both congress and the white house in 2002 and 2004 and then took it away from them in 2006 and 2008 — only to restore control of the house of representatives to them in 2010,” he reminds us. “previously, in the five elections from 1996 to 2004, the biggest gain in house seats by any one party was nine; in 2006, the republicans lost thirty seats and in 2008 the democrats won twenty-one, and in 2010 the democrats lost sixty-three.”this new era of political instability creates seemingly insurmountable obstacles to consensus, as weakened leaders on both sides of the aisle, unable to impose their will, consistently fail to avert a relentless series of fiscal and budgetary showdowns, among other areas of consequential disagreement. naim sees more ineffectual governance and turbulence in the future. “more frequent elections, more referenda, more scrutiny, and more contenders,” he predicts. “all of these trends point to the same direction: the redistribution and scattering of power from established players to more competitors.”in the military sphere, naim regards the leverage of large armies applying overwhelming conventional-force supremacy as an increasingly finite component of strategic power. “in 2008, us defense secretary robert gates observed that of all the many deployments of us forces over more than four decades since the peak of the vietnam era, only one intervention — the gulf war of 1990-91 — was a ‘traditional conventional conflict.’ ” naim notes that the other projections of military power during this period, “from grenada and lebanon to somalia, kosovo, iraq and afghanistan involved counter-insurgency, anti-terrorism or political or humanitarian intervention rather than a sustained duel of command-and-control armies.”’the end of power: from boardrooms to battlefields and churches to states, why being in charge isn't what it used to be’ by moises naim (basic)nonetheless, in an ironic discontinuity between threats and corresponding resources, he notes that the u.s. defense budget in 2012 was more than $700 billion, accounting for roughly half of the world’s military spending. in contrast, according to naim’s analysis, “al qaeda spent about $500,000 to produce 9/11, whereas the direct losses of that day’s destruction plus the costs of the american response to the attacks were $3.3 trillion.”power is also eroding in the zone of corporate and business competition, naim suggests, as established incumbents fall with staggering speed to adroit challengers. while it is not a principal focus of his account, naim’s thesis applies persuasively to the rapid and dynamic change evident in the global technology industry. reigning champions such as google, facebook and amazon have consolidated dominant market positions with staggering speed while former industry juggernauts have been crushed. nokia and rim, maker of the once-ubiquitous blackberry, have seen their share prices collapse by more than 90 percent — and yahoo shares have declined by more than 80 percent — at the same time that their rivals achieved dominance.what accounts for the apparent fragility and evanescence of political, military, commercial and other forms of power in this young century? naim approvingly cites the brilliant strategic thinkerzbigniew brzezinski, a former u.s. national security adviser, who in the early 1970s correctly predicted moscow’s difficulties with modernizing its industrial-era economy and, in the 1980s, presciently anticipated a growing crisis in soviet power. the world has entered a “post-hegemonic era,” brzezinski argues, in which, contrary to the experience in the cold war, “no nation has the capacity to impose its will on others in a substantial or permanent way.”the new era of fragmenting power, according to naim’s assessment, features a more compressed and multitudinous world in which each year 65 million people with vastly contrasting aspirations are added to the global urban population — the equivalent of the city of chicago seven times over. it is a world of hyper-connectivity and ubiquitous global communications, transformed by the phenomenon of the internet and the explosion of mobile telephony, which today exceeds 6 billion individual phone subscriptions, or 87 percent of the world’s population. and it is a world in which the interplay of demography, technology and other variables increasingly correlates to the realm of commercial competition, in which structural or strategic barriers to entry are declining, creating new challengers to the power structure, that naim calls “micropowers.”the new breed of micropowers is opportunistically exploiting the weakness of entrenched but declining incumbents in disparate arenas. “insurgents, fringe political parties, innovative start-ups, hackers, loosely organized activists, upstart citizen media, leaderless young people in city squares” and others “are shaking up the old order,” naim concludes.is there a unified theory at the heart of naim’s highly original, inter-disciplinary meditation on the degeneration of international power? an early chapter in his work posits three expansive “revolutions” in world politics that intersect with and transform four traditional “channels” of power. the ensuing discussion may be tough going for general readers, while the political science crowd may pick at his causal model and lament the absence of detailed case studies. ultimately, these concerns are superfluous. “the end of power” makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix.while the redistribution and decay of power pose profound challenges for domestic politics and national leadership, it is in the domain of global cooperation that naim sees the greatest risks. “from climate change to nuclear proliferation, economic crises, resource depletion, pandemics, the persistent poverty of the ‘bottom billion,’ terrorism, trafficking, cybercrime and more, the world faces increasingly complex challenges that require the participation of ever more diverse parties and players to solve.”yet if naim is correct, in the 21st century “power is becoming easier to disrupt and harder to consolidate,” presaging a troubling trend of a far less resilient global system filled with weaker national and international institutions. if “the future of power lies in disruption and interference, not management and consolidation,” naim asks, “can we expect ever to know stability again?”is a managing director at silver lake, a global technology investment firm, and the author of “lessons in disaster: mcgeorge bundy and the path to war in vietnam.”from boardrooms to battlefields and churches to states, why being in charge isn’t what it used to be
rt @noahpinion: 2014 was the year we saw:
telepathy
suspended animation
a laser cannon
a synthetic chromosome
and a cloaking device:
 as 2014 comes to a close, it's time to reflect on the most futuristic breakthroughs and developments of the past year. this year's crop features a slew of incredible technological, scientific, and social achievements, from mind-to-mind communication to self-guiding sniper bullets. here are 15 predictions that came true in 2014.for the first time ever, two humans exchanged thoughts via mind-to-mind communication .remarkably, the system is completely non-invasive. by using internet-linked electroencephalogram (eeg) and robot-assisted image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (tms) technologies, an international team of researchers were able to get two subjects — one in india and one in france — to mentally transmit the words "hola" and "ciao." it's an important proof of concept for furthering the development of tech-enabled telepathy. image: carles grau et al/plos.and in a similar breakthrough, a different team developed a system that allowed a human subject to control the movements of another person . the university of washington researchers showcased the technology by having participants collaborate on a computer game where a "sender" sent mental instructions to a "receiver" to control their hand movements.in what's being seen as a precursor to a star trek-like replicator, astronauts aboard the iss used their 3d printer to manufacture a socket wrench . remarkably, the 20-part wrench was designed on earth and emailed to astronaut barry wilmore who ran it through the printer. it's a prime example of how 3d printing is poised to change space travel, allowing astronauts to produce equipment on demand and in emergency situations. image: nasa.bae systems, which helps the uk's raf put together its aircraft, has revealed that some… read more read moreit's still in the trial stage, but this a remarkable achievement nonetheless. surgeons at upmc presbyterian hospital are using suspended animation — or what they call emergency preservation and resuscitation — to dramatically cool down trauma victims to keep them alive during critical operations .the technique, which is only being used on patients who would otherwise be expected to die, involves internal rather than external cooling. the patient's blood is replaced with a cold saline solution, which slows down the body's metabolic functions and need for oxygen. image: prometheus.the device, called a high energy laser (hel) weapon, was fitted to the uss ponce, which is currently on exercises in the persian gulf.it's still at the prototype stage, but it's being fielded to evaluate its capabilities in a real-world environment where it has already shown its effectiveness in destroying two boats and a drone . image: u.s. navy.animals are exceptionally complicated things. so complicated, in fact, that we've never… read more read more"my research takes the way the worm's brain is wired and extends it to a robot for sensory input and motor output," buspice told gizmodo. "what we found is that rather than just random, crazy movements by the robot, it actually responded to its environment in the same manner as the biological worm."mathematician steven strogatz once predicted that computer-assisted solutions to math problems will eventually extend beyond human comprehension. his prediction appears to have finally come true.earlier this year, a computer solved the longstanding erdős discrepancy problem . unfortunately, human mathematicians aren't entirely sure about the solution because it's as long as all of wikipedia's pages combined.in what was the year's biggest artificial life breakthrough, researchers from new york university langone medical center reconstructed a synthetic and fully functional yeast chromosome . incredibly, they were also able to insert their own special additions to the chromosome, including a chemical switch that allows scientists to "scramble" it into thousands of different variations to make subsequent gene editing even easier. it's an important proof of concept that could lead to designer organisms and artificial chromosomes in humans.some say it was a media stunt, but it might be the start of a larger trend: hong kong-based deep knowledge ventures appointed a machine learning program, called vital, to its board of directors . it's said to be an "equal member" that will uncover trends "not immediately obvious to humans" in order to make investment recommendations. the system will pour over massive data sets, apply machine learning, and then predict which life sciences companies are the best investments.
rt @sub8u: 2014 has been a good year for indian startups. nice summary.
 consumer internet companies raised over $4bn this year amid an unprecedented global appetite for india's digital pie. over 1,250 new ventures sprouted, with the number of mobile-first startups growing fastest. here's how it unfolded and what lies ahead...the indian entrepreneurship eco             system got its biggest fillip in 2014              as the year saw an unprecedented              number of new businesses spring              up, aided by an exuberant investor sentiment around startups. as more indians took to their smartphones to access the internet, in many cases for the first time, numerous consumer technology ventures were built to cater to this growing population. but what vastly differentiated 2014 from the previous years was the never-seen-before amount of capital that was funnelled into these digital companies across all stages.it wasn't only the bigger online commerce players which received gobs of money      , thanks to the trickle-down effect even the early-stage startups were flush with funds. the entrepreneurial zeal was palpable across food technology , online travel, grocery delivery  , offline-toonline services, all of which were the preferred sectors for starting up as a total of 1,259 new ventures sprouted through the year. sample this: in the food tech space, for instance, out of 145 companies that operate in the country       , 66 were created in 2014; almost half of the 83 local and home services ventures that exist today were built this year, according to data provided by tracxn, which curates information about indian startups and private companies.“just in the last six months, i have seen a massive uptick in the number of startups looking for funding at all stages. what makes this even more exciting is that the quality of startups continues to rise with the numbers going up,“ says pankaj jain, venture partner at 500 startups, a silicon valley seed fund & accelerator.as many as 270 early-stage investments were made in startups this year, with venture capital funds starting to make seed investments and further strengthening the domestic startup story. the vcs' intent was to catch these entrepreneurs early on at lower valuations, triggering the fight for who gets in first. “more of the very early stage startups with little or no revenues received angel and vc backing.driving this were new entrepreneurs starting businesses based on proven models in the us;   we saw things like food tech and financial tech become buzzwords.investors came into these companies very early ,“ says rehan yar khan, an angel investor who raised rs 300 crore in september to start an india-domiciled venture capital fund orios venture partners.traditionally, vcs would leave it for angel funds and individual investors to plough in riskier, seed capital, but not anymore. “we saw a tectonic shift happening in the indian entrepreneurship ecosystem with a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of unique factors of ever   younger, driven and fearless entrepreneurs in a deepened, growing and well-funded market,“ says avnish bajaj, md at matrix partners india, which made six seed-stage investments like limetray and grownout, this year.even as early-stage investments gained traction, the big winners as far as attracting disproportionate amounts of investor money were the later-stage ventures in the consumer tech startup space -in particular the online commerce biggies. an eye-popping 46 funding rounds later, indian e-commerce raised $3 billion this year, according to tracxn -the funding was largely split between flipkart and snapdeal.   the china comparisons grew louder for indian e-tailers after the much-ballyhooed ipo of jack ma's alibaba earlier this year. the next five years of india (internet and mobile) would be equivalent to the last seven years of the chinese market, projections by matrix partners, based on a recent nomura research, say   . this is largely due to the heightened growth of mobile internet. “consumer tech companies exploded, up four times from four years ago as investment rounds grew five-fold to 300 plus this year compared to 60 in 2010,“ says abhishek goyal, co-founder of tracxn.food tech, which was one of the hottest sec  tors being tracked by vcs, saw startups like tinyowl and hola chef begin operations this year.a spiffy-looking location-based food ordering app, tinyowl went live in march. founded by five iit-bombay batchmates, it got on board sequoia capital and nexus venture partners just a few months after the launch, raising $3 million. says harshvardhan mandad, co-founder of tinyowl, “as many of our seniors (from iit) who have done startups are becoming big like flipkart, snapdeal, ola, housing, it gives us   confidence. vcs are also aggressively looking to fund indian startups as we are in a growth stage. we're lucky to be starting at this time.“while money came easy    , some blamed the frothy tech valuations on the advent of hedgies into the indian startup ecosystem this year, who put in $525 million till october across internet companies, according to venture intelligence data.while tiger global, the largest shareholder in flipkart and a top dog among foreign investors in the domestic internet story    , established a beachhead here in 2007 when it bet on just dial, newbies like falcon edge, steadview capital, among others, started their innings in 2014.   hedge funds weren't the only ones to join in.other heavyweight tech investors like russian tycoon yuri milner personally backed olacabs and housing.com while his investment firm dst global pumped millions into flipkart. japan's softbank made its big-bang entry (keeping aside its earlier investment in mobile ad network inmobi) as it poured almost a billion dollars across snapdeal, olacabs and housing in one stroke. “unprecedented global appetite for getting a piece of india's digital consumption story fuelled some audacious bets across many sectors. entrepreneurs were rewarded with big checks and high valuations if they executed well on aggressive, hyper growth strategies,“ says prashanth prakash, partner, accel partners.the worry then is whether this foreign capital will dry up once the investor exuberance fizzles out. “i believe that markets often get the macro trend right but get over-optimistic about the micro trends. there'll be a day of reckoning, where investors will start demanding results and start re-pricing these companies. there'll be a shaking out of the sector and the wheat will be separated from the chaff,“ says aswath damodaran, professor of finance at the stern school of business at new york university        .in this cycle, there has been a structural change in the nature of capital markets with a shift of dollars from public to private investing as tech companies globally opt for private money instead of going for an ipo. “we haven't seen these kinds of private market valuations before as they'd have been in the public markets then. it's nowhere near what we had in 1999-2000, whether it's the number of ipos, maturity of companies when going public or valuation metrics. it's markedly different, this does not feel like a bubble. however, at some point, we will get to a bubble,“ scott kupor, managing partner at andreessen horowitz, told toi in an earlier interview.the likes of uber, dropbox, airbnb and closer home flipkart and snapdeal continue to attract investors, bolstering the new tech economy     .“this should not be confused with a bubble as we have a strong core where a high quality entrepreneurial ecosystem is constantly working towards what technology can do to create efficiencies and value for consumers,“ says abhay pandey   , md, sequoia capital. it's still early days to expect large exits. but, more consolidation may be in the offing through m&as, especially in spaces where clear leaders have emerged.sequoia capital-funded whatsapp's $19bn acquisition by facebook                was the                  largest                   venture                   backed                   exit of the                  year. the                vc fund may have earned 50x return on its investment in jan kaum-led messaging app   chinese tech companies raised over $30bn in ipos, compared to nearly $5bn by their us peers, according to bloombergalibaba, led by jack ma,               went public in                 the world's                  biggest                  ipo,                  raising                 $25bn; it               surpassed facbeook's m-cap with a $231bn valuation on debut   vc investments topped $40bn with continued participation of hedge funds and mfsflipkart raised $1bn at a $7-billion valuation; the e-commerce major raised another $700m at $11bn valuation, becoming the third most valued privately held tech ventureratan tata invested in snapdeal, his first e-commerce bet in india; later picked up stakes in bluestone and urban laddermasayoshi son's softbank committed to invest $10bn in indian internet companies, pumped in $1bn into snapdeal, olacabs and housing.comcopyright and trade mark notice © owned by or licensed to times of india epaper. site best viewed in 1024 * 786 resolutioncopyright © 2010 bennett coleman & co. ltd. all rights reserved.
 when the u.s. dot’s most recent conditions and performance report to congress hit the streets in 2012,[1] it forecast that national vehicle-miles traveled would reach 3.3 trillion that year. a few months later we learned that their estimate was almost 11 percent too high.that overestimate is the equivalent of adding travel from five average-sized states to the total. and the overestimate came in the year of the release, not year 20. this is troubling in a report that is widely regarded as a gauge of the “need” for funding new highway capacity.such a gross error made us wonder how good c&p estimates have been historically. with help from tony dutzik of the frontier group, who has mined vmt statistics for reports issued by the advocacy group u.s. pirg, we reviewed the 20-year projections in the six c&p reports going back to 1999 and compared them to actual reported vmt.enough time has passed by now that 61 yearly projections[2] can be compared to the reported vmt. and in 61 cases out of 61, the c&p estimates were too high. for example, the 1999 c&p overshot 2012 reported vmt by more that 22 percent—almost 11 extra states’ worth of driving.in fact, though the national vmt trend line began flattening in the 1990s and actually turned down in the 2000s, the slope of the c&p projections has remained nearly constant. (see figure 1.)figure 1. u.s. vmt (in trillions) as tracked by fhwa’s travel volume trends (“actual”) and as projected by u.s. dot’s c&p reports (by year reports are dated).to be fair, while u.s. dot publishes the c&p and its demand projections, the projections come from state and local traffic estimates done as part of the highway performance monitoring system. the hpms manual explains how future traffic estimates are obtained:future aadt [average annual daily traffic] should come from a technically supportable state procedure, metropolitan planning organizations (mpos) or other local sources. hpms forecasts for urbanized areas should be consistent with those developed by the mpo at the functional system and urbanized area level.this data may be available from travel demand models, state and local planning activities, socioeconomic forecasts, trends in motor vehicle and motor fuel data, projections of existing travel trends, and other types of statistical analyses.in other words, the projections can be as simple as assuming some level of growth from a base number. so the assumptions are critical. if hpms growth estimates that show up in recent c&ps had assumed modern vmt growth trends would continue, they would have come much closer to predicting reality. but the rolled-up trend estimates show essentially the same slope year after year, indicating that agencies providing hpms data generally have not updated their models and assumptions to account for current conditions, as if they expect the year to be 1980 forever.and not only are these data being aggregated into the national report, but they also are being used in project selection and development around the country. high estimates of vmt have several negative implications, including 1) they imply a level of “needed” spending that is politically unachievable, 2) they can spur overbuilding on projects, draining resources from critical preservation and multimodal investments, and conversely 3) they can discourage construction of lower-cost, lower-throughput streets that improve livability and property values.a few blocks from u.s. dot, the energy department is noticing the new trend lines. its just-released annual energy outlook predicts 0.9 percent annual increases in light-vehicle vmt, a 50 percent reduction from the forecast growth in the 2006 report. over time the difference becomes huge. the new 2030 estimate is 24 percent lower than the earlier forecast. the growth in truck vmt is also down, albeit less dramatically.all six of the u.s. dot’s most recent c&ps have dramatically overestimated vmt. the 2012 edition is due soon. will this be the year that shows transportation-planning assumptions are adapting to reality? or will this new report again overstate the need for highway capacity?[1] the most recent c&p report, released in 2012, was dated 2010 and based on data from 2008. in figure 1 the trend line from the 2010 report begins in 2008. other trend lines reflect similar patterns.[2] the 1999 report provides projections for 16 years for which we now have actual data (1997-2012); the 2002 report provides projections for 13 years (2000-2012), and so on.eric sundquist  is managing director of ssti.
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 in 2003, when i was writing for slate, i took issue with alex ross’s allegation, in a column for the new yorker, that justin timberlake might not own a pen. (ross’s column was not, in large part, about timberlake.) this was before twitter, when people had to learn movable type and start a blog if they wanted to say ridiculous things.alex didn’t send me a diatribe in response. his e-mail was eloquent and friendly. he took issue with a point that i had made about adorno but was gracious enough to admit that maybe he was underestimating timberlake’s skills as a songwriter. that exchange began a friendship that has been vital to me, as an employee of the magazine, as a critical thinker, and as a human being. even if his actions were informal and unintentional, alex was and is an excellent ambassador for the magazine.in 2004, i got a call from david remnick. he asked if i had time to come in and see him.i showed up in his office on my birthday, a friday in january. i was so nervous that i sat on a framed photo of václav havel (or someone who i assumed was havel). i asked remnick if i could take a picture of the old times building, the top of which was visible from his office. as he often does, remnick spread his hands, as if to reassure a lost tourist that he had not, in fact, walked twenty blocks in the wrong direction, and said, “it’ll be here for a while. don’t worry.”this was my first column and is perhaps still my favorite. i had weeks to write and revise it. all i did in those weeks was draft, draft, and draft. some of russell’s unreleased work was being issued on the audika label, so i had a chance to write about someone who was gone—russell died of-related complications in 1992—but was still central to my life. remnick put me in the hands of john bennet, a texan who became my horse whisperer for the next few years. there are only three or four editors on the planet as good as bennet. his touch is so gentle, and his advice so carefully considered, that you never feel the scalpel when he excises a third of your draft. (after working together for a while, bennet said to me, “look, i always cut your first two paragraphs. they’re just throat-clearing.”)i e-mailed my russell piece to bennet on a friday, assuming that i would have to wait until monday for an answer. i borrowed someone’s car and drove to a forest in connecticut and lay on my back in the snow. then i drove home. bennet e-mailed me on saturday morning to tell me that the piece was good enough to run. i don’t remember the following two days, but i may have eaten lobster. i really hate lobster.i had written three columns for the magazine when a journalist e-mailed me some questions, all to the effect of, “what the hell are you doing at the new yorker?” i emailed remnick and asked what i should say. he wrote back, “we’d like it if you told them you’re the pop critic.” the audition had ended.i wrote back to the reporter, took an elevator down to the lobby, and walked out onto forty-third street. my father brought me up on collections of work written by the magazine’s best-known writers: s. j. perelman, joseph mitchell, a. j. liebling, james thurber. i looked up and down the street, imagining what perelman might say about the enormous led screens to my left or the starbucks across from me. my father died suddenly in march 1997, two months before my first son was born. at that point, i was not the writer he’d always hoped i would become. i was an office drone, and played in an instrumental-rock band that my father tolerated, at best. i realized, while standing on forty-third street, that my father would never know about this job. i walked into the starbucks and tried to buy a juice. i couldn’t talk, and stepped out of the line to break down properly. a woman offered me a handkerchief. i thanked her, and went back upstairs. i e-mailed bennet and asked him if the magazine would be o.k. with my going to england to write about a new singer who had one song out, a single called “galang.” he said yes.m.i.a., “ bingo in swansea ,” was the resulting column.i had gone to see m.i.a.’s first new york appearance; the show was held in a chelsea loft and was sponsored by either a clothing company or a liquor company. i am not sure there is another kind of concert now. m.i.a. and her dancer, cherry, performed on the floor, with the crowd circling them. they couldn’t have played more than four or five songs.when i went to meet with her in london, we were both new to being professionals. in the course of three days, we walked around as she told me about her life in sri lanka and in london, in the kind of detail that performers rarely share now in interviews.i saw her again, in 2014, when we taped a video segment for the magazine’s web site. she hugged me and said, “god, it’s been ten years.” then she said, “you were wrong, though. i never said i was sorry.” she was referring to a blog post, from 2012, titled “ m.i.a. shouldn’t have apologized .” after she gave the middle finger at the super bowl, a piece had quoted someone in her camp as saying that she regretted the gesture. i linked to that piece. it seemed like an appropriately m.i.a. moment to meet up and get fact-checked. and she was right.this piece sticks out for several reasons. the assignment came about when an editor stopped me in the hall and said, “why don’t you write about, you know, that shrieking woman?” “the emancipation of mimi” had been out for almost a year, so there had been plenty of time to absorb the music and watch the album devour the charts. these days, no one waits around for a year before writing about an album. the column also typified my editorial approach—the magazine’s approach, really—which was to vary the genres that the column treated evenly and fairly. pop stars and noise-makers would be treated equally, and we would come as close to having no dog in the fight as it is possible in a world where you write words and have a mind. (my preferences obviously warped the columns, no matter how even-handed i tried to be.) i got to see mariah live; she was so comfortable performing in a nightgown that madison square garden shrank and became her living room.successful women in pop are often seen as an extension of a male mastermind. there’s gotta be some guy writing the songs, planning the career, pulling the strings, etc. you would think that madonna’s career arc would have demolished that thinking decades ago, but if you browsed through the mail i’ve received through the years you’d see that this isn’t true. furthermore, musicians who make unapologetically pleasing and soothing music, male or female, often are on the losing side in the cred wars. all i wanted to do with this sade column was to say, “this woman has a vision, and this music means a huge amount to many of us.”i love bill withers’s  first four albums as much as i love any recorded music. if anyone is interested in d’angelo, kelela, or any music that is equally subcutaneous and clever, bill withers is a vital reference. this story, though, isn’t about a feel-good moment. when i interviewed withers for the piece, he was sitting at home, in los angeles. he wasn’t friendly, but he was cordial. as soon as we started talking about the nineteen-eighties, when he was signed with sony, his mood changed radically. i asked something vague about “ just the two of us ,” a song he wrote with grover washington, jr., which was released in 1981, with washington listed as the main artist. withers didn’t like that topic of conversation, so i suggested that we talk about anything else. withers said, “this conversation sucks. i’m going to take a shower.” as disappointed as i was, i loved that comeback. i may even have repurposed it.because i am a cheap date, i liked naming a tom waits column after a wu-tang clan song. the fun part was, again, a fractious interview. my recording options were failing, so as waits and i talked on the phone i told him that i would transcribe his words by hand, then fact-checkers would call and confirm what he had said. four times, waits asked, “are you getting this? how do i know you’re getting this right?” in the end, he said many good things and i could only use one or two of them. the checkers checked them.d’angelo, “ second coming ” and sleater-kinney, “ sister saviors ”it is a felicitous coincidence that these were my last two columns. i don’t trust false modesty. it usually means that a writer has no skin in the game. i love both of these acts and i’m proud of what i said about them. these albums make the job feel like a blessing, which it is. but the records are the real blessing.i’ll close the door by thanking all of my editors: david remnick, john bennet, ben greenman, emily eakin, daniel zalewski, carin besser, blake eskin, michael agger, sasha weiss, amelia lester, and, especially, willing davidson, who spent the better part of the last five years doing things like helping me find a way to explain why brian eno not producing a record is a way of producing records . it’s been a blast.sasha frere-jones joined the new yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic in 2004. he also writes a column about art, life, and music, for newyorker.com.
 did house majority whip steve scalise admit to speaking at a white supremacist event he never attended?house majority whip steve scalise speaks to the media after house republican leadership elections in the longworth house office building on capitol hill in washington, d.c., on june 19, 2014.rep. steve scalise may have just ineptly admitted to speaking at a white supremacist event that eyewitnesses say he never attended. two event attendees say it’s factually inaccurate to characterize scalise’s comments as directed at the supremacist gathering—even though scalise’s own office has said the house majority whip spoke to the group 12 years ago.betsy woodruff is a slate staff writer.kenny knight is a longtime associate of david duke, the former grand wizard of the ku klux klan who ran for governor of louisiana in 1991. he’s been a key player in news that broke on sunday that indicated scalise addressed the white supremacist convention of the european-american unity and rights organization when he was a louisiana state representative in may 2002.knight said on tuesday that it’s “totally incorrect” to say scalise spoke at that convention.“he spoke early in the day to a contingent of people, prior to the conference kicking off,” knight said. “he was not there as a guest speaker at the conference.”according to knight, he and scalise were neighbors in 2002, living in the old jefferson neighborhood outside new orleans. they were friendly and lived within a few blocks of each other. knight recalls that scalise would beep the horn and wave at him if he drove by in his car.“now and then i’d see him at a republican function, we’d say hello, but we never exchanged any philosophy ideas,” knight said.knight has known and publicly supported duke for decades. he agreed to help duke set up some of the logistics for the 2002 euro convention, especially since the former kkk leader was in russia at the time of the event. you can read more about euro’s background here at the southern poverty law center . it’s ugly stuff—anti-semitic conspiracy theories, concerns about “the ‘browning’ of america,” nazi apologia—but knight insists the organization isn’t a white supremacist group.regardless, knight said that he wasn’t involved in planning the event’s itinerary or picking its speakers but that he did book space for it in the landmark best western hotel in metairie, louisiana. besides booking the venue, knight said he also set up refreshments for attendees, arranged for them to eat at a local restaurant, and organized a haunted house tour of the french quarter after the conference.“i, simply as a courtesy to mr. duke, rented the room and set it up to give them a location,” he said. “i wasn’t really involved with the actual conference itself.”it’s important to bear in mind that knight isn’t critical of the conference, which puts him in a very small category.“euro was not a white supremacist organization,” he said. “the people that came were middle-aged, taxpaying, god-fearing, christian people.”according to knight, the euro conference was slated to start in the early afternoon, roughly around 1 p.m. but his reservation at the hotel gave him access to the conference space for a few hours before the event’s official kickoff. at the time, knight headed the jefferson heights civic association, which was largely comprised of elderly people who lived in his and scalise’s neighborhood.knight said he set up a morning event for his own civic association in the hotel space before the euro conference started. though that event was in the conference’s hospitality room, it wasn’t at all related to the euro event, he said.“it was my room to do what i want with it,” he said.knight invited then–state rep. scalise as well as a representative from the jefferson parish sheriff’s office and a person from the american red cross to speak to the civic association at the hotel. knight said he thinks the red cross speaker was from a local chapter but didn’t remember specifically. he also said he didn’t remember the names of either of the other speakers. the representative from the sheriff’s department spoke to attendees about a neighborhood watch program, and the person from the red cross discussed cpr techniques. scalise also spoke.“i wanted to reach out to him and give him an audience so he could talk to people from his district about legislation he was proposing,” knight said. “i did that as a courtesy.”knight estimates that about two-thirds to three-quarters of the people in the hospitality room at the civic association meeting were local residents who weren’t there to attend the euro event, and about one-third to one-quarter were euro convention attendees who arrived early and filtered into the hospitality room to drink coffee and kill time.“i don’t think steve was aware that there was a small contingent of people who came and sat in the audience prior to the euro meeting,” knight said.i asked knight if there was a sign on the hospitality room indicating it had been reserved for the euro conference.“i think not,” knight said. “i really truly believe, if there were any signs or banners up, mr. scalise would [have asked], ‘what is that?’ and he probably would have left. because i don’t recall having any banners or signs up at all.”knight said that when he invited scalise to speak to the civic association, he never mentioned that it would be held in the same room the euro conference would later use or that some conference attendees may be present.barbara noble, knight’s then-girlfriend who was also present at the hotel event and who i spoke with separately, corroborated knight’s account.“[scalise] was just up there for a few minutes, maybe 10, 15 at the most, and it was in the morning,” she said.noble said that there was no signage, banners, or mention of the euro conference at the civic association event and that scalise left immediately after giving his talk.the first report of scalise’s alleged comments to the white supremacist organization came on sunday from louisiana blogger lamar white, who uncovered anonymous posts on stormfront, a longstanding neo-nazi online forum.besides knight and noble, the only event attendees who have spoken publicly about the meeting are scalise himself—who told the times-picayune that he doesn’t remember it—and a white nationalist stormfront message board commenter who wrote under the username “alsace hebert” and whose account now appears to be defunct.however, on monday, an adviser for the house majority whip told the washington post that scalise “appeared at a convention of the european-american unity and rights organization, or euro.”knight and noble are adamant that the jefferson heights civic association event and the euro convention were clearly distinct events. when asked if he had invited scalise to attend the euro conference, knight replied, “that is not what happened. i’ll take a lie-detector test. that is not what happened.”slate might want to check slate.. which has an article up including quotes from david duke, who says scalise was invited to speak at the conference, and accepted.   more...when asked tuesday afternoon, a spokeswoman for scalise didn’t comment on knight and noble’s version of the events.there’s total consensus on the right and left that scalise displayed miserable judgment by associating himself with knight, an ally of the former kkk leader. but knight’s and noble’s accounts cast doubt on an emerging narrative: that, as democratic congressional campaign committee spokesman josh schwerin told politico , the louisiana republican “chose to cheerlead for a group of kkk members and neo-nazis at a white supremacist rally.” if knight and noble are right, then the truth is much less theatrical than some make it sound.
 the author chose to make this story unlisted, which means only people with a link can see it. are you sure you want to share it?over the last few days, dozens of people have sent me a link to andrew watts’ “a teenager’s view on social media written by an actual teen.” increasingly, i’m getting uncomfortable and angry by the folks who are pointing me to this. i feel the need to offer my perspective as someone who is not a teenager but who has thought about these issues extensively for years.almost all of them work in the tech industry and many of them are tech executives or venture capitalists. the general sentiment has been: “look! here’s an interesting kid who’s captured what kids these days are doing with social media!” most don’t even ask for my interpretation, sending it to me as though it is gospel.we’ve been down this path before. andrew is not the first teen to speak as an “actual” teen and have his story picked up. every few years, a (typically white male) teen with an interest in technology writes about technology among his peers on a popular tech platform and gets traction. tons of conferences host teen panels, usually drawing on privileged teens in the community or related to the organizers. i’m not bothered by these teens’ comments; i’m bothered by the way they are interpreted and treated by the tech press and the digerati.i’m a researcher. i’ve been studying american teens’ engagement with social media for over a decade. i wrote a book on the topic. i don’t speak on behalf of teens, but i do amplify their voices and try to make sense of the diversity of experiences teens have. i work hard to account for the biases in whose voices i have access to because i’m painfully aware that it’s hard to generalize about a population that’s roughly 16 million people strong. they are very diverse and, yet, journalists and entrepreneurs want to label them under one category and describe them as one thing.andrew is a very lucid writer and i completely trust his depiction of his peer group’s use of social media. he wrote a brilliant post about his life, his experiences, and his interpretations. his voice should be heard. and his candor is delightful to read. but his analysis cannot and should not be used to make claims about all teenagers. i don’t blame andrew for this; i blame the readers — and especially tech elites and journalists — for their interpretation of andrew’s post because they should know better by now. what he’s sharing is not indicative of all teens. more significantly, what he’s sharing reinforces existing biases in the tech industry and journalism that worry me tremendously.his coverage of twitter should raise a big red flag to anyone who has spent an iota of time paying attention to the news. over the last six months, we’ve seen a phenomenal uptick in serious us-based activism by many youth in light of what took place in ferguson. it’s hard to ignore twitter’s role in this phenomenon, with hashtags like #blacklivesmatter and #iftheygunnedmedown not only flowing from twitter onto other social media platforms, but also getting serious coverage from major media. andrew’s statement that “a lot of us simply do not understand the point of twitter” should raise eyebrows, but it’s the rest of his description of twitter that should serve as a stark reminder of andrew’s position within the social media landscape.let me put this bluntly: teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background. let me repeat that for emphasis.teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background.the world of twitter is many things and what journalists and tech elites see from twitter is not even remotely similar to what many of the teens that i study see, especially black and brown urban youth. for starters, their twitter feed doesn’t have links; this is often shocking to journalists and digerati whose entire stream is filled with urls. but i’m also bothered by andrew’s depiction of twitter users as first and foremost doing so to “complain/express themselves.” while he offers other professional categorizations, it’s hard not to read this depiction in light of what i see in low-status communities and the ways that privileged folks interpret the types of expression that exists in these communities. when black and brown teens offer their perspective on the world using the language of their community, it is often derided as a complaint or dismissed as self-expression. i doubt that andrew is trying to make an explicitly racist comment here, but i want to caution every reader out there that critiques of youth use of twitter are often seen in a negative light because of the heavy use by low-status black and brown youth.andrew’s depiction of his peers’ use of social media is a depiction of a segment of the population, notably the segment most like those in the tech industry. in other words, what the tech elite are seeing and sharing is what people like them would’ve been doing with social media x years ago. it resonates. but it is not a full portrait of today’s youth. and its uptake and interpretation by journalists and the tech elite whitewashes teens practices in deeply problematic ways.i’m not saying he’s wrong; i’m saying his story is incomplete and the incompleteness is important. his commentary on facebook is probably the most generalizable, if we’re talking about urban and suburban american youth. of course, his comments shouldn’t be shocking to anyone at this point (as andrew himself points out). somehow, though, declarations of facebook’s lack of emotional weight with teens continues to be front page news. all that said, this does render invisible the cultural work of facebook in rural areas and outside of the us.andrew is very visible about where he stands. he’s very clear about his passion for technology (and his love of blogging on medium should be a big ole hint to anyone who missed his byline). he’s also a college student and talks about his peers as being obviously on path to college. but as readers, let’s not forget that only about half of us 19-year-olds are in college . he talks about whatsapp being interesting when you go abroad, the practice of “going abroad” is itself privileged, with less than 1/3 of us citizens even holding passports. furthermore, this renders invisible the ways in which many us-based youth use whatsapp to communicate with family and friends who live outside of the us. immigration isn’t part of his narrative.i don’t for a second fault andrew for not having a perspective beyond his peer group. but i do fault both the tech elite and journalists for not thinking critically through what he posted and presuming that a single person’s experience can speak on behalf of an entire generation. there’s a reason why researchers and organizations like pew research are doing the work that they do — they do so to make sure that we don’t forget about the populations that aren’t already in our networks. the fact that professionals prefer anecdotes from people like us over concerted efforts to understand a demographic as a whole is shameful. more importantly, it’s downright dangerous. it shapes what the tech industry builds and invests in, what gets promoted by journalists, and what gets legitimized by institutions of power. this is precisely why and how the tech industry is complicit in the increasing structural inequality that is plaguing our society.
 markets swiss move triggers loan fears in hungary, polandthomas jordan, governor of the swiss national bank, had better not be planning any holidays to hungary or poland any time soon.the snb's decision to lift a ceiling placed on the swiss franc at the height of the eurozone crisis has ravaged stocks in eastern europe and sent hungary's forint and poland's zloty tumbling, as mortgages denominated in swiss francs have suddenly become more expensive to pay off.it was common for borrowers in both countries to take out swiss franc or euro-denominated loans before the financial crisis to get the lowest possible rates.as morgan stanley strategists write in a note today:hungary and poland continue to hold swiss franc-denominated debt – despite the recent progress made on in the redenomination of swiss franc mortgages in the household sector in hungary.indeed, the banking sector could still be exposed to an appreciation of the swiss franc should banks not have hedged themselves. comments from otp and erste bank suggest that some of the larger banks have hedged themselves against this risk, though the negative equity market reaction in hungary suggests there is still concern, creating potential outflows, upward pressure on euro/hungarian florint, and accelerating the dollar/forint move higher.the budapest stock exchange is heading towards its lowest level since september 2011, while the warsaw stock exchange is also down 1.56 per cent to 51,098.33.the zloty is down 1.78 per cent to 3.68 against the dollar and is trading 1.58 per cent lower against the euro at 275.68.the forint is 1.51 per cent lower against the dollar to 275.49, and 1.86 down per cent to 3.68 per euro, having earlier reached a record low of 326 per euro.
 sex steroids can both modulate and be modulated by behavior, and their actions are mediated by complex interactions among multiple hormone sources and targets. while gonadal steroids delivered via circulation can affect behavior, changes in local brain steroid synthesis also can modulate behavior. the relative steroid load across different tissues and the association of these levels with rates of behavior have not been well studied. the bluebanded goby (lythrypnus dalli) is a sex changing fish in which social status determines sexual phenotype . we examined changes in steroid levels in brain, gonad and body muscle at either 24 hours or 6 days after social induction of protogynous sex change, and from individuals in stable social groups not undergoing sex change. for each tissue, we measured levels of estradiol (e2) , testosterone (t) and 11-ketotestosterone (kt) . females had more t than males in the gonads, and more e2 in all tissues but there was no sex difference in kt. for both sexes, e2 was higher in the gonad than in other tissues while androgens were higher in the brain. during sex change, brain t levels dropped while brain kt increased, and brain e2 levels did not change. we found a positive relationship between androgens and aggression in the most dominant females but only when the male was removed from the social group. the results demonstrate that steroid levels are responsive to changes in the social environment, and that their concentrations vary in different tissues. also, we suggest that rapid changes in brain androgen levels might be important in inducing behavioral and/or morphological changes associated with protogynous sex change .sex steroids have an important role in modulating social behavior [1], and social interactions can, in turn, influence steroid levels [2], [3], [4], [5]. for instance, territorial challenges simulated by acoustic playbacks increase 11-ketotestosterone (kt), the most potent fish androgen, in gulf toadfish, opsanus beta [6] and non-invasive administration of kt, in turn, modulates male calling behavior [7]. although the vast majority of studies on steroids and aggression focus on males, female responses do not always align with those of males. female song sparrows melospiza melodia show decreased testosterone (t) in response to territorial intrusion [8] while female california mice peromyscus californicus show no change in t [9]. in the cooperative breeding cichlid neolamprologus pulcher , female and male residents and intruders have higher t and kt than controls that did not receive a territorial challenge, but only male aggression correlates with t [10]. estrogen levels in these females were not affected by social challenge [9], [10], [8]. all of these studies examined changes in circulating steroids , but plasma levels can be different from local tissue levels [11]. while the gonad s are an important source of steroids and probably a major contributor to circulating levels, there is evidence that a variety of tissues, including the brain, also are capable of steroidogenesis . homogenates of brain tissues from goldfish carassius auratus , toadfish , and atlantic salmon salmo salar parr produced large amounts of estrogen , and ovaries and testes synthesized much less estrogen than brain tissue [12], [13]. in fish, male blood kt levels are typically high, but there is evidence that this could be due to extragonadal production: after castration , implanting male sticklebacks gasterosteus aculeatus with the kt precursor 11-ketoandrostenedione (oa) produced high plasma kt levels [14]. in male rainbow trout oncorhynchus mykiss , highest oa to kt conversion activity was found in liver, testis and kidney, followed quite closely by intestine, brain and spleen , while oa activity in muscle was negligible [15]. because muscle is not considered an important site of steroidogenesis, its steroid levels should be reflecting circulating levels, and so we included it in our analysis as a type of negative control .we measured steroids in the brain because local synthesis of steroids could affect behavior through fast, non-genomic mechanisms that can act in a time frame more consistent with rapid behavioral change [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21]. in vivo microdialysis of male zebra finch taeniopygia guttata brain showed local changes in steroid levels in response to social stimuli ; playback of male songs caused an increase in estradiol (e2) and a decrease in t while presenting females to males caused an increase in e2 but not t [22]. these changes in brain steroid concentrations were not reflected in plasma steroid levels [22]. some studies have found a correlation between plasma and tissue steroid levels (see below), but few have examined hormone concentrations across different tissues within an individual. for example, there is a strong correlation between blood and mucus kt, but not between blood and muscle kt in koi cyprinus carpio [23]. in the ratfish hydrolagus colliei , there is a significant positive correlation between plasma and muscle t and kt, but not e2 [24]. a study on the protogynous thalassoma duperrey showed some discrepancies between gonad and plasma steroids [25]. in vitro gonad culture showed that testes of territorial dominant males produced much more kt than females and newly sex changed males, and gonads of sex changed males produced more kt than female gonads. when comparing plasma kt, however, neither types of male differed from females. testosterone production by the gonad was higher in all males relative to females, but there was no significant sex difference in plasma t levels [25].given the mounting evidence that circulating steroid levels are not always concordant with tissue specific levels, we tested whether steroid levels in brain, gonad and muscle show sex or status differences in steroid concentrations and, if so, whether they are differentially responsive to changes in the social environment in the bluebanded goby lythrypnus dalli , a bidirectional sequential hermaphrodite . sex change in this species is controlled by social status [26], [27], and their small size allows for the expression of natural behavior and sex reversal in a controlled laboratory setting. in l. dalli , females can be as aggressive as males and form linear dominance hierarchies [27], so it is also an ideal species for examining differences in steroids among females within different status classes. natural changes in or manipulation of sex steroids are associated with sex change (reviewed by frisch [28]). in protandrous species, e2 levels increase with transition from male to female, and administering e2 to males induces sex change. in protogynous species, kt levels increase during sex change, and kt administration can induce gonadal sex change in females. testosterone in many species does not vary during sex change. the vast majority of these studies on sex change are based on ‘circulating’ levels of hormone measured from whole body homogenates [29], [30], plasma [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37] or fish holding water (earley et al. unpublished data).in the present experiment, we tested the hypothesis that tissue hormone concentrations are different between males and females, and that e2 drops and kt increases during sex change (fig.1). our null prediction is that the hormonal profiles of all tissues would show the same directional change in response to changes in the social environment. deviations from this null prediction would suggest that different mechanisms control hormone concentrations in different tissues.the research conducted herein was approved by the georgia state university iacuc protocol no. a06030.lythrypnus dalli is a small benthic marine goby (20–50 mm adult standard length) in which large males typically dominate a nesting territory containing multiple females [38]. under laboratory conditions, these fish form linear dominance hierarchies when kept in social groups similar to those found in nature [27]. the fish used in this study were collected off the coast of catalina island, ca , in june 2007 by scuba diving (permit #803036-03 to vl), and were initially housed in communal holding tanks at the wrigley institute of environmental sciences on catalina island. from these animals, thirty experimental social groups were established in indoor seawater tables with continuous seawater supply and exposure to the natural summer light cycle. each social group consisted of a male (the largest animal in the tank), a large (alpha) female, a medium-sized (beta) female that was at least 3 mm smaller than alpha, and a small (gamma) female; these size differences ensure stable hierarchy positions. behavioral observations consisted of 10 min sessions, and we recorded the following behaviors: approaches, displacements received, displacements given, attacks, and threat displays. approach behavior is defined as a fish moving within one body length of another fish, and can be considered a form of challenge to the other fish; the fish being approached can react or not, and this often depends on its social status. if the approach ends with the subordinate fish moving away, then it is scored as a displacement (see below) and is a good measure of relative dominance. the attack is a very quick approach aimed directly towards the other fish and causing the fish that was attacked to rapidly move away. attacks happen very fast and if the subordinate fish is too slow to escape, the attack can end with physical contact. conversely, displacements are much less aggressive in nature and describe situations where the dominant fish just swims in the proximity of the subordinate fish, which moves away. submission is measured as the number of times a fish moves away from another member of the social group in response to approaches, attacks, or displacements. finally, threat displays occur when two fish approach one another raising the dorsal fin and opening the opercula while swimming sideways or in circle.in ten groups, fish were kept in the tank for 7 days without any social manipulation, and these are referred to as “stable” groups. behavior was observed on day 6 in the morning and in the afternoon, and on day 7 in the morning. tissue samples were collected from all group members (male and all females) on day 7. in the other twenty social groups, the male was removed from each tank after 6 days to induce sex change in the alpha female. behavior was observed on day 5 in the morning and in the afternoon, on day 6 in the morning plus one hour after male removal in the afternoon, and on day 7 (the day after male removal) in the morning. in ten of these groups, tissues were collected from the alpha and beta females 24 hours after male removal, and these will be referred to as “sex change 24 h” groups. in the remaining ten groups, tissues were collected from alpha and beta females 6 days after male removal. in these groups, additional behavioral observations were performed 5 days after male removal in the morning and in the afternoon, and 6 days after male removal in the morning. these will be referred to as “sex change 6d” groups. for each fish, we recorded standard length, and captured a digital image of the external genitalia ( genital papilla ) at the start and at the end of the experiment. the shape of the genital papilla is a reliable indicator of the sex of the fish and is expressed as length/width ratio. a ratio of 1.2 or less is typical of a round female papilla, while a ratio >1.6 is typical of a thin pointed male papilla; transitional fish have intermediate values [27]. we used axiovision (zeiss inc.) imaging software to take papilla measurements from digital images. fish were then killed via exposure to a lethal dose of tricaine methanesulfonate (ms222). brain, gonads and caudal muscle were collected, and a digital image of the gonads was taken to confirm sex and reproductive status. each tissue was put in a microcentrifuge vial and immediately frozen in liquid nitrogen. all the fish were killed between 1400 and 1600 h. previous work showed that l. dalli water-borne androgen levels peak in the morning and e2 levels peak in the evening [39], so we assayed tissues when hormones do not fluctuate dramatically to avoid differences due to diurnal rhythms . the tissue samples were shipped frozen to georgia state university and stored at −80°c until processing for steroid content.steroid hormones were extracted from tissue following a solid-phase extraction protocol (modified from [40]. briefly, each frozen tissue sample was weighed, transferred to borosilicate vials, and homogenized in 350 µl of buffer in an ice-cold water bath (0.1 m phosphate buffer for brain and gonad samples [ph 7.5], 0.1 m borate buffer [ph 7.5] for muscle samples). after homogenization , 1.5 ml methanol was added to each sample, and they were quickly vortexed and returned to the ice bath. when all samples were homogenized, they were vortexed for 60 min and then stored at 4°c overnight. we repeated the same protocol for 2 control blank samples without any tissues: one containing 0.1 m phosphate buffer and one with 0.1 m borate buffer. the next day, samples were vortexed again for 20 min at room temperature, and centrifuged at 1027×g for 10 min at 4°c. the supernatant was decanted , and 16 ml of water was added to dilute the methanol. the homogenized samples were connected through high purity tubing (saint-gobain tygon formulation 2275) to sep-pak c18 columns (waters) mounted onto a vacuum manifold. before starting, the columns were primed with 2×2 ml washes of methano l followed by 2×2 ml washes of distilled water. after drawing the samples through the columns, the columns were rinsed with 2×2 ml of distilled water to purge salts, and then total hormones were eluted with 2×2 ml of methanol. the eluted methanol was collected in borosilicate vials , dried under a stream of nitrogen, and the resulting hormone residue was resuspended in 350.5 µl of a solution made of 95% eia buffer and 5% ethanol. after vortexing for 15 min, samples were stored at 4°c overnight. samples were vortexed for 45 min prior to assay. eia kits (cayman chemicals, inc.) for e2, kt and t were used to quantify hormone in the samples; kit protocols were strictly followed. assay plates were read on a spectrophotometer (opsys mr, dynex technologies) at a wavelength of 405 nm after 90 min of incubation. see supporting information text for details on the validation of the hormone assays.for stable groups, we compared hormone levels among males and alpha, beta and gamma females. we could not perform a multivariate analysis because levels of e2, t, and kt in each fish are not independent, so we performed three separate anovas , one for each hormone. we tested for normality and homogeneity of variance. to achieve normality, t and e2 levels were log transformed and kt was square root transformed. when the main effects in our statistical models were significant, we performed tukey’s hsd post hoc tests to evaluate differences among the levels. for interaction terms, the number of possible comparisons were numerous, but only a subset of them were relevant to our hypotheses. we thus generated a priori linear contrasts to evaluate differences among the levels of our interaction terms. for sex changing groups, we performed two different analyses. in the first, we performed anovas comparing hormone levels of alpha (dominant) females initiating sex change after male removal at 24 hours and 6 days after male removal to alpha females of stable groups with the male present, and beta-ranking females ascending to dominant female position in sex-changing groups to beta females in stable groups with the male present. this analysis tests whether steroid profiles in sex-changing alphas deviated significantly from stable alphas and whether betas whose status was elevated to alpha differ from individuals who remain beta. in the second analysis, we performed anovas to compare alphas in the sex-changing groups to males, and betas in the sex changing groups to alphas in stable groups. this analysis tests whether steroid profiles in sex-changing alphas approached the profile of stable males, and whether betas whose status was elevated exhibit steroid profiles comparable to those of established alphas. paired t-tests were used to compare values of papilla ratio for each animal at the start versus the end of the experiment. we performed correlations between behavior and hormone levels and between hormones in different tissues. the anovas and linear contrasts were performed with sas version 8.1 (sas institute inc.), while the correlation analyses were performed with jmp (sas institute inc.). all data are reported as mean ± sem .none of the fish in stable groups changed sex, based upon the shape of their external genitalia. initial and final genital papilla length/width ratios were not significantly different for males ( paired t test : t9 = 1.33, p = 0.215 ; initial = 3.28±0.20; final = 3.50±0.15), alphas (paired t test: t9 = 1.29, p = 0.229; initial = 1.09±0.04; final = 1.12±0.04), betas (paired t test: t9 = 0.64, p = 0.540; initial = 1.09±0.04; final = 1.12±0.04) or gammas (paired t test: t9 = 0.90, p = 0.394; initial = 1.13±0.07; final = 1.16±0.03) from stable groups.alpha females in sex change treatments did not show any significant changes in the papilla ratio 24 h after male removal (paired t test: t8 = 1.39, p = 0.202; initial = 1.12±0.02; final = 1.16±0.03), but the papilla shifted towards the male typical shape 6d after male removal (paired t test: t9 = 2.51, p = 0.033 ; initial = 1.17±0.04; final = 1.38±0.07). beta females in sex change treatments did not show any significant changes in the papilla ratio 24 h (paired t test: t8 = 0.67, p = 0.523; initial = 1.08±0.02; final = 1.11±0.02) or 6d after male removal (paired t test: t9 = 0.54, p = 0.601; initial = 1.16±0.03; final = 1.18±0.02).because of the large number of statistical comparisons conducted in the following sections, we generated a full list of significant linear contrasts for stable groups in table s1 of the supporting information. all results in this section refer to table s1 unless otherwise noted.there were significant status, tissue, and status×tissue effects on e2 concentrations (table 1). overall, females had significantly higher e2 than males. linear contrasts revealed that for all tissues, alpha, beta, and gamma females had significantly higher e2 than males. beta and gamma females had significantly higher gonad e2 than alphas. in females, gonads had significantly higher e2 than the other tissues, and brain had significantly more than muscle (fig. 2). in males, gonad and brain e2 did not differ but both had significantly higher e2 than muscle (fig. 2).figure 2. steroid concentrations in stable groups.concentrations of estradiol (e2), testosterone (t) and 11-ketotestosterone (kt) in stable groups. lines between bars represent significant differences.table 1. summary of anovas comparing sex steroids across status classes and tissue types.for both t and kt, there were significant main effects of status and tissue (table 1). beta and gamma females had more t than males, and gammas had more t and kt than alpha females (tukey’s hsd, p<0.05). brain had significantly higher t and kt than muscle and gonad (tukey’s hsd, p<0.05; fig. 2). ovaries of females pooled across status classes had significantly higher t than testes (table s1; female gonad vs. male gonad). this effect was driven by gammas and betas whose gonads had significantly more t than male gonads (table s1 and fig. 2).hormones in sex changing groups: comparing alpha and beta femaleswe compared hormone levels of alpha females in stable groups with those of sex-changing alphas and hormone levels of beta females in stable groups with those of betas rising to the alpha female position at 24 h and 6d after male removal. the full list of significant linear contrasts and their statistics are reported in table s2, and a summary of the three-way interaction for e2 in table s3 of the supporting information. all results in this section refer to table s2 unless otherwise noted.estradiol varied significantly with time, status, and tissue in the sex changing groups (table 1). the significant three-way interaction (time×status×tissue) was driven largely by differences in e2 among tissue types. linear contrasts revealed significantly higher e2 in the gonad than in brain and muscle (fig. 3), and in brain than muscle for alphas (stable and sex-changing) and betas (stable and rising to alpha position) at all time points (table s3). betas rising to the alpha position had significantly higher e2 (pooled tissues) at 6d than at 24 h and compared to beta females of stable groups; this significant difference was likely driven by gonad e2, which was the only tissue to vary with time (fig. 3 and table s3). six days after male removal, betas rising to the alpha position had significantly higher e2 than sex-changing females, which also appeared to be driven by differences in gonad e2 (fig. 3 and table s3).figure 3. steroid concentrations in sex changing groups.concentrations of estradiol (e2), testosterone (t) and 11-ketotestosterone (kt) in stable and sex changing groups. the legends “24 hours” and “6 days” refer to time after male removal.testosterone was higher in betas (stable and rising to alpha position) than alphas (stable and sex-changing), an effect driven mainly by gonad t (fig. 3). sex-changing females had higher kt at 24 h and 6d after male removal than in alpha females of stable groups. for both alphas (stable and sex-changing) and betas (stable and rising to alpha position), kt was significantly higher in brain than in gonad and muscle while brain t was significantly higher than gonad in stable and 6d groups and higher than muscle at all time points (fig. 3). alpha and beta females of stable groups had higher brain and muscle t than alphas and betas from sex changing groups, respectively, at the 24 h and 6d time points (fig. 3). brain kt was significantly higher at 24 h and 6d after male removal than in stable groups, but only at 24 h in the gonad (fig. 3). in muscle, kt was higher in stable groups than after male removal.hormones in sex changing groups: comparing with maleswe compared hormone levels of sex-changing females (alphas) with those of males, and hormones of betas rising to alpha position at 24 h and 6d after male removal with those of dominant alpha females in stable groups (table 1). males had significantly lower e2 than sex-changing females (fig. 3). beta females rising to alpha position had significantly higher gonad e2, and lower brain and muscle t than dominant females in stable groups (fig. 3). sex-changing females had significantly higher brain kt than males, but lower muscle kt and lower brain and muscle t (fig. 3). due to space constraints, we present the details of this result section in the text of the supporting information, the full list of significant linear contrasts in table s4, and a summary of the three-way interaction for e2 in table s5 of the supporting information.we examined the relationship between tissue steroid concentrations and due to the large number of comparisons we report details in table 2. all results in this section refer to table 2 with some depicted as figures (fig. 4 and fig. s1 and fig. s2 in supporting information).correlations between concentration of kt and t in the muscle (a) and in the gonad (b) across all fish, and in the muscle of alpha females in stable groups (c) and in sex changing groups (d). correlations between concentration of kt and t (e) and between e2 and kt in the gonad of alpha females. a solid line means that the associated p value is significant (ptable 2. relationships among hormones both within and across tissue types.among-tissue relationships for a given hormone.first, we compared levels of the same hormone in different tissues to test whether changes occur across all tissues in a uniform way. when all fish were included in the analysis, there was a significant positive relationship between gonad kt and brain kt (fig. s1a) but it was not significant when considering each class of fish separately except for gammas in stable groups. testosterone in the brain and gonad were also significantly positively related only for gamma females in stable groups. muscle kt and gonad kt were significantly positively related for betas rising to the alpha position at 6d and sex-changing alphas at 24 h following male removal (fig. s1d).muscle and brain e2 concentrations were significantly positively related at the population level but this trend did not hold for any of the individual status classes. there was a significant positive relationship between gonad and brain e2 in betas rising to the alpha position at 24 h (fig. s1b) and sex-changing alphas at 6d following male removal (fig. s1c).second, we analyzed whether there was any relationship between different hormones in the same tissue. there were highly significant positive relationships between muscle kt and muscle t (fig. 4a) as well as gonad kt and gonad t (fig. 4b); these relationships were very consistent across the sexes, status classes, and time points. only sex-changing alphas at 24 h and 6d following male removal failed to show relationships between the two androgens in gonad and muscle (fig. 4c–e). gonad e2 and kt concentrations were significantly negatively related only for sex-changing alphas at 6d following male removal (fig. 4f). brain kt and t concentrations were significantly positively related only in betas rising to the alpha position at 24 h and 6d following male removal (fig. s2a–b).we examined the relationships between steroid concentrations in each tissue type and the behavior (approaches, attacks, displacements given, courtship, threat displays and displacement received) of animals in both stable groups and after male removal. all results described in this section refer to table 3 with some depicted as figures (fig. 5 and fig. s3). with few exceptions, all hormone-behavior relationships occurred in sex-changing females and betas rising to the alpha position.figure 5. correlations between hormones and behavior.correlation between the total rate of approaches performed after male removal and concentration of kt in the gonad (a), and in the muscle (b); and between the rate of attacks performed the day after male removal and concentration of e2 in the brain (c). the values refer to alpha females in sex changing groups collected 24 hours and 6 days after male removal. a solid line means that the associated p value is significant (p<0.05) while dotted lines refer to non-significant correlations.males of stable groups that were more aggressive (e.g., approaches, displacements given) had significantly less gonad e2. aside from this, there were no significant relationships between tissue hormones and the behavior of animals in stable groups.there was a significant positive relationship between both muscle and gonad (but not brain) kt of sex-changing females 24 h after male removal and the total number of approaches delivered to subordinate group members in the first day (fig. 5a–b) as well as the number of approaches delivered in the first hour after male removal. brain e2 of sex-changing females 6d after male removal also was significantly positively related to attacks delivered on the first day following male removal (fig. 5c).brain t and kt of betas rising to the alpha position 24 h after male removal were significantly positively related to the number of times they were displaced by the sex-changing female following male removal (fig. s3a–b). brain t and kt of betas 6d after male removal instead showed a significant negative relationship with the rate of displacements received 5 days after male removal (fig. s3c–d).our results demonstrate that levels of steroid hormones are altered during sex change but that these alterations do not follow the same pattern in all tissues. in addition, the strong positive relationship between androgens within different tissues is lost during sex change.we also found a sex difference for t and e2 but not for kt. the higher e2 levels we found in female tissue are consistent with previous work on l. dalli that measured levels of steroids from water samples [39], and with the higher aromatase activity in females relative to males [17]. while water samples did not identify any sex difference in t nor kt [39], the present study shows that females have higher t than males in the gonads. since brain levels of t are much higher than gonad levels and are not sexually dimorphic , they might mask the gonadal sex difference when using methods that average over the whole body (e.g., plasma or water-borne samples). also, the very low levels of kt detected in l. dalli suggest that the lack of sex difference in kt is due to low levels in males rather than unusually high levels in females. these results are different from many fish species where males have much higher kt levels than females [41], but similar to what was found in another bidirectional hermaphrodite , gobiodon histrio , where whole body concentrations of kt were below detection limits in both males and females [30]. 11-ketotestosterone is often viewed as the key hormone for regulating male-typical morphology in teleost fishes [41] and the lack of sex differences in kt in sequential bi-directional sex changers (like l. dalli and g. histrio) is consistent with their reduced overall sexual dimorphism and with the hypothesis that these fish reduce kt production across their life history so as to maintain the capacity for adult sex change in both directions.during sex change, different tissues responded independently to the same social manipulation, demonstrating that tissues can be autonomous when it comes to steroid synthesis, binding, or uptake in response to changes in the social environment. we were surprised to find very few significant correlations when comparing the same hormone across different tissues within individuals. one might expect that if steroids are completely free to reach all organs through circulation, then there should be a positive correlation in steroid levels across tissues within individuals. for example, fish whose gonad is producing high levels of e2 would also have more e2 in brain and/or muscle. instead, our results indicate that each tissue is remarkably independent with regard to steroid concentrations. this result challenges the central dogma that steroids produced in the gonad represent ‘the’ whole body regulator of steroid actions, and could be viewed as a broad application of the law of mass action , which suggests that the concentration and affinity of receptors, binding globulins, and synthetic/ degradative enzymes determines the functional capacity of a signaling biochemical in a given tissue. future studies must consider all these factors together in a tissue to fully understand the mechanism of action of steroid hormones.the results for androgens were unexpected; both t and kt were much higher in the brain than in gonad and muscle. the most likely explanation is that the brain is an important site for androgen synthesis. there is evidence that fish brain homogenates can produce t, e2 and kt [12], [13], [15], [42]. an alternative explanation is that androgens are sequestered from circulation and accumulated in the brain by androgen receptors and/or steroid binding globulins (sbg) at a concentration higher than the gonadal source. steroid binding globulins can transport steroid hormones from circulation into cells [43], and can be internalized by neurons in rats [44]. also, different rates of steroid degradation associated with each specific tissue could explain the different levels of t and kt that we observed among tissue types.the only strong hormone correlation that held true for all females in stable groups was between kt and t in both muscle and gonad. similarly, in male tilapia zillii , plasma kt was positively correlated with plasma t [45]. an obvious explanation is that t is a precursor of kt but for the same reason, we would expect to see the same correlation also in the brain. 11-ketotestosterone might not be directly synthesized in the brain or its rate of synthesis could be independently and locally regulated such that product and substrate are not tightly coupled. also, kt could be binding sbg in the brain with a different affinity than t [46], [47], [48] affecting its metabolism and precluding direct relationships with its precursor.we found no significant difference in t between gonad and muscle. testosterone present in the muscle could be coming through circulation or could be produced by muscle tissue but there is no evidence for any 17β-hsd activity in muscle of male rainbow trout [15].because we found correlations between kt and its precursor t, we also expected correlations between t and another of its metabolites, e2. in the cichlid n. pulcher t correlated with both e2 and kt in plasma [10]. on the other hand, in the protandrous amphiprion melanopus t correlated with e2 in females but not in males, and none of the correlations were present in fish undergoing sex change [49]. in l. dalli, we did not find a correlation between t and e2 in any of the tissues, which suggests that e2 could be synthesized from estrone after aromatization of androstenedione as in the protogynous wrasse pseudolabrus sieboldi [36]. further work is necessary to determine whether l. dalli employs this alternative pathway.after removal of the male from the social groups, we observed changes in steroid levels in tissues of sex-changing females supporting a critical role of kt in the regulation of sex change. comparing the steroid response of alpha females with beta females rising to the alpha position allows one to partition hormonal responses due to changes in social status from those due to sex change. specifically, kt in alphas increases at 24 h and 6d relative to alphas in stable groups, while it does not change significantly in any tissue of betas rising to alphas. these results demonstrate that changes in kt are closely associated with sex change, rather than a change in social status following male removal. in l. dalli, kt can induce masculinization of the genital papilla [50], so the increase is consistent with the male typical papilla ratio we found in sex changing alpha females at 6 days. the rise in kt during sex change might be needed to induce spermatogenesis or the onset of male typical behavior, but is not necessary for the maintenance of male function, as indicated by the lack of sex differences in kt in stable groups. in stoplight parrotfish , serum kt increased in females during sex change, and then again when changing color into the terminal male phase [33] supporting the hypothesis that kt is required during transitions from one reproductive state to another. the mechanism of action of kt is not clear yet, but administration of kt induced the start of sex change and depressed levels of e2 in stoplight parrotfish [51], and in the honeycomb grouper epinephelus merra [32]. increased kt during sex change might function primarily to inhibit e2 production allowing oocytes to regress and gonadal sex change to proceed.we found increased kt in both brain and gonads of sex changing alpha females, so extra-gonadal synthesis of kt could be essential to initiate sex change. interestingly, in stable groups alpha females had the lowest levels of kt in all tissues and this might make the rapid increase in brain and gonadal kt that happens during sex change even more dramatic and effective.in l. dalli, aromatase activity decreases during the first stages of sex change in the brain but not in the gonad [17] so we expected a drop in brain e2 levels during sex change, however this was not the case. changes in e2 levels do not seem to play a major role in the initiation of sex change. in fact, sex changing alphas 6 days after male removal still have e2 levels similar to alpha females in stable groups and much higher than males. our results show that the ovary in l. dalli has the highest levels of e2 while in other teleosts aromatase activity is typically reported to be higher in brain than gonad [52], [13] l. dalli brain has very high level of t, which is the substrate for aromatase, so we would expect much higher levels of e2 in the brain than in the gonad if aromatase activity was equivalent.since in l. dalli the gonad produces much more e2 than the brain, gonadal e2 coming into the brain from circulation could swamp our ability to detect differences in brain e2 levels during the early phases of sex change, or brain aromatase and e2 could just be modulated at a very fine local scale, consistent with a synaptocrine regulation of e2 in the brain [53].in contrast with what happens to kt, concentrations of t in l. dalli decrease in brain and muscle of both alpha and beta females after male removal, suggesting an association of t with the change in social circumstance rather than the induction of sex change per se. other animals have been shown to change steroid levels after being presented with an individual of the opposite sex [54], [55], [56]. the presence of males might increase t levels in female l. dalli in stable groups while male removal might precipitate a decrease in t synthesis. it is worth noting that the strong relationship between kt and t in the other females was lacking in alphas undergoing sex change (fig. 4). both alphas and betas do show the drop in t brain levels in response to male removal suggesting that the increase in kt which is only present in alphas, is responsible of the lack of correlation between t and kt. further work will be needed to understand the mechanism peculiar to the sex changing fish that can induce this rapid increase in kt.we found a positive relationship between androgens and aggression in alpha females but only after male removal when the social situation became unstable. for sex changing females at 24 h, gonad and muscle kt positively correlated with the total rate of approaches to other fish, and muscle kt 6d after male removal with the rate of displacement of subordinate females. we found that alpha female e2 levels correlated with aggression 6d after male removal. the time shortly after male removal is the most critical phase in the onset of sex change because that is when the dominant female takes the place of the male in the hierarchy. thus, aggression levels displayed by an alpha female at that stage might affect hormone levels on the following days. on the day of male removal, l. dalli sex changing females often show increased aggression (e.g., [26], [17]) that can last for several days, but then returns to levels similar to stable groups. most of the significant correlations we found involve the behavior after male removal, so sex steroids might affect behavior only in situations of social instability [4] as suggested by the “ challenge hypothesis ” [5]. the vast majority of studies finding a relationship between androgens and aggression use the resident/intruder paradigm, while in our experiment the fish already established a stable social structure so the hormone-behavior responses might be less dramatic.our results show that different tissues within the same animal often have very different steroid levels, and these tissues can respond differently to the same social stimulus. thus, measures of circulating levels of steroids may not provide adequate information to describe the local steroidal milieu and thus the primary effects of steroid action, which take place at the local level. our data suggest that the gonad in l. dalli is the main source of estrogen and that the brain is an important source of androgens. future studies should seek to determine whether these tissue differences are due to differential rates of synthesis/ catabolism or active compartmentalization by steroid binding globulins or steroid receptors . androgens seem to be an important candidate for steroids that translate changes in the social environment into changes in sexual phenotype. in fact, during the first 6 days of sex change, e2 levels stay stable in all tissues, t decreases dramatically in brain and muscle, and kt increases in the brain. the drop in t could act as a chemical message to signal the lack of mating opportunity, but it is not sufficient to induce sex change without the increase in kt, which only occurs in the sex changing alpha female that is now the new dominant animal. we propose that an increase in brain kt and an associated drop in brain t may serve as a steroidal switch that initiates sex change. future studies also should consider regional differences in brain steroid levels, and the potential for pulsatile steroid secretion and neurosteroids other than those measured in this study (e.g. dhea-s ) to mediate the behavioral and physiological responses to changes in status and sex. socially regulated sex change provides an excellent model in which to study the evolution of novel mechanisms for allowing social interactions to regulate steroid signaling and reproductive phenotype.steroid correlations across tissues. correlations between concentration of kt in the gonad versus kt in the brain (a) across all fish from stable and sex changing groups, between concentrations of e2 in the gonad versus the brain of beta (b) and alpha (c) females, and between concentration of kt in the muscle versus the gonad of alpha females (d). a solid line means that the associated p value is significant (p<0.05) while dotted lines are associated with non-significant correlations.correlations across hormones. correlation between concentration of t versus kt in the brain of beta females in stable groups (a), and in sex changing groups (b). correlation between concentration of e2 in the brain versus kt in the gonad (c) of alpha females. a solid line means that the associated p value is significant (pcorrelation between hormones and behavior. correlation between the rate of displacements received 1 day after male removal and brain concentration of t (a), and kt (b); between the rate of displacements received in the afternoon 5 days after male removal and brain concentration of t (c) and kt (d); between the total rate of displacements received after male removal and concentration of kt in the gonad (e); and between the rate of displacements given before male removal and concentration of e2 in the gonad (f). the values are from beta females in sex changing groups collected 24 hours and 6 days after male removal. a solid line means that the associated p value is significant (p<0.05) while dotted lines refer to non-significant correlations.list of all linear contrasts that are significant or show a trend towards significant values for fish in stable groups.list of all linear contrasts that are significant or show a trend towards significant values for sex changing groups. these linear contrasts compare alpha and beta females in stable groups and in groups undergoing sex change (24 hours and 6 days).three-way linear contrasts comparing females.linear contrasts between stable males and females in sex changing groups.three-way linear contrasts comparing males and females.we would like to thank david sinkiewicz and vincente colunga for help in hormone extraction, bridget wynn, scott wilson, jeff glenn and yong ah for helping with behavioral observations, the staff at usc wrigley institute for environmental studies for logistical assistance, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript.conceived and designed the experiments: vl rle msg. performed the experiments: vl rle. analyzed the data: vl rle. contributed reagents/materials/analysis 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 up until a little over a month ago, kathleen mandt had never spent any significant amount of time on reddit. mandt, an earth and planetary scientist at the southwest research institute, had heard of the social news site, but only because her teenage son “mostly lives on reddit.” she received a crash course, however, when a press release summarizing a recent paper she’d published was submitted to r/science , a thriving community on reddit with over six million subscribers. “a coworker told me about it,” she recalled in a phone interview. “so my son sat me down, signed me up for reddit, and i started answering questions about the paper itself.” it was while she was answering those questions that a redditor suggested in the thread that mandt sign up for an official ama. “so then i had my son sit down and sign me up for an ama.”short for “ask me anything,” amas are a bedrock of the reddit community, so much so that a subreddit devoted to them is one of the most popular on the site. the concept is somewhat self explanatory: a person with some kind of interesting experience offers himself up to the reddit community, promising to answer any question that is asked of him. as i write this, a thread titled, “ iama survivor of stalin’s dictatorship. my father was executed by the secret police and my family became ‘enemies of the people’. we fled the soviet union at the end of wwii. ask me anything ” has over a thousand comments, more questions than any one person could answer in a single sitting. in true reddit fashion, the questions with the most upvotes float to the top, so the popular questions are usually the ones the participants answer.the iama subreddit became so popular that it eventually caught the eye of publicists and became a pitstop for any celebrity on a press tour looking to promote a new project. suddenly you had superstars like george clooney and louis ck stopping by to answer questions. an ama with president barack obama, conducted just before the 2012 elections, drew so much attention that the site temporarily crashed under all the traffic.something happened once celebrities began to flock to iama, however: it became more difficult for non celebrities to get much attention, even when those non celebrities had something particularly unique to share. nathan allen, a mod for r/science and r/askscience (mods are volunteers who police subreddits and have administrative powers), noticed this discouraging trend whenever he’d see scientists try to conduct amas. “if you go through and arrange an ama for a member of the national academies of sciences,” he said in a phone interview, “and you do a lot of work to prep him for the ama, and then george clooney posts an ama on the same day, the [scientist’s ama] gets buried, and these people don’t get any visibility even though it’s really important and the general public needs to have access to it.”so allen, a phd chemist who works for the dow chemical company in pennsylvania, began to think about ways he could leverage r/science’s massive reach to connect scientists to the general public. r/science is a default subreddit, meaning it’s visible to people visiting reddit.com even if they aren’t logged in. according to internal metrics allen has access to, r/science gets between 30,000 and 100,000 unique visitors a day; it’s arguably the largest community-run science forum on the internet. so what if r/science were to form an ama series of its own, focused solely on working scientists who are producing interesting, groundbreaking research?starting in january, r/science officially launched its science ama series, and very quickly you had scientists not widely known to those outside their fields answering questions on the front page of a site that is visited by 114 million people a month. virtually overnight, reddit had created the world’s largest two-way dialogue between scientists and the general public. “of course you can talk about the large audience when scientists go on tv,” said allen.  “but is that really an interaction?” usually, those scientists who you’ll regularly see on cable news or the daily show are among a small group of pop culture celebrities, like neil degrasse tyson or bill nye the science guy. “you have the pop culture scientists like neil degrasse tyson, who’s doing a good job of communicating science, but he’s not publishing a lot of scientific papers,” allen argued. “his role is more science communication, but he’s not so much a practicing scientist who goes out and has ongoing research projects and is doing the nuts and bolts of science.”for the mods, the two-way conversation was as equally important as the sheer reach of the amas. “really the only way people get to find out about new research is if they have journal access or if they read the shortform news story that can be skewed by whatever journalist is covering it,” said chris dawson, another r/science mod. “if you had questions about the study then there wasn’t a good way to get them answered, and now you can.”there has been a longstanding criticism against science journalism, particularly its penchant for histrionically magnifying the scope of the results in such a way that misleads the public into thinking a much more monumental discovery has been made. “the general public won’t catch ‘may,’ ‘could,’ or ‘potentially,’” noted allen. “they just skim over that, and then that’s why they think there are cancer cures every week, because they see reports of early phase academic studies on something that fights cancer in a petri dish. and though this could be the mechanisms in which  a cancer treatment could be provided 30 years from now, the general public reads this as, ‘oh there’s a cure for cancer.’” while the science amas aren’t a panacea for misinformation, by giving the public access to the scientists themselves, allen hopes to eliminate at least some of the impact of sensationalized journalism.since launching, science amas have been conducted up to five times a week, though never more than one a day. the brunt of the labor of organizing each one falls on allen’s shoulders; he not only conducts most of the outreach to solicit participation, but also walks them through the entire process of conducting an ama, from creating an account to crafting the headline so it’ll have a wide appeal to reddit’s userbase. “the problem we encounter is that it turns out big name scientists aren’t big redditors,” he said. “their grad students may be, but they are not. typically, big name scientists are in their late 40s, 50s, 60s — they’re a different generation and don’t really have a natural inclination to post in social media.” much of his outreach involves a simple cold call or email to the scientist; armed with r/science’s web traffic statistics, it’s not difficult to convince a top tier researcher of the ama’s value. gradually, however, the pr departments within universities have begun to notice the series and, wanting to generate publicity for their own faculty, started reaching out to allen to schedule amas.that’s what happened with peggy mason, a professor of neurobiology at the university of chicago who studies empathy in rats. kevin jiang, a communications specialist at the university, approached her several months ago to pitch her on conducting an ama. “it was just as i was about to start teaching a mooc” — short for massive open online course — “we were thinking let’s try to publicize this whole thing. and so we pitched it, and reddit was really easy to work with.we went back and forth and they said what the blurb should say and how short it should be. they also told me to make sure to set aside a lot of time that day. it was a complete trip. it was so much fun.”within minutes after mason’s ama was posted, dozens of questions began to flood the thread. most of the redditors asked questions pertaining to what was mentioned in the short blurb describing her work and few referenced her published research in scholarly journals — a sign that this was mostly a layman audience who merely sought to slake their random curiosities rather than engage in rigorous scientific discussion. mason was asked questions ranging from whether rats mourned the death of other rats to if sociopathy exists in other mammals besides humans. “for me it was an exciting and fun conversation about something i love, even if it wasn’t questions on the one particular subject that i had published on most recently,” kathleen mandt said of her ama .but with a large audience comes great responsibility. we’ve seen the devastating impact of what happens when bad science creeps into the national conversation. recent measles outbreaks, for instance, have been wholly attributed to the pseudoscientific claims propagated by the anti-vaccination crowd. nathan allen was forced to consider his criteria for vetting ama candidates when he was approached by paul héroux, a physicist at mcgill university. “we knew going in that it was going to be controversial,” allen told me. “he holds that electromagnetic radiation from electronic equipment has health effects and can affect the metabolism of cells. this isn’t a generally accepted view, in fact . but the guy is still a legitimate professor at mcgill university. it’s a very good school. it’s called the harvard of canada, and he’s a tenured professor there.”but were those accomplishments enough to warrant allen giving héroux access to such a massive viewership? “i don’t want to be in the business of deciding what’s a fringe idea and what’s mainstream,” he said. “that’s against the basic philosophy of reddit. so i made the decision that, ok, this guy has a fringe idea, and we have a bunch of verified scientists [who frequent r/science]. this guy speaks for himself. he can get up to the mic and answer questions. if he can defend his answers, then we’ll let the community decide whether or not he’s fringe.”héroux posted his ama about a month ago, and what followed in the subsequent hours was about as close as you can come to a bloodbath in a wonky, jargon-laden scientific discussion on the internet. reading it now, the first thing that strikes you is that héroux avoided answering many of the questions that were upvoted to the top of the thread, a heterodox faux pas in a community that’s rooted firmly in the wisdom of crowds. a cadre of biochemists flocked to the ama and, after reviewing the scientist’s research, began to dissect his findings to such a technical and abstruse degree that a layman like me couldn’t even begin to discern the validity of their arguments. “having read some of your paper, i have to say that your conclusions seem like a serious stretch from the evidence,” wrote one redditor. “i find it a bit odd that you think it appropriate to bring your results to a public forum like reddit at this stage. no offense, but your actions strike me as having political intent.”whenever héroux did respond, it was often in a vague, evasive manner that avoided addressing the specifics of his challengers’ questions. several of his answers yielded negative upvotes, a sign that the reddit community had turned against him. “i think the important lesson here is that the general public gets to see that scientists have different opinions,” said allen. “they get to see how scientists are critical of other scientists. they get to see what peer review looks like in a real sense — what sort of minutia is going on. they get to see the actual mechanism of science going on. the comments that were in that thread would not be out of line in any comments you’d get in an anonymous peer-reviewed journal.”reading through the dozens of science amas that have been conducted on reddit, it seems evident that r/science is fulfilling a need that may have been previously unforeseen by the scientific community of researchers who spend years toiling in obscurity, testing and retesting their hypotheses so that one day their hard work may see the light of day in the form of a journal article. in a world where scholarly journals are often frustratingly difficult to access by the general public, there remains a demand in the market for a way to remove the friction between scientists and non scientists. with the rise of moocs and other discussion tools like reddit, science communication is transcending its heretofore gatekeepers. “my personal belief, in the end, is that scientists really work for the people,” said mason. “we’re allowed to follow our intellectual curiosity insomuch as we share it with other human beings.” with six months of amas and thousands of questions uploaded, reddit’s science ama series seems to have brought us significantly closer to that goal.enjoy my writing? want me to create awesome content for your company?  go here  to learn more about what i can offer you.or you can subscribe to my newsletter:
rt @nicktimiraos: us immigrants in 2013:
13% of the population
16% of the workforce
33% of small business owners
 former mayor of providence, r.i., angel taveras, center, says the city would be ‘worse off’ without immigrants and their entrepreneurial spirit. associated press
 it's that time of year again. all of the usual suspects trot out their forecasts for 2015 on markets, interest rates, gold, oil, economic growth and unemployment. you can set your calendars based on these prognostications, just as long as you remember to ignore their often- hilarious track records .regular readers know this is a pet peeve of mine going way back . as we have detailed here too many times to recount , these predictions are a silly waste of time. (i am the sole exception, as you can see by my flawless forecasts for 2014 ).but that doesn’t mean they are not potentially damaging, affecting the psyches of traders and investors alike. as economist john kenneth galbraith once said, “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable .”to bring a bit of accountability to the punditsphere, let’s have a look at some of my favorite forecasts for 2014. keep these in mind when you read the 2015 predictions.crash in bonds: last january, we were treated to a unanimous forecast of higher bond yields and lower bond prices. the year began with the 10-year yielding about 3 percent. it ended at 2.15 percent, confounding the experts. jim bianco of bianco research has been pointing out the money-losing futility of the bond bears for about five years.                                                                                                       inflation: the countryside is littered with the bodies of economists and fund managers alike, slain by their erroneous inflation calls. the call made in the financial times in january 2014 by michael aronstein deserves special mention. his mainstay marketfield fund (distributed by new york life investments) has been, as the ft observed, “the talk of the industry.” the reason: it quadrupled in size in 2013 to $18 billion, pulling in more money than any other actively managed mutual fund. as so often happens, chasing hot money managers leads to disaster: aronstein's wrong-way bet on inflation led the fund to lose 12.5 percent in 2014, a year when bonds were one of the best-performing asset classes.                                                                                                                                        stock-market crash: there have been so many erroneous calls for a stock-market crash that it's hard to choose which deserves special mention. but i am going to give you two that merit attention: the first comes from chapman university professor terry burnham, who predicted dow 5,000 before dow 20,000. he technically hasn't been proven wrong yet, but during the years he has repeated this forecast, the market has gained about 40 percent. that makes him wrong enough in my book. the second was this article in fortune , "why the bull market could end tomorrow." it was filled with forecasts explaining why “smart prognosticators” and “market timing precisionists” believed the top was just about in. that was some 2,000 points ago for the dow jones industrial average and 200 points for the standard & poor's 500 index.gold: i almost feel bad pointing out how awful the gold forecasts have been. but special mention must go to the loudest and highest forecast, and that means peter schiff of europacific capital. last april, schiff made the bold prediction that the “federal reserve’s quantitative-easing program will push gold to $5,000 an ounce .” how did he do? the shiny yellow metal began the year in the low $1,200s, rallied to $1,400, before plunging to $1,150. it closed 2014 just under $1,200 as the fed’s program of qe was ending. gold remains 80 percent or so lower than schiff’s target.oil: almost nobody forecast that the price of oil would be cut in half during 2014. the punditry completely missed this story. there was one noteworthy exception: gene epstein, in a march 2014 barron’s cover story, “ here comes $75 oil ,” got the broad strokes right. he noted that “the long-term outlook for global oil prices is lower, perhaps much lower, giving a strong boost to the u.s. economy while potentially crippling the economy of vladimir putin's russia. vast new discoveries of oil and natural gas in the u.s. and around the globe could drive the oil price to as low as $75 a barrel over the next five years from a current $100.” the timing may have been off somewhat, but that’s as good a prediction about oil as was made. it's notable especially because it was an outlier, and the rest of the world’s economic writers missed it.come back next year, and we will revisit the worst forecasts of 2015.to contact the author on this story:to contact the editor on this story:barry ritholtz is a bloomberg view columnist writing about finance, the economy and the business world. he is a professional money manager and started the big picture finance blog in 2003. read more.
 female cfos less inclined to risky business tax-dodging: u.s. studywashington (reuters) - female chief financial officers at u.s. corporations are less likely to adopt high-risk tax-avoidance strategies than their male counterparts, according to a study by an accounting group.the chances that a company would adopt a risky tax shelter were 17.4 percent lower with a female cfo, said the american accounting association, citing an academic analysis of 92 cases in which a woman replaced a man in that key executive role.the analysis was done by four accounting professors at rensselaer polytechnic institute (rpi) and fordham university. the association, which represents accounting academics, published the study in the latest issue of its twice-yearly journal."on the one hand, women cfos' caution with regard to extreme tax strategies is a strong point in their favor, given the financial and reputational damage firms can suffer from them," rpi's qiang wu said in a statement released on monday."on the other hand, aggressive tax avoidance has proved highly popular in many of the leading firms in corporate america, and reluctance to engage in it is likely to be viewed unfavorably in many places," wu said.about 11 percent of s&p 500-level cfos are women, while women constitute more than 60 percent of auditors and accountants in the united states, the association said.the professors analyzed cases of male-to-female cfo successions at s&p 1500 companies, focusing on 92 instances in which each cfo was in the job for at least three years.tax aggressiveness was gauged by the company's use of a high-risk tax shelter; its claims in financial statements of tax benefits not recognized by the internal revenue service (irs); and by a measure of the book-tax disparity between its publicly reported profits and claims made to the irs."by all three standards, women cfos proved to be significantly less aggressive in tax avoidance than their male predecessors," the statement said.further, it said, the professors found the effective tax rates of companies with female cfos were not meaningfully higher, suggesting that while women were more wary of high-risk tax avoidance, they had no problem with low-risk strategies.the study found "no evidence that sample female cfos behave differently from their male counterparts in less-risky tax-avoidance activities," the statement said.
 septima: my good friend omar, whom i love so dearly! you just ran into that tree!axiothea: and why are you walking about muttering to yourself with your eyes glued not to the beautiful mountain afternoon but to your smartphone?omar khayyam: thar she blows! three points off the larboard bow!! it’s the berne whale!!!sokrates: 48 hours ago it was generally expected that the swiss national bank would continue its large quantitative easing program for the foreseeable future, in order to hold the swiss frank at its peg of 1.2 to the euro. thursday morning it abandoned that policy, with results that were pretty exciting. people thought it might be a hoax. the swiss franc immediately rose in value from 1.2 to 0.87/€–with somebody very unwisely liquidating a short-chf position in a hurry–before settling in a trading range of 1.00-1.05/€. it is right now at 1.01. this is a tightening of monetary policy in europe–some fraction of the anticipated quantitative easing program of the ecb will now simply soak up the eurozone government bonds that the snb will not be buying. this is an instantaneous mark-to-market portfolio loss of about 100b chf for the snb. others outside switzerland who were short chf-denominated assets have probably lost 150b chf. people outside switzerland who were long chf-denominated assets have gained 250b chf. swiss exports will fall for the next two years. and switzerland is now highly likely to fall into a recession.sokrates: “confoederatio helvetica franc”–the formal name of switzerland’s currency.sokrates: just because you only put my–overwhelmingly rich, athenian-citizen, hellenic, male–friends in your dialogues does not mean that everyone has to follow your example.aristokles: but isn’t he a tentmaker, and a drunken poet?silenos: you have a problem with wine?erato: you have a problem with his–and my–type of poetry?el shaddai: you have a problem with people who live in tents, or who make them?septima: actually omar is not a tentmaker. his day job in bokhara is as a mathematician and a physicist–his treatise on demonstration of problems of algebra was absolutely groundbreaking…aristokles: but this is about finance!septima: and what else do underemployed physicists do in this degenerate age to pay the rent?glaukon: and “the berne whale”: what’s with that?. back in 2012 a number of traders noted that it was cheaper to buy credit default protection on the 125 companies that made up the cdx ig 9 index by buying the index than by buying protection on the 125 companies one by one. so they bought the index, sold its components short, and waited for the index to rise or the components to fall so they could close out their positions at a large profit. as of april, however, the gap between the price of cdx ig 9 and what the traders thought it should be and grown, and their bosses were asking them questions like: ‘what have you missed here?’it turned out that the london whale, jpmc’s bruno iksil, had gone long cdx ig 9, gotten underwater, and started rolling double-or-nothing. bruno’s bosses ina drew and jamie dimon then found they had a choice: they could go all-in, hold the portfolio until maturity, and either make a fortune if a fewer-than-expected number or lose jpmc if a greater-than-expected number of the cdx ig 9 125 companies went bankrupt. or they could eat their $6 billion loss and go home. and so the traders had their happy ending.‘similarly’–or so traders said–from late 2008 to today the us treasury bond has, from traders’ perspective, gone similarly haywire. the interest rate on the nominal 10-year treasury note was pushed down to 2.1%/year in the panic as the federal reserve opened the liquidity floodgates. as of now the note yields 1.84%/year as the federal reserve has continued to push and keep treasury bond prices way below ‘fundamentals’, and in the process expanded its balance sheet to $4 trillion.axiothea: i can hear the scare-quotes when you say ‘similarly’ and ‘fundamentals’. would you care to elucidate right now? or is elucidation the project of this dialogue?sokrates: elucidation is the project of this dialogue.sokrates: traders concluded that sooner or later the federal reserve would have to allow interest rates to return to fundamentals–that the policy of trying to keep interest rates away from fundamentals indefinitely was ‘unsustainable’–because unsustainable policies cannot be sustained indefinitely. and so traders sold us treasury bonds short, banked their positions, and sat back to wait to take their profits when the correction came…sokrates: exactly. they ran into the widowmaker. and they were puzzled. bruno iksil, after all, had been pulled up short by his boss ina drew and her boss jamie dimon’s unwillingness to risk betting jpmc on a single roll of the dice. ben bernanke, they thought, ought to have similarly been pulled up short by the risks entailed by permanent ‘disequilibrium’ easy-money policy. but ben bernanke and after him janet yellen have not been pulled up short by rising inflation and the fear it will rise further. they have no supervising ceo to tell them that they are running risks too-large to manage. they dominate the federal open market committee. and, the traders think, they are engaged in behavior as unprofessional as it would have been for jamie dimon and ina drew to tell bruno iksil: ‘you turn out to have made a large directional bet that we can sell unhedged protection and profit? let’s see if you are right: let it ride!’ and so they went public with their concerns about bernanke the washington super-whale just as the london whale’s counterparties and gone public, in search of someone who could tell first bernanke and then yellen that it was time to unwind the federal reserve’s balance sheet.sokrates: like ben bernanke and janet yellen at the federal reserve, the snb embarked on a super-easy-money policy–in switzerland’s case to minimize the damage to switzerland’s export sector it feared would result from a value of chf greater than 1.2/€. and up until thursday morning that super-easy-money policy was the cornerstone of snb plans, commitments, and forward-guidance communications. the snb said that it could and would sustain it indefinitely. now it is gone…omar khayyam: and in the process of its going switzerland now faces a near-term likelihood of recession, switzerland’s taxpayers will now get $100b/€ less of seigniorage from the snb…omar khayyam: central-bank commitments all across the north atlantic are now viewed with grave suspicion. those outside switzerland long chf are now 250 billion € richer. those outside switzerland short chf–polish homeowners with what they thought were cheap swiss mortgages and others–are now 150 b € poorer…aristokles: what could make the snb assign a positive benefit-cost value to this sudden action?sokrates: aristotles of stagira gives answers. i only ask questions. apollo’s oracle at delphi would not have said that i was wisest among the athenians were i so great a fool as to offer answers…omar khayyam: one perspective is provided by the very sharp matthew of alphaville, who writes that this is indeed a return to fundamentals:the whinging of swiss exporters… does not mean the policy change was an error….. ridiculously large current account balance…. export[ing] economic weakness… clearly engaged in currency manipulation…. the snb… argued… switzerland… a victim… just trying to shield itself from outside forces…. we’re skeptical…. [the] exchange rate that balances the flows of money in and out… [is] just might be a lot different than… swiss exporters [wish]…. swiss consumers won’t need to save as much…. imports should… rise… a boost to neighbor[s]…. exporters will be forced to become more competitive…. switzerland… has monetary sovereignty [that]… it used… for ill. the recent move by the snb could be the first step in switzerland’s long-awaited transition towards less savings and more consumption. swiss households should be pleased…hypatia: or we could say boosting its domestic employment while recompensing eurozone residents by providing them with the opportunity to buy well-made swiss stuff cheap. i never know what to do with these arguments that give only the costs while ignoring the benefits or give only the benefits while ignoring the costs…sokrates: perhaps the authors of such arguments should be put on trial for teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and making the worse appear the better cause, and so corrupting the youth of athens?barry: the snb’s quantitative easing program does have a zero-sum expenditure-switching aspect–boosting swiss at the expense of outsiders’ employment–and a zero-sum terms-of-trade aspect–boosting the well-being of outsiders who buy cheap swiss goods at the expense of swiss who sell their goods cheaply. but it also has a positive-sum component: by raising present and expected future world money stocks and by taking risk off of private-sector balance sheets, it is a global monetary stimulus.barry: there is indeed. but you can resolve disequilibria by balancing global demand up or balancing global demand down. this policy move balances down, a bad mistake in a world in which we have not an excess inflationary-gap level but a deficient deflationary-gap level of north atlantic demand.omar khayyam: another perspective is provided by the learned markus and harold of princetown, who see this as the triumph of destructive politics over central-bank credibility economics:the snb was not forced to act by a speculative run…. but domestic criticism of the snb’s large buildup of exchange-rate reserves (euro assets) was mounting…. swiss conservatives… fearing… eurozone government bonds were unsafe… agitated to… acquire gold…. the prospect of large-scale quantitative easing by the european central bank… intensified the political pressure…. economists have… little stud[ied]… when political pressure becomes unbearable…. politics… prevailed over central-bank commitments…. the uncoupling from the euro came as a huge shock…. the risks created… have a fat tail. the negative effects for the swiss economy… may already be showing that abandoning the euro peg was not a good idea…axiothea: i do not think that that is quite accurate. there is an economic argument–that a very large balance sheet is risky because of currency mismatch. if the value of the euro collapses for some reason, swiss taxpayers will be left holding the bag–and so it is better to hold a stable store of value like gold than euros on your central bank’s balance sheet, and not let your central bank’s balance sheet grow too large.charlie: guarding against the danger that the euro will collapse–that there will be a large outburst of inflation in the eurozone that will turn euros into waste paper that buy little or nothing in the way of useful commodities–seems to me to be like buying fire extinguishers instead of wood for your ark when it has been raining for forty days and forty nights. do not expect me to approve of what old ralph used to call: ‘crying: “fire! fire!” in noah’s flood’.glaukon: but the political argument? if politics will place a limit on monetary expansion, it is better not to push those limits and so generate additional uncertainty, confusion, and risk?axiothea: i am still having a difficult time understanding why there should be political pressure to exit the euro on the side of appreciation. the value of the euro is not going to be inflated away. having the swiss price level move in the long run in step with the price levels of its neighbors seems not a bad thing. and as long as there is excess demand for chf-denominated assets at a parity of 1.2/€, satisfying that demand is a source of resources for switzerland: print chf, buy interest-paying bonds with it, and pocket the interest. a central bank that can print the currency people want to hold can and should be the ultimate patient investor. print money, buy bonds with it, and hold them to maturity is not usually thought of as a risky activity.axiothea: so the one economic risk–that the swiss economy will be prevented from undergoing deflation driven by a steadily-appreciating exchange rate–is not a risk at all given that eurozone inflation is simply not in the cards. and the other economic risk–that the swiss will be forced to unwind their position at an inopportune time at which eurozone bond yields are low rather than hold the bonds to maturity–is a risk only if goldbug politicians rile up voters and eliminate central bank independence. that second is a risk, i agree. but why are there goldbug politicians to rile up voters and eliminate the independence of a central bank that seems to be doing a good job of managing the swiss economy in the interest of maximum employment and price stability?omar khayyam: perhaps a full-fledged red-meat believer like jim rogers can add some insight. as quoted by hayley hudson:‘i explained carefully and at length that it was coming and why,’ he said in an email to business insider.i am still astonished they would ever have done something so foolish, but politicians throughout history have always done some amazingly foolish things…. switzerland has… long provided monetary refuge from the wealthy evading the consequences of political turmoil in europe, from french nobility fleeing the guillotine to the jews escaping germany…. banks are supposed to keep your affairs quiet…. in america… that is no longer the case. the government can look… anywhere it wants…. [even] in switzerland [it] is not as sacrosanct as it once was…. [people] want stability… a sound currency… [what] the swiss franc has always offered. the question, now, is whether that is going to last…. every citizen of switzerland benefits from a stronger currency. our dental technician down in geneva is… happy…. but the big exporters get on the phone and the government takes their call….the bank’s currency manipulation will turn out to be disastrous. one of two things is going to happen. in the first scenario… the snb will just have to keep printing and printing and printing…. if you debase the franc, eventually nobody will want it. you will have eroded its value…. the money will move to singapore or hong kong, and the swiss finance industry will wither up and disappear. the alternative scenario is… [in 2010] the swiss central bank, after quadrupling its foreign currency holdings, abandoned the effort…. the country lost $21 billion…. the economist has described the swiss currency as:an innocent bystander in a world where the eurozone’s politicians have failed to sort out their sovereign-debt crisis, america’s economic policy seems intent on spooking investors and the japanese have intervened to hold down the value of the yen.’all of which is true, but i think the problem runs deeper than that. the swiss for decades had a semi monopoly on finance. and as a result they have become less and less competent. the entire economy has been overprotected…. i still have those original swiss francs that i bought in 1970…. had i kept the money in an american savings account, it would have gone down 80 percent against the franc.axiothea: so jim rogers says that either the swiss government will print so many chf that it will lose its value, and finance will leave switzerland because of the debasement of the currency; or the swiss government will print too few chf and so its value will keep rising and it will lose money on its interventions. is that correct?axiothea: but can’t it print the golden mean? not so much that the swiss franc loses value vis-a-vis other competing potential safe nominal assets, but not so few as to require a painful grinding unemployment-generating deflation of the swiss export sector?walter: it should print the ‘natural’ amount to meet the needs of trade, clearly. the problem is that rogers provides no guidance as to what the ‘natural’ amount is…milton: i used to think a steady k% growth rate for broad monetary aggregates would provide the best attainable feedback rule for approximating the ‘natural’ stock of high-powered money. but that position seems less and less defensible with each passing day…charlie: the best way to understand this, i think, is as an exaggerated version of the rubin doctrine that “a strong dollar is in america’s interest”. for jim rogers, a stronger chf than currently exists is always in switzerland’s interest–in the interest of everyone in switzerland, of the dental technician in geneva, with the exception of a few big exporters who want chf depreciated below its “natural” leve…barry: and what is the “natural” level of the chf, in jim rogers’s view?sokrates: if unemployment afflicts only the non-enterprising who deserve it, then for anyone long chf–as jim rogers is–there is no “natural” level of the chf. stronger is always better…glaukon: but surely very few people think like jim rogers?walter: very few people think like jim rogers, but a lot of people have elements in their thought that partake of the rogers-nature. we saw this in the views of the very sharp matthew c. klein, who thinks that switzerland’s export surplus is a signal that the swiss franc is in disequilibrium, rather than a signal that the supply of safe assets in the world economy is in disequilibrium–too low, needs to be boosted, and because it has not been boosted to its equilibrium level there is this knock-on effect on the value of chf.omar khayyam: indeed, walter, you seem considerably wiser than your successors at your little weekly magazine:some analysts speculated that political pressure may have caused the swiss to abandon the policy…. others felt that the snb may be expecting the european central bank to announce quantitative easing… weaken the euro and require even more intervention to cap the franc. already in a hole, the snb may have decided to stop digging…. 60% of swiss exports go to the euro zone and the united states…. the [swiss] equity market has plunged in response…. the whole episode is a useful reminder that currencies are a zero sum game; if some countries pursue policies (such as quantitative easing) likely to weaken their exchange rate, other currencies must gain. the ripple effect can be significant…barry: am i allowed to point out that the chf strengthened not because anticipated ecb qe is zero-sum, but because the snf abandoned its exchange rate-feedback qe program itself? repeat after me: relative policies determine exchange rates; the absolute north atlantic-wide total values of interest rate and qe policies determine the monetary stance of the north atlantic as a whole. and there is a distinct positive-sum aspect to qe: few now are unhappy with the consequences of japan’s current qe policy, for example…sokrates: not “the end of the snb’s qe policy reduces an intra-european distortion at the price of increasing the disequilibrium safe-asset shortage, and so carries the world economy away from its best self”?a distortion has been removed from international markets…. a recurrent puzzle of the eurozone sovereign crisis was that the euro never weakened much, despite the fears for its existence. we can now see that the snb at least deserved part of the blame…. eurozone competitiveness should rise, while the us grows less competitive. this would be healthy…. the snb… had every reason to fight the ‘currency war’… with greater fervour than others. abandoning that fight, with inflation heading towards zero and growth low, tacitly accepts that switzerland will have a recession…. the most lasting lesson… investors… have been shown there are limits to how large a central bank’s balance sheet should grow–and hence… how much they should trust central banks…axiothea: it is as though switzerland has bravely sacrificed itself–accepted a recession, and thrown away 100 billion €–for the sake of helping the adjustment of the eurozone…sokrates: accepted a recession and thrown away 100 billion € i get. helping the adjustment of the eurozone?axiothea: a higher value for chf against the dollar, a lower value of the € against the dollar, more exports from the eurozone to the us and switzerland, fewer exports from switzerland to the eurozone and the us, fewer exports from the us to the eurozone…barry: but fewer safe assets in the north atlantic economy as a whole–hence a greater north atlantic-wide deflationary safe asset-shortage gap–less trust in the ecb’s willingness and power to keep its qe commitments, and a world seen to be a more dangerous place and hence one in which the demand for safe assets is greater. i do not see how this makes the ecb’s task easier. a lower € is a plus for the merchants of hamburg and amsterdam and the manufacturers of the rhineland. but europe as a whole–including switzerland–is surely a loser. and i don’t see how the export benefits outweigh the monetary-credibility minuses even for the eurozone considered in isolation.omar khayyam: and then there are those who believe that the policy of pegging to the euro at 1.2/€ was a reasonable one, that if the snb has abandoned that policy for economic reasons it has made a big mistake, and if it has abandoned it for political reasons that shows a major failure of democratic governance.did the snb score an own goal? francly, yes: “1. the removal of the 1.20 floor on the chf-euro exchange rate was a mistake. 2. superior policy alternatives existed. 3. the old regime was indefinitely sustainable. 4. removing the lower bound on nominal interest rates would have been the best choice. this can be done one of three ways. 5. the economic damage can be limited by restoring the exchange rate floor at a level not below the old one, and/or by eliminating the lower bound on nominal interest rates. 6. the rest of the world can learn from the snb’s experience with a -0.75% deposit rate.”what does the end of the swiss peg tell us about central banks?: the interesting question is why the central bank ended the cap…. as a result of ending the peg, the swiss franc has appreciated substantially, from 1.2 chf per euro to around 1 chf per euro, even though the central bank has lowered the interest rate on sight deposit account balances that exceed a threshold to −0.75%. there seem to be two alternative interpretations. the first is that the central bank simply made a serious mistake. for some, the mistake was to impose the cap in the first place. if you do not take that view, and assuming the market’s immediate move is not a very temporary overreaction, the large appreciation partly undoes the benefits of the original peg. either way, a major mistake has been made at some point…. the second interpretation is that the open ended money creation that the policy implied just became too much for the central bank. in theory the central bank could go on creating money and buying euros forever…. if it ever decided… there was too much swiss money around, the policy could be reversed by selling euros. the central bank might make a loss… but economists generally dismiss this as a non-problem…. but perhaps central banks do not see things this way (ht mt), because they worry about the political consequences of such losses. if this is the case, then this is something that economists need to respond to in one way or another…and we have paul krugman::  these days it’s fairly widely accepted that it’s very hard for central banks to get traction at the zero lower bound unless they can convince investors that there has been a regime change…. on thursday, however, the swiss national bank managed a credible regime change. unfortunately, it was a regime change in the wrong direction. by throwing in the towel on the peg to the euro, the snb immediately convinced markets that its previous apparent commitment to do whatever it takes to avoid deflation is null and void. and this expectations effect trumped the concrete, immediate policy of drastically negative interest rates on reserves…. having in effect thrown away its credibility… it’s hard to see how the snb can get it back…. there will be spillovers: the snb’s wimp-out will make life harder for monetary policy in other countries…. all in all, quite a day’s work.: switzerland’s monetary travails illustrate in miniature just how hard it is to fight the deflationary vortex now dragging down much of the world economy…. in 2008 we entered a looking-glass world…. in many cases, economic virtues became vices: willingness to save became a drag on investment, fiscal probity a route to stagnation… having a reputation for safe banks and sound money… a major liability…. in 2011, the swiss national bank tried a psychological tactic… announced that it would set a minimum value for the euro…. and for three years it worked. but on thursday the swiss suddenly gave up. we don’t know exactly why; nobody i know believes the official explanation, that it’s a response to a weakening euro. but it seems likely that a fresh wave of safe-haven money was making the effort to keep the franc down too expensive. if you ask me, the swiss just made a big mistake. but… switzerland isn’t the important issue. what’s important, instead, is the demonstration of just how hard it is to fight the deflationary forces that are now afflicting much of the world…omar khayyam: and perhaps the learned edward harrison sums it up best:the swiss franc, traditionally a safe-haven… rose some 30 percent over the course of the the european sovereign debt crisis… a huge blow to near-term growth in switzerland…. the snb’s balance sheet is now about 500 billion francs,  80 percent of [annual] gross domestic product…. this expansion has become too much for the snb to bear politically. the swiss pride themselves on sound monetary policy–and a balance sheet of this size due to currency intervention just isn’t the quintessential hallmark of sound money…. in a perfect world, a central bank could have a balance sheet that is equivalent to… even 200 percent… [of annual] gdp… take mark-to-market losses on those assets… the easy monetary policy of a currency war could be like a coordinated devaluation. but in the real world, it’s not. central banks move unilaterally, due to their own narrow political and economic exigencies…. the world is addicted to monetary stimulus. and central banks are doing their best to meet that addiction…. monetary policy is in an abnormal state. and this has created serious macro imbalances…. the swiss franc move is just the scary canary.hyman: i don’t like the “addiction” metaphor. the world’s central banks are not pushers. they are, instead, shoring up the foundations of a building that is sinking due to improper banking and fiscal foundations. no, stop-gap shoring-up timbers are not meant to be permanent. but you do not want to take them away until the proper concrete has been poured for the banking and fiscal foundations so that full employment, balanced growth, and price stability are consistent with monetary-policy normalization…aristokles: did the snb expect this? did they possibly expect their move to negative interest rates on deposits to weaken the chf by as much as the removal of expected future qe to maintain the peg would strengthen it?glaukon: that is my guess. but we really do not know, do we?sokrates: perhaps the best note on which to end! but i cannot help but direct all of you to one more passage:“one trade structure i have always liked is the peg break…. if i had had the confidence to put it on in eurchf…. sell 1.2000 eur puts chf calls and buy twice as many 1.1750 or there about euro puts choosing the period to make this 2×1 put spread at zero premium. the payoff being zero if no break, but if there is to be a break i lose between 1.15 and 1.20, but make on everything below. the theory being that when pegs break they don’t mess around….i had complete faith in what i was told by the snb with respect to their attitude towards the everlasting floor…. why did i have faith in what the snb said? because removing the prop of central bank credence in the midst of a market that is completely controlled by central banks and the expectations of what they will do to save the world leaves a financial world orphaned…. we have to question the worth of analysing fed dots or every word from draghi…. i feel betrayed and i feel confused. how could they do this to me?….the snb have stepped back from an impending wall of euro about to hit the market through [ecb] qe and they are avoiding future costs in continuing the policy…. the [ecb] qe… is going to provide a massive bid for european bonds into which, should they chose, the snb can hand their holdings painlessly…. how ironic if market positioning looking for the ecb qe to support their long bund positions is usurped by the snb has filling their bid….to summarise the potential reasoning for the snb removing the floor and in the process undermining all faith in their future commitments:to get out of the way of up to eur 1trillion of eu qe.yields are so low on their reserve holdings there is no cost benefit.eu qe will provide a bid into which to exit their existing holdings.sokrates: i cannot but feel that (5) was the most important reason in the snb’s mind for it to do this now–but do remember why apollo claims that i am the wisest of the athenians: i do not think that i know things that i do not know…
 history suggests that 2015 will bring numerous reasons to be cheerful. so long as we don’t go on a spending spreeyears ending in 15 (or 65) have often been good ones to be british. in january, we celebrate 750 years since simon de montfort first summoned parliament to westminster. in june, we mark the 800th anniversary of making kings subject to the law in magna carta. three days later it’s off to waterloo for the 200th birthday of the battle.there’s more. in october, we cry god for harry, england and st george, and beat the french again at the 600th anniversary of agincourt. november, for those with any fireworks left, marks the 300th anniversary of arguably the last battle
 
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 i used to work for banks. now i write about them, and about finance and economics generally. although i originally trained as a musician and singer, i worked in banking for 17 years and did an mba at cass business school in london, where i specialized in financial risk management. i’m the author of the coppola comment finance & economics blog, which is a regular feature on the financial times's alphaville blog and has been quoted in the economist, the wall street journal, the new york times and the guardian. i am also associate editor at the online magazine pieria and a frequent commentator on financial matters for the bbc. and i still sing, and teach. after all, there is more to life than finance.the author is a forbes contributor. the opinions expressed are those of the writer.
 a lack of tampons in argentina over the past few weeks is due to a surge in demand caused by irresponsible media reports, commerce secretary augusto costa said, denying that import controls were to blame.“there was a sort of tampons run,” costa said in a radio del plata interview late yesterday. “it was induced by media operations.”three pharmacies in the buenos aires neighborhoods of palermo and puerto madero had no tampons today, and “tampons run” was trending on twitter in argentina. mercadolibre, a shopping website, showed a surge in listings for tampons, with packets of 20 being sold for 110 pesos ($12.80).the government restricts imports, requiring authorization from regulators to bring in goods, in an effort to curb the decline in international reserves, which have fallen 40 percent since their high in 2011. miguel ponce, the chair of the argentine chamber of importers, blamed the tampon shortage on the government, saying on radio mitre today that the central bank owes importers about $5.5 billion for authorized purchases.costa said companies supplying the product couldn’t meet demand because of “logistical issues,” and that the shortages aren’t related to import restrictions. the three main suppliers in the country import the product from brazil , he said.“the current situation is not sustainable, as the government is avoiding selling foreign currency in the fx market only by heavily repressing imports,” guillermo mondino, the head of emerging-market strategy at citigroup inc., wrote in a report today. “external financing is necessary to normalize this situation.”there was a “total restriction of foreign exchange” from dec. 20 to jan. 5, which explains shortages in some products, including tampons, ponce said. the peso weakened 0.1 percent in that period and now trades at 8.59 per dollar.central bank president alejandro vanoli denied restrictions in the authorization and payment of imports and said the monetary authority approved $1.3 billion between those dates.to contact the reporter on this story: camila russo in buenos aires at crusso15@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: brendan walsh at bwalsh8@bloomberg.net philip sanderspress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 investors snapped up dollars, pushing the greenback to its highest level against major currencies since september 2003, as they ramped up bets the u.s. economy will pull ahead of the rest of the world this year, with the federal reserve in the driver’s seat.but as the value of the dollar rises against the currencies of some of the country’s biggest trading partners, so do the risks to america’s manufacturing and tourism sectors and to broader financial markets, economists and industry officials say. another worry: the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 sure tech companies can get some of the work done remotely. but that is no reason to keep people out of the usa. the best programmers (and other highly skilled people) are going to be paying taxes as well as paying people to mow their lawns, build their houses, and educate their children. it is a win for everyone. as far as training people in the us, of course we should be doing that, but just because we open the doors to some skilled people, doesn’t mean we can’t train at home at the same time. besides, getting work done remotely doesn’t provide for any more local training than allowing immigration.i was working for a consulting company 25+ yrs ago where all work was “on location” in temporary project offices. 4 times a year we would have a company wide meet-up and sometimes project meets as well. what we didn’t have then was the internet or even mobile phones but we did have collaboration and project management tools. so distributed workforces are not new.but now it is very much easier to work remotely with all the technology. the irony for many people is they would get more “work” done if they were not in a centralised office with all of the “meetings” and interruptions.a distributed workforce works well when there is a strong shared culture, excellent collaboration tools, a project focus and a high level of trust. open source projects already have the culture which helps. many companies are better organised into smaller project teams and real economies of scale only apply in say a manufacturing situation.i would argue that a distributed environment with project teams in close collaboration is just the post industrial revolution model becoming the new norm.  what has held it back before is better collaboration tools. for knowledge based work – especially it will become the norm in my view.remote working is a niche manufacturing process that either goes really well but doesn’t last, or slowly works to the detriment of the worker.  here’s why…intellectual products require a higher degree of integrated culture, philosophy, virtues, and trust.  the organization’s competitive advantage is made of these connections.i can purchase an sae standard #10-24 x 1″ ss pan head, phillips-drive screw from 1,000 places and i don’t care much about the philosophy or principles of the people that made it.  because it’s standardized, i know it’s going to fit.you don’t want this to be true of you, your work, or your company.  collectively your intellectual products require the shared tribal knowledge that comes from working together.if you are working remotely, it means the type of work you do doesn’t require as much organizational insight and is subject to being commoditized.you are one step away from making screws and competing on a commodity basis.either that, or you are so specialized that the company fears it can’t survive without you.this works really well in the short run, but it ignores how companies respond to fear and risk.as long as intellectual products are made by human beings, these people will need to be together in thought and location.
 there's a reason why so many local newspapers focus on crime and accidents - and a website in southern russia has found out the hard way.the city reporter , based in rostov-on-don, says it lost two-thirds of its readers after deciding to publish only good news for just one day. "do you feel like you are surrounded by negative information? you don't want to read the news in the morning?" the website had asked its readers. "do you think good news is a myth? we'll try to prove the opposite tomorrow!" on 1 december, as promised, the website carried only positive headlines. "no disruption on the roads despite snow," declared one. another announced that an underpass would be built in time for victory day.but as uplifting as they were intended to be, the good news stories sent readership numbers plummeting. "we looked for positives in the day's news, and we think we found them," wrote deputy editor viktoriya nekrasova on facebook . "but it looks like almost nobody needs them. that's the trouble." the following day, the city reporter decided to return to more reliable staples: car crashes and burst water pipes.
rt @maxcroser: 'anyone depressed about the world needs to look at these charts'

 you have successfully emailed the post.it's easy to focus on everything that's going wrong in the world.if the media coverage of isis and ebola has shown us anything, it's that we're easily seduced by fear-mongering.but dr. max roser wants to remind us the world is getting better. that's why roser, a fellow at the institute for new economic thinking, created ourworldindata , a website that tells the visual story of how the world is changing."we are far away from an ideal world — we should work to end poverty, to end hunger, to end war — but in all of these aspects we are making progress," roser wrote in an email to business insider. roser hopes people will find his work encouraging and energize them to make positive change.here are 25 charts from roser's website  that show just how much global living standards have improved.the percent of the world's population living in extreme poverty is declining drastically.
 el cuerpo sin vida del fiscal que hoy debía declarar ante la comisión de legislación penal, fue encontrado en el baño de su vivienda. hay hermetismo respecto de qué fue lo que pasó.conmoción por la muerte del fiscal nisman: el análisis de nicolás wiñazkiel fiscal alberto nisman, quien estaba a cargo de la investigación contra el atentado a la amia , fue encontrado muerto en su departamento de la torre le parc, en puerto madero, un día antes de la declaración que iba a relizar ante el congreso por su denuncia de un pacto del gobierno para dejar libres a los iraníes acusados del atentado. aunque no se conocieron los detalles del hecho, trascendió que su cuerpo apareció sin vida en el baño, aparentemente en la bañadera.las primeras informaciones indicaron que tenía un disparo en la cabeza de un revólver de pequeño calibre. sobre su escritorio estaba la documentación que el fiscal iba a presentar hoy en diputados. la confirmación de la muerte la dio el juez que invtervino en la causa, manuel de campos, y las primeras hipótesis hablaban de un "supuesto suicidio".todavía hay muchas dudas con respecto a lo que pasó. "les pido cautela y que esperen los informen. en los próximos días sabremos las causas de la muerte. encontramos un arma", contó la fiscal viviana fein, una de las primeras en llegar.el fiscal tenía asignados para su protección a diez efectivos de la policía federal. ellos informaron que el viernes lo dejaron en su casa y el sábado no salió en todo el día. nisman les había pedido que lo fueran a buscar el domingo. cuando llegaron al departamento, la custodia no obtuvo respuesta, y al no encontrar a nisman, llamaron a su madre, quien fue la que ingresó al departamento y halló el cuerpo.nisman debía prestar testiminio esta tarde en la comisión de legislación penal de la cámara de diputados por su denuncia contra la presidenta, cristina fernández de kirchner y varios miembros cercanos al gobierno por un plan para encubrir a los iraníes acusados de participar del atentado, en el que murieron 85 personas.desde temprano, en el lugar estuvieron el secretario de seguridad, sergio berni, el jefe de la policia federal, román di santo, y el jefe de prefectura naval.  a las 5, después de que un vehículo de transporte forense de la policía federal trasladó el cuerpo del fiscal, el ministerio de seguridad publicó un comunicado de prensa en el cual  ratificó la información que había trascendido. "se informa que el fiscal federal alberto nisman fue hallado sin vida el día domingo por la noche en su departamento del piso 13 de la torre le parc, en el barrio de puerto madero de la ciudad autónoma de buenos aires".
 drew niv, founding partner and chief executive officer of fxcm inc., center, attends the opening bell ceremony at the new york stock exchange on dec. 2, 2010. closedrew niv, founding partner and chief executive officer of fxcm inc., center, attends... read moredrew niv, founding partner and chief executive officer of fxcm inc., center, attends the opening bell ceremony at the new york stock exchange on dec. 2, 2010.leucadia national corp. gave fxcm inc. a $300 million cash infusion, extending a lifeline to the currency brokerage hobbled by the swiss central bank’s decision to let the franc trade freely against the euro.leucadia, which owns new york-based investment bank jefferies group, extended fxcm a two-year, $300 million senior secured term loan with an initial coupon of 10 percent, according to a statement friday. the transaction allows fxcm, the largest u.s. retail foreign-exchange broker, to “continue normal operations,” according to the statement.fxcm warned thursday that client losses due to the swiss national bank’s action threatened the broker’s compliance with capital rules. the company, which handled $1.4 trillion of trades for individuals last quarter, said it was owed $225 million by clients.shares of new york-based fxcm had tumbled as much as 92 percent friday morning before they were halted, pending an announcement. leucadia shares climbed 0.9 percent to $21.84 as of 12:24 p.m. in new york, when trading was halted.fxcm isn’t the only casualty from the franc’s sudden move. global brokers nz ltd., which is based in auckland, said losses from the surge are forcing it to shut down.“the majority of clients in a franc position were on the losing side and sustained losses amounting to far greater than their account equity,” global brokers nz director david johnson said in a statement dated jan. 15 and posted on the website of affiliated company excel markets.the franc surged as much as 41 percent versus the euro on thursday, the biggest gain on record, and climbed more than 15 percent against all of the more than 150 currencies tracked by bloomberg. dealers in london at banks including deutsche bank ag, ubs ag and goldman sachs group inc. battled to process orders yesterday when the snb surprised investors by ending its three-year policy of capping the franc at 1.20 a euro.the u.s. commodity futures trading commission lets investors put down as little as 2 percent of the value of their foreign-exchange bets. brokers may get stuck with the balance of losses suffered by clients who used leverage, borrowed on credit cards, or did both to bet against the franc.fxcm chief executive officer drew niv , in remarks published in bloomberg markets magazine’s december issue, said individual currency traders are enticed by the chance to control large positions with little money down.“currencies don’t move that much,” he said. “so if you had no leverage, nobody would trade.”fxcm has its own experience saving an embattled trading firm. last year, it acquired some assets from infinium capital holdings llc, a high-frequency trading firm based in chicago. the trading desks it bought became part of v3 markets llc.to contact the reporters on this story: matthew monks in new york at mmonks1@bloomberg.net ; david evans in los angeles at davidevans@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: mohammed hadi at mhadi1@bloomberg.net ; nick baker at nbaker7@bloomberg.net nick bakerpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 company is sticking with figure it gave in 2012 but stresses it's "over" that amount. how much over, google's not saying.danny sullivan on january 16, 2015 at 9:00 amhow many searches does google handle per day, month or year? the company is notorious for not regularly sharing such figures. but we now know that it remains at least more than one trillion, the first update since google last shared over two years ago.a stat in steven levy’s excellent story on backchannel yesterday, how google search dealt with mobile , said that google handles over 3 billion searches per day.it was a rare sighting of a queries-per-day figure presumably from google, which had search executives quoted extensively in the story. at 3 billion queries per day, that has google doing 90 billion per month or 1.1 trillion searches per year.however, it turns out that google didn’t provide a figure for 2015. instead, that stat is the same google previously released back in august 2012. then, google revealed it was doing 100 billion searches per month , or 1.2 trillion per year (the 100 million difference is effectively due to rounding).google confirmed to search engine land that it did give backchannel the 2012 figure — over 100 billion per month, which google rounds to 3 billion per day — for its story. google told us that the figure still holds for today since “over” leaves things open-ended (and by implication, higher). google also said not to expect an updated figure any time soon.can we guess at google’s query growth?if google’s not talking growth, how about we make our own guesstimate?comscore provides its own third-party estimate of how many searches the major search engines handle. for 2012, comscore had google doing roughly 110 billion searches per month worldwide  – not that far off what google itself was claiming.unfortunately, comscore hasn’t released updated worldwide figures since then. we’re checking on this. but it does release figures for the us each month. that provides a fairly conservative way to benchmark google’s growth.comscore’s most recent figures for december 2014 have just come out  (the link might not work because comscore oddly pulled the figures soon after they were published), showing that google handled 12.4 billion searches on desktop in the united states. two years ago , for december 2012, google was at 11.8 billion. that’s a five percent gain.working from that, if google’s seen a similar five percent gain for its worldwide searches, then it would now be doing 105 billion searches per month or 1.26 trillion per year – 1.3 trillion rounded.that’s actually not much of a gain over two years — which may cause some to start wondering about “peak search.” thus, two important caveats:google’s growth with mobile searches, which comscore doesn’t count, might be highereither of these could be giving google more growth that our guesstimate. or not — only google really knows, and it’s not telling.join your peers at search engine land’s smx west conference for three days of tactical sessions, keynotes and clinics on paid search, seo, mobile search and more. early bird rates expire january 30th – register now and save $200. send your team and save an additional 15-35%. register today !danny sullivan is a founding editor of search engine land. he’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. danny also serves as chief content officer for third door media , which publishes search engine land and produces the smx: search marketing expo conference series . he has a personal blog called daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). he can be found on facebook , google + and microblogs on twitter as @dannysullivan .
 brokerage fxcm gets rescue package; deutsche bank and citigroup suffer big hitsbanks, brokers and individual investors were left with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses a day after an unexpected surge in the swiss franc sent shock waves through markets.fxcm inc., a major u.s. retail foreign-exchange broker, emerged as the biggest victim so far and had to be rescued by an emergency $300 million lifeline from investment firm leucadia national corp.shares of fxcm, one of the largest retail...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 las vegas — too bad i can’t use a drone to help me cover the international ces, the giant consumer electronics show. with its high ceilings, the las vegas convention center provides plenty of airspace. and i might actually get to see everything, for a change.but there’s no indoor flying here, except in special zones fenced off with nylon nets. the drone makers are fine with this sensible precaution. but they’re losing patience with federal rules that are crippling the us drone market.for the first time, the ces this year gave unmanned aircraft their own special area on the show floor, and no wonder. worldwide, demand for civilian drones is surging. aviation analysts at teal group figure that $10 billion will be spent on them worldwide over the next decade. but the federal aviation administration is taking its sweet time drawing up regulations to govern drone use. hence the annoyance among drone vendors who would otherwise be having the time of their lives.they are running late,” said yannick levy, executive vice president of parrot, a french company that is one of the world’s top drone makers. the faa was supposed to propose guidelines last year. now they are expected in the next few weeks. even then, public comments and revisions will follow. the process could stretch into 2016 and beyond.meanwhile, hundreds of drones are at work outside of the united states, inspecting railroads and electric power lines, mapping farmland, and surveying real estate. the german package-delivery company dhl uses them to make regular runs to an island in the north sea. america’s military drones taught the world how to make robots fly. but in commercial applications, europe is taking the lead.still, this is a consumer electronics show, and american hobbyists are snapping up drones by the thousands. many of them are manufactured by parrot, which made its name building car electronics. levy said the company wanted to dabble in radio-controlled toys, but miniature cars seemed boring. so it opted for a flying machine. the result was the ar drone, a one-pound, four-rotor helicopter with a built-in video camera. parrot has sold 750,000 of them, and its drone business brings in more revenue than the automotive gear.at the ces, parrot showed off the bebop, a quadricopter that seems underpriced at $499. the bebop can act as a flying wi-fi hot spot. the high-definition camera in the nose features near-perfect image stabilization. one bebop was mounted on a mechanical platform that rocked it sharply up and down, but the camera image, displayed on a nearby tablet, barely moved. filmmakers should buy hundreds of these.a parrot minidrone with headlights was shown at the consumer electronics show in las vegas.but they will need a special faa dispensation to use them. in the united states, it is legal to fly drones as a hobby, as long as you follow some simple rules. for example, you can’t go above 400 feet, you must keep the drone within sight, and you’re not supposed to fly near airports or over large groups of people. but here’s the strictest rule: you can’t fly drones for money. if my photographer wife uses a camera-equipped drone to shoot our church picnic, no problem. if she’s paid to get aerial shots of a wedding party, look out.“if someone can make sense of this, i’m open to hearing it,” said michael drobac, executive director of the small uav coalition, a tech industry group that’s urging the faa to loosen up.spokesman ian gregor said the faa is granting case-by-case exemptions for commercial drone use, with 14 issued so far. “we are introducing unmanned aircraft into america’s airspace incrementally and with the interest of safety first,” he said.indeed, if drones aren’t used safely, the skies could rain robots. parrot accidentally proved that with its ces floor show tuesday. six bebop drones emerged from behind red curtains and began an automated dance, hovering and swooping, missing each other by inches.then came a clattering crash. a drone had fallen to the floor. i’m not sure whether it clipped one of its fellow dancers or bumped the safety net surrounding the stage. either way, the show went on.imagine a flock of package-delivery drones slamming into each other over the back bay, and you can see why the faa is nervous.still, there are plenty of missions where commercial drones could be safely used right now. i wish journalism was one of them.
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 people are completely misunderstanding this nypd slowdown. here’s the key bit:citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.drug arrests by cops assigned to the nypd’s organized crime control bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.all of these, except maybe the drug arrests — and probably including those too — are basically revenue offenses.  by not arresting here, the cops are starving the city for revenue.  the knoxville police do the same thing when they’re crosswise with the city; they stop writing tickets.  the real scandal isn’t that nyc is being denied law enforcement now, it’s that much of that “law enforcement” is really just a system designed to squeeze money out of the citizenry.
 this interview is part of the playboy interview: moguls , a new ebook anthology that also includes conversations with jeff bezos, sergey brin and larry page, david geffen, and more. buy it today at amazon .playboy: we survived 1984, and computers did not take over the world, though some people might find that hard to believe. if there’s any one individual who can be either blamed or praised for the proliferation of computers, you, the 29-year-old father of the computer revolution, are the prime contender. it has also made you wealthy beyond dreams—your stock was worth almost a half billion dollars at one point, wasn’t it?jobs: i actually lost $250,000,000 in one year when the stock went down. [laughs]playboy: you can laugh about it?jobs: i’m not going to let it ruin my life. isn’t it kind of funny? you know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten years. but it makes me feel old, sometimes, when i speak at a campus and i find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that i’m a millionaire.when i went to school, it was right after the sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in. now students aren’t even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much. they certainly are not letting any of the philosophical issues of the day take up too much of their time as they study their business majors. the idealistic wind of the sixties was still at our backs, though, and most of the people i know who are my age have that engrained in them forever.playboy: we were going to say guys like you and steve wozniak, working out of a garage only ten years ago. just what is this revolution you two seem to have started?jobs: we’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. the petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. it changed the texture of society in most ways. this revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. it’s very crude today, yet our macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. what will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? this revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. we’re on the forefront.playboy: maybe we should pause and get your definition of what a computer is. how do they work?jobs: computers are actually pretty simple. we’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the interview]. let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. i would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. i might say, “scoot sideways two meters off the bench. stand erect. lift left foot. bend left knee until it is horizontal. extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. if you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this café, you would appear to be a magician: you could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and i’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. that’s exactly what a computer does. it takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—“go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. at 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.that’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work. most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. you don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. you don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use macintosh—but you asked. [laughs]playboy: obviously, you believe that computers are going to change our personal lives, but how would you persuade a skeptic? a holdout?jobs: a computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. it can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. there are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. we have no idea how far it’s going to go. right now, computers make our lives easier. they do work for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. they increase the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some of that by broadening our possibilities. as things progress, they’ll be doing more and more for us.playboy: how about some concrete reasons to buy a computer today? an executive in your industry recently said, “we’ve given people computers, but we haven’t shown them what to do with them. i can balance my checkbook faster by hand than on my computer.” why should a person buy a computer?jobs: there are different answers for different people. in business, that question is easy to answer: you really can prepare documents much faster and at a higher quality level, and you can do many things to increase office productivity. a computer frees people from much of the menial work. besides that, you are giving them a tool that encourages them to be creative. remember, computers are tools. tools help us do our work better.in education, computers are the first thing to come along since books that will sit there and interact with you endlessly, without judgment. socratic education isn’t available anymore, and computers have the potential to be a real breakthrough in the educational process when used in conjunction with enlightened teachers. we’re in most schools already.playboy: those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home?jobs: so far, that’s more of a conceptual market than a real market. the primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children. if you can’t justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer literate. you know there’s something going on, you don’t exactly know what it is, so you want to learn. this will change: computers will be essential in most homes.jobs: the most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. we’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.playboy: specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?jobs: i can only begin to speculate. we see that a lot in our industry: you don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.playboy: then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?jobs: in the future, it won’t be an act of faith. the hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. a hundred years ago, if somebody had asked alexander graham bell, “what are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. he didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. but remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. it was an amazing breakthrough in communications. you could actually send messages from new york to san francisco in an afternoon. people talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in america to improve productivity. but it wouldn’t have worked. it required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. it took about 40 hours to learn. the majority of people would never learn how to use it. so, fortunately, in the 1870s, bell filed the patents for the telephone. it performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.jobs: it allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. and we’re in the same situation today. some people are saying that we ought to put an ibm pc on every desk in america to improve productivity. it won’t work. the special incantations you have to learn this time are “slash q-zs” and things like that. the manual for wordstar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. to write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. they’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn morse code. that is what macintosh is all about. it’s the first “telephone” of our industry. and, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. you don’t simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.playboy: is that really significant or is it simply a novelty? the macintosh has been called “the world’s most expensive etch a sketch” by at least one critic.jobs: it’s as significant as the difference between the telephone and the telegraph. imagine what you could have done if you had this sophisticated an etch a sketch when you were growing up. but that’s only a small part of it. not only can it help you increase your productivity and your creativity enormously, but it also allows us to communicate more efficiently by using pictures and graphs as well as words and numbers.playboy: most computers use key strokes to enter instructions, but macintosh replaces many of them with something called a mouse—a little box that is rolled around on your desk and guides a pointer on your computer screen. it’s a big change for people used to keyboards. why the mouse?jobs: if i want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, i’m not going to do it linguistically: “there’s a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button.” if you have a spot—“there!” [he points]—i’ll point to it. pointing is a metaphor we all know. we’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.playboy: how long did it take to develop macintosh?jobs: it was more than two years on the computer itself. we had been working on the technology behind it for years before that. i don’t think i’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. almost everyone who worked on it will say that. none of us wanted to release it at the end. it was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore. when we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a five-minute ovation. what was incredible to me was that i could see the mac team in the first few rows. it was as though none of us could believe that we’d actually finished it. everyone started crying.playboy: we were warned about you: before this interview began, someone said we were “about to be snowed by the best.”jobs: [smiling] we’re just enthusiastic about what we do.playboy: but considering that enthusiasm, the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and your own ability to get press coverage, how does the consumer know what’s behind the hype?jobs: ad campaigns are necessary for competition; ibm’s ads are everywhere. but good pr educates people; that’s all it is. you can’t con people in this business. the products speak for themselves.playboy: aside from some of the recurrent criticisms—that the mouse is inefficient, that the macintosh screen is only black and white—the most serious charge is that apple overprices its products. do you care to answer any or all?jobs: we’ve done studies that prove that the mouse is faster than traditional ways of moving through data or applications. someday we may be able to build a color screen for a reasonable price. as to overpricing, the start-up of a new product makes it more expensive than it will be later. the more we can produce, the lower the price will get—playboy: that’s what critics charge you with: hooking the enthusiasts with premium prices, then turning around and lowering your prices to catch the rest of the market.jobs: that’s simply untrue. as soon as we can lower prices, we do. it’s true that our computers are less expensive today than they were a few years ago, or even last year. but that’s also true of the ibm pc. our goal is to get computers out to tens of millions of people, and the cheaper we can make them, the easier it’s going to be to do that. i’d love it if macintosh cost $1000.playboy: how about people who bought lisa and apple iii, the two computers you released prior to macintosh? you’ve left them with incompatible, out-of-date products.jobs: if you want to try that one, add the people who bought the ibm pcs or the pcjrs to that list, too. as far as lisa is concerned, since some of its technology was used in the macintosh, it can now run macintosh software and is being seen as a big brother to macintosh; though it was unsuccessful at first, our sales of lisa are going through the roof. we’re also still selling more than 2000 apple iiis a month—more than half to repeat buyers. the over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. by definition. eventually, it will replace it. but it’s like people who had black-and-white tvs when color came out. they eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.playboy: at the rate things are changing, won’t mac itself be out of date within a few years?jobs: before macintosh, there were two standards: apple ii and ibm pc. those two standards are like rivers carved in the rock bed of a canyon. it’s taken years to carve them—seven years to carve the apple ii and four years to carve the ibm. what we have done with macintosh is that in less than a year, through the momentum of the revolutionary aspects of the product and through every ounce of marketing that we have as a company, we have been able to blast a third channel through that rock and make a third river, a third standard. in my opinion, there are only two companies that can do that today, apple and ibm. maybe that’s too bad, but to do it right now is just a monumental effort, and i don’t think that apple or ibm will do that in the next three or four years. toward the end of the eighties, we may be seeing some new things.jobs: the developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer.playboy: you have a lot riding on this one. some people have said that macintosh will make or break apple. after lisa and apple iii, apple stock plummeted and the industry speculated that apple might not survive.jobs: yeah, we felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. we knew that we had to pull the rabbit out of the hat with macintosh, or else we’d never realize the dreams we had for either the products or the company.jobs: no, no, no. in fact, 1983, when all these predictions were being made, was a phenomenally successful year for apple. we virtually doubled in size in 1983. we went from $583,000,000 in 1982 to something like $980,000,000 in sales. it was almost all apple ii—related. it just didn’t live up to our expectations. if macintosh weren’t a success, we probably would have stayed at something like a billion dollars a year, selling apple iis and versions of it.playboy: then what was behind the talk last year that apple had had it?jobs: ibm was coming on very, very strong, and the momentum was switching to ibm. the software developers were moving to ibm. the dealers were talking more and more of ibm. it became clear to all of us who worked on macintosh that it was just gonna blow the socks off the industry, that it was going to redefine the industry. and that’s exactly what it had to do. if macintosh hadn’t been successful, then i should have just thrown in the towel, because my vision of the whole industry would have been totally wrong.playboy: apple iii was supposed to have been your souped-up apple ii, but it has been a failure since it was launched, four years ago. you recalled the first 14,000, and even the revised apple iii never took off. how much was lost on apple iii?jobs: infinite, incalculable amounts. i think if the iii had been more successful, ibm would have had a much harder time entering the market place. but that’s life. i think we emerged from that experience much stronger.playboy: yet when lisa came out, it, too, was a relative failure in the market place. what went wrong?jobs: first of all, it was too expensive—about ten grand. we had gotten fortune 500-itis, trying to sell to those huge corporations, when our roots were selling to people. there were other problems: late shipping; the software didn’t come together in the end as well as we hoped and we lost a lot of momentum. and ibm’s coming on very strong, coupled with our being about six months late, coupled with the price’s being too high, plus another strategic mistake we made—deciding to sell lisa only through about 150 dealers, which was absolutely foolish on our part—meant it was a very costly mistake. we decided to hire people we thought were marketing and management experts. not a bad idea, but unfortunately, this was such a new business that the things the so-called professionals knew were almost detriments to their success in this new way of looking at business.playboy: was that a reflection of insecurity on your part—“this thing has gotten big and now we’re playing hardball; i better bring in some real pros”?jobs: remember, we were 23, 24 and 25 years old. we had never done any of this before, so it seemed like a good thing to do.playboy: were most of those decisions, good and bad, yours?jobs: we tried never to have one person make all the decisions. there were three people running the company at that time: mike scott, mike markkula and myself. now it’s john sculley [apple’s president] and myself. in the early days, if there was a disagreement, i would generally defer my judgment to some of the other people who had more experience than i had. in many cases, they were right. in some important cases, if we had gone my way, we would have done better.playboy: you wanted to run the lisa division. markkula and scott, who were, in effect, your bosses, even though you had a hand in hiring them, didn’t feel you were capable, right?jobs: after setting up the framework for the concepts and finding the key people and sort of setting the technical directions, scotty decided i didn’t have the experience to run the thing. it hurt a lot. there’s no getting around it.playboy: did you feel you were losing apple?jobs: there was a bit of that, i guess, but the thing that was harder for me was that they hired a lot of people in the lisa group who didn’t share the vision we originally had. there was a big conflict in the lisa group between the people who wanted, in essence, to build something like macintosh and the people hired from hewlett-packard and other companies who brought with them a perspective of larger machines, corporate sales. i just decided that i was going to go off and do that myself with a small group, sort of go back to the garage, to design the macintosh. they didn’t take us very seriously. i think scotty was just sort of humoring me.playboy: but this was the company that you founded. weren’t you resentful?jobs: you can never resent your kid.playboy: even when your kid tells you to fuck off?jobs: i wouldn’t feel resentment. i’d feel great sorrow about it and i’d be frustrated, which i was. but i got the best people who were at apple, because i thought that if we didn’t do that, we’d be in real trouble. of course, it was those people who came up with macintosh. [shrugs] look at mac.playboy: that verdict is far from in. in fact, you ushered in the mac with a lot of the same fanfare that preceded the lisa, and the lisa failed initially.jobs: it’s true: we expressed very high hopes for lisa and we were wrong. the hardest thing for us was that we knew macintosh was coming, and macintosh seemed to overcome every possible objection to lisa. as a company, we would be getting back to our roots—selling computers to people, not corporations. we went off and built the most insanely great computer in the world.playboy: does it take insane people to make insanely great things?jobs: actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. but, yeah, the people who made mac are sort of on the edge.playboy: what’s the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull off those insanely great ideas?jobs: let me compare it with ibm. how come the mac group produced mac and the people at ibm produced the pcjr? we think the mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build mac for anybody else. we built it for ourselves. we were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. we weren’t going to go out and do market research. we just wanted to build the best thing we could build. when you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. you’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. for you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.playboy: are you saying that the people who made the pcjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product?jobs: if they did, they wouldn’t have turned out the pcjr. it seems clear to me that they were designing that on the basis of market research for a specific market segment, for a specific demographic type of customer, and they hoped that if they built this, lots of people would buy them and they’d make lots of money. those are different motivations. the people in the mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.playboy: why is the computer field dominated people so young? the average age of apple employees is 29.jobs: it’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. people get stuck as they get older. our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. you are really etching chemical patterns. in most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. it’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. it’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.playboy: a lot of guys in their 40s are going to be real pleased with you. let’s move on to the other thing that people talk about when they mention apple—the company, not the computer. you feel a similar sense of mission about the way things are run at apple, don’t you?jobs: i do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers. i think apple has a chance to be the model of a fortune 500 company in the late eighties and early nineties. ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting companies in america, polaroid and xerox would have been on everyone’s list. where are they now? they would be on no one’s list today. what happened? companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. they insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. they no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. the creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.what happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. the great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. i know, because that’s how apple was built. apple is an ellis island company. apple is built on refugees from other companies. these are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.you know, dr. edwin land was a troublemaker. he dropped out of harvard and founded polaroid. not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. polaroid did that for some years, but eventually dr. land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things i’ve ever heard of. so land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. the man is a national treasure. i don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: this is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this.anyway, one of our biggest challenges, and the one i think john sculley and i should be judged on in five to ten years, is making apple an incredibly great ten- or 20-billion-dollar company. will it still have the spirit it does today? we’re charting new territory. there are no models that we can look to for our high growth, for some of the new management concepts we have. so we’re having to find our own way.playboy: if apple is really that kind of company, then why the projected twenty-fold growth? why not stay relatively small?jobs: the way it’s going to work out is that in our business, in order to continue to be one of the major contributors, we’re going to have to be a ten-billion-dollar company. that growth is required for us to keep up with the competition. our concern is how we become that, rather than the dollar goal, which is meaningless to us.at apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. we attract a different type of person—a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. we are aware that we are doing something significant. we’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future. most of the time, we’re taking things. neither you nor i made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. i think we have that opportunity now. and no, we don’t know where it will lead. we just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.playboy: you’ve said that the business market is crucial for you to conquer with macintosh. can you beat ibm at work?jobs: yes. the business market has several sectors. rather than just thinking of the fortune 500, which is where ibm is strongest, i like to think of the fortune 5,000,000 or 14,000,000. there are 14,000,000 small businesses in this country. i think that the vast group of people who need to be computerized includes that large number of medium and small businesses. we’re going to try to be able to bring some meaningful solutions to them in 1985.jobs: our approach is to think of them not as businesses but as collections of people. we want to qualitatively change the way people work. we don’t just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. we want to change the way they can communicate with one another. we’re seeing five-page memos get compressed to one-page memos because we can use a picture to express the key concept. we’re seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication. and it’s more fun. there’s always been this myth that really neat, fun people at home all of a sudden have to become very dull and boring when they come to work. it’s simply not true. if we can inject that liberal-arts spirit into the very serious realm of business, i think it will be a worthwhile contribution. we can’t even conceive of how far it will go.playboy: but in the business market, you’re fighting the ibm name as much as anything. people associate ibm with stability and efficiency. the new entry in the computer field, at&t, has that one up on you, too. apple is a relatively young and untested company, particularly in the eyes of corporations that might be customers.jobs: it’s macintosh’s job to really penetrate the business market place. ibm focuses on the top down, the mainframe centric approach to selling in businesses. if we are going to be successful, we’ve got to approach this from a grass-roots point of view. to use networking as an example, rather than focusing on wiring up whole companies, as ibm is doing, we’re going to focus on the phenomenon of the small work group.playboy: one of the experts in the field says that for this industry to really flourish, and for it to benefit the consumer, one standard has to prevail.jobs: that’s simply untrue. insisting that we need one standard now is like saying that they needed one standard for automobiles in 1920. there would have been no innovations such as the automatic transmission, power steering and independent suspension if they believed that. the last thing we want to do is freeze technology. with computers, macintosh is revolutionary. there is no question that macintosh’s technology is superior to ibm’s. there is a clear need for an alternative to ibm.playboy: was any of your decision not to become compatible with ibm based on the fact that you didn’t want to knuckle under to ibm? one critic says that the reason mac isn’t ibm-compatible is mere arrogance—that “steve jobs was saying ‘fuck you’ to ibm.”jobs: it wasn’t that we had to express our manhood by being different, no.jobs: the main thing is very simply that the technology we developed is superior. it could not be this good if we became compatible with ibm. of course, it’s true that we don’t want ibm to dominate this industry. a lot of people thought we were nuts for not being ibm-compatible, for not living under ibm’s umbrella. there were two key reasons we chose to bet our company on not doing that: the first was that we thought—and i think as history is unfolding, we’re being proved correct—that ibm would fold its umbrella on the companies making compatible computers and absolutely crush them.second and more important, we did not go ibm-compatible because of the product vision that drives this company. we think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. so if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference in the world. what we want to do at apple is make computers into appliances and get them to tens of millions of people. that’s simply what we want to do. and we couldn’t do that with the current ibm-generation type of technology. so we had to do something different. that’s why we came up with the macintosh.playboy: from 1981 to 1983, your share of the personal-computer sales slipped from 29 percent to 23 percent. ibm’s part has grown from three percent to 28 percent in the same time. how do you fight the numbers?jobs: we’ve never worried about numbers. in the market place, apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. ibm is trying to focus the spotlight on service, support, security, mainframes and motherhood. now, apple’s key observation three years ago was that when you’re shipping 10,000,000 computers a year, even ibm does not have enough mothers to ship one with every computer. so you’ve got to build motherhood into the computer. and that’s a big part of what macintosh is all about.all these things show that it really is coming down to just apple and ibm. if for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and ibm wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer dark ages for about 20 years. once ibm gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. they prevent innovation from happening.jobs: look at this example: frito-lay is a very interesting company. they call on more than half a million accounts a week. there’s a frito-lay rack in each store, and the chips are all there, and every store’s got the identical rack and the big ones have multiples. for frito-lay, the biggest problem is stale product—bad chips, so to speak. for frito-lay’s service, they’ve got, like, 10,000 guys who run around and take out the stale product and replace it with good product. they talk to the manager of that department and they make sure everything’s fine. because of that service and support, they now have more than an 80 percent share of every segment of chips that they’re in. nobody else can break into that. as long as they keep doing what they do well, nobody else can get 80 percent of the market share, because they can’t get the sales and support staff. they can’t get it because they can’t afford it. they can’t afford it because they don’t have 80 percent of the market share. it’s catch-22. nobody will ever be able to break into their franchise.frito-lay doesn’t have to innovate very much. they just watch all the little chip companies come out with something new, study it for a year, and a year or two years later they come out with their own, service and support it to death, and they’ve got 80 percent of the market share of the new product a year later.ibm is playing exactly the same game. if you look at the mainframe market place, there’s been virtually zero innovation since ibm got dominant control of that market place 15 years ago. they are going to do the same thing in every other sector of the computer market place if they can get away with it. the ibm pc fundamentally brought no new technology to the industry at all. it was just repackaging and slight extension of apple ii technology, and they want it all. they absolutely want it all.this market place is coming down to the two of us, whether we like it or not. i don’t particularly like it, but it’s coming down to apple and ibm.playboy: how can you say that about an industry that’s changing so fast? macintosh is the hot new thing right now, but will it still be in two years? aren’t you competing with your own philosophy? just as you’re after ibm, aren’t there small computer companies coming after apple?jobs: in terms of supplying the computer itself, it’s coming down to apple and ibm. and i don’t think there are going to be a lot of third- and fourth-place companies, much less sixth- or seventh-place companies. most of the new, innovative companies are focusing on the software. i think there will be lots of innovation in the areas of software but not in hardware.playboy: ibm might say the same thing about hardware, but you’re not about to let it get away with that. why is your point any different?jobs: i think that the scale of the business has gotten large enough so that it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to successfully launch anything new.playboy: no more billion-dollar companies hatched in garages?jobs: no, i’m afraid not in computers. and this puts a responsibility on apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll come from us. it’s the only way we can compete with them. if we go fast enough, they can’t keep up.playboy: when do you think ibm will finally, as you put it, fold the umbrella on the companies making ibm-compatible computers?jobs: there may be some imitators left in the $100,000,000-to-$200,000,000 range, but being a $200,000,000 company is going to mean you are struggling for your life, and that’s not really a position from which to innovate. not only do i think ibm will do away with its imitators by providing software they can’t provide, i think eventually it will come up with a new standard that won’t even be compatible with what it’s making now—because it is too limiting.playboy: which is exactly what you’ve done at apple. if a person owns software for the apple ii, he can’t run it on the macintosh.jobs: that’s right. mac is altogether new. we knew that we could reach the early innovators with current-generation technology—apple ii, ibm pc—because they’d stay up all night learning how to use their computer. but we’d never reach the majority of people.if we were really going to get computers to tens of millions of people, we needed a technology that would make the thing radically easier to use and more powerful at the same time, so we had to make a break. we just had to do it. we wanted to make sure it was great, because it may be the last chance that any of us get to make a clean break. and i’m very happy with the way macintosh turned out. it will prove a really solid foundation for the next ten years.playboy: let’s go back to the predecessors of the lisa and the mac, to the beginning. how influential were your parents in your interest in computers?jobs: they encouraged my interests. my father was a machinist, and he was a sort of genius with his hands. he can fix anything and make it work and take any mechanical thing apart and get it back together. that was my first glimpse of it. i started to gravitate more toward electronics, and he used to get me things i could take apart and put back together. he was transferred to palo alto when i was five. that’s how we ended up in the valley.playboy: you had been adopted, hadn’t you? how much of a factor in your life was that?jobs: you don’t ever really know, do you?playboy: did you try to find your biological parents?jobs: i think it’s quite a natural curiosity for adopted people to want to understand where certain traits come from. but i’m mostly an environmentalist. i think the way you are raised and your values and most of your world view come from the experiences you had as you grew up. but some things aren’t accounted for that way. i think it’s quite natural to have a curiosity about it. and i did.playboy: were you successful in trying to find your natural parents?jobs: that’s one area i really don’t want to talk about.playboy: the valley your parents moved to has since come to be known as silicon valley. what was it like growing up there?jobs: it was the suburbs. it was like most suburbs in the u.s.: i grew up on a block with lots of kids. my mother taught me to read before i went to school, so i was pretty bored in school, and i turned into a little terror. you should have seen us in third grade. we basically destroyed our teacher. we would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs. things changed in the fourth grade, though. one of the saints in my life is this woman named imogene hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class. she got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in me for learning things. i learned more that year than i think i learned in any year in school. they wanted to put me in high school after that year, but my parents very wisely wouldn’t let them.playboy: but location had something to do with your interests, didn’t it? how did silicon valley come to be?jobs: the valley is positioned strategically between two great universities, berkeley and stanford. both of those universities attract not only lots of students but very good students and ones from all over the united states. they come here and fall in love with the area and they stay here. so there is a constant influx of new, bright human resources.before world war two, two stanford graduates named bill hewlett and dave packard created a very innovative electronics company—hewlett-packard. then the transistor was invented in 1948 by bell telephone laboratories. one of the three coinventors of the transistor, william shockley, decided to return to his home town of palo alto to start a little company called shockley labs or something. he brought with him about a dozen of the best and brightest physicists and chemists of his day. little by little, people started breaking off and forming competitive companies, like those flowers or weeds that scatter seeds in hundreds of directions when you blow on them. and that’s why the valley is here today.playboy: what was your introduction to computers?jobs: a neighbor down the block named larry lang was an engineer at hewlett-packard. he spent a lot of time with me, teaching me stuff. the first computer i ever saw was at hewlett-packard. they used to invite maybe ten of us down every tuesday night and give us lectures and let us work with a computer. i was maybe 12 the first time. i remember the night. they showed us one of their new desktop computers and let us play on it. i wanted one badly.playboy: what was it about it that interested you? did you have a sense of its potential?jobs: it wasn’t anything like that. i just thought they were neat. i just wanted to mess around with one.playboy: you went to work for hewlett-packard. how did that happen?jobs: when i was 12 or 13, i wanted to build something and i needed some parts, so i picked up the phone and called bill hewlett—he was listed in the palo alto phone book. he answered the phone and he was real nice. he chatted with me for, like, 20 minutes. he didn’t know me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that summer working at hewlett-packard on the line, assembling frequency counters. assembling may be too strong. i was putting in screws. it didn’t matter; i was in heaven.i remember my first day, expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being at hewlett-packard for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. i asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, “to fuck!” [laughs] learned a lot that summer.playboy: at what point did you meet steve wozniak?jobs: i met woz when i was 13, at a friend’s garage. he was about 18. he was, like, the first person i met who knew more electronics than i did at that point. we became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. we pulled all kinds of pranks together.jobs: [grins] normal stuff. like making a huge flag with a giant one of these on it. [gives the finger] the idea was that we would unfurl it in the middle of a school graduation. then there was the time wozniak made something that looked and sounded like a bomb and took it to the school cafeteria. we also went into the blue-box business together.playboy: those were illegal devices that allowed free long-distance phone calls, weren’t they?jobs: mm-hm. the famous story about the boxes is when woz called the vatican and told them he was henry kissinger. they had someone going to wake the pope up in the middle of the night before they figured out it wasn’t really kissinger.playboy: did you get into trouble for any of those things?jobs: well, i was thrown out of school a few times.playboy: were you then, or have you ever been, a computer nerd?jobs: i wasn’t completely in any one world for too long. there was so much else going on. between my sophomore and junior years, i got stoned for the first time; i discovered shakespeare, dylan thomas and all that classic stuff. i read moby dick and went back as a junior taking creative-writing classes. by the time i was a senior, i’d gotten permission to spend about half my time at stanford, taking classes.playboy: was wozniak obsessed at certain periods?jobs: [laughs] yes, but not just with computers. i think woz was in a world that nobody understood. no one shared his interests, and he was a little ahead of his time. it was very lonely for him. he’s driven from inner sights rather than external expectations of him, so he survived ok. woz and i are different in most ways, but there are some ways in which we’re the same, and we’re very close in those ways. we’re sort of like two planets in their own orbits that every so often intersect. it wasn’t just computers, either. woz and i very much liked bob dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. this was california. you could get lsd fresh made from stanford. you could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. california has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities.besides dylan, i was interested in eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time. when i went to college at reed, in oregon, there was a constant flow of people stopping by, from timothy leary and, richard alpert to gary snyder. there was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. that was a time when every college student in this country read be here now and diet for a small planet—there were about ten books. you’d be hard pressed to find those books on too many college campuses today. i’m not saying it’s better or worse; it’s just different—very different. in search of excellence [the book about business practices] has taken the place of be here now.playboy: in retrospect, how did that influence what you’re doing now?jobs: the whole period had a huge influence. as it was clear that the sixties were over, it was also clear that a lot of the people who had gone through the sixties ended up not really accomplishing what they set out to accomplish, and because they had thrown their discipline to the wind, they didn’t have much to fall back on. many of my friends have ended up engrained with the idealism of that period but also with a certain practicality, a cautiousness about ending up working behind the counter in a natural-food store when they are 45, which is what they saw happen to some of their older friends. it’s not that that is bad in and of itself, but it’s bad if that’s not what you really wanted to do.playboy: after reed, you returned to silicon valley and answered a now-famous ad that boasted, “have fun and make money.”jobs: right. i decided i wanted to travel, but i was lacking the necessary funds. i came back down to get a job. i was looking in the paper and there was this ad that said, yes, “have fun and make money.” i called. it was atari. i had never had a job before other than the one when i was a kid. by some stroke of luck, they called me up the next day and hired me.playboy: that must have been at atari’s earliest stage.jobs: i was, like, employee number 40. it was a very small company. they had made pong and two other games. my first job was helping a guy named don work on a basketball game, which was a disaster. there was this basketball game, and somebody was working on a hockey game. they were trying to model all their games after simple field sports at that time, because pong was such a success.playboy: you never lost sight of the reason for the job: to earn money so you could travel.jobs: atari had shipped a bunch of games to europe and they had some engineering defects in them, and i figured out how to fix them, but it was necessary for somebody to go over there and actually do the fixing. i volunteered to go and asked to take a leave of absence when i was there. they let me do it. i ended up in switzerland and moved from zurich to new delhi. i spent some time in india.playboy: where you shaved your head.jobs: that’s not quite the way it happened. i was walking around in the himalayas and i stumbled onto this thing that turned out to be a religious festival. there was a baba, a holy man, who was the holy man of this particular festival, with his large group of followers. i could smell good food. i hadn’t been fortunate enough to smell good food for a long time, so i wandered up to pay my respects and eat some lunch.for some reason, this baba, upon seeing me sitting there eating, immediately walked over to me and sat down and burst out laughing. he didn’t speak much english and i spoke a little hindi, but he tried to carry on a conversation and he was just rolling on the ground with laughter. then he grabbed my arm and took me up this mountain trail. it was a little funny, because here were hundreds of indians who had traveled for thousands of miles to hang out with this guy for ten seconds and i stumble in for something to eat and he’s dragging me up this mountain path.we get to the top of this mountain half an hour later and there’s this little well and pond at the top of this mountain, and he dunks my head in the water and pulls out a razor from his pocket and starts to shave my head. i’m completely stunned. i’m 19 years old, in a foreign country, up in the himalayas, and here is this bizarre indian baba who has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head atop this mountain peak. i’m still not sure why he did it.playboy: what did you do when you came back?jobs: coming back was more of a culture shock than going. well, atari called me up and wanted me to go back to work there. i didn’t really want to, but eventually they persuaded me to go back as a consultant. wozniak and i were hanging out. he took me to some homebrew computer club meetings, where computer hobbyists compared notes and stuff. i didn’t find them all that exciting, but some of them were fun. wozniak went religiously.playboy: what was the thinking about computers then? why were you interested?jobs: the clubs were based around a computer kit called the altair. it was so amazing to all of us that somebody had actually come up with a way to build a computer you could own yourself. that had never been possible. remember, when we were in high school, neither of us had access to a computer mainframe. we had to drive somewhere and have some large company take a benevolent attitude toward us and let us use the computer. but now, for the first time, you could actually buy a computer. the altair was a kit that came out around 1975 and sold for less than $400.even though it was relatively inexpensive, not everyone could afford one. that’s how the computer clubs started. people would band together and eventually become a club.playboy: what would you do with your makeshift computers?jobs: at that time, there were no graphics. it was all alphanumerics, and i used to be fascinated with the programming, simple programming. on the very early versions of computer kits, you didn’t even type; you threw switches that signaled characters.playboy: the altair, then, presented the concept of a home computer.jobs: it was just sort of a computer that you could own. they really didn’t know what to do with it. the first thing that they did was to put languages on it, so you could write some programs. people didn’t start to apply them for practical things until a year or two later, and then it was simple things, like bookkeeping.playboy: and you decided you could do the altair one better.jobs: it sort of just happened. i was working a lot at atari at night and i used to let woz in. atari put out a game called gran track, the first driving game with a steering wheel to drive it. woz was a gran track addict. he would put great quantities of quarters into these games to play them, so i would just let him in at night and let him onto the production floor and he would play gran track all night long.when i came up against a stumbling block on a project, i would get woz to take a break from his road rally for ten minutes and come and help me. he puttered around on some things, too. and at one point, he designed a computer terminal with video on it. at a later date, he ended up buying a microprocessor and hooking it up to the terminal and made what was to become the apple i. woz and i laid out the circuit board ourselves. that was basically it.playboy: again, the idea was just to do it?jobs: yeah, sure. and to be able to show it off to your friends.playboy: what triggered the next step—manufacturing and selling them to make money?jobs: woz and i raised $1,300 by selling my vw bus and his hewlett-packard calculator to finance them. a guy who started one of the first computer stores told us he could sell them if we could make them. it had not dawned on us until then.playboy: how did you and wozniak work together?jobs: he designed most of it. i helped on the memory part and i helped when we decided to turn it into a product. woz isn’t great at turning things into products, but he’s really a brilliant designer.playboy: the apple i was for hobbyists?jobs: completely. we sold only about 150 of them, ever. it wasn’t that big a deal, but we made about $95,000 and i started to see it as a business besides something to do. apple i was just a printed circuit board. there was no case, there was no power supply; it wasn’t much of a product yet. it was just a printed circuit board. you had to go out and buy transformers for it. you had to buy your own keyboard. [laughs]playboy: did you and wozniak have a vision once things started rolling? were you both thinking about how big it could get and how computers would be able to change the world?jobs: no, not particularly. neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere. woz is motivated by figuring things out. he concentrated more on the engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brilliant pieces of work, which was the disk drive, another key engineering feat that made the apple ii a possibility. i was trying to build the company—trying to find out what a company was. i don’t think it would have happened without woz and i don’t think it would have happened without me.playboy: what happened to the partnership as time went on?jobs: the main thing was that woz was never really interested in apple as a company. he was just sort of interested in getting the apple ii on a printed circuit board so he could have one and be able to carry it to his computer club without having the wires break on the way. he had done that and decided to go on to other things. he had other ideas.playboy: such as the us festival rock concert and computer show, where he lost something like $10,000,000.jobs: well, i thought the us festival was a little crazy, but woz believed very strongly in it.playboy: how is it between the two of you now?jobs: when you work with somebody that close and you go through experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life. whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. and even though he may not be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that transcends even friendship, in a way. woz is living his own life now. he hasn’t been around apple for about five years. but what he did will go down in history. he’s going around speaking to a lot of computer events now. he likes that.playboy: the two of you went on to create the apple ii, which actually started the computer revolution. how did that occur?jobs: it wasn’t just us. we brought in other people. wozniak still did the logic of the apple ii, which certainly is a large part of it, but there were some other key parts. the power supply was really a key. the case was really a key. the real jump with the apple ii was that it was a finished product. it was the first computer that you could buy that wasn’t a kit. it was fully assembled and had its own case and its own keyboard, and you could really sit down and start to use it. and that was the breakthrough of the apple ii: that it looked like a real product.playboy: was the initial market hobbyists?jobs: the difference was that you didn’t have to be a hardware hobbyist with the apple ii. you could be a software hobbyist. that was one of the key breakthroughs with the apple ii: realizing that there were a whole lot more people who wanted to play with a computer, just like woz and me, than there were people who could build their own. that’s what the apple ii was all about. still, the first year, we sold only 3000 or 4000.playboy: even that sounds like a lot for a few guys who barely knew what they were doing.jobs: it was giant! we did about $200,000 when our business was in the, garage, in 1976. in 1977, about $7,000,000 in business. i mean, it was phenomenal! and in 1978, we did $17,000,000. in 1979, we did $47,000,000. that’s when we all really sensed that this was just going through the rafters. in 1980, we did $117,000,000. in 1981, we did $335,000,000. in 1982, we did $583,000,000. in 1983, we did $985,000,000, i think. this year, it will be a billion and a half.playboy: you don’t forget those numbers.jobs: well, they’re just yardsticks, you know. the neatest thing was, by 1979, i was able to walk into classrooms that had 15 apple computers and see the kids using them. and those are the kinds of things that are really the milestones.playboy: which brings us full circle to your latest milestones, the mac and your protracted shoot-out with ibm. in this interview, you’ve repeatedly sounded as if there really are only two of you left in the field. but although the two of you account for something like 60 percent of the market, can you just write off the other 40 percent—the radio shacks, decs, epsons, et al.—as insignificant? more important, are you ignoring your potentially biggest rival, at&t?jobs: at&t is absolutely going to be in the business. there is a major transformation in the company that’s taking place right now. at&t is changing from a subsidized and regulated service-oriented company to a free-market, competitive-marketing technology company. at&t’s products per se have never been of the highest quality. all you have to do is go look at their telephones. they’re somewhat of an embarrassment. but they do possess great technology in their research labs. their challenge is to learn how to commercialize that technology. also, they have to learn about consumer marketing. i think that they will do both of those things, but it’s going to take them years.playboy: are you writing them off as a threat?jobs: i don’t think they’re going to be a giant factor in the next 24 months, but they will learn.jobs: radio shack is totally out of the picture. they have missed the boat. radio shack tried to squeeze the computer into their model of retailing, which in my opinion often meant selling second-rate products or low-end products in a surplus-store environment. the sophistication of the computer buyer passed radio shack by without their really realizing it. their market shares dropped through the floor. i don’t anticipate that they’re going to recover and again become a major player.jobs: xerox is out of the business. t.i. is doing nowhere near their expectations. as to some of the others, the large companies, like dec and wang, can sell to their installed bases. they can sell personal computers as advanced terminals, but that business is going to dwindle.playboy: how about the low-priced computers: commodore and atari?jobs: i consider those a brochure for why you should buy an apple ii or macintosh. i think people have already determined that the sub-$500 computers don’t do very much. they either tease people to want more or frustrate people completely.playboy: what about some of the smaller portables?jobs: they are ok if you’re a reporter and trying to take notes on the run. but for the average person, they’re really not that useful, and there’s not all that software for them, either. by the time you get your software done, a new one comes out with a slightly bigger display and your software is obsolete. so nobody is writing any software for them. wait till we do it—the power of a macintosh in something the size of a book!playboy: what about epson and some of the japanese computer makers?jobs: i’ve said it before: the japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. they’re just like dead fish washing up on the shores. the epson has been a failure in this market place.playboy: like computers, the automobile industry was an american industry that we almost lost to the japanese. there is a lot of talk about american semiconductor companies’ losing ground to japanese. how will you keep the edge?jobs: japan’s very interesting. some people think it copies things. i don’t think that anymore. i think what they do is reinvent things. they will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. in some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. that strategy works only when what they’re working with isn’t changing very much—the stereo industry and the automobile industry are two examples. when the target is moving quickly, they find it very difficult, because that reinvention cycle takes a few years.as long as the definition of what a personal computer is keeps changing at the rate that it is, they will have a very hard time. once the rate of change slows down, the japanese will bring all of their strengths to bear on this market, because they absolutely want to dominate the computer business; there’s no question about that. they see that as a national priority.we think that in four to five years, the japanese will finally figure out how to build a decent computer. and if we’re going to keep this industry one in which america leads, we have four years to become world-class manufacturers. our manufacturing technology has to equal or surpass that of the japanese.playboy: how do you plan to accomplish that?jobs: at the time we designed macintosh, we also designed a machine to build the machine. we spent $20,000,000 building the computer industry’s most automated factory. but that’s not enough. rather than take seven years to write off our factory, as most companies would do, we’re writing it off in two. we will throw it away at the end of 1985 and build our second one, and we will write that off in two years and throw that away, so that three years from now, we’ll be on to our third automated factory. that’s the only way we can learn fast enough.playboy: it’s not all competition with the japanese: you buy your disk drives from sony, for instance.jobs: we buy many of our components from the japanese. we’re the largest user in the world of microprocessors, of high-technology ram chips, of disk drives, of keyboards. we save a ton of energy not having to make and design floppy-disk drives or microprocessors that we can spend on software.playboy: let’s talk about software. what are the revolutionary changes in software development as you’ve seen it in the past few years?jobs: certainly, the earlier programming, getting a programming language on a microprocessor chip, was a real breakthrough. visicalc was a breakthrough, because that was the first real use of computers in business, where business people could see tangible benefits of using one. before that, you had to program your own applications, and the number of people who want to program is a small fraction—one percent. coupled with visicalc, the ability to graph things, graph information, was important, and so was lotus.playboy: we’re dropping a lot of brand names with which people may not be familiar. please explain them.jobs: what lotus did was combine a good spread sheet and graphics program. the word-processing and data-base parts of lotus are certainly not the most robust that one can purchase. the real key to lotus was that it combined spread sheet and graphics in one program, so you could go between them very rapidly.the next breakthrough is happening now, thanks to the macintosh, which brought that lisa technology down to an affordable price. there exists, and there will be more, revolutionary software there. you generally want to truly evaluate a breakthrough a few years after it happens.playboy: what about word processing? you didn’t mention that on the list of breakthroughs.jobs: you’re right, i should have listed word processing after visicalc. word processing is the most universally needed application and one of the easiest to understand. it’s probably the first use to which most people put their personal computer. there were word processors before personal computers, but a word processor on a personal computer was more of an economic breakthrough, while there was never any form of visicalc before the personal computer.playboy: have there been breakthroughs in educational software?jobs: there has been a lot of very good software in education but not the breakthrough product, not the visicalc. i think that will come, but i don’t expect it in the next 24 months.playboy: you’ve stressed the fact that education is a high priority for you. how do you think computers are affecting it?jobs: computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn. we formed something called the apple education foundation, and we give several million dollars in cash and equipment to people doing exploratory work with educational software and to schools that can’t afford computers. we also wanted macintosh to become the computer of choice in colleges, just as the apple ii is for grade and high schools. so we looked for six universities that were out to make large-scale commitments to personal computers—by large, meaning more than 1000 apiece—and instead of six, we found 24. we asked the colleges if they would invest at least $2,000,000 each to be part of the macintosh program. all 24—including the entire ivy league—did. so in less than a year, macintosh has become the standard in college computing. i could ship every macintosh we make this year just to those 24 colleges. we can’t, of course, but the demand is there.playboy: but the software isn’t there, is it?jobs: some of it’s there. what’s not there, the people at colleges are going to write themselves. ibm tried to stop us—i hear it formed a 400-person task force to do it—by giving away ibm pcs. but the colleges were fairly astute. they realized the software investment they were about to embark upon would far outweigh the hardware investment, and they didn’t want to spend all that software money on old technology like ibm’s. so in many cases, they turned down ibm’s offers and went with macintoshes. in some cases, they used ibm grant money to buy macintoshes.playboy: will you name some colleges?jobs: can’t. i’d get them in trouble.playboy: when you were in college in precomputer days, what did you and your classmates feel was the way to make a contribution? politics?jobs: none of the really bright people i knew in college went into politics. they all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late sixties and seventies. all of them are in business now—which is funny, because they were the same people who trekked off to india or who tried in one way or another to find some sort of truth about life.playboy: wasn’t business and the lure of money merely the easy choice in the end?jobs: no, none of those people care about the money. i mean, a lot of them made a lot of money, but they don’t really care. their lifestyles haven’t particularly changed. it was the chance to actually try something, to fail, to succeed, to grow. politics wasn’t the place to be these past ten years if you were eager to try things out. as someone who hasn’t turned 30 yet, i think your 20s are the time to be impatient, and a lot of these people’s idealism would have been deeply frustrated in politics; it would have been blunted.i think it takes a crisis for something to occur in america. and i believe there’s going to be a crisis of significant proportions in the early nineties as these problems our political leaders should have been addressing boil up to the surface. and that’s when a lot of these people are going to bring both their practical experience and their idealism into the political realm. you’re going to see the best-trained generation ever to go into politics. they’re going to know how to choose people, how to get things done, how to lead.playboy: doesn’t every generation say that?jobs: these are different times. the technological revolution is more intertwined every day with our economy and our society—more than 50 percent of america’s gross national product comes from information-based industries—and most political leaders today have had no background in that revolution. it’s going to become crucial that many of the larger decisions we make—how we allot our resources, how we educate our children—be made with an understanding of the technical issues and the directions the technology is taking. and that hasn’t begun happening yet. in education, for example, we have close to a national embarrassment. in a society where information and innovation are going to be pivotal, there really is the possibility that america can become a second-rate industrial nation if we lose the technical momentum and leadership we have now.playboy: you mentioned investing in education, but isn’t the problem finding the fiends in a time of soaring deficits?jobs: we’re making the largest investment of capital that humankind has ever made in weapons over the next five years. we have decided, as a society, that that’s where we should put our money, and that raises the deficits and, thus, the cost of our capital. meanwhile, japan, our nearest competitor on the next technological frontier—the semiconductor industry—has shaped its tax structure, its entire society, toward raising the capital to invest in that area. you get the feeling that connections aren’t made in america between things like building weapons and the fact that we might lose our semiconductor industry. we have to educate ourselves to that danger.playboy: and you think computers will help in that process.jobs: well, i’ll tell you a story. i saw a video tape that we weren’t supposed to see. it was prepared for the joint chiefs of staff. by watching the tape, we discovered that, at least as of a few years ago, every tactical nuclear weapon in europe manned by u.s. personnel was targeted by an apple ii computer. now, we didn’t sell computers to the military; they went out and bought them at a dealer’s, i guess. but it didn’t make us feel good to know that our computers were being used to target nuclear weapons in europe. the only bright side of it was that at least they weren’t [radio shack] trs-80s! thank god for that.the point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. and it’s ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways.playboy: where do you see computers and software going in the near future?jobs: thus far, we’re pretty much using our computers as good servants. we ask them to do something, we ask them to do some operation like a spread sheet, we ask them to take our key strokes and make a letter out of them, and they do that pretty well. and you’ll see more and more perfection of that—computer as servant. but the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. and what that means is that it’s going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing we’d like to do regularly, so that we’re going to have, as an example, the concept of triggers. we’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.jobs: simple things like monitoring your stocks every hour or every day. when a stock gets beyond set limits, the computer will call my broker and electronically sell it and then let me know. another example is that at the end of the month, the computer will go into the data base and find all the salesmen who exceeded their sales quotas by more than 20 percent and write them a personalized letter from me and send it over the electronic mail system to them, and give me a report on who it sent the letters to each month. there will be a time when our computers have maybe 100 or so of those tasks; they’re going to be much more like an agent for us. you’re going to see that start to happen a little bit in the next 12 months, but really, it’s about three years away. that’s the next breakthrough.playboy: will we be able to perform all of those things on the hardware we have now? or are you going to charge us for new machines?jobs: all? that would be a dangerous statement, using the word all. i don’t know about that. macintosh was certainly designed with those concepts in mind.playboy: you take great pride in having apple keep ahead. how do you feel about the older companies that have to play catch-up with the younger companies—or perish?jobs: that’s inevitably what happens. that’s why i think death is the most wonderful invention of life. it purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. i think that’s one of apple’s challenges, really. when two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? are we going to be willing to drop our models, or are we going to explain it away? i think we’ll do better, because we’re completely aware of it and we make it a priority.playboy: in thinking about your success, did you ever get to the point where you slapped your head and asked yourself what was happening? after all, it was virtually overnight.jobs: i used to think about selling 1,000,000 computers a year, but it was just a thought. when it actually happens, it’s a totally different thing. so it was, “holy shit, it’s actually coming true!” but what’s hard to explain is that this does not feel like overnight. next year will be my tenth year. i had never done anything longer than a year in my life. six months, for me, was a long time when we started apple. so this has been my life since i’ve been sort of a free-willed adult. each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at apple. so this has been ten lifetimes.playboy: do you know what you want to do with the rest of this lifetime?jobs: there’s an old hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: “for the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. for the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” as i’m going to be 30 in february, the thought has crossed my mind.jobs: and i’m not sure. i’ll always stay connected with apple. i hope that throughout my life i’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. there may be a few years when i’m not there, but i’ll always come back. and that’s what i may try to do. the key thing to remember about me is that i’m still a student. i’m still in boot camp. if anyone is reading any of my thoughts, i’d keep that in mind. don’t take it all too seriously. if you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. you have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. what are we, anyway? most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. at the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. that is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: as you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “bye. i have to go. i’m going crazy and i’m getting out of here.” and they go and hibernate somewhere. maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.playboy: you could take off. you certainly don’t have to worry about money. you’re still working—playboy: let’s talk about the money. you were a millionaire at 23—jobs: and when i was 24, my net worth was more than $10,000,000; when i was 25, it was more than $100,000,000.playboy: what’s the main difference between having $1,000,000 and having several hundred million?jobs: visibility. the number of people who have a net worth of more than $1,000,000 in this country is in the tens of thousands. the number of people who have a net worth of more than $10,000,000 gets down to thousands. and the number who have a net worth of more than $100,000,000 gets down to a few hundred.playboy: what does the money actually mean to you?jobs: i still don’t understand it. it’s a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime—and i feel i have to spend it. if you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your children. it will just ruin their lives. and if you die without kids, it will all go to the government. almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the government could. the challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values.playboy: so what do you do?jobs: that’s a part of my life that i like to keep private. when i have some time, i’m going to start a public foundation. i do some things privately now.playboy: you could spend all of your time disbursing your money.jobs: oh, you have to. i’m convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar.playboy: could that be an excuse to put off doing something?jobs: no. there are some simple reasons for that. one is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. in order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. and that’s the problem with most philanthropy—there’s no measurement system. you give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. so if you can’t succeed or fail, it’s really hard to get better. also, most of the time, the people who come to you with ideas don’t provide the best ideas. you go seek the best ideas out, and that takes a lot of time.playboy: if you plan to use your visibility to create a model for people, why is this one of the areas you choose not to discuss?jobs: because i haven’t done anything much yet. in that area, actions should speak the loudest.playboy: are you completely virtuous or do you admit to any extravagances?jobs: well, my favorite things in life are books, sushi and.… my favorite things in life don’t cost any money. it’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time. as it is, i pay a price by not having much of a personal life. i don’t have the time to pursue love affairs or to tour small towns in italy and sit in cafés and eat tomato-and-mozzarella salad. occasionally, i spend a little money to save myself a hassle, which means time. and that’s the extent of it. i bought an apartment in new york, but it’s because i love that city. i’m trying to educate myself, being from a small town in california, not having grown up with the sophistication and culture of a large city. i consider it part of my education. you know, there are many people at apple who can buy everything that they could ever possibly want and still have most of their money unspent. i hate talking about this as a problem; people are going to read this and think, yeah, well, give me your problem. they’re going to think i’m an arrogant little asshole.playboy: with your wealth and past accomplishments, you have the ability to pursue dreams as few others do. does that freedom frighten you?jobs: the minute you have the means to take responsibility for your own dreams and can be held accountable for whether they come true or not, life is a lot tougher. it’s easy to have wonderful thoughts when the chance to implement them is remote. when you’ve gotten to a place where you at least have a chance of implementing your ideas, there’s a lot more responsibility in that.playboy: we’ve talked about what you see in the near future; what about the far future? if we’re still in kindergarten, and you start imagining some of the ways computers are going to change our lives, what do you see?jobs: when i came back from india, i found myself asking, what was the one most important thing that had struck me? and i think it was that western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic. it is a learned ability. it had never occurred to me that if no one taught us how to think this way, we would not think this way. and yet, that’s the way it is. obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think. what we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools available to them. humans are tool users. what’s really incredible about a book is that you can read what aristotle wrote. you don’t have to have some teacher’s interpretation of aristotle. you can certainly get that, but you can read exactly what aristotle wrote. that direct transmission of thoughts and ideas is one of the key building blocks of why we are where we are, as a society. but the problem with a book is that you can’t ask aristotle a question. i think one of the potentials of the computer is to somehow…capture the fundamental, underlying principles of an experience.jobs: here’s a very crude example. the original video game, pong, captured the principles of gravity, angular momentum and things like that, to where each game obeyed those underlying principles, and yet every game was different—sort of like life. that’s the simplest example. and what computer programming can do is to capture the underlying principles, the underlying essence, and then facilitate thousands of experiences based on that perception of the underlying principles. now, what if we could capture aristotle’s world view—the underlying principles of his world view? then you could actually ask aristotle a question. ok. you might say it would not be exactly what aristotle was. it could be all wrong. but maybe not.playboy: but you would say it was at least interesting feedback.jobs: exactly. part of the challenge, i think, is to get these tools to millions and tens of millions of people and to start to refine these tools so that someday we can crudely, and then in a more refined sense, capture an aristotle or an einstein or a land while he’s alive. imagine what that could be like for a young kid growing up. forget the young kid—for us! and that’s part of the challenge.playboy: will you be working on that yourself?jobs: that’s for someone else. it’s for the next generation. i think an interesting challenge in this area of intellectual inquiry is to grow obsolete gracefully, in the sense that things are changing so fast that certainly by the end of the eighties, we really want to turn over the reins to the next generation, whose fundamental perceptions are state-of-the-art perceptions, so that they can go on, stand on our shoulders and go much further. it’s a very interesting challenge, isn’t it? how to grow obsolete with grace.get staff picks delivered weekly to your inbox:
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 shoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern caracas on jan. 9. 2015. closeshoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern... read moreshoppers line up outside excelsior gama grocery story in the chacao section of eastern caracas on jan. 9. 2015.shoppers thronged grocery stores across caracas today as deepening shortages led the government to put venezuela ’s food distribution under military protection.long lines, some stretching for blocks, formed outside grocery stores in the south american country’s capital as residents search for scarce basic items such as detergent and chicken.“i’ve visited six stores already today looking for detergent -- i can’t find it anywhere,” said lisbeth elsa, a 27-year-old janitor, waiting in line outside a supermarket in eastern caracas. “we’re wearing our dirty clothes again because we can’t find it. at this point i’ll buy whatever i can find.”a dearth of foreign currency exacerbated by collapsing oil prices has led to shortages of imports from toilet paper to car batteries , and helped push annual inflation to 64 percent in november. the lines will persist as long as price controls remain in place, luis vicente leon, director of caracas-based polling firm datanalisis, said today in a telephone interview.government officials met with representatives from supermarket chains today to guarantee supplies, state news agency avn reported. interior minister carmen melendez said yesterday that security forces would be sent to food stores and distribution centers to protect shoppers.empty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015. closeempty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015.empty shelves sit in a supermarket in the la boyera part of eastern caracas on jan. 9, 2015.“don’t fall into desperation -- we have the capacity and products for everyone, with calmness and patience. the stores are full,” she said on state television.president nicolas maduro last week vowed to implement an economic “counter-offensive” to steer the country out of recession, including an overhaul of the foreign exchange system. he has yet to provide details. while the main government-controlled exchange sets a rate of 6.3 bolivars per u.s. dollar , the black market rate is as much as 187 per dollar.inside a plan suarez grocery store yesterday in eastern caracas, shelves were mostly bare. customers struggled and fought for items at times, with many trying to skip lines. the most sought-after products included detergent, with customers waiting in line for two to three hours to buy a maximum of two bags. a security guard asked that photos of empty shelves not be taken.police inside a luvebras supermarket in eastern caracas intervened to help staff distribute toilet paper and other products.“you can’t find anything, i’ve spent 15 days looking for diapers,” jean paul mate, a meat vendor, said outside the luvebras store. “you have to take off work to look for products. i go to at least five stores a day.”venezuelan online news outlet vivoplay posted a video of government food security regulator carlos osorio being interrupted by throngs of shoppers searching for products as he broadcast on state television from a bicentenario government-run supermarket in central caracas.“what we’re seeing is worse than usual, it’s not only a seasonal problem,” datanalisis’s leon said. “companies are not sure how they will restock their inventories or find merchandise, with a looming fear of a devaluation.”the price for venezuela’s oil, which accounts for more than 95 percent of the country’s exports, has plunged by more than half from last year’s peak in june to $47 a barrel this month.“this is the worst it has ever been -- i’ve seen lines thousands of people long,” greisly jarpe, a 42-year-old data analyst, said as she waited for dish soap in eastern caracas. “people are so desperate they’re sleeping in the lines.”to contact the reporters on this story: andrew rosati in caracas at arosati3@bloomberg.net ; noris soto in caracas at nsoto9@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: andre soliani at asoliani@bloomberg.net ; philip sanders at psanders@bloomberg.net nathan crooks, randall woodspress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 is america’s entrepreneurial engine roaring or sputtering?startups are a good thing, whether they are small businesses that help people move up the opportunity ladder or the sort intended to become the next airbnb or uber or google.  the latter, high-impact startups, are especially important for making the us economy as productive and innovative as possible. but the us would seem to have a startup problem. as researchers ian hathaway and robert litan  write in their 2014 paper,   “declining business dynamism in the united states “: “… the firm entry rate—or firms less than one year old as a share of all firms—fell by nearly half in the thirty-plus years between 1978 and 2011.”on its face, that number is alarming. high-impact entrepreneurship is the deep magic of the free enterprise system. less entrepreneurship means a less dynamic american economy — less growth, fewer good jobs, not as much cool stuff.but is the number as scary as it seems? there is an argument to be made that the startup decline is neither that severe nor scary. first, perhaps the numbers are misleading. those long-term startups numbers are surely deflated by industry consolidation, whether from big-box retailers, chain restaurants, or megabanks. and while we may get nostalgic about those mom-and-pop shops, as economist noah smith has put it, “the birth and death of small family businesses is one kind of ‘economic dynamism,’ but not really the kind that leads to increasing living standards or technological progress.”second, just look at the business news. silicon valley seems to be buzzing with startups. an informal bezinga poll late last year of 20 investors and executives in the startup “space” found that three-fourths thought there was a “startup bubble.” around the same time, venture capitalist bill gurley told the wall street journal that he thought “silicon valley as a whole, or that the venture-capital community or startup community, is taking on an excessive amount of risk right now—unprecedented since ’99.” indeed, us firms attracted the most vc dough last year, more than $48 billion, since 2000 — the end of the internet bubble.  it was also the best year since 1990s for initial public offerings.my response: first, although the growth of big-box retailers may be hampering start-ups in the retail sector, explains jpmorgan economist mike feroli, “the decline in entrepreneurship is affecting most industries, not just retail.” a 2014 paper, “ the secular decline in business dynamism in the u.s.” by  ryan decker, john haltiwanger, ron jarmin, and javier miranda notes that “after 2000, the information and high tech sectors exhibited sharp declines in measures of dynamism and entrepreneurial activity. in addition, it is after 2000 that we observe a decline in high growth businesses.” likewise, a 2014 kauffman foundation study notes that  the share of young firms in the high-tech sector has exhibited a more pronounced secular decline in the post-2002 period than in the rest of the economy.” these trends that have continued long-after the tech bubble collapased, which is now 15 years ago.second, things very well may have improved the last couple of years. americans started 410,000 businesses in 2012, notes ben casselman of fivethirtyeight , but an increase of just 2% from a year earlier and still more than 20% below prerecession levels. i asked ian hathaway about this very issue in a podcast last year:now, of course there’s been a surge in activity in recent years.  and, unfortunately what we’re getting with accuracy with our data, which is administrative data that’s calculated by the census bureau, and it comes from – it comes from actual tax records from the irs, so encompassing the entire private sector universe – what we’re getting with accuracy – unfortunately, we have a time lag there.  so, as i mentioned, just yesterday, the data for 2012 were released.  and we all know that there’s been a surge in tech entrepreneurship, in particular in the last couple of years. so while i would expect that rate to have gone up in the two years that have passed, the bigger picture here is that there was a persistent decline for three decades.  so if we’ve experienced a rebound these last few years, and my guess would be that we have, particularly in certain segments of the economy, but we still have a huge hole to climb out of.third, let’s keep things in perspective. although there were nearly 300 ipos last year, that still below the nearly 500 seen in 2000. and as john dearie notes , the small-cap ipo market has recovered anywhere that overall sector. from an analysis last summer: “of the 165 ipos so far this year, less than 7 percent were valued below $50 million, and only 22 percent were valued below $1 billion. by stark contrast, 80 percent of the 3,000 companies that went public between 1991 and 1997 were valued at less than $50 million.” then again, maybe startups are choosing to stay private. from the wsj :wall street is dealing with new challenges in one of its bedrock businesses, taking young companies public, as more startups choose to stay private longer. a number of internet, software and consumer companies are raising huge sums in private deals that enable them to postpone initial public offerings for years, if not indefinitely. moreover, they often negotiate these private placements directly with investors, bypassing banks.it is a debate that will continue. (i haven’t even mentioned how “network effects” may be playing a role in all this.) but i here’s where i am: i want more potentially high-impact startups, in all sectors. and i doubt public policy — whether education, taxes, basic research, regulation, infrastructure – is optimal in generating such an ecosystem. creating an innovation state — rather than just a wafare state or welfare state — is a great lens though which to view a smarter role for government, doing more in some areas, less in others.and, again, here are a few other things i have written on the subject:
 secret nuptials: joseph gordon-levitt has married tasha mccauley. photo:  getty imagesjoseph gordon-levitt has done what most celebrities only dream of doing – he wed his wife in secret.gordon-levitt slipped under the radar and married his girlfriend tasha mccauley on december 20, reports people .the pair wed in a private ceremony in their los angeles home.the inception actor met mccauley, co-founder and ceo of robotics company fellow robots, through friends.while gordon-levitt, 33, stayed fairly tight-lipped about his relationship with mccauley, he did share some details in a 2013 interview on the howard stern show."i have a girlfriend but i tend not to really like to talk about it in public," he said.not wanting to give too much away he said his girlfriend wasn't in "show business" but wouldn't say how long they had been dating.preferring to keep his work like separate from his private life, gordon-levitt said, "i get up in movies and i play other people, so when the audience is watching me in movies, i don't want them thinking about me and who i'm dating, and blah blah blah.""i want them to see the character, the story that i'm telling, you know."and mccauley agrees with her boyfriend."the girl that i'm with, she really doesn't want to be a part of it and you can imagine not wanting to have that kind of scrutiny," he said.gordon-levitt has a string of accomplishments to boast, but his wife is no stranger to success.as ceo of fellow robots, a start-up at nasa research park in silicon valley, the company most recently developed retail robots and according to the wall street journal will be rolling them out in lowes in the us.posting on twitter, mccauley said, "so proud of @fellowrobots . new retail robot will help people shop, and in multiple languages!"mccauley earned a ba from bard college and a graduate certificate in robotics from singularity university and also speaks three languages.in 2013, she went on to receive an international business education and research mba from the university of southern california.in the same year, gordon-levitt founded hitrecord, a production company, and wrote, directed and starred in don jon.gordon-levitt's next movie is the walk, a biopic based on french high-wire artist philippe petit, who walked between the twin towers in 1974.
rt @sub8u: the mobile payments story in africa continues to be aspirational for the rest of the world.
 kahara village, kenya —the wife of a cow herder recently switched on a light in her home for the first time ever, all thanks to a mobile phone.rokoine tipanoi used the mobile phone in november to make a tiny down payment on a solar panel on her roof that provides electricity to her home. the payment was so small, in fact, that it’s cheaper to...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 as seen on conan...  the first limited edition batch of nick offerman's handcrafted wood emojis sold out  in mere minutes, so conan is teaming up with tilt.com again to produce a second batch of the world's heaviest, most impractical, and wildly expensive emojis — with all proc… read full descriptionthe campaign has ended but the conversation hasn't! post a comment below.as seen on conan...  the first limited edition batch of nick offerman's handcrafted wood emojis sold out  in mere minutes, so conan is teaming up with tilt.com again to produce a second batch of the world's heaviest, most impractical, and wildly expensive emojis — with all proceeds going to the children's defense fund.that's right, donate $100, and you will receive a fine 2-inch thick solid pine emoji, in the design of your choice: smiley face, heart eyes ("i love you"), the wink, the cat, or the always popular pile of poo.all proceeds after production and shipping go to the children's defense fund. plus you'll get andy richter's official "certificate of reluctant philanthropy" after purchasing. we need to sell 500 in order to make this happen for the children's defense fund. so don't delay, donate today!i bought mine after it reached 500. will i still receive one?yes! 500 was the minimum to tilt, but we are making as many as are ordered! all proceeds are going to the children's defense fund. when will my emoji arrive?we plan to start shipping our solid wood emojis by the first week of january 2015. you'll also receive an authentic, printable certificate right after purchasing.what is the emoji made out of and how big is it?our handcrafted emojis are always lovingly carved out of solid, high-quality wood. they are about 1 foot in diameter and weigh 3 pounds.can i buy multiple emojis?absolutely! after all, you may need a few to craft your perfect message. you'll need to purchase each emoji separately — after you place your first order, it will be pretty much 1-click to buy again!shipping anywhere in the usa is on us and 100% free! if you are located outside the usa, you will be asked to pay an additional $16 to cover delivery.sorry for the delay folks! we will begin shipping the first 1,000 the week of 1/26. then, we'll be making the second batch and those will ship early february! thanks for everyone's patience!
 i imagine a lot of people would be surprised to learn that the vast majority of infrastructure investment is made by state and local governments and not the federal government, considering that debate tends to focus on the latter. i imagine no one would be surprised that infrastructure investment in the united states has remained mostly flat for several decades.from barry bosworth and sveta milusheva, innovations in us infrastructure financing: an evaluation :it is noteworthy that state and local governments are responsible for an overwhelming proportion (85 percent) of public infrastructure investment, though the federal government does make a financial contribution through its capital grants to the states. adjusted for inflation, investment spending peaked as a share of gdp in the 1960s and fell sharply during the 1970s. the decline was largely the result of the completion of the interstate highway system and a cycle in the construction of education buildings to meet the needs of the baby-boom generation. since 1980, the rate of public investment has been relatively stable, averaging about 2.5 percent of gdp. it contrasts with an average of 3.5 percent of gdp during the 1960s. it is also important to note that investment is measured in constant prices because the cost of construction rose much faster than that of gdp as a whole during the 2000s.state and local governments primarily finance capital projects through the issuance of tax-exempt municipal bonds. these are usually amortizing loans (meaning that the government pays the principal amount down annually — this is very different than how the federal government borrows money) with long terms that match the long useful lives of the projects being financed.there are basically three types of municipal bonds, which are categorized by the types of pledges they involve (i.e., what sources of revenue will be used to repay what has been borrowed with interest):(1) general obligation bonds — these bonds are backed by the full faith, credit, and ability to levy taxes of the government that is borrowing the funds;(2) revenue bonds — these bonds are backed by a specific revenue stream, usually either revenues that are generated by the project being constructed or a lease arrangement with a government borrower; and(3) special assessment bonds — these bonds are backed by specific taxes or fees assessed by the government to offset the costs associated with new development in an area.the question of whether borrowing for capital projects primarily takes place at the state or local level is resolved differently from state to state according to their political structures, legal constraints (constitutional provisions, tax and expenditure limitations, and so on), and cultural preferences.state governments have determined the debt issuing responsibility, either directly or indirectly, in different ways. for example, some states like texas and georgia have maintained a relatively low portion of total state and local debt at the state level. over the last thirty years in texas the state government has only issued 20% of the total state and local debt in real per capita dollars. conversely, states like massachusetts have issued about 80% of total debt at the state levels. a third category of states that includes new york have switched between periods where the state government issued a larger portion of the debt and where local governments issued a larger portion … the majority of state dominant states are concentrated in the northeast, while the majority of local dominant states are in the south and southwest.this is a feature of infrastructure investment (and related taxation) that is often overlooked and makes some generalizations unfair. the populations that bear the weight of paying for infrastructure vary depending on which sources have been pledged to retire debt (or to fund projects outright) and how political power is divvied up at the state and local levels.according to federal reserve data, as of september 2014, state and local governments had approximately $3.63 trillion of outstanding debt . (bloomberg estimates the current figure to be closer to $3.5 trillion once the fourth quarter is taken into account.)the municipal bond market is now smaller than it was in 2009 because state and local governments have been borrowing less money for projects than in previous years. state and local governments have issued approximately $295.5 billion of bonds in 2014 versus a high of $433.3 billion in 2010. of that $295.5 billion, $130.6 billion was new money for capital projects; $109.9 billion was refinancing outstanding bonds; and $55 billion was combined new money and refinancing issues (thomson reuters data, updated through december 9, 2014).state and local governments approach infrastructure investments differently — some have robust capital planning practices and some proceed with projects according to political whim. investors in the municipal bond market play an important role in vetting project elements and the security of fund sources, however. the relatively small number of defaults suggests that investors are good at evaluating bond offerings.fifty-seven issuers defaulted for the first time this year as of december 30, compared with 69 in 2013 and 140 in 2010, according to [municipal market analytics] … outliers include detroit, which emerged from a record $18 billion bankruptcy this year, and puerto rico, whose electric utility is expected to restructure its debt [chad] ferrington said. most defaults are occurring in bonds issued for projects sensitive to the housing bust and recession, such as land deals and retirement homes.there are three main financing tools the federal government employs for infrastructure projects: direct grants; loans and loan guarantees; and tax expenditures. the overwhelming majority of federal infrastructure spending — almost 90 percent by one estimate — comes in the form of grants. since the 1950s, the largest portion of public funding for infrastructure has gone to highways. in 1956, president dwight d. eisenhower signed the federal-aid highway act, which established the federal fuel tax. ever since, the fuel tax has been used to generate resources for the highway trust fund, whose monies are distributed via grants to the states to support the interstate system and other highway projects. these grants, however, are not subject to scrutiny, competition, or even basic calculations to assess need. instead, they are allocated based on formulas.federal lawmakers have resisted adjusting the amount of resources it devotes to infrastructure for a long time. the fuel tax has remained at 18.4 cents per gallon since 199 3.the transportation infrastructure finance and innovation act (tifia) program offers loans and loan guarantees to state and local governments and private entities to assist in the construction of large-scale transportation projects. historically, tifia has funded one-third of the cost of the selected projects, but recent legislation has increased the federal government’s maximum commitment to 49 percent. tifia funding for fiscal year 2014 was $1 billion.the water infrastructure finance and innovation act (wifia) signed into law in june 2014 creates a similar program aimed at water and wastewater projects.the federal government operates two programs that provide matching grants for state revolving loan programs to finance drinking water and wastewater projects. many states have used the portfolio of loans they have made from these programs to issue asset-backed securities. this gives states additional funds to finance projects.i could continue listing projects here. but it is the overall structure — not individual programs — that raises questions.this system of funding has a strong anti-federalist bent. step back and look at how this works. the federal government collects taxes locally through fuel taxes, etc. these tax revenues are sent to washington, where federal agencies take their cut (about 10 cents on the dollar) for administering a miscellany of programs. the money is then sent back to the local level with stipulations about how it can be used (project selection, wage laws, and so on).this structure is derived from the interstate highway system — where it makes sense to organize and prioritize planning at the federal level. but now it is mostly used to fund local projects.(there is also a relatively minor — compared to total investment, not in absolute terms — amount of private capital investment in infrastructure in the utilities, communications, and railway sectors.)this does not offer a complete picture of infrastructure investment in the united states, however, because these measures do not account for operations and maintenance (o&m) costs. back to bosworth and milusheva:o&m represents more than half of the total spending on infrastructure, and in some areas, such as mass transit and aviation, the proportion is two-thirds or greater. infrastructure systems involve much greater costs than just the initial investment to build them. they involve major commitments to future operating and repair costs that need to be funded on an ongoing basis. the inclusion of o&m thus highlights a fundamental problem of infrastructure in the united states: the failure to maintain the investments on a timely and efficient basis. there is an underlying bias in the funding of infrastructure that “free money” (federal grants) is available for new capital investments, but state and local governments must finance the vast bulk of their own o&m costs. not surprisingly, the result is excess investments in facilities that local governments are not prepared to maintain. in those cases where federal funding is available for maintenance, the amounts are limited and beset perverse incentives. o&m has represented only 8 percent of total federal grants since 2000. there is a federal program for bridge repair, the highway bridge program (hbp), but priority is given to states with the worst rating of bridge conditions — hardly an incentive for timely maintenance.this approach has created a mountain of unmet need. the lack of investment in o&m also has the effect of giving constituents the impression that the infrastructure they benefit from on a daily basis involves fewer costs than it does in reality. this makes building political will for increasing taxes and user fees very difficult. problems in funding infrastructure improvements thus become self-perpetuating.so there is a structural mismatch — at least at the federal level — between the costs associated with infrastructure and where resources are directed. i often see journalists and other observers remark, “with interest rates so low, why doesn't the federal government borrow a gazillion dollars and replace all of the crumbling infrastructure already?” there is a lot to be said for the argument that the federal government (and, to some extent, state and local governments) is squandering an opportunity to invest in infrastructure when it has an almost negligible cost of capital. but then there’s the question of who will pay for the maintenance of the new projects going forward and where that money will come from.increasing funding for o&m and crafting smarter policy would do a lot to address this mismatch. but i would submit to you that the trade-off that exists between funding new capital projects and maintaining existing infrastructure is precisely why privatization is here to stay (as i will discuss in a future post).in my next installment, i will delve into tax policy.
rt @sub8u: what happens when you have mobile phones, but no cellular network to use them over? you build the network yourself!
 it took two hours in the rain to anchor the tower to the roof of yaee’s town hall.inside the cloud that is perpetually draped over the small town of san juan yaee, oaxaca, raúl hernández santiago crouches down on the roof of the town hall and starts drilling. men wearing rain gear of various impermeabilities cluster above him, holding a 4-meter-tall tower in place. braided wires trail from four small circles welded near its midpoint; eventually those will be bolted or tied down in order to hold the tower steady during the frequent storms that roll through this part of mexico’s sierra juárez mountains. they don’t want it falling over every time it rains. ninety thousand of the town’s pesos—a bit over $6,000—are invested in the equipment lashed to the top of the tower, in a town where many residents get by on subsistence agriculture.the tower—which hernández, yaee’s blacksmith, welded together out of scrap metal just a few hours earlier—is the backbone of yaee’s first cellular network. the 90,000 pesos come in the form of two antennas and an open-source base station from a canadian company called nuran. once hernández and company get the tower installed and the network online, yaee’s 500 citizens will, for the first time, be able to make cell phone calls from home, and for cheaper rates than almost anywhere else in mexico.rhizomatica’s peter bloom helped make sure the tower could support a base station and an antenna.strategically ignored by mexico’s major telecoms, yaee is putting itself on the mobile communications grid with the help of a oaxaca-based telecommunications non-profit called rhizomatica . its founder, peter bloom, is among the men currently getting soaked on the roof of town hall. it’s may of 2014, and this is the third of what he jokingly calls “artisanal cell phone installations” that he’s led in the sierra juárez in the past year and a half—the first of their kind in the world.by the end of the year, he will have installed six more networks all over the state of oaxaca, bringing the total to nine. armed with an experimental concession from the mexican government that grants rhizomatica access to coveted cellular spectrum all over the country, bloom is slowly but surely bringing coverage to towns that have been left out of the 21st century’s most important technological revolution.of the world’s 7 billion or so cell phones, a few hundred of them are already in yaee—they’re just not connected to a network. kids use them as cameras and mp3 players, and hernández, like many adults, bought his to use in oaxaca city, a seven-hour bus ride away. when he’s there, his cell phone can connect to plenty of base stations, which, in turn, link him to his choice of commercial network. but back in yaee, there are no base stations and therefore no network. every time hernández wants to make a call in his hometown, he hikes for 20 minutes to the top of the highest hill around and hopes to catch some signal trickling in from a faraway base station, installed in a place deemed more profitable for telecoms than small towns like yaee.raúl hernández, el herrero de yaee, construyó en su taller la torre hecha de chatarra.we’ve all heard plenty of uplifting stories of the democratizing potential of cell phones, how they’ve brought everything from voice calls to mobile banking to people who have never had access to landlines and laptops. cell phones “have definitely proven the most ubiquitous piece of communication and digital hardware that people own on earth,” says bloom. but on its own, “your cell phone doesn’t really know how to do anything,” he explains. all of the utility is in the network. and by and large, that network is provided—and, therefore, controlled—by a company that wants to make a profit.that profit comes from subscribers, and if there aren’t enough of them in a particular region, cellular providers simply refuse to install their infrastructure there. some countries get around that economic reality by legally requiring telecom companies to build networks in rural areas, no matter how many people end up paying for a contract. mexico doesn’t have any such laws, meaning that yaee, with its 500 residents, doesn’t stand a chance of attracting a commercial provider.to make things worse, mexico’s telecom industry is largely controlled by telmex, a near-monopoly run by carlos slim. ever since a supposed reform in the late 1980s transferred the country’s state telecom into slim’s hands, mexicans have paid first world rates for third world service—first for landlines, and now for cell service and internet access. and that’s when they live in a place with a network. limited access and high prices meant that only 55 percent of mexicans were using cell phones in 2011, according to the international telecommunication union.despite mexico’s reputation for horrendous, slim-driven telecom service and policy, it’s far from the only country that struggles with providing rural cell phone access. according to the gsm (for global system for mobile communications, the standard technology behind a 2g network) association, a consortium of commercial mobile providers from all over the world, 1.6 billion people in rural parts of developing countries don’t have access to mobile networks. that’s why bloom and his collaborators at rhizomatica say that if you really want to make the benefits of cell phones available to the people who need them most, it’s not enough to democratize the hardware by making the phones themselves super cheap. you have to democratize the infrastructure, the network itself. and that’s a lot harder to do.from a hacker’s point of view, mobile communications came along at just the wrong time. the first commercial systems were deployed in 1991, right before the internet emerged from the academy and started making its way into people’s homes. by the time a strong open source community came into being, cellular networks were locked up behind walls upon walls of patents and proprietary equipment. even today, “it’s very difficult to get your hands on the technology,” says harald welte, an open and free source software developer in germany who works on mobile communications.it wasn’t until around 2006 that old base stations started showing up on ebay, giving interested hackers like welte a firsthand look inside the (albeit already outdated) technology that made 2g mobile networks possible. out of straightforward intellectual curiosity, welte snapped up a few and, four years later, he was able to make the first call on his reverse-engineered, open source network, dubbed open bsc, referring to the base station controllers that coordinate traffic on a cell network.now, rhizomatica is pushing open bsc to its limits out in the real world. “we’re amongst the first people actually putting it into a live environment and using the shit out of it,” bloom says. he first got interested in community cell networks when he was living in nigeria and working with communities that were protesting the presence of oil companies in the niger delta. the activists there had cell phones, but thanks to the high cost of service—not to mention political forces that could monitor their communications or even shut down their network on a whim—it was difficult for them to share information with each other or with larger audiences. so bloom decided to help them build what’s called a mobile mesh network, which connects cell phones directly to each other instead of routing calls through base stations or commercial networks. but the technology, which is mainly used in disaster relief situations like post-earthquake haiti, proved to be too unreliable for everyday use. sustained, real-world levels of traffic overloaded them, and the mesh networks frequently collapsed.when a local man suffered several serious snakebites and needed antivenom right away, there was no signal.a few years later, bloom moved to mexico to be with his now wife, who works with community radio stations in the sierra juárez. these villages wanted but couldn’t afford commercial cell service, and bloom started thinking about a way to continue the project he had started in nigeria. he decided to ditch the mesh network idea and went on the hunt for serious telecom technology, ultimately settling on welte’s open bsc as the strongest open source system. but since bloom’s background isn’t in programming, he needed help installing the software on open source base stations he buys from nuran and another company called fairwaves. he started enlisting the help of any experienced hacker who happened to pass through oaxaca city on backpacking trips and the like. (one of them, an italian, would eventually move to mexico permanently to be part of the rhizomatica team.) today, bloom spends much of his time personally driving the equipment out to villages like yaee, getting soaked on as many roofs as he needs to in order to get the networks up and running.the communities pay 120,000 pesos ($8,000 dollars) upfront for the equipment and installation, about one-sixth of what the commercial provider movistar charges for a similar rural installation. ninety thousand of the pesos go to buy the hardware, and the rest covers rhizomatica’s time and expenses. subscribers to the community network pay 30 pesos (about $2) per month for all local calls and texts, and the town keeps any profit left over after paying for electricity and maintenance. thanks to a mexican company called protokol, which provides internet access all over rural oaxaca, rhizomatica can also hook up the town’s network to a voice-over-ip connection, which allows users to make very cheap long-distance calls to mexico city and even the us, where many people have relatives. once the network is installed, yaee’s residents will be able to call the u.s. for 20 centavos (less than 2 pennies) per minute. a similar call from one of the town’s public landlines runs 15 pesos (about $1) per minute, a prohibitive cost for many residents.still, commercial networks have “20 years of headway” over the open source approach, welte says, and rhizomatica’s community networks can suffer from their distinct diy feel. bloom, hernández, and the rest of the team must make sure to install yaee’s tower above one of the town hall’s windows, so they can run an extension cord through it and plug the base station into a wall socket. that means whenever the power goes out in yaee—which happens frequently, especially during the may-to-september rainy season—they lose the cell network, too. and until the town could raise enough money to move the entire installation to higher ground than the town hall’s roof (which happened in august 2014, three months later), there was no guarantee that rhizomatica’s signal would be able to reach up the hillside to where hernández and a good portion of yaee’s residents live.it’s this fundamental instability that causes the most frustration for users in towns that have had their community networks up and running for longer. in yaviche, a similar sized town on the other side of the mountain from yaee that installed its local network in september of 2013, abi martínez ramos serves as the rural doctor and says that having any cell service at all has been a boon for emergency medicine. but when a local man suffered several serious snakebites and needed antivenom right away, “there was no signal,” he remembers. someone had to physically find martínez to administer treatment, just like in the old days.back in yaee, it takes the team about 2 hours out in the rain to anchor the tower to the roof. but it turns out the rain has caused a more serious problem than merely soaking everyone to the bone. three cloudy days in a row have depleted the solar panels that power protokol’s repeater antennas, knocking out yaee’s internet access. with no internet, bloom and his tech team can’t get the network online. they make plans to come back the following week to finish the job.raúl hernández santiago and peter bloom helped install the first cell phone tower in the town of san juan yaee, oaxaca.despite its problems, an increasing number of communities in oaxaca are eager to be part of rhizomatica’s experiment, attracted by the low price and the promise of complete control over their networks. keyla mesulemeth ramírez, who helps run the community network in talea de castro, a town of 2,000 that volunteered to be a rhizomatica pilot project in the spring of 2013, fields one such inquiry in her office the day before the yaee installation. four men from a town called yalahui have heard bloom is in the area and they want to talk to him about installing a network in their village. they grow coffee, sugar cane, corn, and beans, and they’re tired of not being able to call home when they’re out in the fields. it’s annoying not to be able to call when you’ve forgotten your lunch, they say, but it’s downright dangerous when someone has an accident and needs help. plus, everyone in yalahui has family in mexico city and the us, and they want to be able to call them without worrying about how much it costs. they’ve driven for 5 hours to talk to bloom about a possible solution.mesulemeth is frank with the yalahui men about the cost of the installation and rhizomatica’s waiting list. but she’s sympathetic to their frustration of being left off the cellular grid. “before, cell phone service was a luxury,” she tells them. “now it’s a necessity.” she promises to put them in touch with peter, who finds the group lingering over lunch a few hours later. he goes over the costs again, and says he’ll get out to yalahui as soon as he can. three months later, they’re making calls on a brand new network all their own.
rt @vjsubr: @rstephens @shanemac @pmarca @pattonoswalt wrote about geekdom democratized by the internet. software ate pop culture
 , i could say i saw it coming. and i’d consumed so many single-issue guest-writing stints of gaiman’s that when he was finally giventitle all to himself, i was first in line and knew the language.admittedly, there’s a chilly thrill in moving with the herd while quietly being tuned in to something dark, complicated, and unknown just beneath the topsoil of popularity. something about which, while we moved with the herd, we could share a wink and a nod with two or three other similarly connected herdlings.when our coworkers nodded along to springsteen and madonna songs at the local bennigan’s, my select friends and i would quietly trade out-of-context lines fromsketches—a thieves’ cant, a code language used for identification. we needed it, too, because the essence of our culture—our “escape hatch” culture—would begin to change in 1987.came out, in october. after that, it seemed like everything that was part of my otaku world was out in the open and up for grabs, if only out of context. i wasn’t seeing the hard line between “nerds” and “normals” anymore. it was the last year that a t-shirt or music preference or pastime (dungeons & dragons had long since lost its dangerous, satanic, suicide-inducing street cred) could set you apart from the surface dwellers. pretty soon, being the only person who was into something didn’t make you outcast; it made you ahead of the curve and someone people were quicker to befriend than shun. ironically, surface dwellers began repurposing the symbols and phrases and tokens of the erstwhile outcast underground.fast-forward to now: boba fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless t-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. the. and toad the wet sprocket, a band that took its name from ariff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at bennigan’s. our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun.used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the one ring would be sold as bling.the topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. in fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the internet. everyone considers themselves otaku about something—whether it’s the mythology of. there are no more hidden thought-palaces—they’re easily accessed websites, or facebook pages with thousands of fans. and i’m not going to bore you with the step-by-step specifics of how it happened. in the timeline of the upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the internet. and now here we are.before we can start to rebuild geek culture, we first have to destroy it.the problem with the internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. in the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. you had to wait, month to month, for the issues ofto come out. we couldn’t bittorrent the latest john woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether nirvana or tad would be the next band to break big. imagine the terror!but then reflect on the advantages. waiting for the next issue, movie, or album gave you time to reread, rewatch, reabsorb whatever you loved, so you brought your own idiosyncratic love of that thing to your thought-palace. people who were obsessed withbooks were all obsessed with the same object, but its light shone differently on each person. everyone had to create in their mind unanswered questions or what-ifs. what if leia, not luke, had become a jedi? what happens after rorschach’s journal is found at the end ofwhy create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your imovie?none of that’s necessary anymore. when everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. we’re on the brink of etewaf: everything that ever was—available forever.i know it sounds great, but there’s a danger: everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. action figures, videogames, superhero movies, ipods: all are continuations of a love that wanted more. ever see action figures from the ’70s, each with that same generic anson williams body and one-piece costume with the big clumsy snap on the back? or played atari’s, found the secret room, and thought, that’s it? can we all admit the final battle inlooks like a local commercial for a personal-injury attorney? and how many people had their cassette of thesoundtrack eaten by a walkman?now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome (or, if not, just as immediately rebooted or recut as a hilarious youtube or funny or die spoof), the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling., in which an entire artistic subculture—say, anime, h. p. lovecraft, or the marx brothers—is mapped out so you can become otaku on it but avoid its more tedious aspects.here’s the danger: that creates weak otakus. etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your imovie?can be remade into a comedy trailer. both movie versions of the joker can be sent to battle each another. the dude is inthe coming decades—the 21st-century’s ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—have the potential to be one long, unbroken, recut spoof in which everything inplays eerily in the background.but i prefer to be optimistic. i choose hope. i see etewaf as the balrog, the helter-skelter, the a-pop-alypse that rains cleansing fire down onto the otaku landscape, burns away the chaff, and forces us to start over with only a few thin, near-meatless scraps on which to build.in order to save pop culture future, we’ve got to make the present pop culture suck, at least for a little while.how do we do this? how do we bring back that sweet longing for more that spawned gears of war, the crank films, and the entire joss whedon oeuvre? simple: we’ve got to speed up the process. we’ve got to stoke the volcano. we’ve got to catalog, collate, and cross-pollinate. we must bring about etewaf, and soon.. websites that list the 10 biggest sports meltdowns, the 50 weirdest plastic surgeries, the 200 harshest nut shots.. lists of fails, lists of boobs, lists of deleted movie scenes. entire tv seasons on itunes. an entire studio’s film vault, downloadable with a click. easter egg scenes of wild sex in, period. and yes, i know that a lot of what i’m listing here seems like it’s outside of the “nerd world” and part of the wider pop culture. well, i’ve got news for you—pop culture is nerd culture. the fans ofor obsessed over his eighth-level half-elf ranger character in dungeons & dragons. it’s the method of consumption, not what’s on the plate.since there’s no going back—no reverse on the out-of-control locomotive we’ve created—we’ve got to dump nitro into the engines. we need to get serious, and i’m here to outline my own personal fantasy: we start with lists of the best lists of boobs. every beatles song, along with every alternate take, along with every cover version of every one of their songs and every alternate take of every cover version, all on your chewing-gum-sized ipod nano. goonies vs. saw. every book on your kindle. every book on kindle on every kindle.and directed by the coen brothers.that’s when we’ll reach etewaf singularity. pop culture will become self-aware. it will happen in thefirst: a brilliant nathan rabin column about the worst turkish rip-offs of american comic book characters will suddenly begin writing its own comments, each a single sentence from the sequel to, will appear suddenly in the tv shows section of itunes. someone bittorrenting abootleg will suddenly find their hard drive crammed with elvis presley’s “lost” grunge album from 1994. and everyone’s tivo will recordthis will last only a moment. we’ll have one minute before pop culture swells and blackens like a rotten peach and then explodes, sending every movie, album, book, and tv show flying away into space. maybe tendrils and fragments of them will attach to asteroids or plop down on ice planets light-years away. a billion years after our sun burns out, a race of intelligent ice crystals will build a culture based on dialog from. on another planet, intelligent gas clouds will wait for the yearly passing of the “lebowski” comet. one of the rings of saturn will be made from blurbs for the softcover release of, twirled forever into a ribbon of effusive praise.but back here on earth, we’ll enter year zero for pop culture. all that we’ll have left to work with will be a vhs copy of
 bill gross thinks the party for stocks is over.new york (marketwatch) — that’s all she wrote for the multi-year, bull-market rally.here’s how the former pimco top dog, who abruptly left the investment firm he helped found to join janus capital group back in september , puts it:“... there comes a time when common sense must recognize that the king has no clothes, or at least that he is down to his fruit of the loom briefs, when it comes to future expectations for asset returns. now is that time and hopefully the next 12 monthly “ides” will provide some air cover for me in terms of an inflection point.”gross argues that a rip-roaring market rally that has lasted for the better part of six years, boosted by ultra-loose monetary policy, may be undone by those same policies. he points to super-thin finance rates that have fostered cheap funding for corporations and resulted in razor-thin bond yields.but the bond king says that what this recent pattern hasn’t produced is genuine, tangible economic growth and could come to and abrupt end over the next 12 months.“corporate leaders, sensing structural changes in consumer demand, become willing borrowers, but primarily to reduce their own outstanding shares as opposed to investing in the real economy,” gross writes.gross’s predictions echo earlier remarks he’s made , which have pointed to federal reserve stimulus — set to come to an end in the middle of the year— as contributing to asset-price inflation.so far, gross seems to be on the mark.the new year is off to a rocky start, highlighted by falling crude oil prices — a telling sign that global economic growth is stagnating. on the new york mercantile exchange light, sweet crude oil for february delivery clg5, -5.26%  was trading at $48.19, down 3.6% on tuesday while, brent crude, the international benchmark, was off uk:lcog5  3.4%, to $51.30, after suffering a rough monday. worries about a potential exit of greece from the 19-nation eurozone bloc, which some describe as potentially worse for financial markets than the collapse of lehman brothers in 2008, also is giving the market reason to pause .marketwatch columnist mark hulbert also points out that monday’s rout in the dow, may bode ill for stock investors this year .it’s no wonder gross, and others, are souring on stocks, with all these concerns. but it wouldn’t be the first time that gross has been wrong in calling the bull market dead. gross called for an exit from treasurys in 2011, and proclaimed woeful to returns were in the offing in 2012 and 2013.maybe this time will be different.
 total reserves have fallen from $511bn to $388bn in a year photo: rexrussia’s foreign reserves have dropped to the lowest level since the lehman    crisis and are vanishing at an unsustainable rate as the country struggles    to defends the rouble against capital flight.central bank data show that a blitz of currency intervention depleted reserves by $26bn in the two weeks to december 26, the fastest pace of erosion since    the crisis in ukraine erupted early last year.credit defaults swaps (cds) measuring bankruptcy risk for russia spiked    violently on tuesday, surging by 100 basis points to 630, before falling    back slightly.markit says this implies a 32pc expectation of a sovereign default over the    next five years, the highest since western sanctions and crumbling oil    prices combined to cripple the russian economy.total reserves have fallen from $511bn to $388bn in a year. the kremlin has    already committed a third of what remains to bolster the domestic economy in    2015, greatly reducing the amount that can be used to defend the rouble.the institute for international finance (iif) says the danger line is $330bn,    given the dollar liabilities of russian companies and chronic capital    flight.currency intervention did stabilise the exchange rate in late december after a    spectacular crash threatened to spin out of control, but relief is proving    short-lived.the rouble weakened sharply to 64 against the dollar on tuesday. it has    slumped moe than 20pc since christmas, with increasing contagion to belarus,    georgia and other closely-linked economies.there are signs that russia’s crisis may undermine president vladimir’s    putin’s eurasian economic union before it has got off the ground. belarus’s    alexander lukashenko is already insisting that trade be carried out in us    dollars, while kazakhstan’s nursultan nazarbayev warned that the russian    crash poses a “major risk” to the new venture.the rouble is trading in lockstep with brent crude, which has continued its    relentless slide this week, falling to a five-year low of $51.50 a barrel. “if oil drops to $45 or lower and stays there, russia is going to face a big    problem,” said mikhail liluashvili, from oxford economics. “the central bank    will try to smooth volatility but they will have to let the rouble fall and    this could push inflation to 20pc.”under the russian central bank’s “emergency scenario”, gdp may contract by as    much as 4.7pc this year if oil settles at $60. the damage could be worse    following the bank’s contentious decision to raise rates from 9.5pc to 17pc    in december. bnp paribas says that each 1pc rise in rates cuts 0.8pc off gdp    a year later.bnp’s tatiana tchembarova said the situation is more serious than in 2008,    when russia had to spend $170bn to rescue its banks. this time it no longer    has enough reserves to cover external debt, and it enters the crisis “twice    as levered”.mr putin has imposed partial capital controls by forcing companies to    repatriate foreign currency. this has bought time and shored up the rouble    for a few days, but it is a disguised form of reserve depletion since many    of these companies will need dollars to repay debt.many of these companies are pillars of the russian economy or energy    champions. their dollar debts are implicitly liabilities of the russian    state since these firms cannot be left to default. the oil giant rosneft has    requested $46bn in state aid to help meet repayments and cover investment.igor sechin, rosneft’s chairman, expects oil to recover in the second half of    2015 and fluctuate between $70 and $75 but warned that the group would have    to retrench. “some high-cost projects will be postponed,” he said. analysts    at sberbank said the group faces a “very difficult year”.the total foreign debt of russian companies and state entities is $654bn. they    have to repay roughly $10bn a month since they are shut out of international    capital markets and cannot roll over loans.the iif’s lubomir mitov said the oil crash could leave russia with a current    account deficit of 3.5pc of gdp. each $10 fall in crude cuts export revenue    by 2pc of gdp. this comes on top chronic capital flight and the collapse of    inward flows due to sanctions. the overall “financing gap” could soon reach    10pc of gdp, putting enormous strain on the rouble. “it’s a perfect storm,” he said.the interest costs on hard-currency debt have suddenly doubled in rouble    terms. while commodity exporters earn matching dollars, russian property    developers and domestic companies with dollar-debt have no such buffer.russia’s rts index of stocks has fallen by 62pc since early 2011 but smaller    companies have been hit far harder. kingsmill bond, sberbank’s chief    strategist, said russian equities are among the cheapest in the world and    are trading on fear, ignoring the country’s strategic depth. “people have    been selling indiscriminately. once the oil price stabilises, it will be a    perfect time to buy illiquid domestic stocks, like the homebuilder isr,” he    said.mr bond said brave investors who bought russian stocks at the nadir of the    crisis in 2008-2009 were rewarded with gains of up 1,000pc. “first we have    to wait for oil to hit bottom,” he said.
 opinion piece by mario draghi, president of the ecb,there is a common misconception that the euro area is a monetary union without a political union. but this reflects a deep misunderstanding of what monetary union means. monetary union is possible only because of the substantial integration already achieved among european union countries – and sharing a single currency deepens that integration.if european monetary union has proved more resilient than many thought, it is only because those who doubted it misjudged this political dimension. they underestimated the ties among its members, how much they had collectively invested, and their willingness to come together to solve common problems when it mattered most.yet it is also clear that our monetary union is still incomplete. this was   the diagnosis offered two years ago by the so-called “four presidents” (the european council president in close collaboration with the presidents of the european commission, the european central bank, and the eurogroup). and, though important progress has been made in some areas, unfinished business remains in others.but what does it mean to “complete” a monetary union? most important, it means having conditions in place that make countries more stable and prosperous than they would be if they were not members. they have to be better off inside than they would be outside.in other political unions, cohesion is maintained through a strong common identity, but often also through permanent fiscal transfers between richer and poorer regions that even out incomes ex post. in the euro area, such one-way transfers between countries are not foreseen (transfers do exist as part of the eu’s   cohesion policy , but are limited in size and are primarily designed to support the “catching-up” process in lower income countries or regions). this means that we need a different approach to ensure that each country is permanently better off inside the euro area.this implies two main things. first, we have to create the conditions for all countries to thrive independently. all members need to be able to exploit comparative advantages within the single market, attract capital, and generate jobs. and they need to have enough flexibility to respond quickly to short-term shocks. this comes down to structural reforms that spur competition, reduce unnecessary red tape, and make labor markets more adaptable.until now, whether or not to carry out such reforms has largely been a national prerogative. but in a union such as ours they are a clear common interest. euro area countries depend on one another for growth. and, more fundamentally, if a lack of structural reforms leads to permanent divergence within the monetary union, this raises the specter of exit – from which all members ultimately suffer.in the euro area, stability and prosperity anywhere depend on countries thriving everywhere. so there is a strong case for sharing more sovereignty in this area – for building a genuine economic union. this means more than beefing up existing procedures. it means governing together: shifting from coordination to common decision-making, and from rules to institutions.the second implication of the absence of fiscal transfers is that countries need to invest more in other mechanisms to share the cost of shocks. even with more flexible economies, internal adjustment will always be slower than it would be if countries had their own exchange rate. risk-sharing is thus essential to prevent recessions from leaving permanent scars and reinforcing economic divergence.a key part of the solution is to improve private risk-sharing by deepening financial integration. indeed, the less public risk-sharing we want, the more private risk-sharing we need. a banking union for the euro area should be catalytic in encouraging deeper integration of the banking sector. but risk-sharing is also about deepening capital markets, especially for equity, which is why we also need to advance quickly with a capital markets union.still, we have to acknowledge the vital role of fiscal policies in a monetary union. a single monetary policy focused on price stability in the euro area cannot react to shocks that affect only one country or region. so, to avoid prolonged local slumps, it is critical that national fiscal policies can perform their stabilization role.to allow national fiscal stabilizers to work, governments must be able to borrow at an affordable cost in times of economic stress. a strong fiscal framework is indispensable to achieve this, and protects countries from contagion. but the crisis experience suggests that, in times of extreme market tensions, even a sound initial fiscal position may not offer absolute protection from spillovers.this is a further reason why we need economic union: markets would be less likely to react negatively to temporarily higher deficits if they were more confident in future growth prospects. by committing governments to structural reforms, economic union provides the credibility that countries can indeed grow out of debt.ultimately, economic convergence among countries cannot be only an entry criterion for monetary union, or a condition that is met some of the time. it has to be a condition that is fulfilled all of the time. and for this reason, to complete monetary union we will ultimately have to deepen our political union further: to lay down its rights and obligations in a renewed institutional order.reproduction is permitted provided that the source is acknowledged.
 on a frosty december morning in 1783, some 400,000 people gathered in the tuileries gardens in paris to see the world’s first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon. jacques charles and his assistant, nicolas-louis robert, ascended 1,800 feet into the sky accompanied by a mercury barometer, some sandbags, and a few bottles of champagne.“nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off,” charles later wrote. “i felt we were flying away from the earth and all its troubles for ever.”back on the ground, feelings were more ambivalent. benjamin franklin, then the american ambassador to france, watched the scene from his carriage. a cynical companion remarked, “what’s the use of a balloon?” franklin, aghast, replied, “what’s the use of a newborn baby?”his point: you’re not thinking big enough.when joseph banks, then the president of england’s royal society, first got word in a letter from franklin about the balloons, he too demanded to know their practical applications. there were some obvious implementations—geographical mapping and military reconnaissance sprung first to mind—but he questioned whether ballooning could otherwise “prove beneficial either to society or science.” banks proposed one such practical use-case: a system using balloons to reduce the load on horse-pulled wagons. the idea was that broad-wheeled wagons, which normally would require eight horses to draw, would need just two using such a method.franklin, with a bit more foresight, argued ballooning could “pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception.” he compared ballooning to “magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.”like those hydrogen balloons, small thinking has plagued the development of one of today’s flashiest technologies, virtual reality devices. when oculus, the company that (literally) kickstarted the new vr revolution, originally pitched its device as a “headset designed specifically for video games that will change the way you think about gaming forever,” hardly anyone—least of all gamers—questioned the idea that vr should be anything other than a high-end gaming accessory. like a new graphics card or a better tv, it would be a logical, utilitarian improvement to current display technology for games—a horse-drawn carriage, now improved with balloons.we’ve had a few years to get used to the idea of vr, and some have started getting a little more high-minded about its possibilities. wired has been eager to lead the charge, as when it declared a few months ago that vr will “change gaming, movies, tv, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education, and reality.” of course, it always has been the tendency of magazines to breathlessly celebrate new technologies. in a 1788 article, gentleman’s magazine (the first periodical to use the word “magazine” to describe itself) celebrated the advent of hydrogen ballooning as “the most magnificent and astonishing discovery that has been made for many ages, or perhaps since the creation.” time, gentleman’s magazine assured its readers, would reveal the utility of ballooning experiments.now, though, even the most breathlessly optimistic vr fanboys can’t help but ask: what will be “the killer app” for these new devices? (palmer luckey’s franklin-esque response? “what’s the real world’s killer app?”)to be fair, what people really mean when they ask about vr’s killer app is mostly how will you convince regular people to strap this to their face? that’s probably a valid concern. people wearing oculus headsets look terribly stupid .recently, at a vr convention, i walked down a hallway and passed by a guy—a shockingly skinny one, even by tech enthusiast standards—sitting on a bench, wearing an oculus rift, oblivious to his surroundings. sitting next to him on the bench was a book, supporting a mouse, which he flicked rapidly, manipulating unseen objects in a world visible only to him.he raised his hand to adjust his headgear, and i saw an opportunity to be a terrible person. i quietly moved in, picked up his mouse, and moved it a few feet further down the bench. the helmeted rift user’s hand glided back to where he’d left it, and found only air. i watched as he frowned and fumbled around, and it occurred to me that even if engineers totally solve vr’s motion-sickness problem, they’ll never be able to stop vr users from getting trolled.as ces kicks off next month and dozens of new vr companies pitch their innovations, executives and investors will inevitably ask, “ what’s the killer app? a killer app, by definition, is a piece of software that makes a piece of technology worthy of purchase by the masses. it makes sense to ask that of a game console, because there’s never been a game console that was self-justifying. a game console, or pretty much any new consumer gadget will flounder if it doesn’t get a killer app within a few months of its release. without them, game consoles and other devices have no utility.like human flight, or the ability to undo mistakes in our past, the desire to escape reality (or forge a new one) is a dream older than technology. it’s the kind of thing ancient cultures wrote myths about. when people ask, “what’s the killer app for vr?” they’re assuming vr will follow the path of regular consumer products from one of the many companies trying to sell us stuff. many of us play this game with apple every time a new iphone is coming out: “this company is going to have to somehow justify the existence of the crap it’s selling to me,” we say, “or nobody will buy it.”but to demand a killer app for vr is to ask about the immediate, capitalistic utility of something capable of doing something bigger, of touching a part of the human spirit that’s much older than the modern drive to have the newest, shiny gadget.illustration of jacques charles and nicolas-louis robert’s hydrogen balloon flight in 1783.you can see it on the faces of people who’ve just left an oculus demo. they look dazed, a little bleary-eyed, like they’ve just woken up, having been interrupted from a sweet dream. “put me back in,” said a guy next to me after stepping out of a demo of oculus’ crescent bay prototype. “i want to stay in there.”on the day of charles and robert’s first flight, they floated aimlessly for two hours, landing 27 miles away in a field. in a profoundly unwise moment, charles asked robert to step out of the basket, not realizing that the reduced weight would cause the balloon to take off again.free of the other man’s extra weight, the balloon lifted off again, this time climbing far higher than before: 10,000 feet in only ten minutes. charles kept his calm and made it back to earth by slowly emptying his reserve of gas, but the experience terrified him. he never stepped into a balloon again.the first balloons were easily broken, dangerous inventions with no practical application in the real world, but they captured people’s imaginations. the moment that daredevil frenchmen like jacques charles and the montgolfier brothers began filling huge bags with gasses and bouncing all over the countryside, a craze began. ballomania took over europe, and progress towards achieving the dream of true human flight became inevitable. it didn’t matter that strapping balloons to carriages wasn’t actually useful, because people who could see further knew ballooning was just a baby that just needed nourishment to grow. today, we can reasonably draw a straight line from the first balloon to the creation of the field of aeronautics, to the first airplanes, through to the rockets that put mankind on the moon.go to any vr convention, and you’ll see that pretty much every demo at the show is flawed in ways that would make it poorly suited for regular consumers. motion sickness is still a problem for many, and most of the demos invented by the many developers experimenting with vr throw the infantile stage of the field into stark relief.in truth, that doesn’t matter. with well over 100,000 experimenters who’ve purchased vr developer kits making baby steps towards discovering bigger, more significant uses for vr, we’ve crossed the line that ballooning crossed that december day in paris in 1783. virtual reality doesn’t need a killer app. it just needs to work in its most basic form—to fly—so the crazy people tinkering with it can lead us all someplace new.
 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.100 years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: you walked across it.today, if there's traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. and if there's a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.fail to do so, and you're committing a crime: jaywalking. in some cities — los angeles, for instance — police ticket tens of thousands of pedestrians annually for jaywalking, with  fines of up to $250 .to most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. but it's actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city street."in the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them," says peter norton , a historian at the university of virginia and author of fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the american city . "but under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."one of the keys to this shift was the creation of the crime of jaywalking. here's a history of how that happened.manhattan's hester street, on the lower east side, in 1914. (maurice branger/roger viollet/getty images)it's strange to imagine now, but prior to the 1920s, city streets looked dramatically different than they do today. they were considered to be a public space: a place for pedestrians, pushcart vendors, horse-drawn vehicles, streetcars, and children at play."pedestrians were walking in the streets anywhere they wanted, whenever they wanted, usually without looking," norton says. during the 1910s, there were few crosswalks painted on the street, and they were generally ignored by pedestrians.as cars began to spread widely during the 1920s, the consequence of this was predictable: death. over the first few decades of the century, the number of people killed by cars skyrocketed.those killed were mostly pedestrians, not drivers, and they were disproportionately the elderly and  children , who had previously had free rein to play in the streets.the public response to these deaths, by and large, was outrage. automobiles were often seen as frivolous playthings, akin to the way we think of yachts today (they were often called " pleasure cars "). and on the streets, they were considered violent intruders.cities erected prominent memorials for children killed in traffic accidents, and newspapers covered traffic deaths in detail, usually blaming drivers. they also published cartoons demonizing cars, often associating them with the grim reaper.the november 23, 1924 cover of the new york times shows a common representation of cars during the era — as killing machines. (new york times)before formal traffic laws were put in place, judges typically ruled that in any collision, the larger vehicle — that is, the car — was to blame. in most pedestrian deaths, drivers were charged with manslaughter regardless of the circumstances of the accident.in 1925 midtown manhattan, pedestrians compete for space with increasing automobile traffic. (edwin levick/getty images)as deaths mounted, anti-car activists sought to slow them down. in 1920, illustrated world wrote "every car should be equipped with with a device that would hold the speed down to whatever number of miles stipulated for the city in which its owner lived."the turning point came in 1923, says norton, when 42,000 cincinnati residents signed a petition for a ballot initiative that would require all cars to have a governor limiting them to 25 miles per hour. local auto dealers were terrified, and sprang into action, sending letters to every car owner in the city and taking out advertisements against the measure.a 1923 ad in the cincinnati post, taken out by a coalition of auto dealers. (cincinnati post)the measure failed. it also galvanized auto groups nationwide, showing them that if they weren't proactive, the potential for automobile sales could be minimized.in response, automakers, dealers, and enthusiast groups worked to legally redefine the street — so that pedestrians, rather than cars, would be restricted.the idea that pedestrians shouldn't be permitted to walk wherever they liked had been present as far back as 1912, when kansas city passed the first ordinance requiring them to cross streets at crosswalks. but in the mid-twenties, auto groups took up the campaign with vigor, passing laws all over the country.most notably, auto industry groups took control of a series of meetings convened by herbert hoover (then secretary of commerce) to create a model traffic law that could be used by cities across the country. due to their influence, the product of those meetings — the 1928 model municipal traffic ordinance — was largely based off traffic law in los angeles, which had enacted strict pedestrian controls in 1925."the crucial thing it said was that pedestrians would cross only at crosswalks, and only at right angles," norton says. "essentially, this is the traffic law that we're still living with today."government safety posters ridicule jaywalking in the 1920s and 30s. (national safety council/library of congress)even while passing these laws, however, auto industry groups faced a problem: in kansas city and elsewhere, no one had followed the rules, and they were rarely enforced by police or judges. to solve it, the industry took up several strategies.one was an attempt to shape news coverage of car accidents. the national automobile chamber of commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident, and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. these articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians — signaling that following these new laws was important.similarly, aaa began sponsoring school-safety campaigns and poster contests, crafted around the importance of staying out of the street. some of the campaigns also ridiculed kids who didn't follow the rules — in 1925, for instance, hundreds of detroit school children watched the "trial" of a twelve-year-old who'd crossed a street unsafely, and as norton writes , a jury of his peers sentenced him to clean chalkboards for a week.this was also part of the final strategy: shame. in getting pedestrians to follow traffic laws, "the ridicule of their fellow citizens is far more effective than any other means which might be adopted," said e.b. lefferts, the head of the automobile club of southern california in the 1920s. norton likens the resulting campaign to the anti-drug messaging of 80s and 90s , in which drug use was portrayed not only as dangerous, but stupid.at a 1924 new york safety parade, a jaywalking clown is repeatedly rammed by a slow-moving model t. (courtesy of the barron collier company, via peter norton)auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. they staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. in a 1924 new york safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving model t and rammed repeatedly.this strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. during this era, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. so pro-auto groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as  someone who didn't know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.at first, the term was seen as offensive, even shocking. pedestrians fired back, calling dangerous driving "jay driving."but jaywalking caught on (and eventually became one word). safety organizations and police began using it formally, in safety announcements.use of the word "jaywalking" increases steeply starting in the 1920s. (google ngram viewer)ultimately, both the word jaywalking and the concept that pedestrians shouldn't walk freely on streets became so deeply entrenched that few people know this history. "the campaign was extremely successful," norton says. "it totally changed the message about what streets are for."
 i searched the blog, thinking that i must have written about the titular subject of this blog entry at some point, but i can find no evidence that i did. so let’s do so. it may stand as one of my few legitimate contributions to human interaction.jim’s rule of buts states, “in any charged conversation, find any statements containing the conjunction ‘but’ and reverse the clauses.”this is a self-editing rule, and therefore most practical for written communication until you get the hang of it. but once you do, you can start applying it to verbal communication as well, if only because of the disreputable fact that we spend most of the time others are speaking planning what we’re going to say next rather than listening. or so they say.the most obvious example of the power of jim’s rule of buts is the classic apology. compare, “i’m sorry i yelled at you, but what you said made me really angry.” and “what you said made me really angry, but i’m sorry i yelled at you.” as a coordinating conjunction , ‘but’ joins independent and theoretically equal clauses. but in practice, what follows ‘but’ always dominates what precedes it. so if you really want to apologize, and really want to mollify your interlocutor, you really want to make sure the apology itself is in the dominant position. otherwise, you’re not apologizing; you’re excusing your own conduct.i thought about the more general case of the rule reading dr. t’s piece from yesterday . i also don’t want to hear you say, “well, now, obviously i don’t support violence, but you really shouldn’t be offending [oppressed] people…” but i’m fine with you saying, “well, now, obviously you really shouldn’t be offending [oppressed] people, but i don’t support violence.”jim’s rule of buts is about proportion, and being aware just where you are bestowing your grace. we have a deep impulse to bestow it on ourselves, at others’ expense, without even realizing it. and others have just as good an ear for us doing it. so if you really want to soothe rather than rile, learn jim’s rule of buts today! it will do you good for many days to come.
 general partner of draper, gaither & anderson, 1962-1967. joined bessemer securities corporation in 1967 as vice president in charge of venture capital investments. promoted to senior vice president, investments and then to president, ceo, and a director in 1976.founder, ceo, and chairman of measurex, one of the first companies to develop computer-control systems, in this case, for measuring properties of paper. bossen is the project's example of an entrepreneur whose company benefited from venture capital investment as early as the 1960s.
 back in 2013 i argued that the low labor force participation rate was not evidence of lots of labor market slack:it’s true the payroll gains and falling unemployment rate overlook the low labor force participation. in my view the falling lfpr is not a cyclical issue, even though the variable is itself cyclical.  this is very confusing to most people.  imagine a lfpr that has a strong downward trend for structural (non cyclical) reasons.  also assume the actual lfpr falls in a more cyclical pattern, falling steeply during recessions and leveling off during booms.  the level periods look like “nothing happening,” whereas the lfpr is actually growing relative to the declining trend line.  my prediction is that the lfpr will stay low even after we recover from the recession, and we always recover from recessions.  it’s not a cyclical problem.  this will become obvious by 2016.last october i explained the point further:i noticed that the labor force participation ratio fell to 62.7%, the lowest rate since february 1978. folks, it’s not coming back.  in less than a year the recession will completely end and we will get a normal unemployment rate (about 5%).  jobs will be available and those people simply aren’t coming back.  they are early boomer retirements (perhaps discouraged by the previous job market), disabled (perhaps partly discouraged by the job market in previous years) and young people staying in school longer, or choosing to work less (as is true in affluent towns like my own newton, massachusetts.)  it pains me to say this but it’s pretty clear they aren’t coming back—the job market is good enough where the lfpr rate should not still be falling, if it really were nothing more than discouraged workers sitting there ready to plunge in again when things got a bit better.now it’s 2015 and the progressive mainstream media is finally beginning to contemplate the unthinkable.  here’s the (keynesian) new yorker :despite the subsequent economic recovery, which has now lasted for more than five years, the rate has continued to fall. last month, it stood at just 62.7 per cent, a tie for the lowest level since 1978 (a time when more women stayed at home and did domestic labor rather than join the official workforce).  .  .  .most policy-makers, including janet yellen, the chair of the federal reserve, have been assuming that much of the decline is cyclical and that, as the recovery picks up, more and more discouraged workers will return to the labor force.  .  .  .i agree with that argument: indeed, i’ve  used it myself . by now, though, we should be seeing signs of the participation rate rebounding. the fact that it isn’t is somewhat alarming.but not surprising to readers of themoneyillusion.this entry was posted on january 11th, 2015  and is filed under misc. . you can follow any responses to this entry through the rss 2.0 feed.  you can leave a response or trackback from your own site.well not sure about this one. societies are and businesses adapt, are mutable. people can choose to retire later or work as consultants if the demand for labor is there.if wages rise, should not more labor be supplied?no slack in the labor force? then why are unit labor costs falling?i wish we could conduct a natural experiment and have such an aggressive growth-oriented fed that we experience “labor shortages” — then what would be the labor participation rate?jobs exist to serve some purpose, not to employ someone.  there are lots of boomer jobs that millennials just don’t want to do, because their living standards have always been so high.  that’s why we get wsj stories about $140k welders and people mike rowe exist, even as we import huge numbers of foreigners for it jobs (not complaining, i married one).when you consider that americans consuming $30k are global one-percenters, the employment picture suddenly makes perfect sense.ben,  i actually think there is slack in the labor force, but i don’t think the lfpr is the right measure of it.  i’d look at the u3 unemployment rate, and maybe the u6 rate too.more sumnerian double-speak.  like the roman god janus, dr. sumner speaks with two faces: “imagine a lfpr that has a strong downward trend for structural (non cyclical) reasons.  also assume the actual lfpr falls in a more cyclical pattern, falling steeply during recessions and leveling off during booms. ” “i agree with that argument: indeed, i’ve used it myself. ” “ben, i actually think there is slack in the labor force, but i don’t think the lfpr is the right measure of it. ”or, instead of the above complicated gymnastics and dualities, you can assume the lfpr is simply depressed for the same reason money velocity is depressed and the same reason inflation is depressed:  good ole old-fashioned lack of demand…my questions are: what made the recoveries from the 2001 and 2008 recessions so weak? and why is the situation even worse in the u.k.? this article has part of the answer, but it can’t be all of it:i’ve done a spreadsheet projection based on age-specific participation rates leading up to the great recession, when participation rates were steady (except for a slow rise among age 60+ workers). that way i can eliminate changes in the population structure, particularly baby boomer retirement.the data i have (from the cps) let me do breakdowns by 5-year age brackets. for brackets from age 25-29 to those age 50-54 the movement is quite similar, from 100% in early 2007, falling after may 2008 and plummeting from october to an average of 94% of “normal” in february 2010. while not smooth, participation began rising from january 2013. in december 2014 it was up to 97%.so true, the baby boomers aren’t coming back. and participation for new school leavers (age 20-24) is still only 91% of normal, up from 86%. but the data do suggest that we are in fact slowly returning to normal if we’re careful to adjust for the shifting structure of the us population.now 3% of “normal” is still millions of people. (i only have percentages in my spreadsheet so can’t make that more precise.) in the end we will look like japan, having lost a decade….[…] scott sumner goes back once again to the labor force participation rate: […]if these people aren’t coming back, that would mean there isn’t slack in the economy. that would in turn mean we have tight labor markets and we would see wage inflation. but we don’t. supply and demand.i don’t buy these demographic reasons and theories tossed about without evidence. it’s an awfully big coincidence that they all hit right after a huge cyclical event.ray,  i always love it when commenters attribute statements to me that were made by others.  especially using quotation marks.and there is slack, it’s just that lfpr is not the right measure of slack, use u3 or u6.one thing i will posit is some the lfp change is due to substantial changes in most corporation’s hr policies. there is considerable evidence that jobs remain open far longer than before and corporations interview many more people per position than before.the big change starting in 2000 was companies had far more resumes coming in and sifting through. i wasn’t around for the pre-internet job era, but the real work required limited the applications. now hr departments are subbed out to go through all the applications. that new model particularly hurts less-than-ideal candidates, such as the currently unemployed or those trying to change careers.it’s not a theory completely thought out with economic theory. but if the frictions are stong enough for discouraged workers, then higher ngdp could lead to higher inflation despite a ready supply of discouraged workers willing and probably able to work. the companies which do take a chance on the discouraged workers could charge lower prices than the companies that don’t, but what if no company takes that chance? most industries have economies of scale which prohibit discouraged workers from starting new businesses and if no companies take a chance on discouraged workers, then discouraged workers will remain discouraged.mike, that’s similar to what i have found.  i agree that there is still some slack.  lfp will likely level out for a couple of years until it converges with the downward sloping trend.but, on caveat i would suggest to your analysis is that labor markets were very hot in 2007.  this was masked then by the downward trend in lfp, just as it is now, so that it isn’t widely recognized, even by those who claim that the 2007 economy was in a bubble in other contexts.  so, there was probably some opportunistic cyclical employment at the point where you are pegging your trend line to 100%.  so, we are probably looking at a recovered normal lfp even if your measure recovers to 98 or 99%.  my 2 cents, anyway.if we think of the lfpr as a supply curve, then we will get higher lfprs at higher demand levels (as expressed by wages).there is some contention on this, but wages have been stagnant in the us for 40 years. labor share of business income has declined from 70% to 60%.fica and va “disability” programs have exploded.so then, explain cross country comparisons for me.as we see on my post (below), the us is the only advanced country to suffer employment-to-population declines of the magnitude we have seen here.  it is not bad, the us is absolutely the worst.  worse than italy, the uk, or france.how is it that the germans were able to raise their emp-to-pop ratio even as the us fell, when the germans are aging out?  how is it that the emp-to-pop ratio is 7 pp higher in the netherlands and 12 pp higher in switzerland?  i thought these countries were all aging out, and yet they are trouncing us.it’s because 50-60 year olds have lower lfp in the us, partly because these are prime years for disability eligibility.  so, as baby boomers move through this age group, the demographic decline in lfp is sharper in the us than it is elsewhere.ben,  higher wages might lead to higher lfpr, but won’t monetary stimulus boost wages and prices, leaving real wages little changed?steven,  i’m just telling you what is going to happen (lfpr won’t recover) i’m not telling you why.  in the case of germany, labor market reforms boosted lfpr—we could do the same.  the us labor market has lots of structural problems.  i haven’t studied the differing demographics, and hence don’t know what role they play. lfpr is not coming back—but i have an open mind as to why.  you tell me.vivian,  and the fed was afraid to do qe because they feared losing money on the program.it’s principally driven by policy; it’s absolutely clear from the graph.  changes in the lfp rates are dramatically different in the us than any other oecd country–even as the us economy has out-performed pretty much all of them.the factors in low and declining us lfp will be:- taxes on spouses (not clear on this, but may be a factor in fewer women working)so it’s mostly related to paying people not to work.   lfp is an endogenous variable.  you can make it whatever you want, certainly up to the 70% threshold.  in public policy terms, the current us lfp rate should be considered scandalous, which it is.you know, it’s not like i don’t have a spreadsheet on this.  and it’s not like i haven’t linked it, what, three times before.  mr. erdmann could make a nice living for his blog for a week just running some numbers.  and scott, you could do worse than cracking it open and putting together a little model which integrates population growth, legal and illegal immigration, civil labor force, labor force participation, and disability, et al.  (see the “analysis” tab.)  it will give you a very good feel for how all these numbers move together, and you also have all the data to look at age cohorts and the impact of education.  i have done all the hard work for you.in any event, if i take your view, scott, then the us economy will be gated by a shortage of labor within maybe 12 months.  and then i have no idea why we’re interested in ngdp targeting, because it will be entirely beside the point if we’re at full employment.  it will be secular stagnation 2.0 per larry summers (he disavowed 1.0), that the us will run out of labor before it reaches…ummm….potential gdp.i think larry will have an opportunity to disavow 2.0, too.here is the spreadsheet again: http://www.prienga.com/blog/2014/10/3/employment-tablesi have only seen the summary.  but, my understanding of the paper is that the situation with wachovia created an exogenous shock to credit.  he finds that there are frictions in credit markets, housing markets, and economic activity in general that created local effects proportional to wachovia’s local market share.in effect, each local area had an independent monetary policy, resulting from this.  i see this paper as evidence of the monetary nature of the crisis.only a really wealthy country like the us can pay so many people fit to work not to work.gdp per capita should fall, or grow relatively more slowly than “tougher” countries more as a result. unless offset by stronger than average productivity growth by those in work in the us. which is also possible while it remains the global home of tech advances.steven kopits’ reply gives far too much attention to public policy, and not nearly enough attention to the simple reality that the us is a wealthy country, and in a wealthy country, wealth and income is more likely to leak out from rich to nonrich and working to nonworking people in a variety of methods, including private transfers.there’s a lot more real suffering and a higher likelihood of a lower standard of living without employment in america, relative to pakistan. but you couldn’t fix that without literally turning america into pakistan. most people would say that that isn’t worth it. public-sector behavior is only a small piece.i also very much doubt steven’s general point: lfp is on the decline in every advanced country, or will be, in the long-enough run, because our labor is too expensive relative to alternatives, because living in america is expensive, because we’re a wealthy country. the end. rising productivity, more goods per person, but finite and downsloping marginal interest in buying those goods per person and/or asset accumulation per person. falling demand.why is no one mentioning the effect that obamacare is having on the 50-65 set, without triple digit effective marginal tax rates and huge subsidy cliffs?  and yes, these tax rates apply to spousal income, too.
 to enhance the ability to formulate effective strategies to global problems.the global strategies database attempts to record and map the relationships between strategies and solutions that humanity actually or potentially uses - from awarding prizes, breaking down cultural isolation and campaigning, to wishing and using witchcraft.the international community invests much time and energy in formulating and implementing strategies. however, the tendency is to perceive such strategies in isolation.whilst organizations may be able to identify precisely the set of problems to which they are responding, it is usually much less clear what strategy they are employing in the process. this is because organizations quite often have strategies which are not distinguishable within the organization from programme orientations, working style and the general objectives for which the body was originally established.also, the current approach limits strategy formulation. the conventional way of addressing any problem situation is to elaborate a strategy, but given the number, variety and interrelationships of the problems, as detailed in the world problems database, it is uncertain whether any conventional strategy could be adequate.given this complexity, there is a great advantage in clarifying the range of strategies currently being pursued in response to global problems. this database of strategies indicates the merits and clashes of various strategic approaches which can then be rendered much more explicit to planners.to promote understanding of the values, which are the guiding principles of human behaviour, in the hopes that a more comprehensive understanding will enhance the ability to deal with current global challenges.the human values database attempts to record and map the relationships between human values - from anarchy, boredom and creativity, to xenophobia, youthfulness and zealotry - and which often occur in value polarities of constructive or destructive values.the debate on social policy at the local, national or world level makes many references to concepts such as equality, justice and liberty. these are abstract concepts of great ambiguity and imprecision. however, in attempting to formulate social policy for the future, values must be fed into the decision-making process. therefore, the utility of any such policy depends on an understanding of the complex and shifting architecture of values that regulates human behaviour.what are values, how do they relate to one another, and how do they change? how do they relate to the problems with which society is confronted? knowledge of these matters remains primitive relative to the needs of the time. and, no problem can be recognized, or adequately formulated, unless the values involved, and the apparent threat to them, are stated. many world problems can be specifically associated with the values which they threaten or violate in some way.to provide a context for concepts of human development that are used in essentially different and frequently non-interacting sectors of society, and to draw attention to those concepts of human development which have hitherto been excluded from serious consideration within the international community.the human development database provides descriptions of human development approaches and the relationships between them, as perceived by different beliefs systems, disciplines, religions, and cultures - from absolution, balancing yin and yang and chakra centres of consciousness, to xenophrenia (or psychism), yantra yoga and zen meditation.the term "human development" relates to concepts that people identify with, consider meaningful or reject in their search for growth and fulfilment in life. it points to a process which is of vital interest at a time when the organization and future of life on this planet is challenged by the consequences of past understandings of that same process. for it is human development, through its lack of restraint, which has given rise to a high proportion of the problems of the world.the human development database describes briefly the complete range of concepts of human development. it includes concepts legitimated by the psychological and psychoanalytical establishments as well as those promoted by the various contemporary growth movements. it also includes concepts from religions and from belief systems of different cultures. entries are included on explicit concepts of human development and on therapies, activities or experiences in which a particular understanding of human development is implicit.concepts are also compared, for instance between those that place importance on the psycho-social development of the individual as a unique human being, from those which effectively stress the development of the individual conceived merely as a socio-economic unit. the human development database also provides information on the range of modes of awareness, as well as on the states of consciousness with which people identify during the process of human development, indicating where possible how these are perceived as interrelated stages.to explore the role of metaphor and pattern in relation to governance, understanding of world problems, articulation of more appropriate organizational strategies, transformative conferencing and dialogue, and knowledge organization.the patterns and metaphors database provides descriptions of metaphors and the relationships between them - from ambiguous boundaries, boats and ships and cycles of religious festivals, to unity and diversity, voice, and war.metaphors are a special form of presentation natural to many cultures. they are of unique importance as a means of communicating complex notions, especially in interdisciplinary and multicultural dialogue, as well as in the popularization of abstract concepts, in political discourse and as part of any creative process. they offer the special advantage of calling upon a pre-existing capacity to comprehend complexity, rather than assuming that people need to engage in lengthy educational processes before being able to comprehend.although frequently used in international debate through which strategies are defined, the advantages of metaphor have not been deliberately explored to assist in the implementation of such strategies. each development policy may be considered a particular "answer" to the global problematique. no such answer appears to be free from fundamental weaknesses. a shift to an alternative policy becomes progressively more necessary as the effects of these weaknesses accumulate. however, since each such policy reflects a "language" or mind-set whereby a worldview is organized, no adequate "logical" framework can exist to facilitate comprehension of the nature of such a shift or of the process of transition between alternatives.many familiar metaphors of alternation exist through which the characteristics and limitations of such a shift may be understood. this database is interested in the possibility of deliberately designing metaphors in support of innovative development.to identify classes of symbols considered significant in traditional and modern cultures; and to enhance understanding of the range of symbols that remain active in society and which can be called upon as a cultural resource to give focus to international programmes given that they embody special significance in establishing the identity of international campaigns in relation to other initiatives.the integrative concepts database details the symbols - from abstraction, analogy and adaptation, to union, visualization and world unity.symbols are of special importance in embodying significance and giving focus to any campaign or programme and in establishing its identity in relation to other initiatives. whilst much work has been done on symbols in order to market commercial products or political parties, almost none has been done on their value in communicating the key ideas associated with development strategies.furthermore, when advocating or imposing the use of particular international sets of values, needs or qualities, it is not recognized that these effectively compete as functional substitutes in traditional societies with other sets of qualities represented by hierarchies of gods, spiritual beings, or natural phenomena perceived as governing those qualities or some of them.given the relative rapidity with which such sets are now formulated it is not surprising if they are viewed as artificial, bloodless and unrelated to the complex pattern of qualities associated with traditional sets of symbols.the lack of success of public information programmes, using a confusion of unrelated symbolic gimmicks, is therefore understandable. there would therefore seem to be a need to understand the range of symbols that remain active in society and which, as a cultural resource, can be called upon to give focus to international programmes.
 new york – for several years, and often several times a month, the nobel laureate economist and new york times columnist and blogger paul krugman has delivered one main message to his loyal readers: deficit-cutting “austerians” (as he calls advocates of fiscal austerity) are deluded. fiscal retrenchment amid weak private demand would lead to chronically high unemployment. indeed, deficit cuts would court a reprise of 1937, when franklin d. roosevelt prematurely reduced the new deal stimulus and thereby threw the united states back into recession.well, congress and the white house did indeed play the austerian card from mid-2011 onward. the federal budget deficit has declined from 8.4% of gdp in 2011 to a predicted 2.9% of gdp for all of 2014. and, according to the international monetary fund, the structural deficit (sometimes called the “full-employment deficit”), a measure of fiscal stimulus, has fallen from 7.8% of potential gdp to 4% of potential gdp from 2011 to 2014.krugman has vigorously protested that deficit reduction has prolonged and even intensified what he repeatedly calls a “depression” (or sometimes a “low-grade depression” ). only fools like the united kingdom’s leaders (who reminded him of the three stooges) could believe otherwise.yet, rather than a new recession, or an ongoing depression, the us unemployment rate has fallen from 8.6% in november 2011 to 5.8% in november 2014. real economic growth in 2011 stood at 1.6%, and the imf expects it to be 2.2% for 2014 as a whole. gdp in the third quarter of 2014 grew at a vigorous 5% annual rate, suggesting that aggregate growth for all of 2015 will be above 3%.so much for krugman’s predictions. not one of his new york times commentaries in the first half of 2013, when “austerian” deficit cutting was taking effect, forecast a major reduction in unemployment or that economic growth would recover to brisk rates. on the contrary, “the disastrous turn toward austerity has destroyed millions of jobs and ruined many lives,” he argued , with the us congress exposing americans to “the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts.” as a result, “full recovery still looks a very long way off,” he warned. “and i’m beginning to worry that it may never happen.”i raise all of this because krugman took a victory lap in his end-of-2014 column on “the obama recovery.” the recovery, according to krugman, has come not despite the austerity he railed against for years, but because we “seem to have stopped tightening the screws: public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. and the economy is doing much better as a result.”that is an incredible claim. the budget deficit has been brought down sharply, and unemployment has declined. yet krugman now says that everything has turned out just as he predicted.in fact, krugman has been conflating two distinct ideas as if both were components of “progressive” thinking. on one hand, he has been the “conscience of a liberal,” rightly focusing on how government can combat poverty, poor health, environmental degradation, rising inequality, and other social ills. i admire that side of krugman’s writing, and, as i wrote in my book the price of civilization , i agree with him.on the other hand, krugman has inexplicably taken up the mantle of crude aggregate-demand management, making it seem that favoring large budget deficits in recent years is also part of progressive economics. (krugman’s position is sometimes called keynesianism, but john maynard keynes knew much better than krugman that we should not depend on mechanistic “demand multipliers” to set the unemployment rate.) deficits were not increased enough in 2009 to escape from high unemployment, he insisted, and were falling dangerously fast after 2010.obviously, recent trends – a significant decline in the unemployment rate and a reasonably high and accelerating rate of economic growth – cast doubt on krugman’s macroeconomic diagnosis (though not on his progressive politics). and the same trends have been apparent in the united kingdom, where prime minister david cameron’s government has cut the structural budget deficit from 8.4% of potential gdp in 2010 to 4.1% in 2014, while the unemployment rate has fallen from 7.9% when cameron took office to 6%, according to the most recent data for the fall of 2014.to be clear, i believe that we do need more government spending as a share of gdp – for education, infrastructure, low-carbon energy, research and development, and family benefits for low-income families. but we should pay for this through higher taxes on high incomes and high net worth, a carbon tax, and future tolls collected on new infrastructure. we need the liberal conscience, but without the chronic budget deficits.there is nothing progressive about large budget deficits and a rising debt-to-gdp ratio. after all, large deficits have no reliable effect on reducing unemployment, and deficit reduction can be consistent with falling unemployment.krugman is a great economic theorist – and a great polemicist. but he should replace his polemical hat with his analytical one and reflect more deeply on recent experience: deficit-cutting accompanied by recovery, job creation, and lower unemployment. this should be an occasion for him to rethink his long-standing macroeconomic mantra, rather than claiming vindication for ideas that recent trends seem to contradict.
 origins and destinations of the world’s migrants, from 1990-2013the figures in this interactive feature refer to the total number (or cumulative “stocks”) of migrants living around the world as of 1990, 2000, 2010 or 2013 rather than to the annual rate of migration (or current “flows”) in a given year. since migrants have both an origin and a destination, international migrants can be viewed from two directions – as an emigrant (leaving an origin country) or as an immigrant (entering a destination country).according to the united nations population division, an international migrant is someone who has been living for one year or longer in a country other than the one in which he or she was born. this means that many foreign workers and international students are counted as migrants. additionally, the u.n. considers refugees and, in some cases, their descendants (such as palestinians born in refugee camps) to be international migrants. for the purposes of this interactive feature, estimates of the number of unauthorized or illegal immigrants living in various countries also are included in the total counts. on the other hand, tourists, foreign-aid workers, temporary workers employed abroad for less than a year and overseas military personnel typically are not counted as migrants.there was no data provided for the selected field.
 you’d think by now people might be tired of “the hangover,” the raunchy 2009 comedy about four guys and the bachelor party from hell.after all, the movie has run 72 times on hbo and cinemax, 46 times on tbs and twice on tnt, not to mention video-on-demand and dvds.yet last month, comedy central got hold of the movie for the first time...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 satisfaction with the economy up 13 points in past year, to 41%security from terrorism dips 10 points, but still high at 59%princeton, n.j. -- americans' views about the economy, their overall quality of life and the opportunity to get ahead through hard work are more positive than they were before the 2014 state of the union address -- echoing their improving economic confidence . at the same time, americans are markedly less satisfied with the state of race relations and, to a lesser extent, with the nation's security from terrorism, with crime and with federal taxes.these are the significant changes in how americans see the country at the start of 2015 compared with the same point in 2014, according to gallup's annual mood of the nation poll. this year's update was conducted jan. 5-8, spanning the jan. 7 terrorist attack on the headquarters of french newspaper charlie hebdo in paris that took 12 lives and immediately consumed u.s. and world news headlines.americans' ratings of the remaining aspects of the country in the poll are largely unchanged, including such widely debated areas as education, the level of immigration, healthcare and the nation's energy policies.apart from the changes in the past year, americans are most satisfied with the overall quality of life in the country. eighty-four percent are satisfied with this aspect of the nation, including 30% very satisfied and 54% somewhat satisfied. this eclipses the nation's military strength and preparedness, which earns a 69% satisfaction score. meanwhile, 59% of americans remain satisfied with the nation's security from terrorism, keeping this in the top five despite a 10-point decline since 2014.the rise in americans' satisfaction with the nation's economy to 41% puts the issue at about the middle of the group of 27 areas rated this year, up from the bottom of the pack last year. at the same time, the downturn to 30% in satisfaction with race relations has moved it from the middle of the list to near the bottom, just slightly ahead of the nation's efforts to deal with poverty (26%). other issues on which no more than a third of americans are satisfied are immigration (33%), the moral and ethical climate (32%), government surveillance of u.s. citizens (32%), federal taxes (32%) and the way wealth and income are distributed (31%).yet another way to look at the 2015 results is how they compare with january 2008 -- the last gallup reading of these measures before barack obama took office (the questions weren't asked in early 2009). on that basis, satisfaction is up on six items, led by the availability of affordable healthcare, acceptance of gays and lesbians, the quality of medical care and the level of immigration -- all areas where democrats' satisfaction has surged and independents' has increased, while republicans' has waned or not changed.over the same period, satisfaction is down in seven areas -- most sharply on race relations, where it has fallen among all party groups, and the u.s. system of government and how well it works, down mainly among republicans.the economy is not on this list of issues that have seen major change since january 2008 because economic confidence did not become deeply negative until later in 2008.when americans settle in to watch obama deliver his state of the union address tuesday night, they will do so feeling better about the economy than a year ago -- though still not as content about it as they could be, given that satisfaction stands at 41%. that provides obama with an opportunity to tout his successes while still asking congress to support additional economic measures. it also frees him to make proposals that may have seemed extravagant at the height of the recession, such as his plan to subsidize tuition at community colleges for students who meet certain conditions.race relations, which elicited high mentions on gallup's most important problem list in december, has the compound challenge of suffering the sharpest decline in public satisfaction since 2014 and ranking among the lowest issues tested -- thus making it a prime topic for the president's attention.with obama edging closer to the end of his presidency, he may be speaking as much to the future as to the members of congress sitting before him. in reviewing his achievements, economic progress is likely to be front and center, but he may also highlight the three issues on which public satisfaction -- and particularly democrats' satisfaction -- has increased the most since 2008: healthcare, gay rights, and immigration.results for this gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted jan. 5-8, 2015, with a random sample of 804 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 u.s. states and the district of columbia. for results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. all reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cellphone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
 county set to clamp down on past-due property taxes; bills offer relaxed rulesdetroit—municipal bankruptcy is in detroit’s rearview mirror, but a new challenge looms: a wave of foreclosure notices for unpaid property taxes.after years of delay, wayne county, which includes detroit, is informing residents in an estimated 35,000 occupied homes that they are delinquent in their city taxes, which could lead to their houses being auctioned off. that could affect about one in seven detroit residents, or 97,733...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 question: when you estimate intrinsic value in capital intensive companies like mcdonald’s and walgreens where a very healthy and growing operating cash flow is largely offset by expenditures for new stores, restaurants, etc how do you estimate future free cash flow? and at what rate do you discount those cash flows?warren buffett: we use the same discount rate across all securities. we may be more conservative in estimating cash in some situations.just because interest rates are at 1.5% doesn’t mean we like an investment that yields 2-3%. we have minimum thresholds in our mind that are a whole lot higher than government rates. when we’re looking at a business, we’re looking at holding it forever, so we don’t assume rates will always be this low.we don’t formally have discount rates. every time we start talking about this, charlie reminds me that i’ve never prepared a spreadsheet, but i do in my mind.we just try to buy things that we’ll earn more from than a government bond – the question is, how much higher? if government bonds are at 2%, we’re not going to buy a business that will return 4%.i don’t call charlie every day and ask him, “what’s our hurdle rate?” we’ve never used the term.munger: the concept of a hurdle rate makes nothing but sense, but a lot of people using this make terrible errors. i don’t think there’s any substitute for thinking about a whole lot of investment options and thinking about the returns from each.the trouble isn’t that we don’t have one [a hurdle rate] – we sort of do – but it interferes with logical comparison. if i know i have something that yields 8% for sure, and something else came along at 7%, i’d reject it instantly. it’s like the mail-order-bride firm offering a bride who has aids – i don’t need to waste a moment considering it. everything is a function of opportunity cost.buffett: i’ve been on 19 boards and seen a zillion presentations projecting a certain irr [internal rate of return]. if the boards had burned them all, they’d have been better off. the irr is based on what the ceo wants. the numbers are made up.munger: i have a young friend who sells private partnership interests to investors, and it’s hard to get returns in that field. i asked him, “what returns do you tell them you can get?” he said “20%.” i said, “how did you come up with that number?” he said, “if i told them anything lower, they wouldn’t give me the money.”buffett: there’s no one in the world who can earn 20% on big money. it’s amazing how gullible pension funds and other investors are. they want it so badly that they’ll believe even total nonsense.discount rates used for valuation:- use a long term normalized interest rate for treasuries…e.g. 6%- don’t use different discount rates for different businesses…it doesn’t really matter what rate you use as long as you are being intellectually honest and conservative about future cash flows.- only want one variable to compare in order to assess the viability of an investment – price versus value. if we allowed discount rates to change it would lead to more than one variable.
 co-winner of the 2010 gold medal book award in entrepreneurship, axiom businesswinner of the 2009 prose award in business, finance & management, association of american publishers"lots of governments would like to promote high-tech entrepreneurship and venture capital in their regions--but many don't know how to do it effectively. in his new book boulevard of broken dreams, josh lerner . . . examines which types of policies to promote entrepreneurship and venture capital tend to work--and which don't. lerner supports his carefully researched analysis with numerous examples chosen from around the globe."--mit sloan management review"can governments spark start-up activity and job creation by getting into the venture capital business? or do they just waste taxpayer money whenever they try? those are the two questions that animate the new book from harvard business prof josh lerner, boulevard of broken dreams. . . . [w]hile the stories of failures are entertaining, what's most useful about boulevard are the examples of governments that have gotten it right. . . . [a] really readable collection of data, anecdotes, and thoughtful arguments."--scott kirsner, boston globe blog "innovation economy""today, calls for more innovation and entrepreneurship are more fashionable than ever, especially within government, where politicians and bureaucrats wastefully attempt to manufacture, via policy and subsidies, fresh batches of master agents and adventurers. but can government policy trigger entrepreneurship and subsequent growth? the title of a new book suggests not, boulevard of broken dreams, by harvard professor josh lerner. much of broken dreams is a first-rate handbook for policy makers keen to avoid interventions that have proven track records as disasters. lerner produces example after example of bad program design, bad implementation and plain dumb, even corrupt, policy making."--terence corcoran, national post"mr. lerner provides more than a dozen rules of thumb for effective government intervention in the private sector."--harry hurt iii, new york times"[a] useful book . . ."--david brooks, new york times"during economic turmoil, many look to the government to boost the economy by investing in entrepreneurship. but is that a good idea? josh lerner wrestles with that question in boulevard of broken dreams, which considers the history of the public sector's involvement in entrepreneurship and venture capitalism--what's worked, from silicon valley to singapore, and what's gone horribly awry. . . this book aims to steer policymakers in the right direction."--bized magazine"the book is instructive, well researched and contains some wise lessons from the past in terms of the government's role in promoting entrepreneurship and growth businesses. . . . [t]ake note, politicians and mandarins: this book can provide much-needed advice and perhaps a shortcut to developing more effective policies. . . . [r]ecommended reading to any local economic development practitioner who takes an interest in the big policy questions of today, and [it has] direct relevance to local economic development."--glenn athey, local economy"this important, well-reasoned book reminds us in times of financial crisis that it is innovation and technical change in the real economy that is ultimately responsible for our prosperity--and that, alas, there are no silver bullets or simple policies to advance the process. provocative, interesting, and useful."--amar bhidé, author of the venturesome economy"boulevard of broken dreams shows a deep understanding of the role of government in boosting entrepreneurship."--sir ronald cohen, chairman of the portland trust and bridges ventures, and cofounder and former chairman of apax partners"boulevard of broken dreams is destined to be regarded as the classic study about how governments can succeed or fail in attempting to produce successful entrepreneurial environments and programs. all policymakers interested in achieving success--and avoiding failure--in encouraging entrepreneurial activity need to study and master the lessons described so eloquently by josh lerner."--david m. rubenstein, cofounder and managing director of the carlyle group"innovation and entrepreneurship are incredibly important engines for economic growth. as governments around the world try to restart this engine in the wake of the global crisis, they will find this book to be an ideal guide."--ken wilcox, ceo of silicon valley bank"such a cogent, well-reasoned explanation of the role of government policy--for good and ill--is long overdue. i hope that all audiences, whether policymakers, entrepreneurs, educators, or voters, will read and heed its advice."--richard kramlich, cofounder and general partner of new enterprise associates"in this valuable and well-thought-out book, lerner supports his astute observations with a wealth of clear models drawn from throughout the world. he provides striking examples in which governmental efforts to encourage entrepreneurial activity have been effective, along with other instances in which such efforts have fallen on their face and incurred high costs to society."--william j. baumol, author of the free-market innovation machine"this important and timely book will impact the ways policymakers think about venture capital and how to support it more effectively. the book is deeply rooted in economic research, leaves ideology behind, and focuses on facts. it explains complex economic analysis in simple terms and provides many useful examples to illustrate fundamental issues."--thomas f. hellmann, university of british columbia
 tнtulo del mensaje: venezuela tiene los peores bonos del mundo!!venezuela tiene los peores bonos del mundo!!!en un aсo en rusia sufriу un colapso de la moneda, ucrania cayу en conflictos violentos y argentina dejу de pagar, ningъn paнs ofreciу peores rendimientos de los bonos gubernamentales que venezuela.sus valores denominados en dуlares perdieron un promedio de 31 por ciento en 2014, mбs que cualquier otra naciуn rastreado por los нndices de bloomberg. ucrania, el segundo peor desempeсo, se deslizу alrededor de la mitad, mientras que el resto del mundo emergente ganу en promedio. las naciones desarrolladas perdieron un 0,3 por ciento.como venezolanos cansados de la escasez de la leche a la medicina en medio de la inflaciуn mбs rбpido del mundo, el desplome de este aсo en los precios del petrуleo ayudу a desencadenar una pйrdida de confianza de los inversores en deuda. protestas mortales, hundiendo las reservas de divisas y abanderamiento ingresos crudo empujaron la probabilidad implнcita de que venezuela serб por defecto en los prуximos cinco aсos para el 90 por ciento, la mбs alta del mundo."ahorrar para un dнa lluvioso ciertamente no ocurriу en caracas," ray zucaro, un administrador de dinero en sw asset management llc, dijo por telйfono desde miami. "rusia invadiу ucrania, argentina dejу de pagar, y todos son aъn mejor."ministerio de informaciуn de venezuela no respondiу a las solicitudes enviadas por correo electrуnico en busca de comentarios.el precio del aceite de venezuela, que representa mбs del 95 por ciento de las exportaciones del paнs, se ha desplomado en mбs de la mitad del pico de este aсo en junio a $ 48 el barril, el presidente nicolбs maduro, dijo ayer.con el petrуleo por debajo de $ 50, las necesidades de financiaciуn en el exterior del paнs llegarбn a $ 35,4 mil millones en 2015, segъn bank of america corp.en 22,5 mil millones dуlares, las reservas de divisas de venezuela cubren cerca de dos aсos de pagos de la deuda en el extranjero para el gobierno y la compaснa petrolera estatal petrуleos de venezuela sa, conocida como pdvsa. empresa de investigaciуn de eurasia group ltd. estima que menos de $ 2 millones de dуlares que se pueden implementar fбcilmente para pagar la deuda. el banco central dijo que a principios de este mes que ampliarб la definiciуn de reservas para incluir diamantes, otras piedras preciosas y monedas convertibles.cuentas fuera de presupuesto del gobierno tambiйn se han desplomado cerca de 64 por ciento en el ъltimo aсo a 4800 millones dуlares, segъn eurasia, que citу datos de la empresa de investigaciуn con sede en caracas ecoanalнtica.los fondos, que estбn excluidos de la fiscalizaciуn parlamentaria, carecen de transparencia, sumбndose a la preocupaciуn de los inversores de que venezuela podrнa estar quedбndose sin dinero, dijo hernбn yellati, el jefe de investigaciуn de banctrust & co."no hay informes periуdicos de la cantidad y el tipo de activos estas cuentas tienen", dijo en un correo electrуnico. "en combinaciуn con el fuerte descenso de los precios del petrуleo, los inversores se preguntan si en realidad venezuela tiene el dinero para hacer frente a los pagos de deuda. tal cуctel explosivo no fue visto en 15 aсos de chavismo ".el presidente nicolбs maduro, quien se ha comprometido a continuar la revoluciуn socialista de su difunto predecesor, hugo chбvez, conocido como el chavismo, todavнa tiene la capacidad para reforzar las fuentes de financiamiento del paнs en el corto plazo, de acuerdo con lucila broide, jefe de investigaciуn de crйdito de oppenheimer & co. se puede aumentar precios de la gasolina nacionales de los actuales 6 centavos por galуn, ahorrar dinero mediante la reducciуn de los subsidios al petrуleo a los aliados del caribe y pedir prestado mбs de china, dijo."en teorнa, el servicio de la deuda de venezuela y pdvsa son manejables para el prуximo aсo, y haciendo algunos ajustes que deben ser capaces de pagar" broide dijo por telйfono desde nueva york. "pero la previsibilidad polнtica de venezuela es bajo. si en un plazo de tiempo razonable despuйs de las vacaciones que no vemos ningъn tipo de anuncio - incluso si es marginal - es probable que sea visto como negativo por el mercado ".el anuncio puede incluir un aumento de precios devaluaciуn o la gasolina, dijo.con la inflaciуn anual en un 63 por ciento y constante escasez de bienes bбsicos que causan su popularidad a caer en picado, maduro es poco probable que perseguir tales medidas, dijo risa grais-targow, analista de eurasia.aunque maduro es poder ganar algo de tiempo, una deuda reperfilado voluntaria es probable por delante, segъn paulo vieira da cunha, el economista jefe del fondo de cobertura de hielo caсуn."se ve terrible, pero es posible pensar en otro aсo de confusiуn a travйs de las cosas empeoren", dijo en una respuesta por correo electrуnico a preguntas. no es "no al revйs, sуlo el aplazamiento del acantilado."venezuela is worldТs worst bond as oil price sinks: andes credit(to be sent this column, click salt andcredit. for credit-market news, see top cm.)(bloomberg) -- in a year when russia suffered a currency collapse, ukraine lapsed into violent conflict and argentina defaulted, no country offered worse government-bond returns than venezuela.its dollar-denominated securities lost an average 31 percent in 2014, more than any other nation tracked by bloomberg indexes. ukraine, the second-worst performer, slid about half as much, while the rest of the emerging world gained on average. developed nations lost 0.3 percent.as venezuelans tired of shortages from milk to medicine amid the worldТs fastest inflation, this yearТs plunge in oil prices helped trigger a loss of confidence among debt investors. deadly protests, sinking foreign reserves and flagging crude revenue pushed the implied probability that venezuela will default over the next five years to 90 percent, the highest in the world.Уsaving for a rainy day certainly didnТt happen in caracas,Ф ray zucaro, a money manager at sw asset management llc, said by phone from miami. Уrussia invaded ukraine, argentina defaulted, and theyТre all still better off.ФvenezuelaТs information ministry didnТt respond to e-mailed requests seeking comment.the price for venezuelaТs oil, which accounts for more than 95 percent of the countryТs exports, has plunged by more than half from this yearТs peak in june to $48 a barrel, president nicolas maduro said yesterday.with oil below $50, the nationТs overseas funding needs will reach $35.4 billion in 2015, according to bank of america corp.at $22.5 billion, venezuelaТs foreign reserves cover about two years of overseas debt payments for the government and state oil company petroleos de venezuela sa, known as pdvsa. research company eurasia group ltd. estimates that less than $2 billion of that can be readily deployed to pay debt. the central bank said earlier this month that it will expand the definition of reserves to include diamonds, other precious stones, and convertible currencies.the governmentТs off-budget accounts have also plunged about 64 percent over the past year to $4.8 billion, according to eurasia, which cited data from caracas-based research company ecoanalitica.the funds, which are excluded from parliamentary oversight, lack transparency, adding to investor concern that venezuela may be running out of money, said hernan yellati, the head of research at banctrust & co.Уthere is no periodic reporting of how much and what type of assets these accounts hold,Ф he said in an e-mail. Уcombined with the sharp decrease in oil prices, investors wonder if in fact venezuela has the money to face debt payments. such an explosive cocktail was not seen in 15 years of chavismo.Фpresident nicolas maduro, who has pledged to continue the socialist revolution of his late predecessor hugo chavez known as chavismo, still has the ability to bolster the countryТs financing sources in the short-term, according to lucila broide, head of credit research at oppenheimer & co. he can increase domestic gasoline prices from the current 6 cents a gallon, save money by reducing oil subsidies to caribbean allies and borrow more from china, she said.Уin theory, debt service for venezuela and pdvsa are manageable for next year, and by making some adjustments they should be able to pay,Ф broide said by phone from new york. Уbut venezuelaТs policy predictability is low. if within a reasonable time period after the holidays we donТt see any type of announcement -- even if itТs marginal -- it will likely be seen as negative by the market.Фthat announcement may include a devaluation or gasoline price increase, she said.with annual inflation at 63 percent and constant shortages of basic goods causing his popularity to plummet, maduro is unlikely to pursue such measures, said risa grais-targow, an analyst at eurasia.even if maduro is be able to buy some time, a voluntary debt re-profiling is likely ahead, according to paulo vieira da cunha, the chief economist at hedge fund ice canyon.Уit looks terrible, but it is possible to think about another year of muddle-through with things getting worse,Ф he said in an e-mailed response to questions. there is Уno upside, just the postponement of the cliff.Ф--with assistance from pietro d. pitts in caracas.to contact the reporter on this story:to contact the editors responsible for this story:
 difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target.the bitcoin network has a global block difficulty. valid blocks must have a hash below this target. mining pools also have a pool-specific share difficulty setting a lower limit for shares.how often does the network difficulty change?what is the formula for difficulty?difficulty_1_target can be different for various ways to measure difficulty. traditionally, it represents a hash where the leading 32 bits are zero and the rest are one (this is known as "pool difficulty" or "pdiff"). the bitcoin protocol represents targets as a custom floating point type with limited precision; as a result, bitcoin clients often approximate difficulty based on this (this is known as "bdiff").how is difficulty stored in blocks?each block stores a packed representation (called "bits") for its actual hexadecimal target . the target can be derived from it via a predefined formula. for example, if the packed target in the block is 0x1b0404cb, the hexadecimal target isnote that the 0x0404cb value is a signed value in this format. the largest legal value for this field is 0x7fffff. to make a larger value you must shift it down one full byte. also 0x008000 is the smallest positive valid value.how is difficulty calculated? what is the difference between bdiff and pdiff?the highest possible target (difficulty 1) is defined as 0x1d00ffff, which gives us a hex target ofit should be noted that pooled mining often uses non-truncated targets, which puts "pool difficulty 1" atso the difficulty at 0x1b0404cb is therefore:here's a fast way to calculate bitcoin difficulty. it uses a modified taylor series for the logarithm (you can see tutorials on flipcode and wikipedia) and relies on logs to transform the difficulty calculation:#include <iostream> #include <cmath>   inline float fast_log(float val) { int * const exp_ptr = reinterpret_cast <int *>(&val); int x = *exp_ptr; const int log_2 = ((x >> 23) & 255) - 128; x &= ~(255 << 23); x += 127 << 23; *exp_ptr = x;   val = ((-1.0f/3) * val + 2) * val - 2.0f/3; return ((val + log_2) * 0.69314718f); }   float difficulty(unsigned int bits) { static double max_body = fast_log(0x00ffff), scaland = fast_log(256); return exp(max_body - fast_log(bits & 0x00ffffff) + scaland * (0x1d - ((bits & 0xff000000) >> 24))); }   int main() { std::cout << difficulty(0x1b0404cb) << std::endl; return 0; }to see the math to go from the normal difficulty calculations (which require large big ints bigger than the space in any normal integer) to the calculation above, here's some python:what is the current difficulty?current difficulty , as output by bitcoin's getdifficulty.what is the maximum difficulty?there is no minimum target. the maximum difficulty is roughly: maximum_target / 1 (since 0 would result in infinity), which is a ridiculously huge number (about 2^224).the actual maximum difficulty is when current_target=0, but we would not be able to calculate the difficulty if that happened. (fortunately it never will, so we're ok.)can the network difficulty go down?what is the minimum difficulty?the minimum difficulty, when the target is at the maximum allowed value, is 1.what network hash rate results in a given difficulty?the difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks.  at the desired rate of one block each 10 minutes, 2016 blocks would take exactly two weeks to find.  if the previous 2016 blocks took more than two weeks to find, the difficulty is reduced.  if they took less than two weeks, the difficulty is increased.  the change in difficulty is in proportion to the amount of time over or under two weeks the previous 2016 blocks took to find.to find a block, the hash must be less than the target.  the hash is effectively a random number between 0 and 2**256-1.  the offset for difficulty 1 isthe difficulty is set such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been found at the rate of one every 10 minutes, so we were calculating (d * 2**48 / 0xffff) hashes in 600 seconds.  that means the hash rate of the network wasover the previous 2016 blocks.  can be further simplified towithout much loss of accuracy.at difficulty 1, that is around 7 mhashes per second.at the time of writing, the difficulty is 22012.4941572, which means that over the previous set of 2016 blocks found the average network hash rate was22012.4941572 * 2**32 / 600 = around 157 ghashes per second.how soon might i expect to generate a block?the average time to find a block can be approximated by calculating:where difficulty is the current difficulty, hashrate is the number of hashes your miner calculates per second, and time is the average in seconds between the blocks you find.for example, using python we calculate the average time to generate a block using a 1ghash/s mining rig when the difficulty is 20000:and find that it takes just under 24 hours on average.any one grinding of the hash stands the same chance of "winning" as any other.  the numbers game is how many attempts your hardware can make per second.mining hardware comparison has some stats that may help you predict what you could get.visit a calculator or perform the maths yourself,
rt @brankomilan: global gini 1988-2011; based on 110+ household surveys each year.
 national vices, global virtue: is the world becoming  more equal?i just completed my latest round of global inequality calculations several days ago. the data refer to the benchmark year 2011. this is the seventh benchmark year since i started working on global inequality.  my first paper on the topic included only two years: 1988 and 1993. these were (as the title of the paper says) the first calculations of global inequality based on household survey data alone. afterwards, in my book "worlds apart" , i added the year 1998. and then it went on with years 2002 and 2005 (discussed here ), and finally with a panel of country/deciles created specifically for the paper i wrote with christoph lakner .  the quality of the data improved significantly. while in 1988, i had micro data for  less than half of all surveys, in 2008 and 2011, all surveys (with the unfortunate exceptions of china in 2011 and japan in both years) are based on micro data.            but on the other hand, the coverage of the world population has not improved much in the past twenty five years. i still have data for about 92-95 percent of world population and generally slightly more of world income. my own rule was that unless i have more than 90% of world population and dollar gdp covered, and at least 110 countries included, i  cannot claim to have a global distribution. it is that yardstick  that i reached last week, and that’s why my 2011 numbers are now ready. for 2011, the population coverage is 92 percent, income coverage (measured in current dollar terms) 90 percent, and the number of countries included is 112.             the missing populations are generally people in poor countries. these countries  do not conduct regular household surveys and thus our global income inequality numbers are almost certainly underestimates. there are two additional reasons why they are underestimates but i will mention them below.is global inequality on the decline?            in a paper that discussed changes in global inequality between 1988 and 2008, christoph lakner and i find a slight, but unmistakable, decrease in global gini, from 72 points in 1988 and 1993 to 70.5 gini points in 2008. these were panel data.  on a more detailed sample for the benchmark year 2008, i find an even lower gini of 69.  so, the decline in global inequality of about 2 to 3 gini points was already present during the first decade of the 21 century.            the 2011 data show that the decline has continued. the 2011 global gini is 67, some 2 gini points lower than three years before. this is a remarkable change, driven, as before, by the fast growth rates of china and india, and between 2008 and 2011 also by the absence of growth in rich countries. the average real per capita income, calculated from chinese household surveys, has increased by 45 percent between 2008 and 2011; in india, the increase was  11 percent. but now global inequality is decreasing also because the rich world is not growing.  the us mean income in 2011 is lower than in 2008. that makes global convergence of people’s incomes easier.            there are three. in addition to our imperfect coverage of  poor countries, global inequality is underestimated also by surveys’ non-inclusion of the very rich and, when they are included at all, by  the underestimation of their incomes, especially of those derived from the ownership of capital. this has been a well-known issue for years but has become more serious because of globalization that allows people to move their assets more easily (we are speaking here of legally-owned assets, income from which owners tend to “forget” when they fill survey questionnaires). when christoph lakner and i made some rough adjustments for the underestimate of top 1% incomes, it turned out that almost all but ½ of a gini point of global inequality decline dissipated.  so, this is the second caveat: it could be that the global inequality decline is significantly less if we were to account better for the incomes of the very rich.            the third caveat is similar to the second. there are (we are now much more aware of this after the pioneering work by gabriel zucman ) large financial assets that are not included either in fiscal nor in household survey data. this is money held in tax havens. zucman  estimates it at  8% of global financial assets. information on income from these assets is extremely unlikely to be reported since even the legality of these assets (unlike those of the previous group) is questionable.  using some back-of-the envelope calculation, income from the assets “parked” in tax havens could amount to 0.7-1 percent of global gdp. since it is very likely to be received by the global top 1%, we are thereby further underestimating global inequality.            the gini values i have provided  so far are based on the purchasing power parity (ppp) dollar exchange rates derived from the 2005 international comparison project (icp). one of the reasons  i chose to update my global inequality data for the year 2011 is that the new icp was conducted in that year. when household surveys are conducted in the same year as icp, domestic currency incomes are divided by ppp exchange rates which have also been calculated for that same year. one source of error, projection of ppps to the year when the global icp is not conducted, is thus avoided. the 2011 ppps,  as is by now well-known, have resulted in some significant reassessment of price levels in asian countries (indonesia, india, china). as their price levels were found to be lower than previously thought, ppp exchange rates were reduced, and real incomes accordingly increased. (if country's price level is lower then obviously with the same nominal income, you can buy more goods.) in global inequality calculations, higher real incomes of china, india and indonesia (among the large countries) translate into reduced global inequality.            the effect of 2011 ppps was essentially a level effect, meaning that the changes and the trend were left more or less unaffected while the level of global inequality was reduced throughout (that is, for all years) by about 3 gini points. thus, 2011 global inequality, measured in 2011 ppps, is “only” 64 gini points.             in 2011, the emergence  of the global “middle class” continues. if we take one of the definitions of the middle class, made popular by the world bank’s work on latin america, as people with incomes above $ppp10 per day and less than $ppp50 per day,  29% of world's population belongs to that  group and they control 43% of global income. in 1998, equally defined "middle class" included only 17% of world population. unlike in 1988 and 1993, when global income distribution showed two peaks with high percentages of people among either the extremely poor or the very rich, today’s global income distribution is single-peaked with the “thickening” of the distribution around the middle. (note however that the global median income of $ppp5.7 per day is still vastly below the minimum income that we use to define our “global middle class”).             the  global top 1% is still heavily dominated by the “old rich” oecd countries. there are just above 60 million people in the global top 1%. one-half of them are americans: the richest 11%  of americans are the members of this “club.”  (if we look at the global 2%, the entire top quintile of the us income distribution belongs there.) from other rich and relatively populous countries (germany, france, japan, great britain) 4-5% of the richest people belong to the global top 1%. outside the “old oecd”, only chile and taiwan have more than 1 percent of their populations in the global top 1%.  brazil, south africa and russia each have their own top 1% also in the global top 1%, but not more than that.              there are two take-away messages. the first is that while many national income and wealth inequalities are increasing, or are thought to be unacceptably high, global income inequality is charting  a modest decline. this is not surprising because the bulk of global inequality depends on differences in mean incomes between rich and poor countries, and these are now less than at any time since the end of  world war ii. but for this trend to continue, fast growth rates of china and india are crucial. second take-away message is this: while many national middle classes in rich countries are being “hollowed out”, a global “middle class” is emerging. the shape of the world distribution has moved from being bi-polar, with one peak of the distribution among the very poor and another among the rich, to being single-peaked with a more sizable concentration of people into something that may be called “the global middle class.”
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 jonathan mayer has posted a series of short youtube videos about surveillance law that he created for a stanford coursera course. the videos are intended for non-lawyers, so the content is particularly easy to follow. if you’re interested in learning about surveillance law but you’re not sure where to start, the videos are definitely worth checking out .orin kerr is the fred c. stevenson research professor at the george washington university law school, where he has taught since 2001. he teaches and writes in the area of criminal procedure and computer crime law.
 the secular stagnation discussion has a bad title and sounds wonkish but is extremely important — it is about nothing short of understanding what the economy is and should be about. if you want a lot of detail you can read through marc andreessen 's epic secular stagnation tweet storm and all the great source material that he links to.at the heart of the secular stagnation discussion is the idea that somehow the economy is growing more slowly than it should. see for instance the following quote from a larry summers speech :[…] through this recovery, we have made no progress in restoring gdp to its potential.the rest of the speech goes on exploring the reasons for why this might be so with a particular focus on interest rates.there is, however, another line of inquiry that is much more important and that is to question the very premise here by asking whether gdp makes sense as a measure for the economy going forward.let me give an analogy from the business world. suppose you are newspaper and the kpi you are using to manage your business is your circulation. that works really well for a great many years. then all of a sudden you are in board meetings that show a lack of circulation growth and possibly even a decline. you keep arguing about the reasons for why your management has “made no progress in restoring circulation to its potential.” the debate rages on all the while you completely ignore that your newspaper also has a website on which traffic has been growing steadily.that is what is happening with the economy at large. we are de-materializing it and moving from a world of easily measured and priced atoms to a world of bits which are creating massive consumer surplus. so for instance: we stop printing and selling the encyclopedia brittanica because everyone is using wikipedia instead — that shows up as a decrease in gdp even though many more people now have access and get the benefit of knowledge. if we take dozens of different devices that were all sold separately (film camera, video camera, maps, books, photo albums, pencils, tape recorders, etc) and combine them into a single device (the smartphone) that uses primarily software to accomplish these functions that too can easily result in a decrease in gdp. in a talk i am about to give at dld in munich i will give even more examples of this but you get the idea.by the way, gdp was always a suspect kpi for the economy because of the challenge of negative externalities: if we make products that harm people (eg selling cigarettes that cause lung cancer) and then sell other products to correct the harm (eg lung cancer treatment drugs) both of these increase measured gdp. again, there are tons of other examples like that.to be clear, there are lots of intelligent discussions to be had about phenomena such as reductions in risk premia , the role of china and nafta , the influence of household deleveraging , etc. and their impact on the economy. but until we are willing to ditch gdp as the correct kpi for the economy we will be like the newspaper management team trying desperate measures to fix their circulation problem.you can see me talk about all of this in a presentation recorded last may at dld new york . in the coming days i will write more about this topic including the impact of  technology driving down prices .  chris dixon tweeted a great chart  and you should check out my posts on education and healthcare . imagine for a moment a computer than can correctly diagnose patients within seconds and then think about the implications for gdp.i understand that this is a partial equilibrium argument and will expand on how it can be true for the economy as a whole. as part of that i will also suggest that our obsession with full employment — which is also part of the secular stagnation discussion — is also problematic as a kpi. stay tuned.addendum 2: one other important criticism of gdp as a kpi is that it is silent on distribution. we have seen major changes in that (a) away f rom labor toward capital and (b) within labor from normal distributions towards power laws (eg ceo comp relative to employees).
 my co-author arun rao has re-edited and incorporated the 2013 updates for a vastly revised second edition, the "blue book" (only available as an ebook )the first edition (the "red book") was a book of 537 pages. below the original data.this book is the first history of silicon valley from 1900 to 2010.  it is a comprehensive study of the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the world.  the book has two parts.  a series of chapters provides a chronological narrative that covers one century, from the establishment of stanford university to the age of facebook.  a parallel series of chapters follows significant stories within the story, covering radio, hp, microchips, fairchild, venture capital, xerox parc, software, apple computer, and the internet.  silicon valley did not happen in a vacuum: the book also explores the surrounding social and cultural environment of the bay area.arun rao is an investor and entrepreneur in the san francisco/bay area.  he has previously contributed articles to the economist magazine and seeking alpha on business and the financial markets.  arun has worked at two investment firms in silicon valley, one in menlo park and the other in san francisco.  arun is a graduate of the wharton school of business of the university of pennsylvania and is a licensed attorney.piero scaruffi has lived and worked in silicon  valley since 1983, designing internet and artificial intelligence applications, originally at olivetti's research labs.  he has been a visiting scholar at stanford university and a lecturer at uc berkeley.  in the 1990s  he pioneered internet  journalism on his website  www.scaruffi.com.  in 2006 the new york  times ran an interview with him titled "the greatest website of all time."  he is the author  of 17 books on subjects  ranging from music to  cognitive science. see his biography and his bibliography .in 2014 the "blue book" was translated in chinese.the chinese edition is only available in china.(xinhua news agency's readers poll:main page of the article for those of you who read chinese:
 tristan walker, 30, is using his health- and beauty-products company to focus on issues especially prevalent among people of color.  | walker & company brandswhen it comes to men’s grooming, there's usually a lot of trial and error involved as guys search for the right routine to complement their individual lifestyles. in fact, tech entrepreneur tristan walker -- admired in silicon valley for his success as head of business development at foursquare -- was so frustrated with the quality of over-the-counter razor blades, which constantly left him with razor bumps, that he stopped shaving altogether for 15 years. that's all part of what led him, in december 2013, to launch his very own line of shaving products called bevel .the products are aimed at "men with coarse and curly hair," according to the website of walker & company , walker's start-up health- and beauty-products business, of which bevel is the flagship brand. the line includes a special brush as well as razors and lotions, all of them aimed at the kind of skin-irritation problems that are especially common among black men.in the year since its launch, bevel has attracted investors as diverse as hollywood mogul charles king , hip-hop veteran nas and the venture capital firm andreessen horowitz.during a recent interview with the huffington post, walker, a stanford university graduate school of business alum and a native of queens, new york, opened up on developing bevel, as well as his long-term plan to expand his company and reach underserved minority customers.from a technical perspective, how did you go about developing bevel?we collaborated with a great manufacturing partner, and we went through six, seven different iterations for the formulations of each of the products. we also got the needed advice of some dermatologists around how we can actually make some proprietary formula for not only our priming oil, but our shaving cream and our restoring balm. and after that sixth, seventh time, it just worked. we felt we kind of had the ideal solution for folks. in addition to that, we worked with a great industrial design firm on the design of our blades and our brush.how do you plan to change the mindset of the consumer who prefers the services of a barber instead of shaving?barbers don’t really go out and try to educate [people on shaving and grooming], which is a bit of why we’re here. i think with our ability, we have our online platform that allows us to reach a lot of people very quickly. in addition to the bevel site, we also have a portal called bevel code , and it’s the first digital magazine that focuses on style and grooming for men of color. and we’ve started that because i would go online and i couldn’t find out what kind of moisturizer to use for my skin. i couldn’t find it in gq, i couldn’t find it in esquire, anywhere. so we have content like that. in addition to that, we do these in-depth, one-on-one interviews with style and grooming influencers about their style and grooming habits ... so we have a few ways to help educate folks who either might be skeptical or just don’t know what’s the solution. but at the same time, we’re in it for the long haul.one thing i tell people is that we’re not here to displace the barbershop. you go to the barbershop one day a week -- let’s say saturday. let us take care of you sunday through friday. and i think that is meaningful. we’re about collaborating with them.in your opinion, what’s the importance of owning and operating a black business within the hair-care industry?i’m 30 years old, and when i reflect back on my life, i’ve never had a company that i was proud to support. there’s a lot of companies with products that i love, but [that i'm] not necessarily proud to support. and i feel like that wasn’t the case when my mom and grandmother were coming up with softsheen and that sort of thing. and it’s like, for our generation we can actually build one of the first companies that inspires that pride in our community. so for me it’s important, for that reason.number two, it’s a shame we’re being neglected as consumers, given our cultural influence, our spending power. so we want to inspire that pride -- not only in the products we make, but the design of them, the educational experience and the service offering we provide. and what this allows me to do is, when you get our box, you get a handwritten note from me with my name and email address on it, because i want my customers to really understand where that accountability lies. it’s with me.last october, carol’s daughter went from being an independent black-owned company to being acquired by l’oréal . would you ever consider a buyout from another company?my intention for the company is, i want to build something with as much legacy as a procter & gamble or a johnson & johnson. that’s the ambition. if someone was to come and say “we’ll pay a trillion dollars for your business,” it would be naïve of me, for the sake of my employees, to not consider that. [laughs] but at the end of the day, we’re very much into this for the long haul, because again, we want to build a lasting company that inspires that pride. all too often, you kind of think about a lot of these companies that existed before us -- they get sold to a larger company. and as a result of it, the brand starts to lose sight of its authenticity. and i want to make sure we don’t do that.in five to 10 years, where do you envision walker & company brands and bevel in the marketplace?i think five to 10 years out, we’re probably going to have a slew of brands separate from bevel. and every brand will focus on an acute health and beauty problem that exists for people of color -- but also problems that everyone has. if you think about the razor bump problem, it’s a problem that up to 70 percent of black men and women have. but 30 percent of everyone else [has it]. it’s a very big problem.if you think about things like vitamin d deficiency, if you think about natural hair transitioning, if you think about problems as profound as miscarriages -- how do you focus on problems that people of color over-index on, but that everyone has? so we’re going to develop a suite of brands to solve those problems. and we’re going to do that, over and over again with great design, great education, products that work and a service experience that’s second to none.this interview has been edited and condensed.
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 the american public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. the result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure america into endless wars it can’t win.in mid-september, while president obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in iraq and syria, he traveled to central command headquarters, at macdill air force base in florida. there he addressed some of the men and women who would implement whatever the u.s. military strategy turned out to be.the part of the speech intended to get coverage was obama’s rationale for reengaging the united states in iraq, more than a decade after it first invaded and following the long and painful effort to extricate itself. this was big enough news that many cable channels covered the speech live. i watched it on an overhead tv while i sat waiting for a flight at chicago’s o’hare airport. when obama got to the section of his speech announcing whether he planned to commit u.s. troops in iraq (at the time, he didn’t), i noticed that many people in the terminal shifted their attention briefly to the tv. as soon as that was over, they went back to their smartphones and their laptops and their cinnabons as the president droned on.usually i would have stopped watching too, since so many aspects of public figures’ appearances before the troops have become so formulaic and routine. but i decided to see the whole show. obama gave his still-not-quite-natural-sounding callouts to the different military services represented in the crowd. (“i know we’ve got some air force in the house!” and so on, receiving cheers rendered as “hooyah!” and “oorah!” in the official white house transcript.) he told members of the military that the nation was grateful for their nonstop deployments and for the unique losses and burdens placed on them through the past dozen years of open-ended war. he noted that they were often the face of american influence in the world, being dispatched to liberia in 2014 to cope with the then-dawning ebola epidemic as they had been sent to indonesia 10 years earlier to rescue victims of the catastrophic tsunami there. he said that the “9/11 generation of heroes” represented the very best in its country, and that its members constituted a military that was not only superior to all current adversaries but no less than “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.”if any of my fellow travelers at o’hare were still listening to the speech, none of them showed any reaction to it. and why would they? this has become the way we assume the american military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other american institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. a somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.the public attitude evident in the airport was reflected by the public’s representatives in washington. that same afternoon, september 17, the house of representatives voted after brief debate to authorize arms and supplies for rebel forces in syria, in hopes that more of them would fight against the islamic state, or isis, than for it. the senate did the same the next day—and then both houses adjourned early, after an unusually short and historically unproductive term of congress, to spend the next six and a half weeks fund-raising and campaigning full-time. i’m not aware of any midterm race for the house or senate in which matters of war and peace—as opposed to immigration, obamacare, voting rights, tax rates, the ebola scare—were first-tier campaign issues on either side, except for the metaphorical “war on women” and “war on coal.”why does civilian technology grow ever cheaper and more reliable while military technology does the opposite? an animated explainer narrated by james fallows.this reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the american norm. but it is not. when dwight d. eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. on the eve of the d-day invasion, he warned his troops, “your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” as president, eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.at the end of world war ii, nearly 10 percent of the entire u.s. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). through the decade after world war ii, when so many american families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. most americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.now the american military is exotic territory to most of the american public. as a comparison: a handful of americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. the u.s. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) the other 310 million–plus americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. so too with the military. many more young americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. as a country, america has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. as a public, it has not. a total of about 2.5 million americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in iraq or afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.the difference between the earlier america that knew its military and the modern america that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply in changes in popular and media culture. while world war ii was under way, its best-known chroniclers were the scripps howard reporter ernie pyle, who described the daily braveries and travails of the troops (until he was killed near the war’s end by japanese machine-gun fire on the island of iejima), and the stars and stripes cartoonist bill mauldin, who mocked the obtuseness of generals and their distance from the foxhole realities faced by his wisecracking gi characters, willie and joe.from mister roberts to south pacific to catch-22, from the caine mutiny to the naked and the dead to from here to eternity, american popular and high culture treated our last mass-mobilization war as an effort deserving deep respect and pride, but not above criticism and lampooning. the collective achievement of the military was heroic, but its members and leaders were still real people, with all the foibles of real life. a decade after that war ended, the most popular military-themed tv program was the phil silvers show, about a con man in uniform named sgt. bilko. as bilko, phil silvers was that stock american sitcom figure, the lovable blowhard—a role familiar from the time of jackie gleason in the honeymooners to homer simpson in the simpsons today. gomer pyle, usmc; hogan’s heroes; mchale’s navy; and even the anachronistic frontier show f troop were sitcoms whose settings were u.s. military units and whose villains—and schemers, and stooges, and occasional idealists—were people in uniform. american culture was sufficiently at ease with the military to make fun of it, a stance now hard to imagine outside the military itself.“full-victory—nothing else”: general dwight d. eisenhower gives the order to paratroopers in england the night before they board planes to join the first assault in the d-day invasion of europe. (u.s. army signal corps/ap)robert altman’s 1970 movie m*a*s*h was clearly “about” the vietnam war, then well into its bloodiest and most bitterly divisive period. (as i point out whenever discussing this topic, i was eligible for the draft at the time, was one of those protesting the war, and at age 20 legally but intentionally failed my draft medical exam. i told this story in a 1975 washington monthly article, “what did you do in the class war, daddy?” ) but m*a*s*h’s ostensible placement in the korean war of the early 1950s somewhat distanced its darkly mocking attitude about military competence and authority from fierce disagreements about vietnam. (the one big vietnam movie to precede it was john wayne’s doughily prowar the green berets, in 1968. what we think of as the classic run of vietnam films did not begin until the end of the 1970s, with the deer hunter and apocalypse now.) the tv spin-off of altman’s film, which ran from 1972 through 1983, was a simpler and more straightforward sitcom on the sgt. bilko model, again suggesting a culture close enough to its military to put up with, and enjoy, jokes about it.let’s skip to today’s iraq-afghanistan era, in which everyone “supports” the troops but few know very much about them. the pop-culture references to the people fighting our ongoing wars emphasize their suffering and stoicism, or the long-term personal damage they may endure. the hurt locker is the clearest example, but also lone survivor; restrepo; the short-lived 2005 fx series set in iraq, over there; and showtime’s current series homeland. some emphasize high-stakes action, from the fictionalized 24 to the meant-to-be-true zero dark thirty. often they portray military and intelligence officials as brave and daring. but while cumulatively these dramas highlight the damage that open-ended warfare has done—on the battlefield and elsewhere, to warriors and civilians alike, in the short term but also through long-term blowback—they lack the comfortable closeness with the military that would allow them to question its competence as they would any other institution’s.the battlefield is of course a separate realm, as the literature of warfare from homer’s time onward has emphasized. but the distance between today’s stateside america and its always-at-war expeditionary troops is extraordinary. last year, the writer rebecca frankel published war dogs , a study of the dog-and-handler teams that had played a large part in the u.s. efforts in iraq and afghanistan. part of the reason she chose the topic, she told me, was that dogs were one of the few common points of reference between the military and the larger public. “when we cannot make that human connection over war, when we cannot empathize or imagine the far-off world of a combat zone … these military working dogs are a bridge over the divide,” frankel wrote in the introduction to her book.it’s a wonderful book, and dogs are a better connection than nothing. but … dogs! when the country fought its previous wars, its common points of reference were human rather than canine: fathers and sons in harm’s way, mothers and daughters working in defense plants and in uniform as well. for two decades after world war ii, the standing force remained so large, and the depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most americans had a direct military connection. among older baby boomers, those born before 1955, at least three-quarters have had an immediate family member—sibling, parent, spouse, child—who served in uniform. of americans born since 1980, the millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience.interactive graphic: the first map above (in green) shows per-capita military enlistments from 2000 to 2010, grouped by 3-digit zip code. the second (in red) shows the home towns of deceased soldiers from the iraq and afghanistan wars. enlistment rates vary widely—in 2010, only 0.04 percent of the upper east side of manhattan (zip code prefix 101) enlisted, while the u.s. virgin islands (prefix 008) had an enlistment rate of 0.98 percent. when it comes to lives lost, u.s. territories (particularly guam) shoulder an outsized burden. (map design and development: frankie dintino. sources: department of defense, us census bureau)the most biting satirical novel to come from the iraq-afghanistan era, billy lynn’s long halftime walk, by ben fountain, is a takedown of our empty modern “thank you for your service” rituals. it is the story of an army squad that is badly shot up in iraq; is brought back to be honored at halftime during a nationally televised dallas cowboys thanksgiving day game; while there, is slapped on the back and toasted by owner’s-box moguls and flirted with by cheerleaders, “passed around like everyone’s favorite bong,” as platoon member billy lynn thinks of it; and is then shipped right back to the front.the people at the stadium feel good about what they’ve done to show their support for the troops. from the troops’ point of view, the spectacle looks different. “there’s something harsh in his fellow americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need,” the narrator says of billy lynn’s thoughts. “that’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate vps, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year.” fountain’s novel won the national book critics circle award for fiction in 2012, but it did not dent mainstream awareness enough to make anyone self-conscious about continuing the “salute to the heroes” gestures that do more for the civilian public’s self-esteem than for the troops’. as i listened to obama that day in the airport, and remembered ben fountain’s book, and observed the hum of preoccupied america around me, i thought that the parts of the presidential speech few americans were listening to were the ones historians might someday seize upon to explain the temper of our times.always supportive of the troops: crowds in macon welcome back 200 members of the georgia national guard's 48th infantry brigade combat team returning from afghanistan, september 2014. (david goldman/ap)if i were writing such a history now, i would call it chickenhawk nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. it would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. as a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. the tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. but for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. a chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.americans admire the military as they do no other institution. through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, congress, organized religion, big business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. the one exception is the military. confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed very high. in a gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. about one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in congress.too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “did we have the sense that america cared how we were doing? we did not,” seth moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the iraq war. moulton became a marine corps officer after graduating from harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to wall street it was useful to set an example of public service. he opposed the decision to invade iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “america was very disconnected. we were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.”moulton told me, as did many others with iraq-era military experience, that if more members of congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the united states would probably not have gone to war in iraq at all. because he felt strongly enough about that failure of elite accountability, moulton decided while in iraq to get involved in politics after he left the military. “i actually remember the moment,” moulton told me. “it was after a difficult day in najaf in 2004. a young marine in my platoon said, ‘sir, you should run for congress someday. so this shit doesn’t happen again.’ ” in january, moulton takes office as a freshman democratic representative from massachusetts’s sixth district, north of boston.what moulton described was desire for a kind of accountability. it is striking how rare accountability has been for our modern wars. hillary clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the iraq war, since that is what gave the barely known barack obama an opening to run against her in 2008. george w. bush, who, like most ex-presidents, has grown more popular the longer he’s been out of office, would perhaps be playing a more visible role in public and political life if not for the overhang of iraq. but those two are the exceptions. most other public figures, from dick cheney and colin powell on down, have put iraq behind them. in part this is because of the obama administration’s decision from the start to “look forward, not back” about why things had gone so badly wrong with america’s wars in iraq and afghanistan. but such willed amnesia would have been harder if more americans had felt affected by the wars’ outcome. for our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure. this is a dangerous development—and one whose dangers multiply the longer it persists.ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. by all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. no decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in iraq, afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; linda j. bilmes, of the harvard kennedy school, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. recall that while congress was considering whether to authorize the iraq war, the head of the white house economic council, lawrence b. lindsey, was forced to resign for telling the wall street journal that the all-in costs might be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the u.s. has spent on iraq and afghanistan in many individual years.yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “at this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the u.s. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named jim gourley wrote recently for thomas e. ricks’s blog, best defense. “evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” in 13 years of continuous combat under the authorization for the use of military force, the longest stretch of warfare in american history, u.s. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed osama bin laden. their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing saddam hussein to allying with sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. but they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of u.s. interests in, that part of the world. when isis troops overran much of iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same iraqi national army that u.s. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years.“did we have the sense that america cared how we were doing? we did not,” seth moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the iraq war.“we are vulnerable,” the author william greider wrote during the debate last summer on how to fight isis, “because our presumption of unconquerable superiority leads us deeper and deeper into unwinnable military conflicts.” and the separation of the military from the public disrupts the process of learning from these defeats. the last war that ended up in circumstances remotely resembling what prewar planning would have considered a victory was the brief gulf war of 1991.after the vietnam war, the press and the public went too far in blaming the military for what was a top-to-bottom failure of strategy and execution. but the military itself recognized its own failings, and a whole generation of reformers looked to understand and change the culture. in 1978, a military-intelligence veteran named richard a. gabriel published, with paul l. savage, crisis in command: mismanagement in the army, which traced many of the failures in vietnam to the military’s having adopted a bureaucratized management style. three years later, a broadside called self-destruction: the disintegration and decay of the united states army during the vietnam era, by a military officer writing under the pen name cincinnatus (later revealed to be a lieutenant colonel serving in the reserves as a military chaplain, cecil b. currey), linked problems in vietnam to the ethical and intellectual shortcomings of the career military. the book was hotly debated—but not dismissed. an article about the book for the air force’s air university review said that “the author’s case is airtight” and that the military’s career structure “corrupts those who serve it; it is the system that forces out the best and rewards only the sycophants.”today, you hear judgments like that frequently from within the military and occasionally from politicians—but only in private. it’s not the way we talk in public about our heroes anymore, with the result that accountability for the career military has been much sketchier than during our previous wars. william s. lind is a military historian who in the 1990s helped develop the concept of “fourth generation war,” or struggles against the insurgents, terrorists, or other “nonstate” groups that refuse to form ranks and fight like conventional armies. he wrote recently:the most curious thing about our four defeats in fourth generation war—lebanon, somalia, iraq, and afghanistan—is the utter silence in the american officer corps. defeat in vietnam bred a generation of military reformers … today, the landscape is barren. not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. just more money, please.during and after even successful american wars, and certainly after the standoff in korea and the defeat in vietnam, the professional military’s leadership and judgment were considered fair game for criticism. grant saved the union; mcclellan seemed almost to sabotage it—and he was only one of the union generals lincoln had to move out of the way. something similar was true in wars through vietnam. some leaders were good; others were bad. now, for purposes of public discussion, they’re all heroes. in our past decade’s wars, as thomas ricks wrote in this magazine in 2012, “hundreds of army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness.” this, he said, was not only a radical break from american tradition but also “an important factor in the failure” of our recent wars.partly this change has come because the public, at its safe remove, doesn’t insist on accountability. partly it is because legislators and even presidents recognize the sizable risks and limited payoffs of taking on the career military. when recent presidents have relieved officers of command, they have usually done so over allegations of sexual or financial misconduct, or other issues of personal discipline. these include the cases of the two famous four-star generals who resigned rather than waiting for president obama to dismiss them: stanley a. mcchrystal, as the commander in afghanistan, and david petraeus in his post-centcom role as the head of the cia. the exception proving the rule occurred a dozen years ago, when a senior civilian official directly challenged a four-star general on his military competence. in congressional testimony just before the iraq war, general eric shinseki, then the army’s chief of staff, said that many more troops might be necessary to successfully occupy iraq than plans were allowing for—only to be ridiculed in public by paul wolfowitz, then shinseki’s superior as the deputy secretary of defense, who said views like shinseki’s were “outlandish” and “wildly off the mark.” wolfowitz and his superior, defense secretary donald rumsfeld, ostentatiously marginalized shinseki from that point on.in that case, the general was right and the politicians were wrong. but more often and more skillfully than the public usually appreciates, today’s military has managed to distance itself from the lengthening string of modern military failures—even when wrong. some of this pr shift is anthropological. most reporters who cover politics are fascinated by the process and enjoy practitioners who love it too, which is one reason most were (like the rest of the country) more forgiving of the happy warrior bill clinton than they have been of the “cold” and “aloof” barack obama. but political reporters are always hunting for the gaffe or scandal that could bring a target down, and feel they’re acting in the public interest in doing so.most reporters who cover the military are also fascinated by its processes and cannot help liking or at least respecting their subjects: physically fit, trained to say “sir” and “ma’am,” often tested in a way most civilians will never be, part of a disciplined and selfless-seeming culture that naturally draws respect. and whether or not this was a conscious plan, the military gets a substantial pr boost from the modern practice of placing officers in mid-career assignments at think tanks, on congressional staffs, and in graduate programs across the country. for universities, military students are (as a dean at a public-policy school put it to me) “a better version of foreign students.” that is, they work hard, pay full tuition, and unlike many international students face no language barrier or difficulty adjusting to the american style of give-and-take classroom exchanges. most cultures esteem the scholar-warrior, and these programs expose usually skeptical american elites to people like the young colin powell, who as a lieutenant colonel in his mid-30s was a white house fellow after serving in vietnam, and david petraeus, who got his ph.d. at princeton as a major 13 years after graduating from west point.and yet however much americans “support” and “respect” their troops, they are not involved with them, and that disengagement inevitably leads to dangerous decisions the public barely notices. “my concern is this growing disconnect between the american people and our military,” retired admiral mike mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under george w. bush and barack obama (and whose mid-career academic stint was at harvard business school), told me recently. the military is “professional and capable,” he said, “but i would sacrifice some of that excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the american people. fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. it’s become just too easy to go to war.”citizens notice when crime is going up, or school quality is going down, or the water is unsafe to drink, or when other public functions are not working as they should. not enough citizens are made to notice when things go wrong, or right, with the military. the country thinks too rarely, and too highly, of the 1 percent under fire in our name.a new f-35, part of the first delivery of an anticipated 144 planes, in a hanger at luke air force base, in glendale, arizona, before an unveiling ceremony, march 2014 (ross d. franklin/ap)"if citizens are willing to countenance a decision that means that someone's child may die, they may contemplate more deeply if there is the possibility that the child will be theirs."america’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. this distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. we buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. this leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops (see “gun trouble,” by robert h. scales, in this issue).we know that technology is our military’s main advantage. yet the story of the post-9/11 “long wars” is of america’s higher-tech advantages yielding transitory victories that melt away before the older, messier realities of improvised weapons, sectarian resentments, and mounting hostility to occupiers from afar, however well-intentioned. many of the pentagon’s most audacious high-tech ventures have been costly and spectacular failures, including (as we will see) the major air-power project of recent years, the f-35. in an america connected to its military, such questions of strategy and implementation would be at least as familiar as, say, the problems with the common core education standards.those technological breakthroughs that do make their way to the battlefield may prove to be strategic liabilities in the long run. during the years in which the united states has enjoyed a near-monopoly on weaponized drones, for example, they have killed individuals or small groups at the price of antagonizing whole societies. when the monopoly ends, which is inevitable, the very openness of the united states will make it uniquely vulnerable to the cheap, swarming weapons others will deploy.the cost of defense, meanwhile, goes up and up and up, with little political resistance and barely any public discussion. by the fullest accounting, which is different from usual budget figures, the united states will spend more than $1 trillion on national security this year. that includes about $580 billion for the pentagon’s baseline budget plus “overseas contingency” funds, $20 billion in the department of energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and department of veterans affairs costs, and other expenses. but it doesn’t count more than $80 billion a year of interest on the military-related share of the national debt. after adjustments for inflation, the united states will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the cold war and vietnam war. it will spend about as much as the next 10 nations combined—three to five times as much as china, depending on how you count, and seven to nine times as much as russia. the world as a whole spends about 2 percent of its total income on its militaries; the united states, about 4 percent.yet such is the dysfunction and corruption of the budgeting process that even as spending levels rise, the pentagon faces simultaneous crises in funding for maintenance, training, pensions, and veterans’ care. “we’re buying the wrong things, and paying too much for them,” charles a. stevenson, a onetime staffer on the senate armed services committee and a former professor at the national war college, told me. “we’re spending so much on people that we don’t have the hardware, which is becoming more expensive anyway. we are flatlining r&d.”here is just one newsworthy example that illustrates the broad and depressingly intractable tendencies of weapons development and spending: the failed hopes for a new airplane called the f-35 “lightning.”today’s weapons can be decades in gestation, and the history of the f-35 traces back long before most of today’s troops were born. two early-1970s-era planes, the f-16 “fighting falcon” jet and the a-10 “thunderbolt ii” attack plane, departed from the trend of military design in much the same way the compact japanese cars of that era departed from the tail-fin american look. these planes were relatively cheap, pared to their essentials, easy to maintain, and designed to do a specific thing very well. for the f-16, that was to be fast, highly maneuverable, and deadly in air-to-air combat. for the a-10, it was to serve as a kind of flying tank that could provide what the military calls “close air support” to troops in combat by blasting enemy formations. the a-10 needed to be heavily armored, so it could absorb opposing fire; designed to fly as slowly as possible over the battlefield, rather than as rapidly, so that it could stay in range to do damage rather than roaring through; and built around one very powerful gun.there are physical devices that seem the pure expression of a function. the eames chair, a classic no. 2 pencil, the original ford mustang or vw beetle, the macbook air—take your pick. the a-10, generally known not as the thunderbolt but as the warthog, fills that role in the modern military. it is rugged; it is inexpensive; it can shred enemy tanks and convoys by firing up to 70 rounds a second of armor-piercing, 11-inch-long depleted-uranium shells.the tragedy of the f-35 is that a project meant to correct problems in designing and paying for weapons has come to exemplify them.and the main effort of military leaders through the past decade, under the republican leadership of the bush administration and the democratic leadership of obama, has been to get rid of the a-10 so as to free up money for a more expensive, less reliable, technically failing airplane that has little going for it except insider dealing, and the fact that the general public doesn’t care.the weapon in whose name the a-10 is being phased out is its opposite in almost every way. in automotive terms, it would be a lamborghini rather than a pickup truck (or a flying tank). in air-travel terms, the first-class sleeper compartment on singapore airlines rather than advance-purchase economy plus (or even business class) on united. these comparisons seem ridiculous, but they are fair. that is, a lamborghini is demonstrably “better” than a pickup truck in certain ways—speed, handling, comfort—but only in very special circumstances is it a better overall choice. same for the first-class sleeper, which would be anyone’s choice if someone else were footing the bill but is simply not worth the trade-off for most people most of the time.each new generation of weapons tends to be “better” in much the way a lamborghini is, and “worth it” in the same sense as a first-class airline seat. the a-10 shows the pattern. according to figures from the aircraft analyst richard l. aboulafia, of the teal group, the “unit recurring flyaway” costs in 2014 dollars—the fairest apples-to-apples comparison—stack up like this. each warthog now costs about $19 million, less than any other manned combat aircraft. a predator drone costs about two-thirds as much. other fighter, bomber, and multipurpose planes cost much more: about $72 million for the v-22 osprey, about $144 million for the f-22 fighter, about $810 million for the b-2 bomber, and about $101 million (or five a‑10s) for the f-35. there’s a similar difference in operating costs. the operating expenses are low for the a-10 and much higher for the others largely because the a-10’s design is simpler, with fewer things that could go wrong. the simplicity of design allows it to spend more of its time flying instead of being in the shop.in clear contrast to the a-10, the f-35 is an ill-starred undertaking that would have been on the front pages as often as other botched federal projects, from the obamacare rollout to the fema response after hurricane katrina, if, like those others, it either seemed to affect a broad class of people or could easily be shown on tv—or if so many politicians didn’t have a stake in protecting it. one measure of the gap in coverage: total taxpayer losses in the failed solyndra solar-energy program might come, at their most dire estimate, to some $800 million. total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the f-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the f-35. here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire iraq war.the condensed version of this plane’s tragedy is that a project meant to correct some of the pentagon’s deepest problems in designing and paying for weapons has in fact worsened and come to exemplify them. an aircraft that was intended to be inexpensive, adaptable, and reliable has become the most expensive in history, and among the hardest to keep out of the shop. the federal official who made the project a symbol of a new, transparent, rigorously data-dependent approach to awarding contracts ended up serving time in federal prison for corruption involving projects with boeing. (boeing’s chief financial officer also did time in prison.) for the record, the pentagon and the lead contractors stoutly defend the plane and say that its teething problems will be over soon—and that anyway, it is the plane of the future, and the a-10 is an aging relic of the past. (we have posted reports here on the a-10, pro and con, so you can see whether you are convinced.)in theory, the f-35 would show common purpose among the military services, since the air force, the navy, and the marine corps would all get their own custom-tailored versions of the plane. in fact, a plane designed to do many contradictory things—to be strong enough to survive navy aircraft-carrier landings, yet light and maneuverable enough to excel as an air force dogfighter, and meanwhile able to take off and land straight up and down, like a helicopter, to reach marines in tight combat circumstances—has unsurprisingly done none of them as well as promised. in theory, the f-35 was meant to knit u.s. allies together, since other countries would buy it as their mainstay airplane and in turn would get part of the contracting business. in fact, the delays, cost overruns, and mechanical problems of the airplane have made it a contentious political issue in customer countries from canada and holland to italy and australia.interactive map: parts from the f-35 are sourced from over 250 locations around the globe, spanning 11 countries and, in the u.s., more than 90 congressional districts. hover over any red dot to see a list of contractors. (map design and development: frankie dintino. source: center for international policy.)the country where the airplane has least been a public issue is the united states. in their 2012 debates, mitt romney criticized barack obama for supporting “green energy” projects, including solyndra. neither man mentioned the f-35, and i am still looking for evidence that president obama has talked about it in any of his speeches. in other countries, the f-35 can be cast as another annoying american intrusion. here, it is protected by supplier contracts that have been spread as broadly as possible.“political engineering,” a term popularized by a young pentagon analyst named chuck spinney in the 1970s, is pork-barrel politics on the grandest scale. cost overruns sound bad if someone else is getting the extra money. they can be good if they are creating business for your company or jobs in your congressional district. political engineering is the art of spreading a military project to as many congressional districts as possible, and thus maximizing the number of members of congress who feel that if they cut off funding, they’d be hurting themselves.a $10 million parts contract in one congressional district builds one representative’s support. two $5 million contracts in two districts are twice as good, and better all around would be three contracts at $3 million apiece. every participant in the military-contracting process understands this logic: the prime contractors who parcel out supply deals around the country, the military’s procurement officers who divide work among contractors, the politicians who vote up or down on the results. in the late 1980s, a coalition of so-called cheap hawks in congress tried to cut funding for the b-2 bomber. they got nowhere after it became clear that work for the project was being carried out in 46 states and no fewer than 383 congressional districts (of 435 total). the difference between then and now is that in 1989, northrop, the main contractor for the plane, had to release previously classified data to demonstrate how broadly the dollars were being spread.whatever its technical challenges, the f-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. for a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of bernie sanders—former socialist mayor of burlington, current independent senator from vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. in principle, he thinks the f-35 is a bad choice. after one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in florida, sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” yet sanders, with the rest of vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an f-35 unit assigned to the vermont air national guard in burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “for better or worse, [the f-35] is the plane of record right now,” sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. that’s the reality.” it’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? as vermont goes, so goes the nation.the next big project the air force is considering is the long range strike bomber, a successor to the b-1 and b-2 whose specifications include an ability to do bombing runs deep into china. (a step so wildly reckless that the u.s. didn’t consider it even when fighting chinese troops during the korean war.) by the time the plane’s full costs and capabilities become apparent, chuck spinney wrote last summer, the airplane, “like the f-35 today, will be unstoppable.” that is because even now its supporters are building the plane’s “social safety net by spreading the subcontracts around the country, or perhaps like the f-35, around the world.”admiral mike mullen, the then-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at a press conference in baghdad in august 2011. (joseph epstein)politicians say that national security is their first and most sacred duty, but they do not act as if this is so. the most recent defense budget passed the house armed services committee by a vote of 61 to zero, with similarly one-sided debate before the vote. this is the same house of representatives that cannot pass a long-term highway trust fund bill that both parties support. “the lionization of military officials by politicians is remarkable and dangerous,” a retired air force colonel named tom ruby, who now writes on organizational culture, told me. he and others said that this deference was one reason so little serious oversight of the military took place.t. x. hammes, a retired marine corps colonel who has a doctorate in modern history from oxford, told me that instead of applying critical judgment to military programs, or even regarding national defense as any kind of sacred duty, politicians have come to view it simply as a teat. “many on capitol hill see the pentagon with admirable simplicity,” he said: “it is a way of directing tax money to selected districts. it’s part of what they were elected to do.”in the spring of 2011, barack obama asked gary hart, the democratic party’s most experienced and best-connected figure on defense reform, to form a small bipartisan task force that would draft recommendations on how obama might try to recast the pentagon and its practices if he won a second term. hart did so (i was part of the group, along with andrew j. bacevich of boston university, john arquilla of the naval postgraduate school, and norman r. augustine, the former ceo of lockheed martin), and sent a report to obama that fall. [here is that memo.] he never heard back. every white house is swamped with recommendations and requests, and it responds only to those it considers most urgent—which defense reform obviously was not.soon thereafter, during the 2012 presidential race, neither barack obama nor mitt romney said much about how they would spend the billion and a half dollars a day that go to military programs, except for when romney said that if elected, he would spend a total of $1 trillion more. in their only direct exchange about military policy, during their final campaign debate, obama said that romney’s plans would give the services more money than they were asking for. romney pointed out that the navy had fewer ships than it did before world war i. obama shot back, “well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. we have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. we have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.” it was obama’s most sarcastic and aggressive moment of any of the debates, and was also the entirety of the discussion about where those trillions would go.jim webb is a decorated vietnam veteran, an author, a former democratic senator, and a likely presidential candidate. seven years ago in his book a time to fight, he wrote that the career military was turning into a “don’t break my rice bowl” culture, referring to an asian phrase roughly comparable to making sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. webb meant that ambitious officers notice how many of their mentors and predecessors move after retirement into board positions, consultancies, or operational roles with defense contractors. (pensions now exceed preretirement pay for some very senior officers; for instance, a four-star general or admiral with 40 years of service can receive a pension of more than $237,000 a year, even if his maximum salary on active duty was $180,000.)webb says it would defy human nature if knowledge of the post-service prospects did not affect the way some high-ranking officers behave while in uniform, including “protecting the rice bowl” of military budgets and cultivating connections with their predecessors and their postretirement businesses. “there have always been some officers who went on to contracting jobs,” webb, who grew up in an air force family, told me recently. “what’s new is the scale of the phenomenon, and its impact on the highest ranks of the military.”of course, the modern military advertises itself as a place where young people who have lacked the chance or money for higher education can develop valuable skills, plus earn gi bill benefits for post-service studies. that’s good all around, and is part of the military’s perhaps unintended but certainly important role as an opportunity creator for undercredentialed americans. webb is talking about a different, potentially corrupting “prepare for your future” effect on the military’s best-trained, most influential careerists.if more members of congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the united states would probably not have gone to war in iraq.“it is no secret that in subtle ways, many of these top leaders begin positioning themselves for their second-career employment during their final military assignments,” webb wrote in a time to fight. the result, he said, is a “seamless interplay” of corporate and military interests “that threatens the integrity of defense procurement, of controversial personnel issues such as the huge ‘quasi-military’ structure [of contractors, like blackwater and halliburton] that has evolved in iraq and afghanistan, and inevitably of the balance within our national security process itself.” i heard assessments like this from many of the men and women i spoke with. the harshest ones came not from people who mistrusted the military but from those who, like webb, had devoted much of their lives to it.a man who worked for decades overseeing pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “the system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” what kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.”of course it was the most revered american warrior of the 20th century, dwight d. eisenhower, who warned most urgently that business and politics would corrupt the military, and vice versa. everyone has heard of this speech. not enough people have actually read it and been exposed to what would now be considered its dangerously antimilitary views. which mainstream politician could say today, as eisenhower said in 1961, that the military-industrial complex has a “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—[that] is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government”?seth moulton, a few days after his victory in last fall’s congressional race, said that the overall quality and morale of people in the military has dramatically improved since the days of a conscript force. “but it’s become populated, especially at the highest ranks, by careerists, people who have gotten where they are by checking all the boxes and not taking risks,” he told me. “some of the finest officers i knew were lieutenants who knew they were getting out, so weren’t afraid to make the right decision. i know an awful lot of senior officers who are very afraid to make a tough choice because they’re worried how it will look on their fitness report.” this may sound like a complaint about life in any big organization, but it’s something more. there’s no rival army or marine corps you can switch to for a new start. there’s almost no surmounting an error or a black mark on the fitness or evaluation reports that are the basis for promotions.every institution has problems, and at every stage of u.s. history, some critics have considered the u.s. military overfunded, underprepared, too insular and self-regarding, or flawed in some other way. the difference now, i contend, is that these modern distortions all flow in one way or another from the chickenhawk basis of today’s defense strategy.at enormous cost, both financial and human, the nation supports the world’s most powerful armed force. but because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action, the normal democratic feedbacks do not work.i have met serious people who claim that the military’s set-apart existence is best for its own interests, and for the nation’s. “since the time of the romans there have been people, mostly men but increasingly women, who have volunteered to be the praetorian guard,” john a. nagl told me. nagl is a west point graduate and rhodes scholar who was a combat commander in iraq and has written two influential books about the modern military. he left the army as a lieutenant colonel and now, in his late 40s, is the head of the haverford prep school, near philadelphia.“they know what they are signing up for,” nagl said of today’s troops. “they are proud to do it, and in exchange they expect a reasonable living, and pensions and health care if they are hurt or fall sick. the american public is completely willing to let this professional class of volunteers serve where they should, for wise purpose. this gives the president much greater freedom of action to make decisions in the national interest, with troops who will salute sharply and do what needs to be done.”i like and respect nagl, but i completely disagree. as we’ve seen, public inattention to the military, born of having no direct interest in what happens to it, has allowed both strategic and institutional problems to fester.“a people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it,” andrew bacevich wrote in 2012. bacevich himself fought in vietnam; his son was killed in iraq. “persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do.”“our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect,” gary hart’s working group told the president.mike mullen thinks that one way to reengage americans with the military is to shrink the active-duty force, a process already under way. “the next time we go to war,” he said, “the american people should have to say yes. and that would mean that half a million people who weren’t planning to do this would have to be involved in some way. they would have to be inconvenienced. that would bring america in. america hasn’t been in these previous wars. and we are paying dearly for that.”with their distance from the military, politicians don’t talk seriously about whether the united states is directly threatened by chaos in the middle east and elsewhere, or is in fact safer than ever (as christopher preble and john mueller, of the cato institute, have argued in a new book, a dangerous world?). the vast majority of americans outside the military can be triply cynical in their attitude toward it. triply? one: “honoring” the troops but not thinking about them. two: “caring” about defense spending but really viewing it as a bipartisan stimulus program. three: supporting a “strong” defense but assuming that the united states is so much stronger than any rival that it’s pointless to worry whether strategy, weaponry, and leadership are right.the cultural problems arising from an arm’s-length military could be even worse. charles j. dunlap jr., a retired air force major general who now teaches at duke law school, has thought about civic-military relations through much of his professional life. when he was studying at the national defense university as a young air force officer in the early 1990s, just after the first gulf war, he was a co-winner of the prize for best student essay with an imagined-future work called “the origins of the american military coup of 2012.”his essay’s premise was cautionary, and was based on the tension between rising adulation for the military and declining trust in most other aspects of government. the more exasperated americans grew about economic and social problems, the more relieved they were when competent men in uniform, led by general thomas e. t. brutus, finally stepped in to take control. part of the reason for the takeover, dunlap explained, was that the military had grown so separate from mainstream culture and currents that it viewed the rest of society as a foreign territory to occupy and administer.recently i asked dunlap how the real world of post-2012 america matched his imagined version.“i think we’re on the cusp of seeing a resurgence of a phenomenon that has always been embedded in the american psyche,” he said. “that is benign antimilitarism,” which would be the other side of the reflexive pro-militarism of recent years. “people don’t appreciate how unprecedented our situation is,” he told me. what is that situation? for the first time in the nation’s history, america has a permanent military establishment large enough to shape our dealings in the world and seriously influence our economy. yet the americans in that military, during what dunlap calls the “maturing years of the volunteer force,” are few enough in number not to seem representative of the country they defend.“it’s becoming increasingly tribal,” dunlap says of the at-war force in our chickenhawk nation, “in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. it’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.”people within that military tribe can feel both above and below the messy civilian reality of america. below, in the burdens placed upon them, and the inattention to the lives, limbs, and opportunities they have lost. above, in being able to withstand hardships that would break their hipster or slacker contemporaries.“it’s become just too easy to go to war,” says admiral mike mullen, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.“i think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves,” dunlap said. “and there is some rationality for that.” anyone who has spent time with troops and their families knows what he means. physical fitness, standards of promptness and dress, all the aspects of self-discipline that have traditionally made the military a place where misdirected youth could “straighten out,” plus the spirit of love and loyalty for comrades that is found in civilian life mainly on sports teams. the best resolution of this tension between military and mainstream values would of course come as those who understand the military’s tribal identity apply their strengths outside the tribe. “the generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts,” dunlap said of the young veterans of the recent long wars. “they were literally making life-or-death decisions. you can’t take that generation and say, ‘you can be seen and not heard.’ ”in addition to seth moulton, this year’s congress will have more than 20 veterans of iraq and afghanistan, including new republican senators tom cotton of arkansas and joni ernst of iowa. the 17 who are already there, including democratic representatives tulsi gabbard and tammy duckworth and republican representatives duncan d. hunter and adam kinzinger, have played an active role in veterans’ policies and in the 2013 debates about intervening in syria. gabbard was strongly against it; some of the republican veterans were for it—but all of them made arguments based on firsthand observation of what had worked and failed. moulton told me that the main lesson he’ll apply from his four tours in iraq is the importance of service, of whatever kind. he said that harvard’s famed chaplain during moulton’s years as an undergraduate physics student, the late peter j. gomes, had convinced him that “it’s not enough to ‘believe’ in service. you should find a way, yourself, to serve.” barring unimaginable changes, “service” in america will not mean a draft. but moulton says he will look for ways “to promote a culture where more people want to serve.”for all the differences in their emphases and conclusions, these young veterans are alike in all taking the military seriously, rather than just revering it. the vast majority of americans will never share their experiences. but we can learn from that seriousness, and view military policy as deserving at least the attention we give to taxes or schools.what might that mean, in specific? here is a start. in the private report prepared for president obama more than three years ago, gary hart’s working group laid out prescriptions on a range of operational practices, from the need for smaller, more agile combat units to a shift in the national command structure to a different approach toward preventing nuclear proliferation. three of the recommendations were about the way the country as a whole should engage with its armed forces. they were:appoint a commission to assess the long wars. this commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from afghanistan and iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. such a commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions.clarify the decision-making process for use of force. such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities.restore the civil-military relationship. the president, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. the traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.barack obama, busy on other fronts, had no time for this. the rest of us should make time, if we hope to choose our wars more wisely, and win them.
 in 2012, i wrote a column for the atlantic magazine explaining why americans were prisoners of the cable bundle. we could dream about escaping $90-a-month fees for hundreds of channels we didn’t need, but such flights of imagination were, in the short term, hopeless, due to the arrangement of the pay-tv business and fruitful economics of bundling. in 2013, i wrote another column explaining how espn had become perhaps the most lucrative entertainment company in the world by gleaning $5 a month from every cable-watching household, even those that had never watched a second of sportscenter.two years ago, cable television stretched like a massive arch across the entertainment landscape and espn was its keystone. the future, i said, would probably look a lot like the present. architects don’t carelessly part with their keystones. cable wasn’t going anywhere.well, two and a half years later, i’m not ashamed to say that i’m beginning to look like an idiot. on monday, espn announced that it’s teaming up with dish to offer a new web-only product, sling tv, that will allow viewers to stream a small bundle of channels including espn for just $20. the worldwide leader in sports joins hbo and cbs (including showtime) in giving cord-cutters a way to watch their channels without buying the full cable package.put more dramatically: the most prestigious cable network, the most-watched tv network, and the most expensive cable network have all announced plans to side-step the traditional cable bundle—since just october. (for the next four months to continue the trajectory of such drama, the nfl would have to be shut down for the 2015 season, and congress would pass a law banning further production on ncis.)the economics behind sling tv are straightforward. there are 10 to 15 million american households with a broadband internet connection and no cable. right now they are paying tv companies practically nothing. tv companies would like them to pay something. so they'll try to thread the needle by creating a product that is good enough for this group—a.k.a.: the cord-cutters or the cord-nevers—but not so good that cable subscribers trade in their $90 monthly payments.whether this offering will “work” is unknowable at the moment. dish has been buying up lots of wireless spectrum nationwide to make sling tv work smoothly, but anybody who’s tried to watch live tv on their computer knows it can be a hair-tuggingly awful experience.but whether it “works” is also a secondary story. the real story is that it’s happening in the first place. the cable bundle is coming apart, and there’s basically no way we’re ever getting back to 2012.the very concept of television has unbundled completely. the word itself means radically different things for different generations. to a teenager, television might mean youtube, vine, and facebook videos. to a twentysomething college grad, it is (their parents’ password to) netflix and (their roommate’s sister’s password to) hbo go. to a family of four, it’s the plain old cable bundle. to a sports fanatic living alone, it’s $90 a month to watch espn.going forward, it seems tv fans will have three options: (1) a la carte, where viewers cobble together netflix, hulu plus, and other internet fare, little of which is live; (2) the little bundle, like sling tv and other cheap packages of live channels; and (3) the big bundle.the eulogies for tv are too much: we’re not standing over the grave of cable television. instead, we’re standing at the top of the mountain of the big bundle's growth and seeing a gentle slope coming down beyond the peak. total subscribers declined last year for the first time ever by 166,000 households. some top channels lost even more viewers . the future of video points away from the big bundle. cable has what my friend in the industry calls the fox news problem: the product is wildly successful today, but its best customers are old, are getting older, and aren't likely to live forever.the walt disney company (which owns espn), released the following statement this afternoon:“we are excited to see our innovative efforts with dish come to fruition with this value package targeting the 12 million broadband-only households.  this will support the overall multichannel subscription model, while offering viewers yet another way to access disney and espn content.”espn hopes that it is providing a purely additive product that takes nothing away from its cable juggernaut, the big bundle. perhaps it’s right. but it is also participating in the unbundling of television, as a whole—not just the product, but also the product category, the very concept of tv. espn became the richest property in entertainment by conquering a simpler age of cable television. that was last century’s peak. onto the next mountain.
rt @john_menezes: a16z’s balaji srinivasan, joe gebbia, john stanfield &amp; ben uretsky discuss "the end of ownership"  
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 but it’s not that the media doesn’t cover nigeria, or that westerners don’t care about africans. after all, when boko haram fighters kidnapped nearly 200 girls from a school in chibok in april of last year, a public campaign to bring them back attracted widespread publicity, with even first lady michelle obama contributing a photograph. two years before that, a video from the now-defunct ngo invisible children that highlighted joseph kony, the ugandan warlord who leads the lord’s resistance army, was viewed over 100 million times in its first six days. these campaigns, whatever their shortcomings, did at least show that people in the west aren’t totally indifferent to african suffering.another missing note: so many of these campaigns are picked to death by westerners with critiques that range from well-thought out and pragmatic analyses of the potential of campaigns to lead to useful actions to rote recitation of english department cliches . either way, the effect is similar — and interesting. the common refrain on twitter last week was over the injustice of boko haram’s killings being ignored while those of the charlie hebdo attackers received worldwide, nonstop attention. but when such attention was granted — and in spades — to kony and the lra, we saw righteous think piece after think piece after think piece.   one wonders whether the target of the opprobrium had, in fact, been shifted from kony to the invisible children ngo. some critics had a point. it was hard to believe that something as poorly thought out and emotionally manipulative as invisible children would have led to anything beneficial, and the results showed. but invisible children followed a well-trodden road — they mimicked countless movements unable to resist the temptation to embrace attention-grabbing signature issues and political stances that very well could be their downfall. but that’s not really the larger lesson. the lesson is that media attention is a firehose and once it is turned on one cannot complain that they got soaked. once the eyes of the world media are on ___ bad thing happening, wolf blitzer is on the scene in search of another malaysian airplane to milk for ratings, and bono is recording another treacly humanitarian fundraising ballad that makes all right-thinking human beings want to amputate their ear drums there is no turning back. there will be no nuance. you will not be able to control the interpretation so it fits your desired narrative. instead, you will have the lowest common denominator. and not just the depredations of cable television, but also the horrors of hashtag activism and #hottakes on twitter. you may even have an online vigilante mob or two ready to go on reddit, a reporter that discredits the cause through sheer professional malpractice, and a charlatan serving up more than three cups of lies to an gullible audience.you may even have an old man chased through the streets of los angeles because of a reporter thirsty for a bitcoin story . and let’s not get ourselves started about a certain fox news terrorism analyst’s, ahem, inside dirt on the alleged sharia dystopia that is….. birmingham, england ? <sarcasm> wow, i had no idea birmingham, not raqqa, was the seat of the caliphate! </sarcasm>summing this up, you go to war with the “media” (old and new) you have, not the media you want. and anything hot enough to grab the world’s attention and get policy leaders talking will also attract an horde of people looking to profit from it. was not jay-z merely being honest in such motivations (hov, unlike “three cups of tea“‘s greg mortenson, will never try to pull one over you)  when he showed up trying to hawk occupy wall street t-shirts ? the only way to square the contradiction between “my favorite issue isn’t getting loads of attention” and “my favorite issue is getting loads of attention and its ruining everything” is that advocates labor under the delusion that there is a perfect formula for the kind of attention an issue deserves. moreover, they themselves feel that they deserve to have that preference for such an attention distribution and style of narrative satisfied. if that’s their desire, it will be eternally disappointed. it is difficult to believe that an amorphous array of everything from cnn news hosts to twitter personalities could coordinate to deliver the “right” message even if they (1) wanted to and (2) knew what the right message was.needless to say it is difficult if not impossible to specify in advance what the proper response (and aesthetic of coverage) for an incident like the boko haram massacre should be. regionalists disagree — how would people who know nothing of boko haram or nigeria do any better? and what is the incentive anyway? wolf blitzer needs his malaysian airlines to chase, greg mortenson needs to get paid, and a twitter activist is looking at their analytics dashboard and saying “damn, papa’s getting a bit low — time to invent another hashtag.” it is very easy to see yet another baldly racist “heart of darkness”-esque narrative being propagated due to the pattern of pre-existing coverage and the sheer horror of the atrocities. 
 when the "big bang" of the modern internet exploded more than 20 years ago, the first set of shockwaves impacted macro sectors like shopping, media and travel. and those shockwaves fundamentally altered the landscape for their offline counterparts.fast forward to today, there isn’t a major sector that hasn’t been completed transformed by successive waves of innovation from web 1.0 to the modern mobile app world.what happened along the way is that more than 3 billion people are now on the internet * , and at those numbers, even a small niche represents a very large aggregate community of interest.enter the mega niche and the power of passion.passion brings people together, and passion creates connections within people that share it in very powerful ways. today, 3 billion people are finding each other to share their interests with others — in many cases using crude web 1.0 bulletin boards.these mega niches aren’t small: some are tens, even hundreds of millions of community members strong. the shared interest that brings them together can be literally anything — cooking, cars, clothes , parenthood, watch collecting, tennis , surfing , skateboarding , home design, bird-watching, a popular podcast .giving these groups the power to communicate in the context of their shared interest is tremendously powerful.apps that are well-designed and cater exclusively to a mega niche community, away from other, less relevant content, can be captivating to their users. and there are opportunities to create these apps everywhere you look.car enthusiast mega niche: an app that connects people who share a love for old volkswagens, despite those people spanning continents, would be exceptionally valuable and useful for its community. the bulk of the communication in the app would be centered around the topic of the cars the community members are so passionate about, which would keep users engaged. in such an app, communications features would enable community members to teach each other how to perform maintenance, share knowledge, buy and sell goods, exchange stories.new mother mega niche: an app for new mothers would bring women all over the world together and enable them to share in the experience of motherhood, surely highlighting the similarities in experience regardless of location and also allowing women to benefit from others’ cultural practices. in such an app, communications features would enable community members to exchange experiences with sleep-encouraging practices for newborns, tactics to soothe fussy babies, recommendations about baby products and overall just provide one another support.skateboarder mega niche: an app for skateboarders would have potential to connect as many as 14m skateboarders in the u.s. alone. for app creators seeking to build a viable, sustainable app, that’s 14m people who want to engage around the topic of skateboarding. they want to learn how to do tricks, share commentary on a pro's performance at the x games, chat about their experience with a new deck.watch collector mega niche: an app for watch collectors would allow the small but exceedingly committed group of enthusiasts to share in their passion for watches . in such an app, communications features would allow users to exchange reviews, debate over minute mechanical and stylistic details in watches, discuss watch care and optimization.for app creators, these mega niches are highly engaged and monetizable.the interest within the mega-niche communities is extremely focused, therefore the content in such apps would be exceedingly consistent and on-topic. bringing these like-minded people together, and allowing them to communicate in the context of their shared interest, provides great value and utility to an app’s users.there’s a mega niche of people who like pretty much anything and everything. every subreddit could, and should, be an app.many of these apps currently give their users information/content, but don’t provide them any way to communicate with one another. imagine how much more engaging and useful these apps could be if they allowed their users to connect with one another.apps that serve mega niche communities have the potential to foster extremely meaningful communications, with an exceptionally high signal-to-noise ratio.facebook has 1.3 billion users , which makes it one of the largest online communities in the world. but facebook users’ only shared interest, presumably, is the people they communicate with through the app.we’ve all seen evidence of the need for some sort of segmentation, or proof that some passions and interests would be better shared in a mega-niche community instead of a general one like facebook. take the superbowl, for example. non-football fans quickly become exhausted of mentions of the sport and long for a way to mute them in their feeds. at the same time, however, we see the nfl app’s numbers skyrocket during the superbowl, proving how engaging an app that connects members of the football mega-niche community can be during such a relevant event.layer gives app creators all of the tools necessary to build the right native, in-app communications experiences for mega niches that are centered around any shared interest. we give you open-sourced ui components and features like text chat, video chat and messaging that supports any payload. we give you powerful-out-of-the-box push notifications, and typing indicator and read receipts so you can bring your mega niche together and give them a sense of presence in their conversation.as always, we can’t wait to see what you build with layer.thanks to tomaz stolfa for contributing to this post.
 the euro tumbled to a nine-year low against the highflying dollar monday, struck by nerves over greek politics and steadily building expectations that the european central bank will soon beef up its stimulus program.the euro sank as low as $1.1861 against the dollar in asian trading hours monday, below the nadir it struck in the early stages of the euro crisis in 2010. by late afternoon in the u.s., the single currency rebounded to...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 a electronic board of a securities firm in tokyo on jan. 16, 2015. asian stocks were sharply lower friday after a surprise move by the swiss national bank to abandon its efforts to keep its currency artificially cheap shocked the market. japan's nikkei 225 dropped 1.43 percent to 16,864.16.losses mounted from the swiss currency shock as the largest u.s. retail foreign-exchange brokerage said client debts threatened its compliance with capital rules and a new zealand-based dealer went out of business.fxcm inc. (fxcm) , which handled a record $1.4 trillion of trades by individuals last quarter, said clients owe $225 million on their accounts after the swiss national bank ’s decision to abandon the franc’s cap against the euro roiled markets worldwide. global brokers nz ltd. said losses from the franc’s surge are forcing it to shut down. ig group holdings plc (igg) estimated an impact of as much as 30 million british pounds ($45.5 million) and swissquote group holdings sa set aside 25 million francs ($28.4 million).“i would be astonished if we did not see more casualties,” nick parsons, the london-based head of research for the u.k. and europe at national australia bank ltd., said by phone from sydney. “this was a 180-degree about turn by the snb. people feel hurt and betrayed.”the franc surged as much as 41 percent versus the euro on thursday, the biggest gain on record, and climbed more than 15 percent against all of the more than 150 currencies tracked by bloomberg. dealers in london at banks including deutsche bank ag, ubs group ag and goldman sachs group inc. battled to process orders yesterday when the snb surprised markets with its announcement in zurich.market turmoil from the move extended into a second day as asian shares dropped with u.s. index futures, while japanese and australian government bond yields plunged to records as investors sought haven assets.“clients experienced significant losses” after the franc’s surge, fxcm said in a statement dated jan. 15. that “generated negative equity balances owed to fxcm of approximately $225 million.”the brokerage dropped 15 percent in new york trading yesterday to an almost two-year low of $12.63, leaving the company valued at about $596 million. the shares were cut to sell from neutral by citigroup inc., which lowered its price target to $5 from $17.spokeswoman jaclyn klein didn’t immediately respond to calls to her mobile and office phones.the u.s. commodity futures trading commission allows investors to put down as little as 2 percent of the value of their foreign-exchange bets. brokers may get stuck with the balance of losses suffered by clients who used leverage, borrowed on credit cards, or did both to bet against the franc.drew niv, fxcm’s chief executive officer, said that individual currency traders are enticed by the chance to control large positions with little money down, in remarks that were published in bloomberg markets magazine’s december issue.“currencies don’t move that much,” he said. “so if you had no leverage, nobody would trade.”the company warned investors in a regulatory filing last march that its risk controls were imperfect. fxcm had 230,579 retail customers on dec. 31. they traded $439 billion of currency in december, with an average of 595,126 trades a day.“some of our methods for managing risk are discretionary by nature and are based on internally developed controls and observed historical market behavior,” the company said in the regulatory filing. “these methods may not adequately prevent losses, particularly as they relate to extreme market movements.”most of fxcm’s retail clients lost money in 2014, according to the company’s disclosures mandated by the cftc. the percentage of losing accounts climbed from 67 percent in the first and second quarters to 68 percent in the third quarter and 70 percent in the fourth quarter.the snb ended its three-year policy of capping the franc at 1.20 per euro a week before the european central bank meets to discuss government bond purchases to boost the euro-area economy. such a policy, known as quantitative easing, could spur pressure on the franc to appreciate against the euro. the snb spent billions defending the currency cap after introducing it in september 2011.deutsche bank was among dealers to suffer disruptions to electronic trading, with its autobahn platform temporarily ceasing to provide quotes, according to a dealer from outside the bank. auckland-based global brokers nz said the market for francs was disrupted for hours.“the majority of clients in a franc position were on the losing side and sustained losses amounting to far greater than their account equity,” global brokers nz director david johnson said in a statement dated jan. 15 and posted on the website of affiliated company excel markets. all of the firm’s client funds are in segregated accounts and “100 percent of positive client equity or balance is safe and withdrawable immediately,” johnson said.hsbc holdings plc is investigating reports that customers in hong kong bought the swiss franc below market rates when an online banking system failed to keep up with the currency’s gains after the removal of the cap.apple daily and the hong kong economic journal cited unidentified bank customers as saying that they took advantage of the mistake yesterday evening. hsbc spokeswoman maggie cheung said in an e-mail that the lender was looking into the reports.ig group shares fell 4.4 percent yesterday. the u.k. spread-betting firm said the financial impact from the surge in the swiss franc was partially dependent on its ability to recover client debts.the market turmoil turned the $1.9 billion john hancock absolute return currency fund (jcuax) into the biggest loser among u.s. peers. it tumbled 8.7 percent yesterday, the steepest drop on record and the most among more than 2,000 u.s.-domiciled funds tracked by bloomberg with at least $1 billion under management. the fund had its second-biggest short position in the franc at the end of november, according to the latest fact sheet on john hancock’s website.“when they pulled the rug under the market, the swiss franc rallied against everything,” said chris weston , chief market strategist at ig markets ltd. in melbourne . many funds “would have been in a lot of pain last night,” weston said.to contact the reporters on this story: david evans in los angeles at davidevans@bloomberg.net ; kevin buckland in tokyo at kbuckland1@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: garfield reynolds at greynolds1@bloomberg.net michael patterson
 create your own data transformation: [+]use a formula to modify and combine data series into a single line. for example, invert an exchange rate a by using formula 1/a, or calculate the spread between 2 interest rates a and b by using formula a - b.use the assigned data series variables above (e.g. a, b, ...) together with operators {+, -, *, /, ^}, braces {(,)}, and constants {e.g. 2, 1.5} to create your own formula {e.g. 1/a, a-b, (a+b)/2, (a/(a+b+c))*100}. the default formula 'a' displays only the first data series added to this line. you may also add data series to this line before entering a formula.
 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.recently  jonathan glancey at the bbc and  nelson schwartz at the new york times have taken a look at the apparent death of the full-scale indoor shopping mall in the united states. very few new malls have been built, and a large (and seemingly growing) share of the malls that exist are approaching a state of "death" with vacancy rates above 40 percent.this is a complicated phenomenon, but one important factor is the rise of online shopping. schwartz dismisses this too quickly with the observation that "less than 10 percent of retail sales take place online." this is true, but a large share of the commerce department's retail sales series consists of food and car dealerships, which don't really compete with online retail. here's e-commerce as a share of non-automotive, non-food (or restaurant) sales:that's a lot more than 10 percent. it's not a full explanation for the phenomenon, but it's a really important part of the story. the shopping mall is a complicated ecosystem, full of implicit subsidies and agglomeration effects, and the ecosystem is being shocked by competition from online that's growing at an incredibly pace.
 on charlie rose last night, charlie played straight man to larry summers. "what economist has influenced you most?" charlie asked. "keynes," summers answered, trying to look like he wasn't saying something obvious, "keynes."keynes understood psychology, but there is something about human psychology that all this end-of-days talk about keynes misses. when the government throws money at the populace, and keeps describing it as a hail mary pass they regret they have to make, it must vitiate the effect of the stimulus itself. the first time keynesianism was used, it was a surprise move to a nation that wasn't an expert on economic theory; the second time around, everyone knows what is supposed to happen, and that can't be good. in human affairs, history matters.penicillin works even if they tell you they're going to give it to you, maybe even better. but people's minds are different from people's bodies. is a stimulus so stimulating when they keep telling you they are going to stimulate you? can you get excited when everyone around you is watching to see how excited you get?
 family-owned businesses are a large and growing force. organizations that want to collaborate—or compete—with these companies in emerging markets must first understand them.december 2014 | byÅsa björnberg, heinz-peter elstrodt, and vivek panditthe industrial titans of the gilded age were largely family businesses. but today, in most developed nations—particularly the united states, the united kingdom, and japan—the largest, industry-leading companies are typically held by a broad, dispersed mix of shareholders. less than one-third of the companies in the s&p 500, for example, remain founder- and family-owned businesses, meaning that a family owns a significant share and can influence important decisions, particularly the election of the chairman and ceo.so far, the picture is quite different in emerging economies. approximately 60 percent of their private-sector companies with revenues of $1 billion or more were owned by founders or families in 2010. and there are good reasons to suspect that these companies will remain a more significant part of their national economies in emerging markets than their counterparts in the west did about a century ago. as brisk growth propels emerging regions and their family-owned businesses forward, our analysis suggests that an additional 4,000 of them could hit $1 billion in sales in the years from 2010 to 2025 (exhibit 1). if that’s how things shake out, such companies will represent nearly 40 percent of the world’s large enterprises in 2025, up from roughly 15 percent in 2010. developing an understanding of them, therefore, is fast becoming a crucial long-term priority—not only for global companies active in emerging markets, but also for would-be investors that must ultimately decide whether and how to support this fast-growing segment of the economy.a growing number of family-owned businesses in emerging markets could hit $1 billion in sales in the years from 2010 to 2025.the starting point for many family-controlled local companies is a demonstrable, even dominant, “home field” advantage; they have a deep understanding of their countries and industries, as well as considerable influence on regulators. they derive all this from years of personal relationships with stakeholders across the value chain. many have proved resilient through times of economic crisis. 1 1.for example, across asia, businesses owned by families or founders have increased their share of total market capitalization since 2008, while state-owned enterprises have ceded share over the same period. for more, see “avoiding the dinosaur trap,” economist, may 31, 2014, economist.com.the very fact that they are family businesses may be advantageous in an emerging market. where the conventions of commercial law and corporate identity are less developed, doing business on behalf of a family can signal greater accountability—the family’s reputation is at stake, after all—and a stronger commitment. indeed, we have observed circumstances where a personal commitment from the owner of a family business was as powerful as a signed contract.local philanthropic efforts reinforce this signaling. in the philippines, the ayala foundation—a nonprofit branch of the ayala corporation, the country’s largest conglomerate and a family-owned business—states its mission as improving the quality of life for all filipinos by eradicating poverty. similarly, in india, the gmr varalakshmi foundation, an arm of the market-leading gmr group, strives to “develop social infrastructure and enhance the quality of life of communities” throughout the country. companies such as these work within and for their communities.they can also work fast. as one executive at such a company told us: “all the world is trying to make managers think like owners. if we put in one of the owners to manage, we don’t need to solve this problem.” an owner–manager can move much more rapidly than an executive hired from outside. there’s no need to pass decisions up a chain of command or to put them in front of an uncooperative board, and many of the principal–agent challenges that confront non-family-controlled companies are neutralized. family-owned businesses can therefore place big bets quickly, though of course there’s no guarantee that they will pay off. still, manager–owners are largely relieved of the quarter-to-quarter, short-term benchmarks that can define—and distort—performance in western public companies, so they’re freer to make the hard choices necessary to create long-term value.indeed, the owners’ long time horizons and sense of mission often suffuse the whole organization. a mckinsey survey of businesses owned by families and founders showed that 90 percent of board members and top managers—family members or not—said that family values were present in the organization, and fully 70 percent said that they were part of its day-to-day operations. for the past ten years, mckinsey has measured and tracked organizational health in hundreds of companies, business units, and factories around the world. nearly two million employees have answered questions that rate the health of their organizations. we then produce a single health score, or index, reflecting the extent to which employees agree that their companies meet empirically derived litmus tests in each of nine dimensions of organizational health. when we isolate businesses owned by families and founders in emerging markets—as we did for nearly 60 leading companies in asia, central america, and south america, with over 100,000 survey respondents—we see health outcomes that are better than or comparable to those of other companies in the same markets (exhibit 2). moreover, in asia these companies are stronger than their non-family counterparts on several specific management practices, including shared vision, strategic clarity, employee involvement, and creativity and entrepreneurship.family-owned businesses in emerging markets have health outcomes better than or comparable to those of non-family-owned businesses in those same markets.for all these reasons, there may be little need for companies to jettison family-oriented governance to attract investment. in a world where free-flowing capital seeks out success, the emerging markets’ strong-performing publicly traded family businesses will probably be rewarded. market-leading ones can expect to be sought out by potential investors and venture partners alike, for success is a magnet.the resilience of family-owned businesses in emerging markets contains a paradox for global companies operating there. many companies approach these markets in search of rapid growth, yet the family-owned businesses they’re considering partnering with are balancing the importance of liquidity against an extremely long view. founders and families hold their shares for decades, even centuries. “for us,” the chairman of such a business explained, “short term is 5 years, and medium term is 20 years—that is, one generation.” multinationals that afford their country managers just three to five years (and sometimes even less time) to make progress are creating a significant mismatch.indeed, mismatches between the time horizons of country managers and businesses owned by families and founders can create tensions that undermine strategic partnerships. exacerbating matters is the volatility of many emerging markets. many country managers don’t experience a full business cycle, so they struggle to understand and quantify risk, to form a “through cycle” view of the opportunities, and thus to partner meaningfully with their peers in family-owned businesses.moreover, many family-owned companies place a premium on building strong, well-diversified businesses—sometimes to an extent that conflicts with the developed world’s conventional core competence–based strategies for value creation. as our colleagues have noted, for example, the largest conglomerates in china, india, and south korea are entering new businesses (often in unrelated industries) at a startling pace, adding an average of one new-business entry every 18 months. 2 2.see martin hirt, sven smit, and wonsik yoo, “ understanding asia’s conglomerates ,” mckinsey quarterly, february 2013. almost 70 percent of these diversifying conglomerates are family or founder owned. in large part, they aspire to play the portfolio game, taking advantage of access to talent and capital, as well as allocating family assets across different industries. this is an appropriate strategy for preserving wealth over the long term—and one that, our research finds, is paying dividends for conglomerates in the bric 3 3.brazil, russia, india, and china. countries. the implication for global companies and investors is that family-owned companies making moves into or out of seemingly unrelated industries can show up unexpectedly as competitors, partners, asset purchasers, or sellers, with varying degrees of success. 4 4.to be sure, many founder- and family-owned businesses struggle in these circumstances. for example, one of india’s largest such conglomerates has a long tail of value-destroying companies in sectors where more focused players have delivered higher returns. ultimately, the fundamentals still apply: coherence in strategy, strong decision making, and the ability to realize synergies.the wild card, of course, is succession. fewer than 30 percent of family- and founder-owned businesses around the world survive to the third generation as family-owned businesses, 5 5.see christian caspar, ana karina dias, and heinz-peter elstrodt, “ the five attributes of enduring family businesses ,” mckinsey quarterly, january 2010. and it’s an open question whether those in emerging markets will fare any better. history suggests they won’t. while statistics are scarce, analyses comparing the top 10 or 20 family-owned businesses in a given emerging-market country 20 years ago with today’s leaders show great discrepancies. nonetheless, there is some reason for optimism: the factors behind successful transitions are reasonably well known, and much can be learned from companies that failed the test. (today’s family-owned businesses in emerging markets are more likely than ever to engage in careful succession planning.) still, the basic challenges—such as family feuds, nepotism, and the gradual loss of entrepreneurship when leadership passes on to new generations—will surely bring down many family-owned companies in emerging markets, as they have elsewhere.similarly, such businesses may create ownership models that are inflexible and lack transparency, drawing the attention of activist investors who see value in better governance, more disciplined capital structuring, and getting out of so-called hobby businesses that support family members. this strikes at the heart of the question: is the family the best owner or manager of a company, or is it in business to support the family? potential partners, investors, and competitors should carefully look at such a company’s family tree, ownership models, and current succession processes before drawing conclusions about sustainability.finally, people who watch emerging markets should keep a weather eye on the role of regulation, as many governments in these countries are struggling to strike a balance between denying family-owned businesses excessive privileges and opportunities to make profits, on the one hand, and fostering entrepreneurism to promote their economies, on the other. 6 6.see “the new age of crony capitalism,” economist, march 15, 2014, economist.com. would-be investors ignore at their peril the potential of regulatory intervention to reshape the nature of competition in these markets quickly and dramatically.for more on this topic, download the compendium perspectives on founder- and family-owned businesses, on mckinsey’s private equity & principal investors site .Åsa björnberg is a senior expert in mckinsey’s london office, heinz-peter elstrodt is a director in the são paulo office and coleader of the family business practice, and vivek pandit is a director in the mumbai office.
 three months ago we announced coin center, and in that time we have been incredibly busy building the new organization. today, as we launch our website, i’d like to tell you a bit more about us, what we’ve been up to, and where we plan to go.coin center is an educational and research institution focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies. think of us as a think tank for blockchain technology. our mission is to build a better understanding of the technology in order to promote a regulatory climate that preserves maximum freedom of action for digital currency innovation. we are not a trade association or an industry group. our job is not to represent any particular company, or industry, or currency, but instead it is to advocate for the freedom to innovate using blockchain technology.success for us is a world in which regulators, the media, and the public understand what cryptocurrency technologies are (and aren’t) and why they’re important. a world in which technologists can continue to enjoy the freedom to tinker. a world in which entrepreneurs can confidently make the promise of cryptocurrency a reality for consumers. yet one of the greatest potential impediments to that world is overburdensome regulation.we are pragmatists and understand that certain uses of cryptocurrency technologies will be regulated. as a result, the key to preserving the freedom to innovate is to make sure regulators take a sensible approach. we can help ensure this by engaging policymakers and regulators in dialog and serving as a useful resource. what we hope to offer them–as well as the media and the public at large–is education and research.education about the technologies and how they work, their challenges and promises, and how their use implicates certain regulations is vital. without a clear understanding of the technology, it’s easy to get the policy wrong. and as we engage in a dialog with regulators, novel policy and legal questions emerge. our research aims to answer these questions and identify the unintended consequences to which some policy choices can lead.to these ends, over the past three months we’ve met with and begun a conversation with policymakers across government–from members of congress and their staff, to regulatory agencies including fincen, the consumer financial protection bureau, and the federal trade commission and the commodity futures trading commission. we have also been a part of the dialogue–providing testimony to the cftc’s first ever hearing on bitcoin, and filing comments in new york’s ongoing bitlicense proceeding. we’ve also spoken on various panels and events hosted by the world bank, cardozo law, new york law school, american banker, and the electronic transactions association. and just before the thanksgiving break bloomberg asked us to moderate a panel of regulators including cftc commissioner mark wetjen, fincen director jennifer shasky calvery, and former sec chairman arthur levitt.in the coming months we plan to continue our engagement and education. for example, later today i’ll be speaking on a panel for the d.c. bar association looking at bitcoin and the cfpb. later this month we’ll begin dipping our toe internationally as our research director, peter van valkenburgh, will be presenting on cryptocurrency and regulation at an emerging technology event for eu parliamentarians . and along with these public events, we’ll continue to meet privately with policymakers.we’ve got an amazing team of dedicated professionals working full time to get the public policy affecting cryptocurrencies right, and we’re incredibly fortunate to have the board, advisors, and contributors that we do. that said, we need your help, too.while some of the leading companies  and venture capitalists in the bitcoin space are generously helping us get off the ground, our aim is to be as broad-based as possible. we hope you’ll consider supporting coin center’s work with a donation. in addition to our gratitude and hard work you will also receive a thank you t-shirt and a regular update memo from me. whether you decide to support us today or not, please sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on twitter to get our latest updates.we think bitcoin and block chain technologies have a bright future, but it’s going to take a lot of work. we’ve been doing that work, we’re going to continue, and we’re excited to start sharing that journey with you.
 french president francois hollande congratulated the european central bank for bringing inflation close to zero at a time when economists are criticizing it for precisely that reason.while the ecb aims to keep the inflation rate at just below 2 percent, it’s been well short of that for more than a year and fell below zero in december. hollande’s gaffe comes as the central bank considers massive government bond purchases for the first time to rectify the situation.while low inflation boosts household’s real incomes, ecb president mario draghi is concerned that falling prices could lead to consumers delaying spending, ultimately pushing the euro-area economy into a deflationary spiral. the governing council will hold its next policy meeting on jan. 22“growth is also what the ecb is after,” hollande said in a speech to french diplomats today in paris. “in terms of inflation, it has attained its targets, since it is almost zero today in europe . i want to congratulate it on its action.”hollande’s office in paris didn’t immediately respond to calls for comment.to contact the reporter on this story: mark deen in paris at markdeen@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: fergal o’brien at fobrien@bloomberg.net kevin costelloepress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 makerbot invents a way to 3d print with limestone, metal, and woodthe world of 3d printing is getting some new materials to work with, creating the potential to print some really innovative objects.at ces, makerbot just announced a new move to allow customers to print with metal, wood, and limestone. to be sure, these will be composite materials, with the metals and other printed materials alloyed with the plastic. but it means that users will be able to create functional tools through 3d printing, moving the technique beyond gorgeous sculptures, toys, and trinkets.the materials are made possible by new extruders, which means they’ll be able to be used on some older models and not just new machines. the new composites should be available later this year.prepare for a world of 3d printed hammers, circuits, and other household objects. and more: just yesterday, we heard about a new plan to print electronics .
 (a) average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees: total private, dollars per hour, seasonally adjusted (ahetpi)production and related employees include working supervisors and all nonsupervisory employees (including group leaders and trainees) engaged in fabricating, processing, assembling, inspecting, receiving, storing, handling, packing, warehousing, shipping, trucking, hauling, maintenance, repair, janitorial, guard services, product development, auxiliary production for plant's own use (for example, power plant), recordkeeping, and other services closely associated with the above production operations.#nonsupervisory employees include those individuals in private, service-providing industries who are not above the working-supervisor level. this group includes individuals such as office and clerical workers, repairers, salespersons, operators, drivers, physicians, lawyers, accountants, nurses, social workers, research aides, teachers, drafters, photographers, beauticians, musicians, restaurant workers, custodial workers, attendants, line installers and repairers, laborers, janitors, guards, and other employees at similar occupational levels whose services are closely associated with those of the employees listed.
 the biggest looming source of inflation: non-college educated menin the same week that president obama advocated for making community college free for all americans for 2 years for those willing to work for it, we got a jobs report that gave more evidence about a theme that’s been developing over the past couple years: we’re running out of “old economy” men.as much as silicon valley complains, a scarcity of web developers doesn’t lead to inflation — most of the technology we use, from google to facebook to twitter to our phone operating systems, is free to consumers. that whole “you can’t eat an ipad” thing. we continued to be over-stored in retail, as this week’s jcpenney and macy’s store closures reminded us. and we all know what’s happened to the price of oil in recent months.central banks around the world have cut interest rates to zero and bought trillions of dollars worth of securities, and that hasn’t caused inflation. and nobody in the developed world has a strong appetite for large-scale fiscal stimulus.instead, inflation will come from the most unlikely of sources: the humble, frustrated, beaten-down industrial man. responding to decades of social and economic clues — iron man being the new marlboro man, steve jobs being cooler than dirty jobs, the outsourcing of manufacturing work, stagnating blue collar wages at home, and the relatively recent fear of robots and technology killing what few blue collar jobs remain, parents have raised their sons for white-collar, intellectual work.but for at least the next several years it looks like the blue collar man has a tailwind. i say man and not woman because the work i’m referring to is done mostly by men. women represent 12-13% of construction workers and less than 25% of transportation/warehousing workers. their employment share in these two industries hasn’t risen in 25 years:and it’s those two industries, construction in particular, where profound shortages are developing. single-family residential construction is still at recessionary levels:and yet the unemployment rate for construction workers is near the levels of the last boom. the unemployment rate for transportation/utilities workers is similarly low:transportation/warehousing average hourly earnings have been growing faster than overall hourly earnings over the past couple years, and the difference between construction wages and overall wages has risen since the last cycle, despite the overall low level of construction:the obvious question is why don’t more less-educated men come into these industries as the unemployment rate falls and wage pressures increase? and the answer is because that pool of labor is shrinking.the overall male labor force level hasn’t increased since 2008:and looking at just the labor force level of those 25 years and over without college degrees (unfortunately this series includes both men and women), it’s fallen by 3-4 million since 2008:also note that men over the age of 55 have never represented a higher level of overall male employment (over 22% compared to 1994’s 12%). most of these men will be retiring in the next 10-15 years and represent a huge headwind to labor supply:we are going to need to build a lot of labor-intensive single family houses for the millennial generation. hotel occupancy is at record levels and we need to build more :the truck driver shortage should only get worse in 2015. the continued growth of amazon, uber, and “appconomy-based delivery services” means more and more of a need for drivers and couriers.and we haven’t even begun to discuss the need for transportation infrastructure spending, which is becoming more and more of a high priority legislative item at the local, state, and federal level.and on the supply side we have a lot of less-educated men set to retire, more-educated young men taking their place in the workforce who see “old economy work” as a cultural stigma, and the immigration system that could work to alleviate this shortage is dysfunctional and stuck in washington.
 older workers want part-time jobs, not retirementhalf of all those approaching retirement intend to carry on working when they reach their mid-sixties, according to the government’s older workers champion.ros altmann said a national study suggested that in the next few years the number of over-65s still working could quadruple from 1.2 million to 4.8 million.almost all of the over-50s who planned to continue working sought part-time roles so they could ease themselves into retirement rather than suddenly stopping work altogether.ms altmann said that employers’ attitudes would have to change, with training for older workers imperative so that they could keep up with technologicalthe government admitted that only 45 per cent of the 3.5 million workers who reach retirement between 2016 and...road signs depicting a hunched-over couple clutching a walking stick encourage discrimination against the over-50s,...the mod was unfairly mocked for raising its recruitment age. over-50s with an appetite for work have plenty to...patients are at risk because doctors and nurses are still scared to raise safety concerns, according to an influential group of mps who say the treatment of whistleblowers is a “stain on the reputation of the nhs”tripadvisor users have now voted it the best in the world citing its personal service, in part due to having only three rooms and very attentive owners
 by aaron blake december 29, 2014 follow @aaronblakewpnew york mayor bill de blasio bows his head in an observance of a moment of silence at city hall for the two slain nypd officers in new york, dec. 23, 2014.(reuters/carlo allegri)congress doesn't get much done these days. but it has a really good chance right now.issues of race and police -- as with most things these days -- are deeply divisive. and our new poll shows  that divide is as much about partisanship as race ; white democrats tends to be much closer to non-whites than to white republicans, as our dan balz and scott clement report. hence, more partisan gridlock ahead, right?well, maybe not. even as people can't even agree on how big the problem is (or whether there is a problem at all), there is something almost everyone agrees upon: the solutions.or, at least some of the solutions.the poll shows an almost-unheard-of amount of consensus when it comes to proposed changes in how law enforcement conducts its business.it shows 86 percent of americans support requiring patrol officers in their areas to wear small video cameras while on duty -- a finding in line with other polling on this subject.what's a little more surprising, though, is the consensus on another issue related to the ferguson and eric garner cases: independent prosecutors. the poll shows about the same percentage -- 87 percent -- support having these outsiders handle cases in which unarmed americans are killed by police.it's hard to overstate the consensus on these two issues. the lowest amount of support for each is among self-described "conservative republicans," and 76 percent of them support independents prosecutors and 79 percent support body cameras.there is even overwhelming support for these changes among those who don't really see there being a problem right now.and here's how popular these two proposals are: among those republicans who say the grand jury got it right -- i.e. those who think there really isn't much of a problem here that warrants action -- even 76 percent of them support independent prosecutors. just 22 percent are opposed.these are the kind of consensuses you just don't often see.now, does that mean congress will return in january and immediately pass legislation on body cameras and independent prosecutors? of course not. plenty of popular policy ideas never get passed for a wide variety of reasons. a similar portion of americans, for example, supported expanded background checks for gun purchases last year, and that never happened. and in this case, law enforcement and unions might fight the proposed changes -- particularly when it comes to ceding power to independent prosecutors.in addition, a cbs news poll conducted earlier this month showed lower support for independent prosecutors when you offer local district attorneys as an alternative. then, it was 49 percent in favor of independent prosecutors and 39 percent in favor of local das.but as this new post-abc poll shows, broad consensus on these solutions are possible. from there, it's whether congress can make it work.as we often caution, though, it's best not to hold one's breath.aaron blake covers national politics and writes regularly for the fix.
 this is more like it.a deal being announced today with genentech points the way for 23andme, the personal genetics company backed by facebook billionaire yuri milner and google ventures to become a sustainable business – even if the company’s discussions with the u.s. food and drug administration stretch on for years.according to sources close to the deal, 23andme is receiving an upfront payment from genentech of $10 million, with further milestones of as much as $50 million. the deal is the first of ten 23andme says it has signed with large pharmaceutical and biotech companies.such deals, which make use of the database created by customers who have bought 23andme’s dna test kits and donated their genetic and health data for research, could be a far more significant opportunity than 23andme’s primary business of selling the dna kits to consumers. since it was founded in 2006, 23andme has collected data from 800,000 customers and it sells its tests for $99 each. that means this single deal with one large drug company could generate almost as much revenue as doubling 23andme’s customer base.“i think that this illustrates how pharma companies are interested in the fact that we have a massive amount of information,” says anne wojcicki, 23andme’s chief executive and co-founder. “we have a very engaged consumer population, and these people want to participate in research. and we can do things much faster and more efficiently than any other research means in the world.”alex schuth, who heads technology innovation and diagnostics business development at genentech, says he was drawn by the 12,000 patients 23andme has recruited with the help of the michael j. fox foundation, and by the physical data on those patients. “that is something unparalleled,” he says. “obviously the goal for us for this collaboration is target discovery to find new medicines for patients in a disease-modifying sort of way.”the deal comes at a critical time for 23andme because in late 2013 the food and drug administration told the company it could no longer return health information to its customers. this has hurt sales. it also makes it difficult for 23andme to build its database and make it more appealing to large pharmaceutical companies.the genentech deal is not the first one with a drug company that 23andme has done – it has had collaborations with pharmaceutical companies going back to the company’s founding. last year it announced a collaboration with pfizer to enroll more than 10,000 patients with colitis or crohn’s disease in its database to look for genetic clues to the cause of those bowel disorders.but the new deal shows the scale and power of 23andme’s existing database (or, as 23andme refers to it, community) in a way that others have not. genentech, the u.s. unit of swiss drug giant roche, will make use of one of the biggest communities on 23andme’s website: the one for parkinson’s.wojcicki and her husband sergey brin (the two are now separated) have been very public about their desire to understand parkinson’s, which runs in brin’s family. 23andme has signed up 12,000 parkinson’s patients and 1,300 of their parents and siblings. these participants are amazingly willing to volunteer for research. in one study, one of 23andme’s partners wanted to take a deep skin biopsy from 24 patients in 23andme’s database who had a particular parkinson’s mutation. eight patients volunteered within 24 hours.23andme’s tests only scan the genome for known variations. genentech wants to go deeper, and will pay to get full genome sequences – that’s all of a person’s dna – for 3,000 parkinson’s patients or their first-degree relatives. the goal, schuth says, is to discover new targets for drugs and diagnostic tests. the companies have not yet decided who they will hire to do this dna sequencing.people who have bought 23andme kits and agreed to donate their data to research (that’s about 600,000 of the company’s 800,000 customers) automatically consent for 23andme to sequence their genomes. 23andme says that it is also able to share anonymous and pooled data about their self-reported health traits without asking. but genentech wants even more: it wants to look at health and genetic data on an anonymous but individual basis. for that reason, the company will have to ask customers if they want to enter the study.one big question behind 23andme’s business model has always been whether customers will be happy or upset when they find out that they realize they have paid to be used in for-profit research projects. “i’m sure some people will feel great, no problem, and some will feel cheated,” says hank greely, director of the center for law and the biosciences at stanford university. “and the reactions will form a bell curve.”but greely says those issues are unlikely to apply to this deal. the fact that 23andme will be getting consent from participants makes things a lot cleaner. so does doing the study in parkinson’s patients and their relatives, who have engaged with 23andme partly for the purpose of doing disease research.“when we’ve had people come in who have a disease, they are very clear that they want us to do whatever it is going to take to actually make a difference in their disease,” says wojcicki. “they’re just very, very clear about that. do whatever it takes that’s going to have an impact on my life or an impact on the lives of my children.”one big question is when 23andme will once again be allowed to let consumers in the united states access data about their health. the legality of 23andme’s product has been a thorny question since the company was founded in 2006. even at its peak, 23andme could not analyze tests sent from the state of new york because of the laws there. (new york residents could send their 23andme kits in from somewhere else.)in 2012, 23andme announced that it had raised $50 million in funding from investors including google ventures, facebook billionaire yuri milner, and new enterprise associates. wojcicki said that the company planned to grow its customer base to 1 million, significantly expanding its ability to do research. 23andme began to run advertisements that emphasized the health benefits some customers had gotten from its tests.at the same time, 23andme was supposed to be trying to work with the fda to figure out how to clear its test as a medical device. but in november 2013 the fda sent 23andme a scathing, public letter, saying that the company had been radio silent with regulators for six months and telling it to stop giving health information or risk an enforcement action. i said at the time that 23andme might have “the single dumbest regulatory strategy i have seen in 13 years of covering the food and drug administration.”wojcicki ticks off a number of steps that 23andme has made to fix its relationship with the fda. she hired kathy hibbs, from genomic health, a maker of cancer diagnostics, to manage the company’s relationship with the regulator. and 23andme has been in constant dialogue with the fda since submitting an application last may.“i am hopeful for 2015,” wojcicki says. “it has been quite a transformation for the company, to really change and go through this entire process.”there is really no telling, though, how long it will take to get the consumer business on track and to get fda approval. if the database of genetic and health information 23andme has built were not already valuable, the company would be facing a dicey future.but if genentech is willing to pay for access to the data, it may well be valuable enough now. there are other indications that 23andme, while not as big as wojcicki dreamed, is big enough to matter. one analysis using patient-reported data predicted asthma as a side effect for genentech’s cancer drug herceptin. an analysis presented at the american society for human genetics last year said that genes related to drugs that had been successful were present in 23andme’s database. reset therapeutics, a small south san francisco biotech, is using 23andme’s database to hunt for rare disease drugs.eventually, 23andme will need to start growing its genetic database again, and doing that will require reigniting the consumer business. but it can afford to wait. wojcicki says that she has always been playing a long game.when she first started 23andme, she says, someone at a big pharma company told her that if she really wanted to make a difference in the world, she would be ready to work for 10 years with the fda to define what direct-to-consumer genetic testing would look like as a business. if not, if she wanted to sell the company quickly, she’d need a totally different strategy.“at 23andme, we made that choice then,” wojcicki says. “we are very much in it for the long haul.”
 in my recent forbes post about venezuela , i said that neither the exchange rate policy nor the government's fiscal policy were sustainable, and the maduro regime would eventually be forced to devalue and enact painful fiscal reforms. in the comments, alexander guerrero observed that it is already too late for this, because the economic mismanagement of the last few years has all but destroyed the supply-side of the economy: devaluation now would be likely to result in hyperinflation and default. the tragedy is that what is playing out now in venezuela has happened many times before. those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.....and nowhere is that more true than in latin america. in this paper from 1989, dornbusch & edwards examine the reasons for the parlous state of peru's economy at that time in the light of the economic collapse of chile in the early 1970s. these comments set the scene (my emphasis):our purpose in setting out these experiences, those of chile under allende and of peru under garcia, is not a righteous assertion of conservative economics, but rather a warning that populist policies do ultimately fail; and when they fail it is always at a frightening cost to the very groups who were supposed to be favored......we are struck by the strong similarities in chile, peru,and in other episodes not developed in detail here of the way policy makers viewed the objective conditions of their economy, how they proposed that strongly expansionary policies should and could be carried out, and how they rationalized that constraints could be dealt with. and, of course, we are impressed by the fact that in the end, foreign exchange constraints and extreme inflation forced a program of violent real wage cuts that ended in massive political instability, coups and violence. but how does everything go so badly wrong?dornbusch & edwards explain that the problem is a combination of factors:the combination of external influences (debt crises,economic blockades etc.), domestic policies (socialization of firms, bank nationalization, etc.) and macroeconomic policies bring about an unsustainable economy where inflation is out of control, and the foreign exchange constraints force realism on policy makers. and they go on to list the four stages of the unfolding disaster.phase i: in the first phase, the policy makers are fully vindicated in their diagnosis and prescription: growth of output, real wages and employment are high, and the macroeconomic policies are nothing short of successful. controls assure that inflation is not a problem, and shortages are alleviated by imports. the run-down of inventories and the availability of imports (financed by reserve decumulation or suspension of external payments) accommodates the demand expansion with little impact on inflation.phase ii: the economy runs into bottlenecks, partly as a result of a strong expansion in demand for domestic goods, and partly because of a growing lack of foreign exchange. whereas inventory decumulation was an essential feature of the first phase, the low levels of inventories and inventory building are now a source of problems. price realignments and devaluation, exchange control, or protection become necessary. inflation increases significantly, but wages keep up. the budget deficit worsens tremendously as a result of pervasive subsidies on wage goods and foreign exchange.phase iii: pervasive shortages, extreme acceleration of inflation, and an obvious foreign exchange gap lead to capital flight and demonetization of the economy. the budget deficit deteriorates violently because of a steep decline in tax collection and increasing subsidy costs.the government attempts to stabilize by cutting subsidies and by a real depreciation. real wages fall massively, and politics become unstable. it becomes clear that the government has lost.phase iv: orthodox stabilization takes over under a new government. an imf program will be enacted; and, when everything is said and done, the real wage will have declined massively, to a level significantly lower than when the whole episode began! moreover, that decline will be very persistent, because the politics and economics of the experience will have depressed investment and promoted capital flight. the extremity of real wage declines is due to a simple fact: capital is mobile across borders, but labor is not. to make their point, dornbusch & edwards provide the  following charts of real wages for, respectively, chile under allende  and peru under garcia.remember that at the time they wrote, peru's collapse was in progress. the pattern is clear. when the economy collapses under the triple burden of supply-side dysfunction, unsustainable fiscal finances and capital flight, the real wage falls to below its previous level. the inevitable imf program restores stability, but at the price of stagnation, inequality and poverty for much of the population. and as dornbusch & edwards explain, therein lie the seeds of the next crisis:initial conditions: the country has experienced slow growth, stagnation or outright depression as a result of previous stabilization attempts. the experience, typically under an imf program, has reduced growth and living standards. serious economic inequality provides economic and political appeal for a radically different economic program.the receding stabilization will have improved the budget and the external balance sufficiently to provide the room for, though perhaps not the wisdom of, a highly expansionary program.policymakers explicitly reject conservative economic policies and implement highly expansionary policies designed to reduce inequality and eliminate poverty quickly, usually by means of large real wage rises.  i was struck by the beliefs that justify such dramatic reversal in policy, in particular the rejection of conventional economics: chavez, allende and their kind simply don't think that the rules of economics apply to them. and when it all goes horribly wrong, they blame external factors while exonerating the domestic policies that have enabled external factors to exert such a destabilising influence on the country. it is hardly surprising if investors do not wish to invest in countries where their investments are at risk of expropriation, or where their profits could be wiped out by large government-mandated wage rises or sudden tax increases, or where rising inflation erodes not only their returns but their capital. the loss of capital investment arising from these policies is probably the most damaging aspect, since it erodes supply-side capacity and directly causes precipitous real wage falls when the collapse eventually comes.having said that, it is not reasonable to blame expansionary "populist" policies for economic collapses without taking account of the role of the preceding harshness in setting them up. imf programmes may stabilise the economy, but too often at the cost of real suffering among the population: the desire to improve their lot is entirely understandable. austerity breeds profligacy, which in its turn is forced to give way to even more austerity. rinse, repeat. this has been the story of latin america for a very long time.venezuela is currently in phase iii. there are pervasive shortages, inflation is over 65% and rising, and foreign reserves are declining sharply despite venezuela's trade surplus. the budget deficit is currently at 17% and rising. the economy is demonetizing rapidly as more and more transactions are done on the black market. to make matters worse, the us government has imposed sanctions on venezuela for suppressing dissent. so far, the government has resisted devaluation and subsidy cuts, but it cannot do so for much longer. maduro - never as popular as his predecessor - is resorting to bribing the population with unsustainable fiscal expenditures, but this will only hasten the economic collapse that now appears inevitable. venezuela is headed for default, hyperinflation, disorderly regime change and a wrenching fiscal adjustment. and the people who will suffer - indeed are already suffering - are the poor that chavez and maduro set out to help, just as the poor in chile and peru suffered.alexander guerrero's warning about venezuela seems all too prescient:to  put it in few words, our fiscal situation is similar with the russian  one in 1989 at the fall of communism in europe. it means we have  to go  for a unlimited privatization process, i know that politically there is  no way to get it, but we are driving to that point, i just beg god, that  everything happens in peace, i doubt it any way!.but this is not wholly a latin american story. much of what is described here also applies to greece. the only difference is that greece is in the euro, so hyperinflation is impossible and all the adjustment must come from brutal fiscal retrenchment and sharp falls in real incomes. but if it were to leave the euro, or worse, be thrown out for non-compliance with troika demands.....be careful what you ask for, mr. tsipras.
 
 the baby boomers were the most populous and richest generation to walk the earth. now, they are just the richest. the millennial generation, or generation y, are the largest generation in human history. their story thus far bears a strong resemblance to the experiences of their parents. the peak of the baby boom happened in 1957. for their children, the millennials, it came 36 years later in 1993 (figure 1).in both cases, the peak population for young adults (defined here as 16 to 24 years old) happens two decades later. for baby boomers, this happened in 1980. some 36 years later, for their children, it is happening now. to chart the voyage of millennials in 2014 and beyond, we can observe what their parents did from 1980 on.both generations came of age during the worst recessions since the great depression. by the time the vietnam war ended in 1975, the baby boomers of their peak birth year (1957) were 18 years old.when the united states withdrew the bulk of their forces for the iraq war, millennials from their peak birth year (1993) were also 18 years old. there are comparable elements between the common perception of millennials and the views of the older generations about the baby boomer counter-culture. finally, the perception of our institutions is likewise weakened: according to gallup, confidence in federal government to solve domestic problems declined from 76% to 56% just between 1972 and 1976 before rebounding to the peak of 83% in 2001. once again, confidence has declined — now down to just 42%.it could be said that the millennial generation is coming of age in much the same way as their parents did: in a depressed economy and demoralized society. despite this, the boomer generation still retires the richest in history — in money, real capital, and living standards. the institutions that the public had lost faith in, but were nonetheless preserved, delivered a better future.the term lost generation was created to describe the generation which came of age during wwi, and its use peaked in 1946. google ngram data ends in 2008, just in time for the term to be revived for the millennials.the pessimism around the millennial generation is, at best, premature. we already know that  income scales with education , and the millennial generation will be the most educated in history. the oldest of the millennials, 30–34s, have a much higher post-secondary attainment rate than than their parents: 45% to the 40% of 50–54s. beyond education, income also scales with age. with the modal millennial being 21 today, over the next decade millennials will likely make their largest age-based income gains (more than $22,000). with this higher income, 25–34’s spend a great deal more, and more frequently form households.the census bureau  forecasts an additional 30 million americans in 10 years. this is in addition to the 22 million 20–24s who largely haven’t formed households, who will become 30–34s who have. even using the densest household age bracket, 35–44s at 3.3, that is 16.25 million new households, or 1.625 million per year (figure 4). this is largely consistent with other estimates, such as from the federal reserve’s andrew paciorek .the cleveland fed’s timothy dunne further  estimates that there is a shortfall  of 2.6 million households (occupied homes). both papers outright disclaim any correlation to homebuilding, or the kind of homebuilding because the cyclicality of homebuilding and inventory is external to their models.using vacancy data from the census to tell the supply or inventory story, we find surprisingly similar conclusions.the number of housing starts per population strongly relates to the average of renter/homeowner occupancy. moreover, average occupancy statistically leads starts, with a peak correlation at 20 months of 62.5%. this means the present occupancy rates explain nearly two-thirds of housing construction 20 months out.leaves us with a present estimate of 1.7 million starts in two years, 70% higher than the present rate.the residuals, though the minority, are still large, and demonstrate that there are many frictions between demographics and construction.newly formed households infrequently occupy newly constructed housing. even in total, under-35 homeownership has remained comfortably below majority , even at the height of the housing boom. any view that credit availability to younger households will be a serious deterrent is inconsiderate to the homeownership structure of young people. in reality, newly constructed homes are occupied by established households. they move up, sell or rent their previous dwelling to less established households, who then sell or rent to newly formed households.it’s easy to see how this process could lead to the frictions we’ve witnessed. cyclicality in upper-end incomes and credit availability becomes the tail that can wag the dog, but the structural demand limitations ultimately win, as we saw in the premature or over building in the mid aughts.the unemployment rate for boomers around 1980 spiked to nearly the same magnitude as for their children three decades later (figure 6). private residential fixed investment coincidentally collapsed  from 6% of gdp to 3% for the boomers, and from 5.2% to 2.4% for their children. one benefit the millennials will have over the boomers is that the workforce will actually be getting younger at the same time that the population will be getting older. this will mean roughly the same number of peak-aged workers to serve the demand of an extra generation.figure 6: unemployment rate for 20 to 24 years, private residential fixed investment / gdpthe “youngening” of the labour force between 1960 and 1980 sharply reversed in 1980 as the largest generation began to dominate labour demographics (figure 7). once again, the largest generation will dominate the labour market, except this time it will be the millennials. the quantity of millennials who can join the work force is slightly larger than the size of their parents retiring from it.there are 300,000 baby boomers hitting 65 every month for the next 19 years . this has already distorted the anchoring for what a “healthy” non-farm payroll growth looks like.the decline of the activity rate is very much in line with the ratio of population to seniors. usage of the activity or participation rate as a proxy for unemployment is consequently flawed.this is where we reach the crest of the future opportunities of millennials. the un predicts that the dependency ratio (the ratio between peak-aged workers and those too young or old to work) is will rise more than 10 points to 32 in the next decade alone, and continuing with a shallower slope for decades after.if you poll some, the great twin threats to american labour are foreign debt and robots. the soaring dependency ratio in both the united states and abroad alters the calculus here: for future output to simply stay flat, productivity must increase at a faster pace than the dependency ratio rises.our two top foreign treasury debt holders , japan and china, will be be experiencing an even more rapid and elongated rise in dependency ratio. the years of being able to export the surplus of working-aged labour are closing in those countries, while the united states has some of the most favourable working-aged demographics in the industrialized world. in this way, the baby boomers left their children an annuity of a sort — they paid foreigners money for decades that their children will exchange for labour.there will necessarily be more robots, or real capital. there will be more  real capital , and the output of the country will become increasingly real capital intensive — that is, the usage of real capital as a factor of production will rise above the others. in the past, as the dependency ratio has remained relatively flat, this has led to surplus value accruing to the owners of real capital. in a future with a soaring dependency ratio, productivity through real capital formation will be to contain labour costs rather than capture surplus value. that is, to wit, the increasing dependency ratio will pressure the business sector to invest in productivity because labour will get relatively scarce as retirements stagnate the labour force.invoking the who, to the people talkin’ about my generation: the kids are alright.don’t miss an insight from our global community of authors. subscribe to inside investing here .
 because he doesn't have enough going on, elon musk—he of tesla motors , spacex, solarcity , and the hyperloop— is launching another project. musk wants to build a second internet in space and one day use it to connect people on mars to the web.musk is tonight hosting a spacex event in seattle, where the company is opening a new office. the talk will mostly be about spacex’s plans for hiring aerospace and software engineers in the pacific northwest to boost the company’s rocket-building efforts. but he'll also use the talk to announce his newest idea, which would launch a vast network of communication satellites to orbit earth. the network would do two things: speed up the general flow of data on the internet and deliver high-speed, low-cost internet services to the three billion-plus people who still have poor access to the web. “our focus is on creating a global communications system that would be larger than anything that has been talked about to date,” musk told bloomberg businessweek ahead of the announcement.the space internet venture, to which musk hasn’t yet given a name, would be hugely ambitious. hundreds of satellites would orbit about 750 miles above earth, much closer than traditional communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit at altitudes of up to 22,000 miles. the lower satellites would make for a speedier internet service, with less distance for electromagnetic signals to travel. the lag in current satellite systems makes applications such as skype, online gaming, and other cloud-based services tough to use. musk’s service would, in theory, rival fiber optic cables on land while also making the internet available to remote and poor regions that don’t have access.in musk’s vision, internet data packets going from, say, los angeles to johannesburg would no longer have to go through dozens of routers and terrestrial networks. instead, the packets would go to space, bouncing from satellite to satellite until they reach the one nearest their destination, then return to an antenna on earth. “the speed of light is 40 percent faster in the vacuum of space than it is for fiber,” musk says. “the long-term potential is to be the primary means of long-distance internet traffic and to serve people in sparsely populated areas.”this project, he says, will be based in the seattle office. (musk has yet to determine the location of the satellite factory.) the office will start with about 60 people and may grow to 1,000 within three to four years. the employees will also work on spacex’s falcon rockets, dragon capsules, and additional vehicles to carry various supplies (and soon, people) into space. “we want the best engineers that either live in seattle or that want to move to the seattle area and work on electronics, software, structures, and power systems,” musk says. “we want top engineering talent of all kinds.”earlier this week, the entrepreneur greg wyler announced a similar effort through a startup called oneweb. wyler has spent the last 15 years trying to bring internet access to the so-called “other three billion.” he started a telecommunications company in rwanda that set up africa’s first 3g cell network. later, he founded a company called o3b, which owns a satellite network that delivers fast, cheap internet to hard-to-reach places along the equator. through oneweb, wyler looks to expand this vision and fill the skies with hundreds of satellites that will beam their signals down to low-cost, solar-powered rooftop antennas.oneweb has announced that qualcomm and the virgin group will invest in its effort, which is expected to cost around $2 billion. wyler has also already secured the spectrum needed to deliver such a service from space and expects to be up and running by 2018. he has a team of more than 30 engineers developing the satellites, antennas, and software for oneweb.musk and wyler have known each other for years. musk, in fact, used to crash at wyler’s guest house in atherton, calif. while there are major similarities between the two ventures, musk says he’ll have an edge through spacex’s smarts and manufacturing techniques. “greg and i have a fundamental disagreement about the architecture,” musk says. “we want a satellite that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than what greg wants. i think there should be two competing systems.”musk describes his system as “a giant global internet service provider” for anyone. but he wants to go even bigger than that: he sees it as the basis for a system that will stretch all the way to mars, where he plans to set up a colony in the coming decades. “it will be important for mars to have a global communications network as well,” he says. “i think this needs to be done, and i don’t see anyone else doing it.”we see it as a long-term revenue source for spacex to be able to fund a city on mars.the backers of oneweb, including virgin chief richard branson, contend that musk doesn't have the rights to spectrum he’ll need to create such a network. “i don’t think elon can do a competing thing,” branson says. “greg has the rights, and there isn’t space for another network—like there physically is not enough space. if elon wants to get into this area, the logical thing for him would be to tie up with us, and if i were a betting man, i would say the chances of us working together rather than separately would be much higher.”spacex will need to be careful with its ambitions: satellite makers have a choice as to whose rockets carry their machines. according to musk, spacex will focus on making satellites for itself for the time being, rather than competing with its customers, although that may change over time. “i think we would consider building satellites for ourselves and for other people,” he says. “we’ll start by building ones that address the specific application that we are working on, and then we will be more than happy to sell to other people.”musk said it will take many, many years to have his internet service up and running. “people should not expect this to be active sooner than five years,” he said. and it’ll be expensive: around $10 billion to build, he says. “but we see it as a long-term revenue source for spacex to be able to fund a city on mars.”in palo alto, calif.  he is the author of elon musk: tesla, spacex, and the quest for a fantastic future (harpercollins, may 2015). follow him on twitter @valleyhack .
 there are three common myths about tech founders: they are extremely young, they are technically trained, and they’ve often graduated from a prominent local university. the logic then follows that to accelerate the growth of a local tech sector, cities need to actively cultivate people who fit this profile and encourage them to start a business. but on all three counts, the data tell a different story.two of the most successful tech entrepreneurs in history—bill gates and mark zuckerberg—follow this model. both were college dropouts who studied computer science by day, programmed by night, and built large public companies without ever having worked at one. anecdotes from popular media have only added to the cult of youth. last year, articles in the new republic and the new york times explored the role young entrepreneurs have played in shaping silicon valley. the verdict in both follows a familiar line: for better or worse, successful tech sectors are products of young entrepreneurs, who disrupt whole industries without ever having worked in them.these founders, in turn, are invariably portrayed technical experts. hbo’s silicon valley is emblematic of this stereotype: its protagonists are nerds. what they lack in business and social skills, they make up for in technical brilliance. the show is satire, but not pure hyperbole, either. science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) education is now at the center of entrepreneurship policy, and cultivating technical talent has become an important goal of the white house’s office of science and technology policy (ostp).where better to get that technical education than at a great local university? stanford is the classic example, with hundreds of future silicon valley entrepreneurs passing through its palo alto campus. a university of this caliber not only creates great talent, the theory goes, but also helps a region to retain it. it makes sense, then, to assume that without a world-class university nearby, a city’s tech sector cannot thrive.over the last year, we at endeavor insight began studying the new york city tech sector, one of the largest in the world, to understand just how closely these myths align with reality. we started with publicly available data from crunchbase, angellist, and linkedin, and layered on top of it interviews with nearly 700 local tech founders. we found that none of these three stereotypes hold up.we looked at the university start year for over 1,600 new york city tech founders, and found that college dropouts are the exception, not the rule. while the bulk of founders were in their twenties, the average founder in our analysis was 31 years old at company founding, and a full 25% were older than 35 when their companies got their start.we also found that youth does not predict success. we took recent research by the harvard business review a step further, by comparing founders’ age to traditional measures of success—investment amount, employee count, exit value—and found no relationship between age and company success.the most successful entrepreneurs are not like mark zuckerberg or bill gates, and instead tend to be mid-career specialists with substantial industry experience. take alexandra wilkis wilson. she earned an mba and worked for several years at retailers like bulgari and louis vuitton before founding gilt groupe, a leading e-commerce business that has raised over $200 million. the same is true for neil blumenthal, who spent five years as director of visionspring, honing his industry knowledge before founding online eyeglass company warby parker.tech founders are also much less technical than conventional wisdom leads us to believe. we divided new york city tech founders’ college majors into two categories: stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and non-stem, and found that just 35% studied stem fields, while 65% majored in something else. in fact, these founders were more likely to study political science than electrical engineering or math.when computer chips were made by hand, tech entrepreneurship was the domain of engineers and computer scientists. but today the barriers to starting a tech company have never been lower. with just a few clicks, a would-be entrepreneur can build a website, acquire new customers, and begin making sales. scientists will continue to develop new technologies, but most entrepreneurs will succeed by applying existing solutions to new markets, creating a thriving local tech sector in the process.local universities certainly develop new research and talent, but their role in attracting and retaining entrepreneurial talent is less certain. in truth, talent flows to wherever opportunity is greatest. new york city is no exception, with over 90% graduating from college outside of the city. (the university of pennsylvania, 100 miles to the south, is the school with the most alumni in our sample of new york city tech founders.)despite its world-class universities, new york city’s tech scene succeeds because people want to live there, not because they studied there. the average future entrepreneur initially comes to the city to work for one of its existing companies, taking the plunge to found a company almost a decade after graduating. ultimately, it is not the cities that educate entrepreneurs, but rather the ones that attract and retain them that are building top-performing tech sectors.our research shows that entrepreneurs don’t fit the stereotypes. policymakers looking to further local tech sectors need to base their decisions on numbers, not anecdotes. in reality, the entrepreneurs they are seeking to support are older, less technically trained, and more likely to have attended college elsewhere. whatever their age, experience, or background, the best policies use data to help local entrepreneurs scale their businesses and reinvest as mentors, angel investors, and serial entrepreneurs in the city where they got their start.michael goodwin is a project leader at endeavor, a global nonprofit that supports high-impact entrepreneurship. as part of it’s research team, endeavor insight, michael explores how to accelerate the growth of entrepreneurship ecosystems in cities around the world. prior to working at endeavor, michael led a global study of small and medium sized businesses in ghana, india, the philippines, and peru at innovations for poverty action.
 the financial times has regrouped, reconfigured, and relaunched what was its , now calling it “exchange” . when i first saw the title “a-list”, i was envious–it seemed so perfectly right.so now that it has been abandoned, i am going to pick up the name. i am going to set up my own a-list by asking: what, in my view, was the washington center for equitable growth’s a-list of people to pay attention to in the fall of 2014? what things i read led me to say “this is a must-read!” and “this is about ‘equitable growth’”?as with all revealed-preference exercises, there is no thought behind the list. it should, ideally, be combined with a top-down conscious assessment of influence and worth, for both conscious classifications and unconscious emergence can easily lead us astray. but i want to leave that for some future date.so this is what a look back at my preferences as written in electrons by the “must reads” i have posted at http://equitablegrowth.blog reveals: a list of 101:
 remembering aaron swartz with action: watch new, unreleased footage from "internet's own boy"two years after the death of hacker, activist, and good human being aaron swartz, new video and a new way to bring life to his legacy of making the world a better place.activist, developer, and good human being aaron swartz died two years ago this week, after being hounded by prosecutors in a bizarre, senseless, unjust federal case that threatened him with total loss of freedom over a misunderstanding by authorities of how the internet, and hacking to make things better, works.today, " the internet's own boy " director brian knappenberger shares with boing boing this never-before-seen footage captured in the making of that film, which tells the story of aaron's life, his work, his loves, and the legal case that led to his death . the feature is shortlisted for an academy award.this week in los angeles, i hosted a conversation about the making of the film, with mr. knappenberger.you can watch our conversation here. watch the entire film here .the never-before-seen video is being released today in honor of lessig's " new hampshire rebellion ," which brings  the life of aaron's legacy forward. brian tells us:"this weekend, two years to the day after his death, the world is still on fire with the issues that aaron swartz was fighting for.  this weekend is also the beginning of the aaron-inspired new hampshire rebellion walk lead by larry lessig demanding an end to the culture of corruption in washington."i wanted to release these extra clips from the interviews i conducted for the internet’s own boy to thank everyone involved with the film and to all the audiences around the world who have been so supportive and have responded so powerfully to aaron’s story."for those following aaron’s legal case, yesterday also brought news that the white house has refused to take action on a petition to remove those responsible for its appalling overreach."it has never been more clear for those concerned about the issues aaron cared about - ending corruption, increasing transparency in government, understanding civil liberties and equality in an increasingly networked world and reforming a very broken criminal justice system - that justice still has a long road ahead."
 for the past few years, one of the most exciting class of gadgets on display at ces has been drones. but the basic rules of what a drone was, and what it did, were stable. they got cheaper, lighter, and easier to use even as they became more powerful. but it was still a flying craft with a camera that required a pilot to operate. it was exciting that flying, a hobby which once took a lot of effort and skill, was suddenly available to anyone. even old, non-technical folks like martha stewart were smitten . but if there is one thing social media, smartphones, and selfie sticks have taught us, it’s that most people prefer to be in front of the camera.this year, the big feature drone companies were pushing at ces were units that could fly themselves, acting as your personal cinematographer in the sky. units like the airdog , hexo+ , zano , trace , and ghost all touted their “follow me” feature, where the drone locks onto you and flies anywhere you go. we saw hours of beautiful slow motion footage of extreme athletes capturing themselves in action. and while not everyone spends their days shredding down a mountain, normal people were offered the ability to launch a drone that shoots an amazing 360-degree selfie. who wouldn’t want that?however, all of this "follow me" tech is pretty limited in where it can actually be used, because most drones still lack a critical feature needed for autonomous flight: reliable "sense and avoid" technology that can see what’s around and use that data to make smart decisions about how to avoid accidents in real time. airdog and zano claim to have that technology already working in the lab, if not out in the real world yet. but so far it’s just big claims and vaporware. luckily, there was one amazing and tangible breakthrough this year, and it came from an unexpected source: intel.at its keynote this year, intel showed off drones that could fly themselves through a forest, navigating around trees. onstage, they reacted to people who moved towards them, dodging to avoid a collision. it was powerful sense-and-avoid technology, and it was powered by intel’s realsense , a system of camera hardware and software originally developed to allow people to control their computer without having to physically touch their mouse or keyboard. "this is a good example of technology being extended beyond its original intent," said intel ceo brian krzanich. "once we had that developed, we learned we could push that into drones."intel partnered with ascending technologies , a german company that makes industrial and research grade drones. they took an asctec firefly and used lightweight carbon fiber mounts to attach six realsense cameras on top for 360-degree coverage. ascending built a custom pci-express interface board and used a tiny, lightweight quad-core intel atom processor to crunch the data. it ran an algorithmic chain, processing depth information from six cameras, performing real-time sensor data fusion and state estimation, near-field obstacle avoidance, and path planning navigation. with realsense talking to the asctec trinity autopilot system, something remarkable happened.krzanich said intel is making the realsense sdk available to developers now, and expects to start selling the hardware sometime later this year. as this and competing technologies come to market, powerful sense and avoid will quickly proliferate across the industry. "the good news from ces 2015 is that the semiconductor giants are throwing billions of dollars of research and [production] capacity at problems we, the drone industry, need solved," said chris anderson, the ceo of 3d-robotics . "so between qualcomm’s work on real-time vision built into their snapdragon program and intel’s work on realsense vision, which is a standalone chip, those things are now going to be driving next year’s drones, and they are going to be available at a cost and speed that we, the drone industry, could never have done on our own."rapid progress in sense and avoid isn’t just great news because it will open up many amazing new abilities for both commercial and consumer drones. it’s critical because the industry, at least in the us, is in danger of being regulated to death. as someone who has fallen in love with drones, ces made me feel both excited and terrified at the same time. the drone industry today, at least in the us, is balanced on a knife’s edge. every year brings units that are cheaper, more powerful, and more autonomous. it has the potential to be the next multi-billion dollar tech industry, akin to pcs and smartphones: a ubiquitous gadget that becomes part of our daily life and pop culture.but new faa regulations, mandated by congress for 2015, could also derail the industry in a big way. reports on the agency’s plans have signaled they may make it much tougher for civilians to own and fly drones . and in the absence of federal rules, local governments are considering basically banning them entirely . reliable sense-and-avoid technology that regulators can rally behind as a safety standard is what the industry needs to ensure its continued expansion. last year that seemed like a long shot. now it seems like brilliant technology has put it well within our reach.
 much of the hundred billion dollars the u.s. spent to rebuild afghanistan was stolen. credit illustration by shoutin october, 1951, a band of thieves hijacked a large shipment of opium in the port town of punggol, in northeast singapore. the singapore of that era bore little resemblance to the one we know today: as a key entrepôt in the drug trade between india and china, the island was beset by crime and corruption. when british colonial authorities investigated the theft, they discovered that the culprits included several high-ranking members of singapore’s police. in the aftermath of the scandal, the colonial administration created the corrupt practices investigation bureau. when singapore achieved independence, some years later, the new prime minister, lee kuan yew, announced that he was “sickened” by decadence and corruption, and pledged to rid singapore of graft. members of his government wore white shirts and trousers when they were sworn into office, as a signal of the purity of their intentions.new leaders often condemn the venality of their predecessors, only to exceed it when they assume office. from duvalier, in haiti, to fujimori, in peru, to erdoğan, in turkey, it’s a predictable twist in the drama of political transition. but lee delivered on the rhetoric, enacting new anticorruption legislation and bestowing real power on the anticorruption bureau. he raised salaries for civil servants, to minimize any temptation to sell their influence, and instituted harsh jail terms for those caught taking bribes. in 1986, lee’s minister of national development, an architect named teh cheang wan, was investigated for accepting kickbacks from two real-estate developers. he killed himself with a fatal dose of barbiturates, maintaining, in a suicide note addressed to lee kuan yew, “it is only right that i should pay the highest penalty for my mistake.”by the time lee stepped down as prime minister, in 1990, singapore had gone from being one of the more corrupt countries on the planet to one of the least. according to transparency international’s most recent corruption perceptions index, singapore now ranks seventh in the world for transparent government—less corrupt than australia, iceland, or (by a good margin) the united states. the story is heartening but anomalous. it is almost unheard of for a nation to expunge a culture of corruption so thoroughly. some countries get slightly better, some get slightly worse, but, the world over, corruption tends to endure.“everybody does it,” john noonan, a federal judge in california, wrote in his eight-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page volume, “bribes: the intellectual history of a moral idea” (1984): “romans and visigoths, englishmen and africans, catholics and jews, pagans and protestants, capitalists and communists, imperialists and patriots.” the word “corruption” derives from the latin corrumpere, which can mean to bribe, but also to mar or destroy. yet, on the available evidence, corruption has always permeated so many fields of human endeavor that it may be not a corruption of anything—but, rather, a regrettable feature of our natural condition. accountable government is an ideal, to be sure. it may also be an aberration.definitions of corruption tend to focus on the conflict of interest that arises when private imperatives intrude upon the public sphere. robert klitgaard, an economist who has done field work on corruption in dozens of countries, once posited a formula: corruption = monopoly power + discretion – accountability. in klitgaard’s reckoning, corruption is a crime of calculation. if that’s the case, shouldn’t the problem be susceptible to rational solutions? any country could simply take singapore as a blueprint and tinker with the variables, as lee kuan yew did, recalibrating the risk/reward ratio for officials who might feel inclined to betray their office. scholars and activists who focus on corruption often describe the problem as one that might eventually be eradicated, like smallpox. even noonan concludes his sprawling chronicle of millennia of graft on an improbably hopeful note, arguing that, just as slavery was once widely accepted and is now reviled, bribery may one day “become obsolete.”but corruption has outlived all predictions of its demise. indeed, it appears to be thriving. according to the african union, during the nineteen-nineties a quarter of africa’s gross domestic product was siphoned off by graft. the united nations estimates that corruption adds a ten-per-cent surcharge to the cost of doing business in many parts of the world. corruption infects every level of government, bedevils foreign development, enables terrorism, and fuels transnational crime. it is a recurring conundrum in business, in religious institutions, in education, in sports. yet our conceptual vocabulary for understanding this pathology, let alone combatting it, remains conspicuously meagre. the very term “corruption” is so inclusive as to be almost meaningless, encompassing bribery, nepotism, bid-rigging, embezzlement, extortion, vote-buying, price-fixing, protection rackets, and a hundred other varieties of fraud.corruption creeps in, unnoticed, “like some odorless gas,” sarah chayes writes in her new book, “thieves of state: why corruption threatens global security,” * and confounds policy objectives without attracting much policy attention. chayes spent most of the past decade living in afghanistan. her book, which is part memoir and part treatise, argues that the united states has a tendency not just to ignore international corruption but to compound it, and that in places like afghanistan this willful ignorance can be destabilizing and dangerous. chayes tells the fascinating story of her own quixotic effort to launch a singapore-style anti-corruption campaign in one of the most corrupt countries on earth.chayes arrived in afghanistan, in 2001, as a correspondent for national public radio, covering the fall of the taliban. she ended up in the arid and dusty southern city of kandahar, which she once described as “like the moon, with goats on it.” she had not been in afghanistan long before she decided to give up journalism and join a nonprofit called afghans for civil society. her remit was ambitious but diffuse: develop a sister-school program, establish a radio station, rebuild a village that had been destroyed by allied bombing. afghans for civil society was established by qayum karzai, an exiled afghan businessman who had been living in baltimore before the u.s. invasion and happened to be the older brother of hamid karzai, the man coalition forces installed as afghanistan’s interim president, in 2002.“the classic error that outsiders make in afghanistan is to single out a proxy,” chayes writes. the predicament is familiar: the foreign interloper, whether a journalist, a general, or a colonial administrator, arrives ignorant of the local languages and customs, and needs someone who can serve as interpreter and guide. the foreigner often pays (or overpays) for this arrangement, with money or some other inducement, and thus a codependence between proxy and patron is born. a central theme of “thieves of state” is the subtle power that these proxies can accumulate and the tendency for the unschooled yet profligate outsider to become hopelessly stymied by his man on the ground.because the soldiers and civilians who flooded into afghanistan after the fall of the taliban did not know how to (or, in some cases, care to) engage with the local population except through their designated fixers, the fixers ended up controlling the aperture through which key members of the international community perceived the conflict. chayes’s use of the word “proxy,” with its cold war connotations, seems deliberate; the united states has a history of falling for strongmen in dicey locales and overlooking their sins in the interests of some larger strategic agenda. mobutu was a hedge against the communists. mubarak was a hedge against regional war. the saudis are a hedge against paying too much for gas. the culture of warlordism in afghanistan that we know today took shape not in this recent conflict but in an earlier one—during the nineteen-eighties, when the united states paid local surrogates to fight the soviets. as american military and intelligence operatives entered the country after september 11th, they sought out regional brokers, empowering a new generation of hard and unscrupulous partners.in an irony that chayes dwells on perhaps too briefly, her own initial proxies in afghanistan were all members of the karzai coterie. qayum karzai had ambitious plans for his country, and became something of a mentor to chayes. her fixer was a man named abdullah, whom another karzai brother—the shady power broker and reputed drug kingpin ahmed wali karzai—had commended to her. in chayes’s account of her gradual education in the politics of occupied afghanistan and her belated revelation that the karzais were a bunch of crooks, the creeping transition from naïveté to disillusionment is not so different from what the united states encountered, on a broader level. in a december, 2002, interview with the boston globe, chayes said that hamid karzai, whom she had not yet met, reminded her of her father: “a dyed-in-the-wool political animal, and yet such a deeply good person that he instinctively believes good of everyone around him.” it was only later that she began to reconsider the karzais. qayum’s charity was incorporated in delaware, yet he seemed curiously indifferent to bookkeeping. at a dinner in 2003, chayes watched as ahmed wali took delivery of foil-wrapped bundles of cash.eventually, chayes cut ties with the karzais and set out on her own, establishing a soap factory in kandahar, in 2005. most westerners who came to afghanistan during this period tended to cycle in and out of the country, and to live in fortified residences, insulated from the general population. but chayes effectively went native. she lived in a compound with a large afghan family. she grew close to her colleagues and neighbors and became known around kandahar as an oddity: a tall american woman who dressed like an afghan man, spoke pashto, and slept with a kalashnikov propped beside her bed.at the factory, employees complained about the demoralizing toll of corruption. reconstruction money was entering the country in torrents, but managed just as quickly to disappear. infrastructure projects seemed never to be completed, while contractors, subcontractors, and cronies grew rich. it was no secret who the profiteers were: they would “thrust around town in slick s.u.v.s worth years of an ordinary farmer’s harvest.” a private security industry sprang up to meet the needs of the international community and morphed overnight into a lucrative protection racket. every day, millions of dollars in cash were declared by couriers at kabul international airport, and then flown to the united arab emirates, where the new afghan élite invested in real estate and bentleys. according to the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction, the united states has, since 2002, spent a hundred and four billion dollars on rebuilding the country (nearly as much, in today’s dollars, as was spent on the marshall plan), a large but untold fraction of which was skimmed away by middlemen before it could produce any tangible improvement for the afghan people. “we know all this money is coming in,” a farmer outside kandahar told chayes, yet there was little the local population could do as it vanished. for the average afghan, it was like watching a slow-motion heist in broad daylight.a certain reliance on foreign largesse was not exactly new to the country. in “afghanistan: a cultural and political history” (2010), thomas barfield observes that payment to leaders by wealthy outside powers has been a regular feature of afghanistan’s history since the nineteenth century, and, indeed, that the distribution of these spoils has often constituted “the main glue that held the afghan state in one piece.” any highly corrupt society is bound together by a series of interlocking reciprocities: the local policeman who shakes down a passing civilian must in turn pay tribute to his police supervisor, who must pay his supervisor, and so forth; favors or spoils may be distributed in the other direction. the durability of these relationships makes corruption difficult to eradicate, but it may also have the paradoxical virtue of drawing together an otherwise fractious society. in a 1968 essay, “corruption is not always scandalous,” the political scientist james q. wilson suggested that a blinkered puritanism prevents americans from being able to make pragmatic distinctions between “harmful and not-so-harmful varieties of corruption” and from “allowing our moral outrage to be proportional to the problem.”some scholars have argued that corruption can be not just benign but useful in states that are undergoing political transition. samuel huntington, the political theorist, once suggested that some amount of corruption could be a “welcome lubricant,” easing the path to modernization, and that if economic growth is what you are after “the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over-centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over-centralized, honest bureaucracy.” economists often maintain that corruption is a bar to development, but many countries—most notably, china—have enjoyed tremendous economic growth in spite of rampant graft. some observers contend that china’s economic boom would not have been possible if the leadership hadn’t tolerated a symbiotic and often corrupt relationship between government and business interests. beijing has now instituted an anti-corruption campaign that some worry may slow productivity. “in the past, with corruption, you could pay an official and get something done,” a chinese economist, mao yushi, recently said to the times. “now the officials won’t accept money, but don’t approve things, either.”was the corruption that was flourishing in afghanistan a necessary exigency at a precarious moment in its history? the economist mancur olson described the transition from anarchy to some nascent political order as one in which roving bandits become stationary bandits. the roving bandit will plunder what he can and move on, but at a certain point he realizes that he will be able to steal a lot more in the long run if he performs the minimal state functions necessary to increase economic production and institutionalize his theft—“in the form of taxes.” thus he is driven, purely by his own self-interest, to “settle down, wear a crown, and replace anarchy with government.” this is what george washington plunkitt called “honest graft”: a scenario in which there is no conflict of interests, at least in theory, because the selfish interests of the leader and the broader interests of the state are aligned.but, as chayes studied the graft of the karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other afghans. warlords could hoodwink u.s. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the americans intelligence tips about supposed taliban ties. many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, chayes began to reassess the problem. this wasn’t a situation in which the afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. the government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members. washington supported hamid karzai and his ministers and adjutants in the hope that they could establish a stable government, help pursue al qaeda, and keep the taliban at bay. but the karzai government wasn’t a government at all, chayes concluded. it was “a vertically integrated criminal organization.” the united states was treating karzai like a stationary bandit, when he was really a roving bandit in disguise.one explanation for why some countries are more corrupt than others and why so few have managed, like singapore, to dramatically curtail corruption is that graft may be endemic in certain cultures. in “economic gangsters: corruption, violence, and the poverty of nations” (2008), the economists raymond fisman and edward miguel describe an experiment in which they sought to determine whether corrupt behavior was governed more by cultural background or by the relative severity or permissiveness of the law. in order to test the question, they examined five years of unpaid parking tickets in new york city that were associated with cars driven by foreign diplomats who worked at the united nations. lee kuan yew believed that if you introduced tough penalties for corruption you could curb behavior. fisman and miguel sought to test the opposite hypothesis: who, in the absence of any legal penalty—the diplomats enjoyed immunity and would never be punished for failure to pay parking tickets—would pay, rather than abuse this prerogative? they discovered that diplomats from some countries had no unpaid parking tickets, whereas diplomats from other countries had many. in a single year, one fellow accumulated five hundred and twenty-six unpaid tickets. (he was from kuwait.) using a corruption index from the world bank, the economists correlated these results with levels of corruption in the relevant nations. diplomats from countries where corruption tends to be high were very likely to generate unpaid parking tickets; those from countries where corruption was low tended, if they racked up tickets at all, to pay them. the norwegians, needless to say, were without blemish.even so, there could be explanations for this data that aren’t neatly determinist. if you take a norwegian out of norway, her respect for the law may tell you less about some deep, immutable cultural dna than about a series of civic reflexes that she has been taught as a citizen of norway. “the confucian theory was man could be improved, but i’m not sure he can be,” lee kuan yew once told an interviewer. “he can be trained, he can be disciplined.” the example of singapore would seem to indicate that, if you change the laws, you can eventually change people’s outlook, too.noonan notes, in his history of bribery, that while some amount of corrupt behavior may be a constant feature across cultures and across historical epochs, a certain moral revulsion toward corruption is just as common: even in nations where bribery is part of daily life it tends to be publicly frowned upon, and is almost always at least technically illegal. noonan likens corrupt behavior to another human practice that is no less widespread for all the moral and religious opprobrium—sex. to the jaded expats of kabul, an easy cultural essentialism suggested that afghans simply like corruption, that it is the way they have always done things. but in her workshop chayes heard something different. in the face of flagrant misappropriation, she found, ordinary citizens could experience a sense of grievance so potent that it filled them with something worse than anger—a desire for revenge. nurallah, an employee at the factory who once worked as a police officer, told her about the humiliation that his brother experienced during a shakedown by afghan police. “if i see someone plant an i.e.d. on the road, and then i see a police truck coming . . . i will not warn them,” nurallah said. this is the central revelation in “thieves of state”: at a certain point, systemic corruption became not just a lamentable by-product of the war but an accelerant of conflict. all those bribes and kickbacks radicalized the local population, turning it against the afghan government and, at least some of the time, toward the taliban.chayes cites a survey conducted by u.s. military commanders in kabul, in which captured taliban prisoners were asked why they joined the insurgency. the leading reason, according to chayes, “was not ethnic bias, or disrespect of islam, or concern that u.s. forces might stay in their country.” it was “the perception that the afghan government was irrevocably corrupt.” there is by now an extensive literature on the revival of the taliban after the invasion of 2001, and chayes may be somewhat reductive in her handling of the evidence here, in order to support her thesis. but in another recent book, “no good men among the living,” a searing account by anand gopal of the unintended consequences of the invasion, one of the central figures is akbar gul, a taliban commander who gave up the insurgency and returned to civilian life, only to grow demoralized by the outlandishly predatory corruption of the afghan national police—and reënlist.the notion that u.s. support for despotic, disreputable regimes ends up fuelling radicalism is by now a familiar argument. but, by applying the logic of “blowback” to the issue of graft in afghanistan, chayes develops a muscular new vocabulary for talking about the problem of corruption. good governance is often construed as an essentially humanitarian preoccupation, a civil-society concern that is forever trumped by more pressing strategic obligations. but chayes became convinced that in afghanistan kleptocratic rule was actually “manufacturing taliban,” providing fodder for the expanding insurgency. in unstable and potentially explosive places like afghanistan, she argues, the dilemma of corruption is not, as it might appear, one in which american values and interests are in tension. even a hard-nosed realist should regard corruption as a dire concern, she maintains, because it is not merely a matter of the rule of law and democratic principles—it is “a matter of national security.” this is the real intellectual innovation of chayes’s book: she takes what has always been the losing position in policy debates and imbues it with a new rhetorical power.when barack obama was elected president in 2008, chayes saw an opportunity to make her case for a reconsideration of the importance of afghan corruption, and travelled to washington. her revelation about the threat that venality poses to national security had provided her with a mode of argument that might prove persuasive with a critical audience—the military. rather than speak in the soft rhetoric of social justice or development, she fashioned an argument around narrow self-interest: “corruption, in army speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy.” chayes is, by her own admission, a “strident” campaigner, and eventually she found herself in the e-ring of the pentagon, having secured an audience with mike mullen, the genial, bookish admiral who had recently become chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. as chayes made her case that coalition forces should recalibrate their priorities in afghanistan, mullen opened a spiral notebook and took notes. at the end of the meeting, he inquired, with concern, about her personal safety. asked a similar question by a pbs reporter in 2003, chayes had replied that she enjoyed “powerful backing,” adding, “i am connected with the karzais.” now she told mullen that, if he should see president karzai anytime soon, he might “let it slip” that he and chayes were friends. “that will reduce the threat to me,” she said.mullen took chayes on as an adviser. the united states was in the process of shifting its military strategy in afghanistan to focus on counterinsurgency, one element of which was an effort to promote good governance so as not to further alienate the afghan population. as the arab spring began, chayes travelled to tunisia, egypt, and other regional hot spots, taking inventory of the popular antipathy toward kleptocratic regimes and the ways in which it could spark revolt. she returned convinced that a link between kleptocracy and violent religious extremism was “a global phenomenon.” here chayes may be overreaching. what are we to make of all those corrupt african despots whose greed prompted no religious extremism? or of russia, for that matter, where vast wealth has been expropriated by a handful of oligarchs and bureaucrats without stirring widespread disaffection? still, it’s hard to dispute her general point—that a state engaged in predatory corruption is gambling with its own political legitimacy and runs the risk of breeding insurrection.but, now that chayes could get people to care about corruption, there remained the question of what they could do about it. if you want to turn afghanistan into singapore, where do you start? with her access to military decision-makers in kabul, chayes suggested a series of practical reforms: washington could be more discriminating about its partnerships in afghanistan; local officials and power brokers who were known to be corrupt should be isolated; and u.s. officials should work with afghan prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against those who were especially shady. military commanders like stanley mccrystal and david petraeus appeared receptive, at least in theory, to chayes’s thesis. but any time she proposed measures that might antagonize president karzai and his circle she encountered resistance; the perception among american officials in kabul, both military and civilian, was that these were partners in the fight against the taliban, and the united states could not afford to alienate them. “if you want intelligence in a war zone, you’re not going to get it from mother teresa or mary poppins,” one u.s. official told the times, in 2010.even so, with american assistance, afghan prosecutors prepared a test case against a karzai aide named muhammed zia salehi, who had been captured on a wiretap soliciting a bribe. as soon as he was arrested, salehi telephoned karzai, and was promptly released; the prosecutor who indicted him was investigated and later fired. when chayes tried to generate a blacklist of especially nefarious afghans, her efforts were blocked, because, she implies, the central intelligence agency appeared to be making payments to multiple people on the list. the times revealed in 2013 that the agency had been delivering clandestine bags of cash directly to the offices of president karzai, and the paymaster in this operation turned out to be none other than salehi. (little wonder the president released him so quickly.) when chayes watched ahmed wali karzai take those packages of money back in 2003, the people handing him the money were american spies.singapore’s corruption investigators were free to pursue even high-level officials without fear of reprisal. but if the united states was going to make any effort to reform afghanistan’s political culture, it would do so only from the neck down. in practice, though, even investigations of relatively minor players produced fierce reactions from more senior afghan officials. in the hierarchy of corruption, those senior officials secured the loyalty of junior functionaries by allowing them to shake down their own subordinates—and to steal from the local populace—with impunity. “how well the regime defended even its lowliest officials would broadcast a message throughout the system about the strength of the protection guarantee,” chayes writes. the effort to prosecute malefactors foundered. one u.s. official who worked alongside afghan investigators expressed his frustration: “we can’t find a fish little enough to go after.” following some inconclusive discussion at the white house about tackling afghan corruption, the question was quietly set aside in 2011.if “thieves of state” is a chronicle of sarah chayes’s ultimate failure to launch an ambitious anticorruption campaign in afghanistan, one does wonder what such a campaign would have looked like. it might be tempting to extrapolate lessons from a country like singapore, but singapore is a tricky analogy for afghanistan. with just over five million people in a territory of less than three hundred square miles, singapore is tiny, centrally controlled, peaceful—and rich. and it is not just corruption that has been abolished on the little island but a variety of lesser human infractions, from spitting on the sidewalk to failing to flush a public toilet: the population is subject to an authoritarian penal code. most important, perhaps, singapore had, in lee kuan yew, a leader who was truly invested in the anticorruption agenda. when singapore was ruled by the british—or, during the second world war, occupied by the japanese—corruption prevailed. only when the outsiders departed did it really get cleaned up. as a general rule, occupying powers tend to push countries into corruption, not pull them out of it. although chayes’s book does not dwell on iraq, america’s relationship with nuri al-maliki has striking similarities to its relationship with the karzai government. in both instances, washington sheltered and fattened its proxies until, eventually, they turned into monsters.it seems unlikely that any outside force can introduce enough carrots and sticks to persuade a country to reform its political system. when romania was campaigning for admission to the european union, in 2003, it launched an anticorruption drive, and appointed a tough justice minister who spurred a series of corruption cases against senior officials. as soon as romania joined the e.u., in 2007, the campaign fizzled, the justice minister was fired, and the cases were dropped. “a fish rots from the head,” chayes observes, and, in the absence of national leaders with integrity and political will, it doesn’t appear that the united states will be able to reverse the pathologies in afghanistan, iraq, or any other country, notwithstanding washington’s share in creating and sustaining some of those pathologies. indeed, we may struggle to differentiate between the kinds of patronage that might assuage a population—the “glue” that thomas barfield describes—and the state-sanctioned larceny that chayes argues, convincingly, is a threat not just to afghanistan’s national security but to that of the united states.perhaps the soundest course for u.s. foreign policy when it comes to international corruption would be to adopt a hippocratic precept: significant reform must come from within, but, at a minimum, the united states should do everything it can to insure that it does not exacerbate the problem. this is no small step, given that the money of many a kleptocrat finds its way into the u.s. financial system (and high-end real-estate market), and that the front companies that foreign officials use to hide stolen assets are often registered in this country. american banks reliably accommodate financial shell games, and when these banks are caught facilitating offshore criminality the u.s. justice department tends to let them off with a fine and a warning, rather than file criminal charges. but then that is a reflection of the soft, civilized form that corruption frequently takes in america. we can lecture the afghans about the evils of kickbacks and patronage networks, but what would an afghan make of a euphemism like “campaign finance,” or of the fact that next year our presidential election may come down to the wife of one former president and the son of another? even upright singapore, in 2004, elected, as its third prime minister, lee kuan yew’s son, lee hsien loong. corruption endures, legal and otherwise. in september, the former world bank official and good-governance expert ashraf ghani was sworn in as the new president of afghanistan, amid widespread allegations of vote-tampering. he has promised to tackle corruption. ♦* clarification: an earlier version of this article misstated the title of sarah chayes’s book. it is “thieves of state.”patrick radden keefe has been contributing to the new yorker since 2006 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2012.
 handy is creating a big business out of small jobs. the company finds its customers self-employed home-helps available in the right place and at the right time. all the householder needs is a credit card and a phone equipped with handy’s app, and everything from spring cleaning to flat-pack-furniture assembly gets taken care of by “service pros” who earn an average of $18 an hour. the company, which provides its service in 29 of the biggest cities in the united states, as well as toronto, vancouver and six british cities, now has 5,000 workers on its books; it says most choose to work between five hours and 35 hours a week, and that the 20% doing most earn $2,500 a month. the company has 200 full-time employees. founded in 2011, it has raised $40m in venture capital.handy is one of a large number of startups built around systems which match jobs with independent contractors on the fly, and thus supply labour and services on demand. in san francisco—which is, with new york, handy’s hometown, ground zero for this on-demand economy—young professionals who work for google and facebook can use the apps on their phones to get their apartments cleaned by handy or homejoy; their groceries bought and delivered by instacart; their clothes washed by washio and their flowers delivered by bloomthat. fancy hands will provide them with personal assistants who can book trips or negotiate with the cable company. taskrabbit will send somebody out to pick up a last-minute gift and shyp will gift-wrap and deliver it. spoonrocket will deliver a restaurant-quality meal to the door within ten minutes.the obvious inspiration for all this is uber, a car service which was founded in san francisco in 2009 and which already operates in 53 countries; insiders say it will have sales of more than $1 billion in 2014. sherpaventures, a venture-capital company, calculates that uber and two other car services, lyft and sidecar, made $140m in revenues in san francisco in 2013, half what the established taxi companies took (see chart 1), and the company shows every sign of doing the same wherever local regulators give it room. its latest funding round valued it at $40 billion. even in a frothy market, that is a remarkable figure.bashing uber has become an industry in its own right; in some circles, though, applying its business model to any other service imaginable is even more popular. there seems to be a near-endless succession of bright young people promising venture capitalists that they can be “the uber of x”, where x is anything one of those bright young people can imagine wanting done for them (see chart 2). they have created a plethora of on-demand companies that put time-starved urban professionals in timely contact with job-starved workers, creating a sometimes distasteful caricature of technology-driven social disparity in the process; an article about the on-demand economy by kevin roose in new york magazine began with the revelation that the housecleaner he hired through homejoy lived in a homeless shelter.this boom marks a striking new stage in a deeper transformation. using the now ubiquitous platform of the smartphone to deliver labour and services in a variety of new ways will challenge many of the fundamental assumptions of 20th-century capitalism, from the nature of the firm to the structure of careers.the new opportunities that technology offers for matching jobs to workers were being exploited well before uber. topcoder was founded in 2001 to give programmers a venue to show off. in 2013, it was bought by appirio, a cloud-services company, and now specialises in providing the services of freelance coders. elance-odesk offers 4m companies the services of 10m freelances. the model is also gaining ground in the professions. eden mccallum, which was founded in london in 2000, can tap into a network of 500 freelance consultants in order to offer consulting services at a fraction of the cost of big consultancies like mckinsey. this allows it to provide consulting to small companies as well as to concerns like gsk, a pharma giant. axiom employs 650 lawyers, services half the fortune 100 companies, and enjoyed revenues of more than $100m in 2012. medicast is applying a similar model to doctors in miami, los angeles and san diego. patients order a doctor by touching an app (which also registers where they are). a doctor briefed on the symptoms is guaranteed to arrive within two hours; the basic cost is $200 a visit. not least because it provides malpractice insurance, the company is particularly attractive to moonlighters who want to top up their income, younger doctors without the capital to start their own practices and older doctors who want to set their own timetables.the los angeles-based business talent group provides bosses on tap for companies that want to tackle a specific problem without adding another senior executive to the payroll: fox mobile entertainment, an online-content provider, turned to it for a temporary creative director to produce a new line of products. creative companies add a twist to the model: they demand ideas, rather than labour and services, and give a prize or prizes only to the ones they find interesting. innocentive has applied the prize idea to corporate r&d; it turns companies’ research needs into specific problems and pays for satisfactory solutions to them.tongal does the same thing with its network of 40,000 video-makers. in 2012 colgate-palmolive, a consumer-goods company, offered $17,000 to anyone who could make a 30-second advertisement for the internet. the ad was so good that the company showed it at the super bowl alongside blockbuster ads that cost hundreds of times more. members of the quirky network post their product ideas on the company’s website. other members vote on the attractiveness of each idea and come up with ways of turning it into reality. since its birth in 2009 the company has acquired over a million members and brought 400 products to the shops.perhaps the most striking of all the on-demand services is amazon’s mechanical turk, which allows customers to post any “human intelligence task”, from flagging objectionable content on websites to composing text messages; workers on the site choose what to do according to task and price. the set-up uses to the full most of the capabilities and advantages that make on-demand business models attractive: no need for offices; no full-time contract employees; the clever use of computers to repackage one set of people’s needs into another set of people’s tasks; and an ability to access spare time and spare cognitive capacity all across the world.the idea that having a good job means being an employee of a particular company is a legacy of a period that stretched from about 1880 to 1980. the huge companies created by the industrial revolution brought armies of workers together, often under a single roof. in its early stages this was a step down for many independent artisans who could no longer compete with machine-made goods; it was a step up for day-labourers who had survived by selling their labour to gang masters.these companies introduced a new stability into work, a structure which differentiated jobs from one another more clearly than before, thus providing defined roles and new paths of career progress. many of the jobs were unionised, and the unions fought to improve their members’ benefits. governments eventually built stable employment along these lines into the heart of welfare legislation. a huge class of white-collar workers enjoyed secure jobs administering the new economy.for a while after the second world war everybody seemed to benefit from this model: workers got security, benefits and steady wage rises; companies got a stable workforce in which they could invest with a fair expectation of returns. but the model started to get into trouble in the 1970s, thanks first to deteriorating industrial relations and then to globalisation and computerisation. trade unions have lost power in the private sector, particularly in america and britain, where legislation has reduced their ability to take action (see chart 3). companies kept stricter control of their labour costs, increasingly contracting out production in industrial businesses and re-engineering middle-management. computerisation and improved communications then sped the process up, making it easier for companies to export jobs abroad, to reshape them so that they could be done by less skilled contract workers, or to eliminate them entirely.this has all resulted in a more rootless and flexible labour force. pensioners and parents wanting or needing to spend more time on child care swell the ranks of students and the straightforwardly unemployed. a recent study by the freelancers union, a pressure group for freelance workers, suggests that one in three members of the american workforce (and a higher proportion of younger people) do some freelance work.the on-demand economy is the result of pairing that workforce with the smartphone, which now provides far more computing power than the desktop computers which reshaped companies in the 1990s, and to far more people (see chart 4 on next page). according to benedict evans of andreessen horowitz, the new iphones sold over the weekend of their release in september 2014 contained 25 times more computing power than the whole world had at its disposal in 1995. connected to each other and to yet more data and processing power in the cloud, these devices are letting people design or find ad hoc answers to all sorts of business problems previously solved by the structure of the firm.the way economists understand firms is largely based on an insight of the late ronald coase. firms make sense when the cost of organising things internally through hierarchies is less than the cost of buying things from the market; they are a way of dealing with the high transaction costs faced when you need to do something moderately complicated. now that most people carry computers in their pockets which can keep them connected with each other, know where they are, understand their social network and so on, the transaction costs involved in finding people to do things can be pushed a long way down.this has a range of knock-on consequences, all of which are becoming key features of the on-demand economy. one is further division of labour. thomas malone, of the mit sloan school of management, argues that computer technology is producing an age of hyper-specialisation, as the process that adam smith observed in a pin factory in the 1760s is applied to more sophisticated jobs.another is the ability to tap underused capacity. this applies not just to people’s time, but also to their assets: to drive for lyft or uber, you do need a car. the on-demand economy is in many ways a continuation of what has been called the “sharing economy” exemplified by airbnb, a company which turns apartments into guesthouses and their owners into hoteliers. for people with few assets, though, on-demand labour markets matter more.and new areas are being opened to economies of scale. spoonrocket prepares its food in two central kitchens in san francisco and berkeley. it delivers food quickly because it keeps a fleet of cars, equipped with thermal bags to keep the food warm, roaming the streets of san francisco. “we’re like a gigantic cafeteria serving all of san francisco,” says anson tsui, one of the company’s founders.the aim of the on-demand companies is to exploit low transaction costs in a number of ways. one key is providing the sort of trust that encourages people to take a punt on the unfamiliar. customers worry about the quality of their temporary employees: nobody wants to give the key to their apartment to a potential burglar, or their health details to a dud doctor. potential freelances, for their part, do not want to have to deal with deadbeats: about 40% of freelances are currently paid late.on-demand companies like handy provide customers with a guarantee that workers are competent and honest; oisin hanrahan, the company’s founder, says that more than 400,000 people have applied to join the platform, but only 3% of applicants get through its selection and vetting process. the workers, for their part, can hope for a steady flow of jobs and prompt payment with minimal fuss. handy’s computer system also tries to schedule each worker’s jobs in such a way as to minimise travel time.despite these capabilities, handy is not necessarily looking at huge success, any more than the other ubers-of-x are. there are three reasons for scepticism about their chances.the first is that on-demand companies trying to keep the costs to their clients as low as possible have difficulties training, managing and motivating workers. myclean, a cleaning service based in new york city, tried using purely contract workers, but discovered that it got better customer ratings if it used permanent staff. the company thinks that better services justify higher labour costs. uber drivers complain that the company pays them like contract workers while seeking to manage them like regular employees: they are told to take regular rather than premium fares, but are not reimbursed for their fuel. america’s gathering economic recovery may make it harder for companies to attract casual labour as easily as they have done in the past few years.the second problem is that on-demand companies seem likely to be plagued by regulatory and political problems if they get large enough for people to notice them. american on-demand companies are terrified that they will be stuck with retrospective labour bills if the courts force them to reclassify their workers as regular employees rather than contract workers (a classification which is not always consistent from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, raising the level of anxiety). handy at one point included a clause in its contracts imposing any such retrospective costs on its clients, though it has now withdrawn it.faced by the threat of uber, established taxi companies around the world have organised strikes, filed lawsuits and leant on regulators. in the netherlands uber has been banned; south korea is treating it as an illegal taxi service. in germany anti-uber feeling has nurtured a broader criticism of “plattform-kapitalismus”; its perceived readiness to reduce all aspects of people’s lives, from spare rooms to spare time, to assets to be auctioned off is seen as deeply dehumanising. but such protests often act as advertising for the services they are aimed against. and a recent study revealed that american politicos spend more on uber than on regular taxis when campaigning, a strong indication that the road ahead is likely to remain clear.the third issue is size. the on-demand model obviously has network effects: the home-help company with the most help on the books has the best chance of providing a handyman at 10:30 sharp. yet scaling up may be difficult when barriers to entry are low and bonds of loyalty are non-existent. it will be hard to get workers to be loyal to just one middleman. a number of uber drivers also work for lyft.in many service industries it is hard to see obvious economies of scale on a national or global level. being the best dry-cleaning service in cleveland does not necessarily offer a killer edge in cologne. and taste can be fickle, especially with companies that often look like positional goods that trade, at least in part, on the cachet that they confer to their consumers. many of the people who currently regard spoonrocket as cool may drop it if it becomes a national brand. on-demand companies may find themselves stuck in a world of low margins, high promotional costs and labour churn as they struggle to attain the sort of market dominance that locks in their network advantages. alfred, a subscription service, is already aggregating the work of specific on-demand companies such as instacart and handy to offer its boston members a one-stop shop; such aggregation could drive down prices for the basic on-demand providers yet further.even if the eventual on-demand victors do carve out profitable domestic-service businesses, many observers doubt that their model is more broadly applicable. some critics argue that on-demand companies like bloomthat and handy may be capable of delivering flowers or cleaning houses, but when it comes to companies in the main flow of the knowledge economy they are destined to remain marginal. this objection, though, is not very convincing. the sort of people currently using uber are subject to the same forces as the people who drive them from place to place.the knowledge economy is subject to the same forces as the industrial and service economies: routinisation, division of labour and contracting out. a striking proportion of professional knowledge can be turned into routine action, and the division of labour can bring big efficiencies to the knowledge economy. topcoder can undercut its rivals by 75% by chopping projects into bite-sized chunks and offering them to its 300,000 freelance developers in 200 countries as a series of competitive challenges. knowledge-intensive companies are already contracting out more work to the market, partly to save costs and partly to free up their cleverest workers to focus on the things that add the most value. in 2008 pfizer, a pharma company, undertook a huge self-examination under the heading pfizerworks. it realised that its most highly skilled workers were spending 20% to 40% of their time on routine work—entering data, producing powerpoint slides, doing research on the web. the company now contracts out much of this work.thus more and more of the routine parts of knowledge work can be parcelled out to individuals, just as they were previously parcelled out to companies. this could be bad news for the business models of professional-service companies which use juniors to do fairly routine work—thus providing the firm with income and the juniors with training—while the partners do the more sophisticated stuff. as on-demand solutions and automation prove applicable to more and more routine work, that model becomes hard to sustain. incloudcounsel undercuts big law firms by as much as 80% thanks to an army of freelances that processes legal documents (such as licences, accreditation and non-disclosure agreements) for a flat fee.the key role that cutting things up into routines plays in both spheres suggests that the interaction between the on-demand economy and automation will be a complex one. gobbetising jobs with the aim of parcelling them out to people who don’t see or need to see the big picture is not that different from gobbetising them in a way that allows automation. often the first activity may prove a prelude to the second; it is easy to see uber as a forerunner to an eventual system that has no drivers at all. in other cases, though, the cost-efficiency of contracting out may reduce the incentives to automate.what sort of world will this on-demand model create? pessimists worry that everyone will be reduced to the status of 19th-century dockers crowded on the quayside at dawn waiting to be hired by a contractor. boosters maintain that it will usher in a world where everybody can control their own lives, doing the work they want when they want it. both camps need to remember that the on-demand economy is not introducing the serpent of casual labour into the garden of full employment: it is exploiting an already casualised workforce in ways that will ameliorate some problems even as they aggravate others.the on-demand economy is unlikely to be a happy experience for people who value stability more than flexibility: middle-aged professionals with children to educate and mortgages to pay. on the other hand it is likely to benefit people who value flexibility more than security: students who want to supplement their incomes; bohemians who can afford to dip in and out of the labour market; young mothers who want to combine bringing up children with part-time jobs; the semi-retired, whether voluntarily so or not.megan guse, a law graduate, says that the on-demand model allows her to combine a career as a lawyer with her taste for travel. “a lot of my friends that have gone the big law route have these stories about having to cancel weddings, vacations and miss family events. i can continue working while being in exotic places.” flexibility is also valuable for elite workers who want to wind down after decades of selling their soul to their companies. jody greenstone miller, the founder of business talent group, says that her company’s comparative advantage lies in rethinking corporate time: by breaking up work into projects, she can allow people to work for as long as they want.the on-demand economy is good for outsiders and insurgents—and for entrepreneurs trying to create new businesses using such people. matt barrie, the founder of freelancer.com, links the fate of two groups of potential winners: entrepreneurs in the rich world who have few resources will be able to link up with workers in the poor world who have little money. in europe the labour market drives a wedge between insiders who have lots of protections and outsiders who don’t; on-demand arrangements may give outsiders a chance of breaking in. thus in countries such as france, italy and spain, on-demand companies may improve the job chances of the young unemployed.if this seems attractive, it is also a measure of the way that the on-demand economy will contribute to pressure to reduce labour rights in all sorts of situations; a growing abundance of on-demand employees with no normally accepted rights such as sick-pay and overtime will give employers at firms with more standard structures an incentive to cut back. the more such pressures spread, the more protests against “plattform-kapitalismus” the world is likely to see.the on-demand economy will inevitably exacerbate the trend towards enforced self-reliance that has been gathering pace since the 1970s. workers who want to progress will have to keep their formal skills up to date, rather than relying on the firm to train them (or to push them up the ladder regardless). this means accepting challenging assignments or, if they are locked in a more routine job, taking responsibility for educating themselves. they will also have to learn how to drum up new business and make decisions between spending and investment.at the same time, governments will have to rethink institutions that were designed in an era when contract employers were a rarity. they will have to clean up complicated regulatory systems. they will have to make it easier for individuals to take charge of their pensions and health care, a change which will be more of a problem for america, which ties many benefits to jobs, than europe, which has a more universal approach. they will also have to encourage schools to produce self-reliant citizens rather than loyal employees.one of gilbert and sullivan’s oddest operettas, “utopia limited—or the flowers of progress”, focuses on an exotic south sea island which, under the influence of victorian industrialism, sets about turning all the inhabitants into limited companies. it is rarely performed today, in part because the targets of its on-the-nose-in-1893 satire seem remote. but perhaps, after a century in which companies were vast things, such a satire of corporate individualism is due for a revival or two. if so, the piece will be easier than ever to stage: if there are not already on-demand services that can provide polynesian props, semi-retired set designers and down-on-their-luck tenors at the swipe of a screen, there soon will be.
 
rt @cinemax: the most dangerous town in america is back to beat you mercilessly. #banshee returns to #cinemax friday at 10pm et.
 
 california governor jerry brown said in his annual state-of-the-state speech yesterday, “we are leaders in renewable energy and efficiency; we have extended health care to millions; we are transforming our educational and criminal justice systems; we are building the nation’s only high-speed rail system.” closecalifornia governor jerry brown said in his annual state-of-the-state speech yesterday,... read morecalifornia governor jerry brown said in his annual state-of-the-state speech yesterday, “we are leaders in renewable energy and efficiency; we have extended health care to millions; we are transforming our educational and criminal justice systems; we are building the nation’s only high-speed rail system.”california is overtaking brazil as the world’s seventh-largest economy, bolstered by rising employment, home values and personal and corporate income, a year after the most-populous state surpassed russia and italy.the golden state, with an equivalent gross domestic product of $2.20 trillion in 2013, expanded last year by almost every measure, according to data compiled by bloomberg. brazil’s gross domestic product, in contrast, declined 1 percent from $2.25 trillion in the first three quarters of 2014 as its export of raw materials fell.governor jerry brown , 76, sworn in this month to an unprecedented fourth term, is presiding over the turnaround as he steers away from persistent deficits and fiscal turmoil that prompted republican presidential candidate mitt romney in 2012 to compare california to greece, which has about a 10th of its gdp. california-based companies from apple inc . to walt disney co . handed investors a total return of 119 percent since january 2011, when brown returned to the governor’s office, compared with 96 percent for the standard & poor’s 500 .“it’s the diversity of the california business environment, from movies to the internet to agriculture -- the incredible array of businesses that make up the state,” brown said yesterday in an interview at his office in oakland, where he was mayor from 1999 to 2007. “certainly getting our finances in line as a state is also helpful: the new investments in our schools; solid universities; investments in water and energy. all this gives security and keeps california very much in the forefront of investment, change, cultural adaptation and leadership.”brown’s economy has sustained its momentum since 2013, when the value of goods and services produced in the state topped that of russia and italy to vault california to no. 8 in the world. california grew an average of 4.1 percent annually during the first three years of brown’s most recent term.economists in brazil, with a population five times bigger than california’s 38.3 million, cut their growth estimate and raised their inflation forecast for this year on jan. 12, as the central bank raises rates in the world’s second-biggest emerging market. its economy grew 0.1 percent in the third quarter over the three previous months, after contracting 0.6 percent in the second quarter.“resource-rich nations are traditionally subject to boom and bust,” brown said. “we’re not just dependent on one particular industry or resource.”brown, in his inaugural speech on jan. 5, said the california economy can expand even as the state grows more aggressive in requiring the use of renewable energy sources and reducing the use of gasoline.“we have to prove to the world that you can move forward with progressive and forward-thinking climate change policies while growing the economy simultaneously,” kevin de leon, a democrat and state senate president pro tem, said yesterday in an interview in sacramento. “they’re mutually compatible and inclusive as opposed to exclusive.”brown’s policies, for the most part, are proving beneficial to the long-term economic health of california, said chris thornberg , principal at beacon economics llc, a los angeles-based research company. thornberg credited larger forces, though, from federal reserve policy to the purging of bad loans from the real-estate market for the state’s recovery.“from an investor standpoint, i don’t think anybody could have done a better job,” said michael e. johnson, managing partner at gurtin fixed income management in solana beach, california.california’s ascendance comes as the world bank cut its forecast for global growth this year, with the improving u.s. economy and lower fuel prices failing to offset disappointment elsewhere in the world.“the global economy today is much larger than what it used to be, so it’s a case of a larger train being pulled by a single engine, the american one,” world bank chief economist kaushik basu told reporters on a jan. 13 conference call. “this does not make for a rosy outlook for the world.”california leads u.s. states in agriculture, technology and manufacturing revenue growth, bloomberg data show. it’s home to more companies on the s&p 500 than any other state. the state’s job growth outpaced the nation’s in the first nine months of last year. california’s non-farm employment of 15.7 million people is at an all-time high.challenges remain. while employment rebounded last june to levels from before the 18-month recession that ended in 2009, its jobless rate of 7.2 percent as of november was tied with mississippi for the second-highest among u.s. states.almost a quarter of californians live in poverty, the highest rate in the nation, according to the u.s. census bureau. spending on welfare remains lower than before the recession began.“we’ve brought our unemployment rate down rather quickly and we’ve recovered the jobs deficit that we incurred during the recession, which in percentage terms was bigger than the nation’s,” said robert kleinhenz , the chief economist for the los angeles county economic development corp. “it dug itself into a deeper hole but it did manage, through faster growth, to recover almost as quickly.”california has rebounded from when romney, the former governor of massachusetts, dismissed the state as a failed economy as it grappled with the prospects of tax increases and budget cuts.“entrepreneurs and business people around the world and here at home think that at some point america is going to become like greece or like spain or italy, or like california -- just kidding about that one, in some ways,” romney said, to laughter from his audience.like california, the city of oakland, of which brown was mayor for two terms, has experienced an economic revival.“the proximity of san francisco and being located in the bay area” are the pivotal factors behind oakland’s resurgence, brown said. “there is a dynamic interplay. oakland is closer to san francisco than san francisco is to itself. west oakland is closer to the financial district and even south of market than most of san francisco. i did push condo development and responsible policing to keep the crime down.”the new oakland mayor, libby schaaf , was a former brown aide and city council member who emerged as frontrunner after winning the governor’s endorsement in october.analysts are more bullish on california-based businesses than on u.s. companies, as measured by the russell 3000 index, bloomberg data show. companies based in the state will provide a 15 percent return to investors in the coming year, compared with 12 percent for the index.to those who assert that california’s tax and regulatory structure make it a hostile place to do business, brown offers an anecdote: he tells a story about a silicon valley investor he met at a cocktail party who started and sold three technology-related businesses.the cost of protecting bonds of california from default tumbled the most among all the states in the four years ended dec. 31. credit-default swaps, which investors use to hedge against losses or to speculate on creditworthiness, declined 201 basis points to 104 basis points, bloomberg data show.credit swaps, which typically decline as investor confidence improves and rise as it deteriorates, pay the buyer face value if a borrower fails to meets its obligations, less the value of the defaulted debt. a basis point equals $1,000 annually on a contract protecting $10 million of debt.“that huge deficit was a shock to the political sensibility,” brown said. “i was able, in that context, to win substantial cuts on the part of government spending. i was also able to win approval of proposition 30 to inject more revenue into the economy. all of that together brought us a place of more stability.”while final figures for 2014 for the california economy won’t be available until june, projections in brown’s proposed state budget show the gains.per-capita annual income in california was estimated to have increased by $1,700 to $50,338 in 2014, according to state data. california home prices climbed an average of 12 percent last year through sept. 30.“california is growing faster than the u.s. economy, which is a bright spot in the global economic situation,” said sung won sohn, a professor at california state university-channel islands in camarillo who was chief economist at wells fargo & co. “california is always more volatile than the u.s. we tend to go down more rapidly and we tend to rise more rapidly.”brown’s jan. 9 budget proposes spending a record $165 billion. temporary sales and income tax increases that he championed in 2012, combined with surging capital gains revenue tied to stock market gains, have left the state with a $5 billion surplus in the fiscal year that begins in july. the governor is seeking to store much of that surplus in reserves to cushion against economic downturns.california-based technology companies brought in $692 billion in revenue in the past 12 months, about half the industry’s sales across the u.s. the value of manufacturing in california climbed 8 percent to $204 billion in 2012, compared with a 7.4 percent increase in texas to $176 billion.agriculture in california produced $21.4 billion in revenue in 2012, three times more than the $6.8 billion in second-ranked iowa. the number of companies in california that rank in the top 500 in the world in terms of market capitalization rose almost 48 percent since 2009.high-technology jobs in the business and professional services sector in california were forecast to grow to 15.7 percent of the economy in 2014, up from 15.4 percent a year earlier.“i’ve found that people get very stuck in what is,” brown said. “i very much like tradition, but you have to be able to change and disrupt while balancing tradition. the continuity and the change blending together is your creative task.”to contact the reporters on this story: michael b. marois in sacramento at mmarois@bloomberg.net ; shin pei in new york at spei@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: stephen merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net alan goldstein, jeffrey taylorpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 posted by jason furman on december 23, 2014 at 09:30 am esttoday’s upward revision indicates that the economy grew in the third quarter at the fastest pace in over a decade. the strong gdp growth is consistent with a broad range of other indicators showing improvement in the labor market, increasing domestic energy security, and continued low health cost growth. the steps that we took early on to rescue our economy and rebuild it on a new foundation helped make 2014 already the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s. indeed, 2014 was a breakthrough year for the united states across a wide range of metrics important to middle-class families. nevertheless, there is more work to be done to ensure that all americans can share in the accelerating recovery.1. real gross domestic product (gdp) grew 5.0 percent at an annual rate in the third quarter of 2014—the strongest single quarter since 2003—according to the third estimate from the bureau of economic analysis. while quarterly growth reports are volatile, and some of the growth in q3 reflected transitory factors, the recent robust growth data indicate a solid underlying trend of recovery. indeed, the strong growth recorded in each of the last two quarters suggests that the economy has bounced back strongly from the first-quarter decline in gdp, which largely reflected transitory factors like unusually severe winter weather and a sharp slowdown in inventory investment. consumer spending, business investment, and net exports all remained positive contributors this quarter. real gross domestic income (gdi), an alternative measure of the overall size of the economy, was up 4.7 percent in q3.2. third-quarter real gdp growth was revised up 1.1 percentage point from the second estimate released in november. most of the upward revisions were in personal consumption and business investment, the most persistent and stable components of gdp. the contributions of consumer spending and business investment were revised up 0.7 and 0.2 percentage point, respectively, including increased contributions from health care and other services, nonresidential structures investment, and intellectual property investment. an upward revision to inventory investment also accounted for 0.1 percentage point of the revision.3. in the third quarter, personal consumption expenditures rose 3.2 percent at an annual rate. with real wages rising for two years, consumer sentiment at its highest level since 2007, and households having substantially deleveraged , consumption growth continues to trend upward. consumers cite improved employment and wage expectations—along with declining gasoline prices—as major drivers of improved economic optimism, according the reuters/university of michigan consumer sentiment survey. the improved optimism is borne out in broad-based consumption growth, with durable goods spending continuing its pattern of strong growth in the recovery, and nondurable goods and services consumption picking up from the previous quarter. but challenges remain for consumers, and we have more work to do to boost wages for middle-class families.4. the current account deficit remained near its lowest level since the late 1990s as the declining federal budget deficit has boosted domestic saving. the current account balance is a measure of net transactions between the united states and the rest of the world, including our trade balance and other income flows across our borders. when the current account is in deficit, as it has been for most of the past 30 years, the united states borrows from abroad to finance its spending. but our current account deficit has narrowed sharply since the crisis, in large part because of increased domestic saving including the fall of the federal budget deficit from 9.8 percent of gdp in fy 2009 to 2.8 percent in fy 2014. the u.s. current account deficit now stands at 2.5 percent of gdp, down from more than 6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005. the smaller deficit reduces our reliance on foreign borrowing, encouraging a more sustainable recovery.5. real private domestic final purchases (pdfp)—the sum of consumption and fixed investment—is up 3.3 percent over the last four quarters, a faster four-quarter growth rate than real gdp. real pdfp growth is generally a more stable and forward-looking indicator than real gdp because it excludes highly volatile components like inventory investment and net exports. in the first and second quarters of this year, gdp growth fluctuated widely, but pdfp was positive in both quarters, showing a less sharp pattern of decline and rebound. in the third quarter, pdfp grew a bit more slowly than gdp, but on balance, it has risen faster over the past year and continued its historical pattern of more steady growth.  as the administration stresses every quarter, gdp figures can be volatile and are subject to substantial revision. therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one single report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.jason furman is chairman of the council of economic advisers.
 xi jinping, china's president, said this year’s anti-graft work would focus on strengthening official accountability mechanisms, keeping a closer eye on family members and close allies of potentially corrupt officials, and improving supervision of state-owned enterprises, a corruption-plagued area that saw hundreds of senior officials toppled in the past two years. closexi jinping, china's president, said this year’s anti-graft work would focus on... read morexi jinping, china's president, said this year’s anti-graft work would focus on strengthening official accountability mechanisms, keeping a closer eye on family members and close allies of potentially corrupt officials, and improving supervision of state-owned enterprises, a corruption-plagued area that saw hundreds of senior officials toppled in the past two years.president xi jinping said there will be no let-up in his “fierce and enduring” battle against corruption, which has already taken down thousands of senior officials including the country’s former security chief.xi vowed to maintain “high pressure” and “zero tolerance” on graft this year, as corruption “has not vanished” and “temptations still remain,” in speech at a plenary session of the communist party’s top disciplinary agency in beijing yesterday.while xi is seeking to address a problem that he says risks undermining the party’s legitimacy, he is also trying to weaken some well-entrenched vested interests and consolidate his power, according to jean-pierre cabestan, director for government and international studies at hong kong baptist university.“xi wants to turn what is a campaign into a standard practice aimed at, if not ferreting out corruption, at least keeping it under control; hence the longevity of this new crackdown,” cabestan said in an e-mail interview. “the jury is still out as far as the results of this campaign are concerned; obstacles to deepening reforms are still formidable.”his crackdown on graft -- the harshest since the republic’s founding in october 1949, according to state media -- kicked off weeks after he became party boss in november 2012 and has snared more than 100,000 communist cadres, including both “flies and tigers,” or low- and high-level officials, according to ccdi figures released last month.the past two years bear out the importance of “catching tigers,” li chengyan, director of the research centre for government integrity building at peking university, said in a phone interview. “only beating big tigers can exert a sufficient deterrent effect.”in the speech, xi cited for the first time the names of zhou yongkang, a former member of the party’s politburo standing committee in charge of domestic security, and ling jihua, a former top aide of retired president hu jintao, as high-profile examples in his graft-busting efforts. these cases “demonstrated to the world the communist party has a head-on approach to problems and correcting mistakes,” xi said, calling the effort “self-purifying.”the risk of xi’s anti-graft drive has “probably receded” since zhou was formally put under investigation in july, according to cabestan.“for xi, the most dangerous period was prior to july when he had to convince the leadership and the elder leaders of the party to get rid of zhou and prosecute him,” he said.in laying out goals and challenges for this year, xi stressed the importance of institutionalizing his campaign. “only by making it into a habit, a norm” can we deliver long-run and lasting impacts, he said.xi said this year’s anti-graft work would focus on strengthening official accountability mechanisms, keeping a closer eye on family members and close allies of potentially corrupt officials, and improving supervision of state-owned enterprises, a corruption-plagued area that saw hundreds of senior officials toppled in the past two years.“the party’s work-style construction and anti-graft campaign is always on the road,” xi said.xi’s speech shows this year’s anti-corruption work won’t be light, said li of peking university.“it’s wise and necessary to single out the soes as one of the focuses, as it’s a high-risk area and has become a hotbed of corruption,” li said. “there’s a lot of collusion between power and money there, and many officials just use the soes as their private coffers.”to contact the reporter on this story: ting shi in hong kong at tshi31@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: rosalind mathieson at rmathieson3@bloomberg.net andrew davis, greg ahlstrandpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 "all the empirical evidence we have is that interest rates within the range of variation we see do not affect investment. investment is driven by perceptions of risk and accelerators in demand that drive the demand for investment. so it's not a surprise i think that the zero interest rates have not stimulated investment. because nobody has ever been able to find a significant interest rate effect on investment.""as far as the banking system goes it really is an interesting observation that... while interest rates never affected anything, at least nobody could detect an econometric effect... monetary policy was very powerful historically. i could show you, in fact i had a chart... of what the connection was between nominal changes in the money supply and nominal gdp one year later. and in the 1960s it is an incredibly tight relationship. by the 1990s it has disappeared completely.it seems to me you want to think about why is it that monetary policy worked then and doesn't seem to work now. and also why is it it works in some countries and doesn't work in others.what we used to have in the united states was a regulated ceiling of zero percent interest on demand deposits. that was a tax on depositors and a subsidy to the banking system. in fact, what it meant was since they never reduced the money supply deposits were a source of permanent zero interest rate financing to the banking system. and there are other countries, notably japan, that also did that historically. what that meant was that when the money supply expanded - just ordinary open market operations - and you forced more deposits into people's hands that was a hidden tax and subsidy system that injected equity directly into the banks. and if what is important is risk absorption capacity not the price of money that greatly increased the risk absorption capacity of banks which meant they would absorb more risk from firms. and the terms on which they lend matter apparently in studies more than the average interest rate at which they lend. that tax and subsidy system went away when they abolished the limit on interest on demand deposits. so this hidden tarp disappeared and it disappeared all over the world. and what you start to see of course is to enable banking system to recover you have to do direct subsidies to replace that tax and subsidy system.so that sweden which is the big success story in the late 1980s in recovering from this kind of a serious crisis directly recapitalises the banks. in the asia crisis which is at least as bad as this - there was at least as much overleverage. korea and malaysia that directly recapitalised the banks recovered really quickly. that indonesia and thailand that try and rely on traditional monetary policy, like japan did in the crisis, don't see any effect.so i think that one of the things that we have also inadvertently done that is actually showing up for the first time - although you do see evidence of it in the slow recovery from the very mild recession in the u.s. in 1991 - is we have basically disarmed traditional monetary policy. so poor ben bernanke is having to learn a whole lot of new dance steps in order to try and get this party going. but i think that again is a fundamental structural change that has passed below the radar because nobody is thinking about it."monetary policy helps repair balance sheets during recessions not through low interest rates but through provision of equity to banks. until 1980 regulation q imposed a zero rate of interest on bank deposits. the fed's control of the money supply then allowed the fed to engineer an increase in zero interest deposits, which acts as an injection of equity. when regulation q was eliminated, monetary policy no longer had this effect. alan greenspan was not a villain, he was not a hero, he was irrelevant. by the time he got in the driver's seat of the car that people before him had repeatedly driven off the road, the steering wheel had been removed. when the car stayed on the road he believed he was a genius.one of the things that no nobody so far, it seems to me, has talked about is that we used to have an automatic system tied to monetary policy for actually restoring bank equity. coming out of the depression there was a zero interest rate ceiling on demand deposits. and money supply demand deposits never shrank. so demand deposits represented a permanent zero interest rate source of funds for the banking system. the amount of it determined, of course, by open market operations. a zero interest rate permanent source of funds is called equity. so under the old interest rate ceilings, which got the bad name of financial repression, you had a mechanism whereby the fed could directly tax depositors. and tranfer that money to bank equity. the irony is that all the keynesian and traditional economic emphasis was on interest rate effects. when i went to graduate school, when joe [stiglitz] went to graduate school, nobody has ever been able to find those. on the other hand monetary policy has had very powerful effects.and i think i gave you a handout. have you got a copy of this - a tail of two decades? what i want you to look at first is the 1960s - the first column is percentage change in the money supply a year ago (this is just m1) and the second column is contemporary like 1961 change in nominal gdp. look down that column and notice how tightly those two things are connected. that in 1961 growth in the money supply goes from 0.7 to 2.8, growth in gdp a year later goes from 3.3 to 5.8. in 1962 growth in the money supply goes down, nominal gdp growth goes down. growth of the money supply goes up, nominal gdp growth goes up. it is an almost perfect correlation. and that is presumably this powerful equity effect that you see. now look at column two after the zero interest rate ceiling on demand deposits has been removed. money supply growth is all over the lot and it has no effect at all that is systematically visible on changes in nominal gdp.so i am going to basically come out and say what i think is true: alan greenspan is not a hero. alan greenspan is not a villain. alan greenspan is irrelevant. that when he got into the driver's seat of this car that was extremely hard to drive that people have historically driven off the road the steering wheel had been disconnected from the wheels. so he is up there moving the wheel around like crazy the car stays on the road because he doesn't have a destabilizing effect and he thinks he is a genius.the reason that is important, among other things, and by the way characteristically if you turn over all over the world post-sort of 1990 or late 1980s when economies have gotten in trouble - it is exactly what you talked about with the nordics - traditional monetary policy has not helped to get them out of trouble. ultimately, what it has taken in the absence of this tax and equity creation system is direct equity transfusions. and you see that in japan where they relied on traditional monetary policy and have continued to do so it has had no effect. in the asia crisis it was a useful test - thailand and indonesia were well-behaved and relied on traditional monetary policy they had a very bad experience. korea and malaysia directly recapitalised their banks they did very well. in the europe of the 1980s and 1990s the nordics who directly recapitalised their banks had sharp successful recoveries. countries that relied on traditional monetary policy did not.so, the first things i think from a minskyan perspective where these equity injections are absolutely crutial to mitigating the effect of business cycles that what you want to keep in mind is they are history. and you are going to have to start to think creatively about alternative sources of... or for performing that function so that monetary policy works.the second thing i think is equilly important - when you look at bank leverage ratios and you recognize that demand deposits historically represented equity capital the increases in leverage have been absolutely massive. now, still there are some rents associated with deposits but nothing like what they were. and i think when you start to talk about serious capital requirements you cannot ignore those rents associated with deposit positions and actually local information. but at least in terms of a proper accounting for the equity capital of banks things got much worse in the post-1990 period and it was all just a train-wreck waiting to happen and did happen outside the united states and ultimately, of course, in the united states.so, that is the first thing i think from a minskyan perspective you recognize that the balance sheets were at the heart of almost all business cycles. and you recognize that the traditional power of monetary policy came because of the requlated ceiling on demand deposits and the ability of the monetary authorities to actually repair balance sheets without going through the legislature or any similar things.
 when the first mobile phone call was made in 1973, few members of the public were interested in the new technology. telecoms companies had to invent reasons to use them—for instance, that they could be used to call a friend to pass the time when stuck in a car during a traffic jam—in order to get sceptical consumers to adopt them. but now, most people in rich countries could not imagine life without one: there are now more active mobile-phone connections in america and europe than people.the rising importance of mobiles—not simply to make calls but to access the internet as well—partly explains why bt, a fixed-line telecoms firm, decided to make a £12.5 billion ($19.6 billion) bid for ee, britain's biggest mobile operator, on december 15th. bt also hopes that the merger will allow the firm to profitably offer what is know as “quad-play” (a bundle of fixed and mobile phone calls, internet access and television), which will also help keep customers from switching away from its other products.
 ‘twas the year of the drones. did you get to fly one?what an amazing year 2014 was for the drone industry. amazing highs and frustrating lows. lots of new companies, new startups, many kickstarter success stories, and an ecosystem of technology companies developing to service the new industry. it is safe to assume most people probably heard about drones this past year (even those who planned to shoot them down from the sky), but question is, did you get to fly one? if not, find a friend that got one as a christmas present. you will be delighted to see even your own home in a never before-seen perspective.i got involved in the industry several years ago as an investor when commercial drones were illegal (unfortunately they remain so), faa had no real plan to allow for commercial drone operation (seems to still be the case) and hobbyist drones were niche toy items (that has dramatically changed in 2014). a friend of mine emailed recently when he himself got a drone as a christmas present…and asked if we had reached #peakdrones. or was there more excitement to look forward to in 2015. i told him things were just starting to get busy in the drone world and here are only some of the things i expect to see from the industry in 2015:hardware, software, data or service – industry remains unsure where profits will be had. on one hand this means we are seeing innovation across the value chain, on the other it also means companies are hedging and trying to change their tune on a monthly basis. hardware companies opening up platforms for software developers and software companies trying to lock in hardware manufacturers to use their systems. data guys tried to take the higher ground but not much data available without owning hardware & software solutions. its a mess out there and will take a while to clear up. i like helen greiner’s ( cyphy works ‘ founder & ceo) opinion on this: “customers don’t buy hardware, software, data or services. they buy solutions to their problems”. a lot of the rest is sloganeering that is more relevant to silicon valley more than anywhere else. [disclosure: cyphy works is a lux portfolio company]that said, we are starting to see some fantastic companies emerge in and around the drone ecosystem. i expect 2015 to bring more data analytics (+mapping + visualization + crop models), camera (high resolution, 3d, infrared, multispectral) and service (imaging as a service) companies.optical stabilization/computational imaging – most uavs are being designed for use as imaging platforms. 2015 is bound to bring the latest in computational imaging to the drone world. from onboard computational imaging to stabilize the drone itself, to computational imaging to stabilize and crop the image and real-time video editing. for example brightsky labs is already working on this. [disclosure: brightsky labs is a lux portfolio company]precision navigation – even though it is used on almost all drones, gps navigation is still far from ideal for drone use. drones often find themselves in gps denied environment, close to buildings, under bridges, in electronically noisy environments and indoors. in the coming year or so we will see some new technologies brought into commercial world that use rtk, slam and other techniques to aid, and in some cases replace, traditional gps navigation. just as important will be sophisticated (but low cost) sense and avoid systems built around lidar or optical imaging systems which will rely on on-board intelligence for autonomous flying.true consumer drone – yes dji is expected to do $500m or so in revenue and others like parrot , 3dr and others are offering consumer drones, i still believe these drones need help with form/function ease of use. they still look and feel like hobbyist playthings, rough on the edges hardware-wise and relatively complicated software to work with. many still rely on external cameras (such as the popular gopro) but we are already starting to see built in cameras, and rumors are ripe that gopro is working on its own drone as well. 2015 might finally bring us that elusive pocket drone that would be cute, friendly, really easy to use, and a sexy selfie/follow-me drone that one can take on their next trip even to disneyland. market is still looking for the ipod of the drone world, one that i could give to my 6 year old daughter to play with and even take into the pool with her.virtual reality space is taking off at about the pace and fervor as drones. and i am super excited about the two coming together in the near future. while we have already seen demos of drone-view through oculus etc, i am looking forward to vr specific camera systems getting mounted on-board so a true vr experience can be created. how awesome was this video of a drone flying through fireworks? now imagine feeling like you are flying through it in 3d yourself.application specific drones – some companies would have you believe a drone is a drone is a drone. that is certainly not true and i think as the industry grows up a bit we will see segmentation and application specific drone development. we may already be seeing signs of that. the $500 drone you gifted to your uncle is probably not best suited to be used by a farmer in the field or on an offshore oil & gas platform. just because you can put solar cells on a drone doesn’t mean it is able to carry the weight needed for high resolution imaging for agricultural uses, and most likely neither the traditional multicopter or the fixed wing is the right solution for drone delivery. similarly, while its ok to put all computational capabilities and intelligence on a cell phone for a selfie drone, a security/remote monitoring drone many need on-board real-time image processing for it to be fully effective. we are also starting to see interesting work arounds to the battery limitation problem. for example skycatch has shown a battery replacement system while cyphy works is using a micro-filament tether for power and communications. so on and so forth with many applications, especially in the commercial/industrial sectors.management of drone fleets – right now customers are buying what they would themselves consider prototypes, in onesies and twosies. but expectations are that if the promised value is there, drones will be operated in fleets, no different than cars, trucks and other specialized equipment. not only will we see software tools for fleet management (especially with all kinds of sense and avoid technologies) but also a secondary service industry to grow up around repair, maintenance of fleets and management of insurance and expert pilots (until drones are allowed to fly fully autonomously).cost - we have started to see a bifurcation in the pricing of consumer vs commercial drones. consumer drones are priced around $1,000 (as low as $500) while commercial drones are priced anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000. there is a lot of work to do on cost reduction of drones, and in business models to make drones available for general use. i would like to see consumer drones priced at <$500 with retail store margin built in. on commercial front we should soon start seeing more drones as a service companies vs the traditional buy, maintain, manage own fleet of drones.internationalization of us drone industry – we are already starting to see that happen. while 3d printing was touted for bringing manufacturing back to america, faa inaction and in fact hints of regressive regulation, is forcing our fledgling drone industry to look for markets, partners and even investors abroad. australia, japan, france, dubai etc will be beneficiaries of technology leadership that us held for a while. i am already starting to see foreign companies pitching investors in the us for startups bringing commercial revenues outside the us. lawyers facilitating commerce department and itar clearances stand to benefit. unless faa can soon bring a common set of principles to govern drone use, we will unfortunately continue to see loss of local talent, technology and business leadership in this space.2014 was definitely the year of the drones. this year the conversation changed from “drones kill” to “drones affect privacy”, and hopefully 2015 will bring conversation to “drones do good”. i am a big believer in drones, especially because drones are basically flying robots and there are so many things robots can do better, faster, cheaper than humans…we have seen what amazing things robots can do in our homes (e.g. roomba), in commerce (e.g. kiva) and even in hospitals (e.g. intuitive surgical’s da vinci). at lux capital we expect to continue to look for additional investments in this exciting space in 2015.
rt @wsjd: how instacart compares with its boom-and-bust counterpart webvan
 george shaheen built one of the most glorious flops of the dot-com bust. fifteen years later he is a believer again.mr. shaheen is the former chief executive of webvan group inc., the online grocery company that in less than three years burned through more than $800 million in cash, went public, filed for bankruptcy and then ceased...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 the biggest rally in the dollar in more than four years is raising a red flag that the best-performing major currency of 2014 risks reversing course.“i am alarmed by consensus and positioning, both of which are extreme,” kit juckes, a london-based global strategist at societe generale sa, wrote in a note today. “a correction seems likely very soon, if it isn’t already starting.”hedge funds and other large speculators boosted futures wagers on the greenback’s strength versus eight of its major peers at the end of last month to the most since the week through dec. 2, when bullish positions reached a record, according to the washington-based commodity futures trading commission. the latest bet was as large as the record net-short position, or wager against the dollar, in 2011, which preceded a turn higher by the u.s. currency, juckes said.currency traders are starting to question the extent to which the dollar can strengthen in 2015 after it completed its best year since 1997. faltering global growth has cast doubt on the timing of u.s. interest-rate increases, which supported the greenback through the second half of last year, even as the bank of japan and european central bank embrace monetary stimulus.the difference in the number of positions on gains versus those on declines -- net longs -- rose to 404,766 as of dec. 30, cftc data released yesterday showed. it was the most since the 428,558 reached earlier in the month, the record in data going back to 2003. the record net-short position was 405,267 in march 2011.the dollar index , which intercontinental exchange uses to track the greenback against the currencies of six major u.s. trade partners, was little changed at 91.318 today after touching 91.775 yesterday, the highest since december 2005. the measure has advanced 16 percent from a low in may, the biggest rally since the period ending june 2010.the greenback traded at $1.1940 per euro, after the 19-nation currency weakened to $1.1864 yesterday, the lowest since 2006.to contact the reporter on this story: rachel evans in new york at revans43@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: dave liedtka at dliedtka@bloomberg.net greg storeypress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 this post is meant to be a simple, brief survey of the block chain, from the point of view of an investor in the space. for someone who has read widely on all aspects of bitcoin, this will feel rudimentary, but my goal here is to explain the idea of the block chain’s potential to a ore lay business audience. it will lack technical depth and instead focus on business applications that are likely to be created in the next few years.over this summer and spring, i’m going to write more about bitcoin and the block chain, specifically from the vantage point of founders who are working in the space right now and those investors who are interested in products that could arrive on the market in the next 2-5 years. the first post in this series was more of a preface, which you can read here . this post and the subsequent ones will presume some basic knowledge of the block chain. one of the best primers i’ve found (and please suggest more in the comments) is by antonis polemitis, which you can read here .back to the block chain. after reading as much as i can, and after talking to many smart folks in the space, i’ve come to a few conclusions: (1) the block chain as a computer science innovation is for real; and (2) there are 101+ business applications that can be rewritten by harnessing its attributes; but (3) it is very early days and right now, most of the best minds working in this space are focused on payments and stored value.put another way, it is very early for the block chain, which is a bad thing for a momentum or inflection investor, but a great thing for an investor who believes in the power of the block chain and wants to lay down an early, early bet. (if you are working on the block chain right now, please do get in touch with me.)so, what can the block chain do, theoretically? too much to list here. “a 101 things,” is my standard answer. this is a primer on a few areas, and then i plan to dig into each one with more detail in the summer. regardless, i’ll offer some ideas as examples of new business processes that excite me specifically, in no particular order:many of the smart folks working in the space cited the idea of “smart contracts” as the one area which posses the most widely-applicable aspect of what can be “on-chain.” a smart contract acts as a specific protocol which helps parties create, validate, and enforce contracts without the need of expensive human overhead costs. contracts that become interesting when “smart” could be drm, derivatives, p2p commerce, and other business processes. all this said, there are some folks working on block chain-related ideas that, at least today, do not seem to be solving a big problem. of course, it is early days, so who knows. (earlier in the year, naval and balaji posted on appcoins , which poses thoughts for how block chains could change the financial side of starting a business.)the block chain can be leveraged to verify, attribute, timestamp, and prove, irrefutably, that work has been done at a specific point in time with specific characteristics. these record-keeping capabilities could open the door to a more transparent form of governance. this has been referred to as the public ledger. today, we hold people and entities accountable to the fact that we can point to something that shows commitment or promise — in the future, work verified by the chain would be theoretically immune to disagreement (but i’m sure there will be “chain deniers”). just like in smart contracts, there are a few companies working in the space, but not many.this is the space that is currently in play and has real players most of us recognize by name, such as bitpay, coinbase, and circle, among others, which are leading the way to bring bitcoin to the masses and financial mainstream. someone will win this space and they will all also provide their own apis to empower other developers to build on the block chain, but it remains to be seen if independent developers will want to use their apis versus building on a neutral platform like chain , which is sort of like an aws for the block chain.a good percentage of block chain enthusiasts i spoke with cautioned against a mentality of “block chain for x,” in the same way we all do this with “uber for x.” they believed this will also generate very bad ideas that either don’t make sense in practice or that look cool but don’t really solve a big problem. while some of these solutions will be technically feasible with the block chain, they said to expect a period of crappy ideas before someone or a group of folks hits it big. and when they mean big, they mean trillion dollar market big. with that caution kept in mind, however, everyone admittedly is very bullish on the block chain. today, it is early. outside of a few teams, i have yet to see it. i would love to see it, and i’m sure i’m not seeing it all. finally, there are of course many other use cases, but these seemed to be the big ones that resonated with everyone i spoke with, and underneath them, undoubtedly lie fascinating new ideas.
 in a top-loading washer, water circulates primarily along the poloidal axis during the wash cycle, as indicated by the red arrow in this illustration of a torus .the top-loading or vertical-axis clothes washer is most popular in australia,[ citation needed ] new zealand, canada, the united states, and latin america.[ citation needed ] simplified, very-low-cost versions are made for markets in asia, africa, and other less-developed parts of the world.this design places the clothes in a vertically mounted perforated basket that is contained within a water-retaining tub, with a finned water-pumping agitator in the center of the bottom of the basket. clothes are loaded through the top of the machine, which is usually but not always covered with a hinged door.during the wash cycle, the outer tub is filled with water sufficient to fully immerse and suspend the clothing freely in the basket. the movement of the agitator pushes water outward between the paddles towards the edge of the tub. the water then moves outward, up the sides of the basket, towards the center, and then down towards the agitator to repeat the process, in a circulation pattern similar to the shape of a torus . the agitator direction is periodically reversed, because continuous motion in one direction would just lead to the water spinning around the basket with the agitator rather than the water being pumped in the torus-shaped motion. some washers supplement the water-pumping action of the agitator with a large rotating screw on the shaft above the agitator, to help move water downwards in the center of the basket.in most top-loading washers, if the motor spins in one direction, the gearbox drives the agitator; if the motor spins the other way, the gearbox locks the agitator and spins the basket and agitator together. similarly, if the pump motor rotates one way it recirculates the sudsy water; in the other direction it pumps water from the machine during the spin cycle. because they usually incorporate a gearbox, clutch , crank , etc., top-loading washers are mechanically more complex than front loading machines. an example of the complex mechanisms once used to produce different motions from a single motor is the so-called " wig wag " mechanism, which was used for decades until modern controls rendered it obsolete. the electromechanical components in conventional top-load washers have largely reached maturity, and there is a trend towards simpler mechanical components but greater complexity in electronic controllers.the top-loader's spin cycle between washing and rinsing allows an extremely simple fabric softener dispenser, which operates passively through centrifugal force and gravity . the same objective must be accomplished by a solenoid valve on a front loader. another advantage to the top loading design is the reliance on gravity to contain the water, rather than potentially trouble-prone or short-lived front door seals. top loaders may require less periodic maintenance, since there is no need to clean a door seal or bellows, although a plastic tub may still require a periodic "maintenance wash" cycle (described below).as with front-loading washers, clothing should not be packed tightly into a top-loading washer. although wet fabric usually fits into a smaller space than dry fabric, a dense wad of fabric can restrict water circulation, resulting in poor soap distribution and incomplete rinsing. extremely overloaded top-loading washers can either jam the motion of the agitator, overloading or damaging the motor or gearbox, or tearing fabrics. extreme overloading can also push fabrics into the small gap between the underside of the agitator and the bottom of the wash basket, resulting in fabrics wrapped around the agitator shaft, possibly requiring agitator removal to unjam.some top-loading machines use mechanisms vert similar to front-loading drum machines, and are described below .arctic be1200a+ is a front loading budget model sold in 2008 with 6 kg load, lcd indicator, 1200 rpmthe front-loading or horizontal-axis clothes washer is the dominant design in europe, the middle east, asia, africa, and much of the rest of the world. in the u.s. and elsewhere, most "high-end" washing machines are of this type. in addition, most commercial and industrial clothes washers around the world are of the horizontal-axis design.this layout mounts the inner basket and outer tub horizontally, and loading is through a door at the front of the machine. the door often but not always contains a transparent window. agitation is supplied by the back-and-forth rotation of the cylinder and by gravity. the clothes are lifted up by paddles on the inside wall of the drum and then dropped. this motion flexes the weave of the fabric and forces water and detergent solution through the clothes load. because the wash action does not require the clothing be freely suspended in water, only enough water is needed to moisten the fabric. because less water is required, front-loaders typically use less soap, and the repeated dropping and folding action of the tumbling can easily produce large amounts of foam or suds.front-loaders control water usage through the surface tension of water, and the capillary wicking action this creates in the fabric weave. a front-loader washer always fills to the same low water level, but a large pile of dry clothing standing in water will soak up the moisture, causing the water level to drop. the washer then refills to maintain the original water level. because it takes time for this water absorption to occur with a motionless pile of fabric, nearly all front-loaders begin the washing process by slowly tumbling the clothing under the stream of water entering and filling the drum, to rapidly saturate the clothes with water.front-loading washers are mechanically simple compared to top-loaders, with the main motor (a universal motor or variable-frequency drive motor) normally being connected to the drum via a grooved pulley belt and large pulley wheel, without the need for a gearbox, clutch or crank. but front-load washers suffer from their own technical problems, due to the drum lying sideways. for example, a top loading washer keeps water inside the tub merely through the force of gravity pulling down on the water, while a front-loader must tightly seal the door shut with a gasket to prevent water dripping onto the floor during the wash cycle. this access door is locked shut during the entire wash cycle, since opening the door with the machine in use could result in water gushing out onto the floor. for front-loaders without viewing windows on the door, it is possible to accidentally pinch fabric between the door and the drum, resulting in tearing and damage to the pinched clothing during tumbling and spinning.nearly all front-loader washers for the consumer market must also use a folded flexible bellows assembly around the door opening, to keep clothing contained inside the basket during the tumbling wash cycle.[ citation needed ] if this bellows assembly were not used, small articles of clothing such as socks could slip out of the wash basket near the door, and fall down the narrow slot between the outer tub and basket, plugging the drain and possibly jamming rotation of the inner basket. retrieving lost items from between the outer tub and inner basket can require complete disassembly of the front of the washer and pulling out the entire inner wash basket. commercial and industrial front-loaders used by businesses (described below) usually do not use the bellows, and instead require all small objects to be placed in a mesh bag to prevent loss near the basket opening.the bellows assembly around the door is a potential source of problems for the consumer front-loader. the bellows has a large number of flexible folds to permit the tub to move separately from the door during the high speed extraction cycle. on many machines, these folds can collect lint, dirt, and moisture, resulting in mold and mildew growth, and a foul odor. some front-loading washer operating instructions say the bellows should be wiped down monthly with a strong bleach solution, while others offer a special "freshening" cycle where the machine is run empty with a strong dosing of bleach. in the past, suggested remedies have included adding vinegar to the laundry detergent, running an empty cycle with bleach every few weeks, wiping the door gasket with a diluted bleach solution every other week, and leaving the front-loading washer door ajar between loads.compared to top-loading washers, clothing can be packed more tightly in a front loader, up to the full drum volume if using a cottons wash cycle. this is because wet cloth usually fits into a smaller space than dry cloth, and front loaders are able to self-regulate the water needed to achieve correct washing and rinsing. extreme overloading of front-loading washers pushes fabrics towards the small gap between the loading door and the front of the wash basket, potentially resulting in fabrics lost between the basket and outer tub, and in severe cases, tearing of clothing and jamming the motion of the basket.there are many variations of these two general themes. top-loading machines in asia use impellers instead of agitators. impellers are similar to agitators except that they do not have the center post extending up in the middle of the wash tub basket.some machines which actually load from the top are otherwise much more similar to front-loading drum machines. they have a drum rotating around a horizontal axis, as a front-loader, but there is no front door; instead there is a liftable lid which provides access to the drum, which has a hatch which can be latched shut. clothes are loaded, the hatch and lid are closed, and the machine operates and spins just like a front-loader. these machines are narrower but usually taller than front-loaders, usually have a lower capacity, and are intended for use where only a narrow space is available, as is sometimes the case in europe. they have incidental advantages: they can be loaded without bending down; they do not require a perishable rubber bellows seal; and instead of the drum having a single bearing on one side, it has a pair of symmetrical bearings, one on each side, avoiding asymmetrical bearing loading and potentially increasing life.there are also combo washer dryer machines that combine washing cycles and a full drying cycle in the same drum, eliminating the need to transfer wet clothes from a washer to a dryer machine. in principle, these machines are convenient for overnight cleaning (the combined cycle is considerably longer), but the effective capacity for cleaning larger batches of laundry is drastically reduced. the drying process tends to use much more energy than using two separate devices, because a combo washer dryer not only must dry the clothing, but also needs to dry out the wash chamber itself. these machines are used more in europe, because they can be fitted into small spaces, and many can be operated without dedicated utility connections.true front-loaders, and top-loading machines with horizontal-axis drum as described above, can be compared with top-loaders on a number of aspects:efficient cleaning: front-loaders usually use less energy, water, and detergent compared to the best top-loaders. [26] "high efficiency" washers use 20% to 60% of the detergent, water and energy of "standard" washers. they usually take somewhat longer (20–110 minutes) to wash a load, but are often computer controlled with additional sensors, to adapt the wash cycle to the needs of each load. as this technology improves, the human interface will also improve, to make it easier to understand and control the many different cleaning options.[ citation needed ]water usage: front-loaders usually use less water than top-loading residential clothes washers. estimates are that front-loaders use from one third [27] to one half [28] as much water as top-loaders.spin-dry effectiveness: front-loaders (and european horizontal axis top loaders) offer much higher maximum spin speeds of up to 2000  rpm , although home machines tend to be in the 1000 to 1400 rpm range, while top-loaders (with agitators) do not exceed 1140 rpm. high-efficiency top-loaders with a wash plate (instead of an agitator) can spin up to 1100 rpm, as their center of gravity is lower. higher spin speeds remove much more residual water, making clothes dry faster. this also reduces time and energy if clothes are dried in a clothes dryer .[ citation needed ]cycle length: top-loaders have tended to have shorter cycle times, in part because their design has traditionally emphasized simplicity and speed of operation more than resource conservation.wear and abrasion: top-loaders require an agitator or impeller mechanism to force enough water through clothes to clean them effectively, which greatly increases mechanical wear and tear on fabrics. front-loaders use paddles in the drum to repeatedly pick up and drop clothes into water for cleaning; this gentler action causes less wear. the amount of clothes wear can be roughly gauged by the amount of accumulation in a clothes dryer lint filter, since the lint largely consists of stray fibers detached from textiles during washing and drying.difficult items: top-loaders may have trouble cleaning large items, such as sleeping bags or pillows , which tend to float on top of the wash water rather than circulate within it. in addition, vigorous top-loader agitator motions may damage delicate fabrics. [29]noise: front-loaders tend to operate more quietly than top-loaders because the door seal helps contain noise, and because there is less of a tendency to imbalance. top-loaders usually need a mechanical transmission , which can generate more noise than the rubber belt or direct drive found in most front loaders.compactness: true front-loading machines may be installed underneath counter-height work surfaces. a front-loading washing machine, in a fully fitted kitchen, may even be disguised as a kitchen cabinet . these models can also be convenient in homes with limited floor area, since the clothes dryer may be installed directly above the washer ("stacked" configuration).water leakage: top-loading machines are less prone to leakage, because simple gravity can reliably keep water from spilling out the loading door on top. true front-loading machines require a flexible seal or gasket on the front door, and the front door must be locked during operation to prevent opening, lest large amounts of water spill out. this seal may leak and require replacement. however, many current front-loaders use so little water that they can be stopped mid-cycle for addition or removal of laundry, while keeping the water level in the horizontal tub below the door level. best practice installations of either type of machine will include a floor drain or an overflow catch tray with a drain connection, since neither design is immune to leakage or a solenoid valve getting stuck in the open position.maintenance and reliability: top-loading washers are more tolerant of maintenance neglect, and may not need a regular "freshening" cycle to clean door seals and bellows. during the spin cycle, a top-loading tub is free to move about inside the cabinet of the machine, using only a lip around the top of the inner basket and outer tub to keep the spinning water and clothing from spraying out over the edge. therefore, the potentially problematic door-sealing and door-locking mechanisms used by true front-loaders are not needed. on the other hand, top-loaders use mechanical gearboxes that are more vulnerable to wear than simpler front-load motor drives.accessibility and ergonomics: front-loaders are more convenient for very short people and those with paraplegia , as the controls are front-mounted and the horizontal drum eliminates the need for standing or climbing. for people who are not unusually short, top-loaders may be easier to load and unload, since reaching into the tub does not require stooping. risers, also referred to as pedestals, often with storage drawers underneath, can be used to raise the door of a true front-loader closer to the user's level.initial cost: in countries where top-loaders are popular, front-loaders tend to be more expensive to buy than top-loaders, though their lower operating costs can ultimately lead to lower total cost of ownership , especially if energy, detergent, or water are expensive. on the other hand, in countries with a large front-loader user base, top-loaders are usually seen as alternatives and more expensive than basic off-brand front loaders, although without many differences in total cost of ownership apart from design-originated ones. in addition, manufacturers have tended to include more advanced features such as internal water heating, automatic dirt sensors, and high-speed emptying on front-loaders, although some of these features could be implemented on top-loaders.german laundry centrifuge extracts water from laundry. the advent of automatic washing machines with spin cycles made such specialized appliances largely obsolete by the 1970s.the earliest washing machines simply carried out a washing action when loaded with clothes and soap, filled with hot water, and started. over time machines became more and more automated, first with very complex electromechanical controllers, then fully electronic controllers; users put clothes into the machine, select a suitable program via a switch, start the machine, and come back to remove clean and slightly damp clothes at the end of the cycle. the controller starts and stops many different processes including pumps and valves to fill and empty the drum with water, heating, and rotating at different speeds, with different combinations of settings for different fabrics.many front loading machines have internal electrical heating elements to heat the wash water, to near boiling if desired. the rate of chemical cleaning action of the detergent and other laundry chemicals increases greatly with temperature, in accordance with the arrhenius equation . washing machines with internal heaters can use special detergents formulated to release different chemical ingredients at different temperatures, allowing different type of stains and soils to be cleaned from the clothes as the wash water is heated up by the electrical heater.however, higher-temperature washing uses more energy, and many fabrics and elastics are damaged at higher temperatures. temperatures exceeding 40 °c have the undesirable effect of inactivating the enzymes when using biological detergent .many machines are cold-fill, connected to cold water only, which they heat to operating temperature . where water can be heated more cheaply or with less carbon dioxide emission than by electricity, cold-fill operation is inefficient.front loaders need to use low-sudsing detergents because the tumbling action of the drum folds air into the clothes load that can cause over-sudsing and overflows. however, due to efficient use of water and detergent, the sudsing issue with front-loaders can be controlled by simply using less detergent, without lessening cleaning action.washing machines perform several rinses after the main wash to remove most of the detergent. modern washing machines use less water due to environmental concerns; however, this has led to the problem of poor rinsing on many washing machines on the market, [30] which can be a problem to people who are sensitive to detergents. the allergy uk website suggests re-running the rinse cycle, or rerunning the entire wash cycle without detergent. [31] in response to complaints, many washing machines allow the user to select additional rinse cycles, at the expense of higher water usage and longer cycle time.higher spin speeds remove more water, leading to faster drying. if a heated clothes-drier is used after the wash and spin, energy use is reduced if more water has been removed from clothes. however, faster spinning can crease clothes more. also, mechanical wear on bearings increases rapidly with rotational speed, reducing life. early machines would spin at only 300 rpm and, because of lack of any mechanical suspension, would often shake and vibrate.in 1976, most front loading washing machines spun at around 700 rpm, or less.separate spin-driers, without washing functionality, are available for specialized applications. for example, a small high-speed centrifuge machine may be provided in locker rooms of communal swimming pools to allow wet swimsuits to be substantially dried to a slightly damp condition after daily use.many home washing machines use a plastic, rather than metal, outer shell to contain the wash water; residue can build up on the plastic tub over time. some manufacturers advise users to perform a regular maintenance or "freshening" wash to clean the inside of the washing machine of any mold , bacteria , encrusted detergent, and unspecified dirt more effectively than with a normal wash.a maintenance wash is performed without any laundry, on the hottest wash program, [32] adding substances such as white vinegar , 100 grams of citric acid , a detergent with bleaching properties, or a proprietary washing machine cleaner. the first injection of water goes into the sump [33] so the machine can be allowed to fill for about 30 seconds before adding cleaning substances.capacity and cost are both considerations when purchasing a washing machine. all else being equal, a machine of higher capacity will cost more to buy, but will be more convenient if large amounts of laundry must be cleaned. fewer runs of a machine of larger capacity may have lower running costs and better energy and water efficiency than frequent use of a smaller machine, particularly for large families. running a large machine with small loads is wasteful.for many years energy and water efficiency were not regulated, and little attention was paid to them. from the last part of the twentieth century increasing attention was paid to efficiency, with regulations enforcing some standards, and efficiency being a selling point, both to save on running costs and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with energy generation, and waste of water.as energy and water efficiency were regulated, and a selling point, but effectiveness of rinsing was not, manufacturers tended to reduce the degree of rinsing after washing, saving water and motor energy. this had the side-effect of leaving more detergent residue in clothes. insufficient rinsing can leave enough detergent in clothes to affect people with allergies or sensitivity. [30]washing machines display an eu energy label with grades for energy efficiency, washing performance and spin efficiency. grades for energy efficiency run from a+++ to g (best to worst), providing a simple method for judging running costs. washing performance and spin efficiency are graded in the range a to g. however, all machines for sale must have washing performance a, such that manufacturers cannot compromise washing performance in order to improve the energy efficiency. this labeling has had the desired effect of driving customers toward more efficient washing machines and away from less efficient ones.top-loading and front-loading clothes washers are covered by a single federal standard regulating energy consumption. the old federal standard applicable until january 1, 2011 included no restriction on water consumption; washer manufacturers faced no legal restriction on how much unheated rinse water could be used. [34] energy consumption for clothes washers is quantified using the energy factor .but after new mandatory federal standards were introduced, many us washers were manufactured to be more energy- and water-efficient than required by the federal standard, or even certified by the more stringent energy star standard. [35] manufacturers were found to be motivated to exceed mandatory standards by a program of direct-to-manufacturer tax credits. [36]
 civil asset forfeiture has become a growing problem with law enforcement agencies. note that i do not say it has become a growing problem for law enforcement agencies; they love it. often the cash and other valuables seized go to the agencies that do the seizing. the potential for abuse is obvious, and as with so many obvious things, it has been acted upon . essentially, the government turned to mugging people who made the mistake of carrying a lot of cash around. the program has its origin in an understandable desire for better law enforcement tools to combat drug gangs and other forms of violent organized crime. but as nietsche said, we must beware that in fighting monsters, we do not ourselves become monsters. and there is some good news for us monster-haters: eric holder has decided to radically curtail a federal revenue-sharing program that gave local law enforcement agencies incentives to seize assets whenever they could. agencies will still be able to perform civil asset forfeitures under state law, but that money often goes to the general fund rather than the agencies themselves, which lessens the incentives for indiscriminate seizures. this move won't fix all the problems with asset forfeiture statutes, but at least it's a good start.libertarians like to say that the nearest thing to immortality on this earth is a government program. programs change their names or get absorbed into bigger programs, but they rarely just die. i'm pleased to see that there's an exception to this rule, and it's one that really matters. we're all a little bit more free today.to contact the author on this story:to contact the editor on this story:megan mcardle is a bloomberg view columnist who writes on economics, business and public policy. she is the author of "the up side of down." read more.
 by joseph stromberg on october 14, 2014sports play an outsized role in american life. last year, the sports industry took in an estimated  $57 billion , and in an era when television audiences are splintering and fewer of us watch live tv than ever before, a  full third of the country still tuned in to watch the super bowl. spectator sports have ballooned from a mere form of entertainment into one of the few shared experiences that cut across us regions, classes, and demographics. here are 40 maps and charts that explain sports in america — the passes, the shots, the players, the teams, the dollars, and, of course, the fans.when it comes to sports, american exceptionalism rules. most of the world is filled, first and foremost, with soccer fans. but soccer is a distant fourth in the hierarchy of us sports. the most popular sport in the united states is a strange, complex game played pretty much nowhere else on earth: american football. number two and three (baseball and basketball, respectively) are relatively niche sports on a global level, getting serious attention in just a few countries. meanwhile, few americans even know the rules for cricket — a sport that, by most measures, is the second most popular in the world.america's pro sports teams represent cities. but the players on them typically have no real ties to those cities — they were just drafted or signed to the teams playing in them. these maps show where players in each league actually come from on a per capita basis. the deep south leads the country in producing nfl and mlb players, while the border states of minnesota, michigan, and new hampshire are predictably home to the most hockey players. on the whole, louisiana — a hotbed of football, basketball, and baseball talent — produces the highest number of pros per capita, while utah produces the fewest.another way of seeing the regional imbalance in the production of athletes in different leagues is this fascinating animated gif created by slate’s ben blatt . much like the maps that track the country’s shifting population center over time (in other words, the point at which you have equal populations on all sides), this map shows the population centers for each of the four major sports. hockey’s hugs the canadian border for pretty much the entire 20th century, while the other three sports’ dive south and west — farther south and west than the us population center, which is in missouri — showing the disproportionate number of pros born in the deep south and west coast.what is america's most popular sport?since 1937, gallup has regularly asked americans which sport is their favorite to watch. this simple chart shows the most profound shift that’s occurred in the us sporting landscape so far. there was a time when we were a baseball country. now, we’re a football country — a place where nearly two thirds of all americans say they regularly watch football, and regular season games get bigger tv ratings than game 7 of the world series. basketball, in fact, has entered a tie with baseball for second place since the mid-nineties. gallup data shows roughly when this shift from baseball to football as the country's favorite sport occurred: the late 1960s. perhaps not coincidentally, this is the era when the super bowl was established, the afl and nfl merged, and the modern nfl as we know it began.the 32-team, $10 billion beast that is the nfl began in 1920 as a humble collection of 14 midwestern teams based in cities like akron, ohio, and muncie, indiana. over the years, 12 of those teams folded and the other two ultimately moved, but the league eventually gave rise to a stable, profitable league with a national geographic base in larger cities. this animated map — which shows logo changes, expansion, and relocations — begins in 1950, shortly before the rival american football league formed and eventually forced the nfl to merge with it in 1966. in the subsequent years, eight more teams were added, ultimately producing the sports juggernaut that we know and love ( and hate ) today. note: the map incorrectly shows the cardinals moving directly from chicago to arizona in 1960, instead of spending 27 years in between in st. louis.all nfl teams are not created equal. this map, which facebook built based on likes, shows the areas dominated by fans of each team. some teams have vast, scattered regions of fans (the dallas cowboys and pittsburgh steelers), others have fanbases that merely fill their state’s borders (the indianapolis colts and atlanta falcons), and fans of some relatively new teams still haven’t really spread beyond their metro regions (the houston texans and jacksonville jaguars). zoom in and you’ll see some surprising trends — like how the jets dominate exactly one county (nassau) in an otherwise giants-centric new york region.the biggest shift in the evolution of the nfl has been the modern-day emphasis on passing instead of running. this map from grantland shows all 18,104 passes thrown during the 2013 season. as you might expect, a large number of passes (about 40 percent) are thrown within five yards of the line of scrimmage, and these have the highest completion rate (about 74 percent). but the map also shows the significant number of passes thrown to the sidelines, and the increased percentage of passes completed over the middle. check out grantland’s article to see each quarterback’s individual data.the second-biggest shift in the evolution of the nfl is even more tangible: players have gotten truly enormous. in the early days, many players were large but still within the range of normal humans — around 200 pounds, and 6 feet tall. today, the average player is now around 250 pounds, and 6’2" or so. the blob that forms at the top-right around the year 1995 or so is made up of today’s offensive linemen and defensive tackles, who are virtually all above 300 pounds and average about 6’4".given the nfl’s huge popularity, there’s something very surprising about the average three-hour nfl game: very little of it involves people playing football. partly because of the basic design of football (quick plays interspersed with lots of standing around) and the economics of tv broadcasts (commercial breaks and on-screen promotions jammed in after every score, punt, and kickoff), only 8.3 percent of the game i recently charted was actual gameplay. most of the telecast either showed players standing around between plays (35.5 percent), commercials (24.5 percent), or replays (10.7 percent).if there’s anything that can shake the nfl from its spot at the top of the sports pyramid, it’s the issue of head trauma — and, in particular, an alarming disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (cte) . the condition, caused by multiple blows to the head over time, causes depression, dementia, and other symptoms, and can only be diagnosed after death, when scientists search for a buildup of a protein called tau (shown on the right side of the image, in a whole brain slice at top and a microscopic slide at bottom). at latest count, 76 of 79 deceased players surveyed have been found to have cte, with many dying prematurely due to suicide.major league baseball goes much farther back than the nfl, with some franchises (like the chicago cubs) tracing their history all the way back to the 1870s-era national association of professional base ball players, which later became the national league. in 1901, it was joined by the nascent american league, forming the major leagues that we know today. between 1903 and 1953, the two eight-team, mainly northeastern leagues remained fairly stable. but starting in the 1950s, a wave of relocation — defined largely by westward movement — began. keyed by the 1958 movement of the dodgers and giants to california, the major leagues eventually became truly national, with 29 teams spread across the country (and one in canada).this map, showing which team has the most facebook likes in each county in the country, reveals in terms that there are essentially two types of franchises — the yankees and red sox, and then everyone else. while most teams have fan bases located roughly in their own geographic area, the yankees and red sox dominate all sorts of random counties with no local teams, in states like utah, louisiana, montana, and hawaii. most other teams have pockets of fans in their home regions, with a few (the rangers and braves) extending out surprisingly far. meanwhile, there are three teams that dominate exactly zero us counties: the oakland athletics and new york mets (who both share markets with larger, older teams) and the toronto blue jays (who play in canada).baseball is often thought of as a hierarchical class system, with poor, small-market teams (like the pirates and royals) as perennial losers, and the aforementioned large-market yankees and red sox dominating the playing field because they can simply buy talent. but although this may be the general rule, there are plenty of exceptions. this chart — which compares each team’s 2014 record and payroll — shows that a number of big-spending clubs failed to crack the postseason (the yankees and phillies, among others) while a number of frugal teams did (like the a’s and royals).although all but one major league baseball club is based in the us, a significant proportion of players are born elsewhere — about 27 percent, more than the nfl or the nba. this is one trend that has defined baseball’s modern era, with increasing numbers of hispanic players coming to play in the us over the last few decades. the dominican republic and venezuela lead the way with 10 and 7 percent of mlb players, respectively.for fans in major league cities, it’s easy to forget that big-league clubs are only a small percentage of the pro baseball teams across the country. this map shows the top 111 of the 350 minor league teams in existence, in terms of attendance — all the minor league clubs that draw over 3,000 fans per game. most of them are minor-league affiliates for mlb teams. they mainly serve as a farm system for younger players to move up through as they attempt to make it in the majors — but also as a way for veterans who can’t quite make the big leagues to entertain fans in cities like toledo, omaha, and buffalo.pro pitchers throw a wide variety of pitches that dive, dart, and curve in different directions, but all of them can be explained by the same basic rule of physics called the magnus effect. based on the grip and throwing motion a pitcher uses, different sorts of spin will be imparted on the ball after it’s thrown. with a standard curveball (shown in the diagram), the ball’s forward spin — augmented by its 108 raised stitches — slightly compresses the air above it, creating a zone of lower air pressure below and higher pressure above. this causes it to dive as it travels the 60 feet and 6 inches to home plate. a standard fastball does the opposite: backspin compresses air under the ball, causing it to drop less than expected.this map, generated based on about 24,000 votes on the website commoncensus.org, isn’t perfect — among other things, it was made before the supersonics moved to oklahoma city to become the thunder — but it gives you a rough idea of the nba fan bases across the us. one interesting observation is that the lakers are the yankees of basketball — the default team that people in places like vegas, omaha, and sioux falls root for, rather than the nba team closest to their city. a more recent new york times fan map shows that the miami heat have also taken on that role, at least across the southeast. whether the heat retain that popularity after losing lebron james, however, is uncertain.like the other leagues, the nba has seen a significant amount of relocation in its 68-year history. more often than in other leagues, though, teams hanging on to their names when moving have made for some absurd results. while the dallas stars and indianapolis colts don’t sound all that strange, the memphis (previously vancouver) grizzlies and los angeles (née minneapolis) lakers don't make a ton of sense — there are no grizzlies in memphis, and relatively few lakes in los angeles. of course, the winner in the absurd team name competition is the jazz, the nba team that moved from melodious new orleans to buttoned-down salt lake city.more than any other league, the nba has embraced big data. in every arena, a series of cameras rely on algorithms to automatically track every player — as well as the ball — throughout the entire game. coaches love this data because it helps them make smarter decisions. and for fans, it can provide some arresting visuals that define the game in new terms. this map of a ball’s path throughout an entire game, for instance, reveals the chaotic, unpredictable movement that occurs, as well as the shots and passes that get repeated over and over — like the passes around the perimeter, and the foul shot, followed by the ball getting returned to the shooter.the nba’s age of analytics has also revealed which types of shots are most often made (and missed), leading to an increasing focus on two shots in particular — layups and three-point shots. this map, showing the expected number of points per attempt from each spot on the floor (color), as well as the number of shots taken from each spot (size of hexagon) for an entire season, reveals the huge importance of three-pointers and layups. the reason is simple: layups are made at a higher rate than any other shot, and threes are worth more — so even if they’re successful slightly less often, they end up being worth it. it turns out that threes from the corner are especially valuable, because the shape of the three-point arc means they can be taken a little bit closer in to the basket.conventionally, there are five different positions on a basketball team: point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center. but in 2012, stanford undergraduate and data enthusiast muthu alagappan decided to remap the positions of nba players based on seven key statistics (rates of point, rebound, block, assist, steal, foul, and turnover production per minute played). he found that the five traditional positions oversimplify and group very different players together. instead, he proposed a new set of 13 positions (including "paint protector" and "role player") to describe the 400-plus players in the nba much more accurately. several nba teams have now reached out to alagappan to use his model in building their own rosters.in 1997, the nba founded the wnba — a high-profile women’s basketball league in which teams would share arenas, owners, and (oftentimes) color schemes with nba teams. despite some struggles over the years — nine of 18 total teams (shown as white dots on the map) either folded or moved — the wnba has since grown steadily into a 12-team league with steadily increasing attendance and tv ratings. six of those teams are now independently owned, and four play in their own arenas. in 2014, the phoenix mercury won the championship, their third title.the national hockey league has a history that’s a bit different from the other major sports leagues’: after being founded in 1917 and going through the conventional period of new teams starting up and promptly folding, the nhl stuck at exactly six teams (the "original six") for a remarkable 25 years. in the late 60s and 70s, the league began quickly expanding again, giving franchises to the west coast, western canada, the midwest, and even the south. some of these teams folded or moved, but combined with the absorption of four teams from the folded world hockey association, this brought the league up to 21 teams, a number that held steady until another wave of southward expansion in the 1990s.the nhl was once a league of mostly american teams filled with canadian players: in the early 1960s, as much as 98 percent were born in canada. that is no longer the case. the share of canadian-born players has fallen over the past few decades as the game has spread, and the current percent of players born in the us (23.8 percent) is at an all-time high. additionally, the nhl has more players from outside north america (25.7 percent) than any major us league apart from the mlb. sweden leads the way with 7.9 percent of players — and stockholm, remarkably, is the hometown of just as many (11) as montreal.map all mentions of "hockey" on twitter during a random period during the nhl season — the map shows mentions during december 2013 — and one thing stands out: despite the nhl’s foremost efforts, fans still cluster along the canadian border. the blue dots show individual tweets, while the redder colors show the percentage of all tweets, but both reveal a much higher level of interest in canada, as well as northern cities like minneapolis, detroit, and boston. the nhl has spread teams across the southern united states, but increased interest is growing more slowly.there are thousands of collegiate sport programs in the united states. one thing unites the vast majority of them: they do not have original team names. this enormous chart by pop chart lab is a detailed taxonomy of the most common names in existence — sorting the many birds (there are 60 eagle teams alone), the various mammals (lions, tigers, and bears, yes, but also stags, camels, and seawolves), and the 24 colleges that simply have colors as their mascots. fun fact: there are hundreds of animal team names, but only three schools have named theirs after plants. go sycamores!this deadspin map reveals an absurd truth about the bloated college sports system in the us: in most states, the highest-paid public employee is either a football or basketball coach. though most of the money for these huge salaries comes from team revenues, not tax dollars, these big-time college football and basketball programs as a whole are still usually a net financial negative for universities. in fact, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe these programs as essentially professional sports franchises that happen to be connected to (and supported by) a public university.when title ix was signed into law in 1972, it banned discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program that receives federal funding. one of the biggest impacts of that law has been in college sports — it directs ncaa schools to offer the same athletic opportunities to female as male students, and as a result, the number of female college athletes has skyrocketed. still, women make up about 53 percent of all students at these schools but only 46 percent of athletes, and their teams continue to receive significantly less funding than men’s.college sports programs are grouped into roughly geographic conferences — and for most of modern sports history, they never moved. there was once a time when the pac-12 was made up of schools on the pacific coast, the big ten was wholly in the midwest, and the acc’s teams all played, naturally, near the atlantic. that time is no longer. over the past decade or so, the major conferences have played a cutthroat game of realignment, robbing each other of schools (and destroying traditional rivalries) only to be robbed in turn the next offseason. this graphic conveys the overwhelming complexity of the changes, but they can be summarized in two words: football and money. in most cases, universities have pulled all their sports teams out of one conference and into another for the purpose of improving their football prospects, and conferences have sought universities based on their ability to help garner bigger tv contracts.this map, compiled by facebook at the start of the 2013 season based on the number of likes for the top 25 teams, shows the areas dominated by fans of each team. much of it is interesting to look at, if not surprising — most large state schools dominate their home states, but don’t go far past their borders. but there are some exceptions. oregon has fans across northern california, rather than stanford, and texas fans can be found all across the west. compare with this more recent new york times map (which also features more schools) to look even more closely at the borders that define rivalries.this admittedly unscientific map — it was created based on survey data collected by a reddit user — still tells us something important about college football: it thrives off a healthy amount of rivalry and hatred. in general, historically dominant teams (like texas, ohio state, michigan, alabama, and florida) are hated in all states that border their schools. in some cases, they're even the most-hated teams in their home states — presumably due to fans of other teams sick of their attention and success.this map was also generated by facebook, at the start of the 2013 ncaa tournament, and shows the team with the most likes in every county — out of the field of 68 teams in the bracket. not surprisingly, the map is dominated by big schools (which are mostly higher-ranked teams), leaving precious few likes for the valparaisos and ionas of the world. facebook also breaks down the country’s favored cinderella teams, and which counties prefer which teams in each part of the bracket.since 1982, the pinnacle of women’s softball has been the women’s college world series. though any ncaa division 1 university can send a team to the tournament, it has been positively dominated by one state: california. ucla alone has won 11 out of 32 championships, and the state as a whole has accounted for way more final four appearances than any other. arizona is next, with arizona university and asu winning a combined 10 titles. but recently, the balance of power has shifted south, with florida and alabama winning titles in the last three years, and the sec as a whole accounting for more final four appearances than the pac-12 over the past seven years.this map shows the number of gold medals (both in the winter and summer olympics) won by inhabitants of each state on a per capita basis. one thing stands out: montana and vermont have produced an unusually high number of them. the reason is mainly geologic: both states have the kind of snow-covered mountains that people can grow up skiing and snowboarding on, allowing them a much greater change to become competitive at the international level.major league soccer is a pretty new league: it was only founded in 1993, in conjunction with the us hosting the world cup. and although it still lags behind football and baseball in per-game attendance, the mls is growing steadily — it now averages just over 18,000 fans per game, slightly more than the nba and nhl. this map shows the locations of the 19 teams in the mls (16 in the us, and 3 in canada), along with a number of minor league teams. in addition, the league will add teams in new york city and orlando for the 2015 season, to be followed by atlanta and miami in future years.americans once dominated international tennis. in the late seventies and early eighties, stars like jimmy connors and chris evert won dozens of grand slam tournaments (that is, the four most prestigious annual tennis events — the us open, the french open, the australian open, and wimbledon). even the semifinals often featured multiple americans at once. but that's changed in the last decade. since the retirement of pete sampras and andre agassi, no american male has climbed the ranks to become a top international player — and no american man has made it to a grand slam semifinal since 2010. the decline in top american women hasn't been quite as severe, but that's mainly due to one family: apart from serena and venus williams, there has been just one grand slam semifinal appearance by an american woman since 2005.nascar’s sprint cup series is the top level of stock car racing in the country. when people talk about nascar, this series is generally what they mean — an annual schedule of 36 races on 23 different tracks that began in 1949. each race, drivers accumulate points based on their finish and the number of laps they lead for, with 16 drivers selected to compete in the final 10 races, called the chase for the championship. traditionally, most races were in the southeast, but nascar has expanded north and west over the past few decades, and now has races in 20 different states.given its place as the most popular form of auto racing in the us, there’s something you may not know about nascar: it’s definitely not the fastest. unlike other types of auto racing (like formula one), nascar is stock car racing, which means it ostensibly uses the same cars that anyone can purchase at a ford dealership. in practice, the cars are now custom-built for racing and just vaguely resemble commercial sedans, but they’re still subject to high levels of restrictions that ensure they don’t go too fast for safety purposes. as a result, top speeds peaked in the 1980s and have been gradually declining since.which sports do high school students play?more so than in any other country, team sports are a huge part of the american high school experience. this chart shows which sports students play the most: the top sports by number of students participating, with men's in green and women's in orange. one reason that football has so many more participants is that the average roster size is so much bigger than other in other sports — it can include as many as a hundred kids, and some schools don't even make cuts. as with college sports, the number of women in high school sports has increased dramatically since title ix, but there are still many more men playing in total: 4.5 million, versus 3.3 million women.the 39 other maps in this feature mainly explain the sports that most of us like to sit on our butts and watch. but this map, which shows 77 million bike rides and 19 million runs taken by people using the app strava, is a reminder that the vast majority of athletes don't get paid to play in front of thousands of people — they do simple things like running, biking, and walking for exercise and pleasure. a proper explanation of sports in america can’t just be about the sports that we watch, but also those that we play ourselves. explore the whole interactive map to see the millions of runs and rides that normal americans (albeit ones that have gps-enabled devices and are inclined to use such an app) have taken over the past few years.
 marc andreessen’s thoughtful “tweetstorm” on secular stagnation raises a number of important questions.  we are in agreement that the essence of the secular stagnation issue is not whether technology has stopped advancing; but rather whether there is a mismatch between desired saving and investment opportunities that results in low equilibrium real interest rates, precipitates financial instability, and may inhibit economic growth. here i respond to his specific questions and criticisms regarding the secular stagnation hypothesis:have there ever been periods of sustained growth with stability from levels of output reasonably close to potential? is there any normal to which we can hope to return?for the roughly 30 years after world war ii, the american economy generated consistent growth in living standards with business cycles of relatively low amplitude.  from the early 1980s until the late 1990s, the economy again preformed quite well, leading many economists to speak of “the great moderation.”  so, we have plenty of experience with satisfactory economic performance to set as an aspiration.is the apparent decline in real interest rates something fundamental or just the removal of a risk premium that was present after the high inflation 1970s?no one can be sure, but note that:(i)                 there is a similar downward trend in real short rates, where inflation uncertainty is not a large issue.(ii)               markets – in the form of 30-year indexed bonds – are now predicting that real rates well below 2 percent will prevail for more than a generation.(iii)             however we understand real interest rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s, inflation was clearly under control by the early 1990s, and indexed bond yields have steadily trended down since then – not just in the united states, but in the world at large.(iv)             i think it is quite plausible and consistent with marc’s picture that equilibrium real rates were roughly constant at around 2 percent until the mid-1990s and have trended downward since that time.is growth in the labor force and in productivity really slowing?with respect to the labor force, the facts are pretty clear.  the growth of the adult population will be much slower over the next 25 years than over the last 25 years.  female labor force participation, after trending upward for a long time, is now trending downward.  and rates of work among teenagers and among men with limited skills were trending down before the recession, and they are now trending down more rapidly.  of course the millennials are, as marc points out, a bigger generation than the boomers. but this does not deny the argument that the growth rate of the labor force is declining.there is plenty of room for debate about measurements of productivity.  it is very likely that official statistics take insufficient account of quality improvements and new products.   whether this phenomenon is increasing with the passage of time is hard to ascertain. television, for example, was a massive change in lifestyles during the 1950s. but the evolution of productivity growth is not essential to the argument about whether equilibrium real interest rates have declined.  this decline could have occurred for many other reasons – including increased foreign saving, lower priced capital goods, slower labor force growth, increased demand for safe assets, more burdens on financial intermediation, and lower rates of inflation.what to make of it all?marc writes “while i am a bull on technological progress, it also seems that much that progress is deflationary in nature, so even rapid tech may not show up in gdp or productivity stats even as it =higher real standards of living”from an economist’s point of view, this paragraph is very hard to understand.  real gdp and productivity statistics are calculated after adjusting for price changes – so they are unaffected by inflation or deflation.  it is also not clear how one would distinguish deflationary and inflationary progress.  the price level reflects the value of goods in terms of money, so it is hard to analyze without thinking about monetary and financial conditions.there is a major puzzle regarding how technological changes, which seem to be associated with so much efficiency and certainly with job displacement, do not show up more visibly in productivity statistics.  but i at least cannot understand in what sense this phenomenon can be attributed to technological progress’ deflationary character.marc and i agree that we are headed into a period of soft real interest rates, where there will be more money available than great deals.  this may, as he suggests, not be all bad; as it will make it easier for risky ideas to get funded.the danger which i think is very real is that the zero lower bound on nominal rates will prevent the attainment of full employment as desired investment falls short of desired saving.  a related danger is that the very low interest rates will encourage risk-taking and asset price inflation in ways that will ultimately give rise to financial instability.the important point to recognize is that – as the experience of the us economy in the 1930s demonstrates – even with rapid innovation it is possible for economic performance to be very poor when finances are not successfully managed.  recent good news about the state of the us economy should not blind us to this reality.
 over the past decade, smartphones have radically changed many aspects of our everyday lives, from banking to shopping to entertainment. medicine is next. with innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. and the end result will be that you, the patient, are about to take center stage for the first time.with the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients. digital avatars won’t replace physicians: you will still be seeing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically altered. (i consult for several companies on many of the issues discussed here.)all of this raises serious issues about hacking and personal privacy that haven’t yet been addressed—and the accuracy of all of these tools needs to be tested. people are also right to worry that the patient-doctor relationship could be eroded, diminishing the human touch in medicine. but the transformation is already under way.let’s say you have a rash that you need examined. today, you can snap a picture of it with your smartphone and download an app to process the image. within minutes, a dedicated computer algorithm can text you your diagnosis. that message could include next steps, such as recommending a topical ointment or a visit to a dermatologist for further assessment.smartphones already can be used to take blood-pressure readings or even do an electrocardiogram. ecg apps have been approved by the u.s. food and drug administration for consumers and validated in many clinical studies. the apps’ data are immediately analyzed, graphed, displayed on-screen updated with new measurements, stored and (at an individual’s discretion) shared. i thought i’d seen it all in my decadeslong practice as a cardiologist, but recently, for the first time, i had an ecg emailed to me by a patient, with the subject line, “i’m in atrial fib, now what do i do?” i immediately knew that the world had changed. the patient’s phone hadn’t just recorded the data; it had interpreted it.now, at any time of day or night, you can demand and get a secure video consultation with a doctor via smartphone at the same cost (about $30-$40) as the typical copay charge through employer health plans. this may seem exotic now, but several large consulting firms—including deloitte and pricewaterhousecoopers—have forecast that virtual physician visits (replacing physical office visits) will soon become the norm. deloitte says that as many as one in six doctor visits were already virtual in 2014. in many u.s. cities, you can even use a mobile app to request a doctor’s house call during which a physician would not only provide a consultation but could even perform procedures, such as suturing a wound, which would have usually required an expensive emergency room visit.with innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. agence france-presse/getty imagesmany surveys show that most consumers want to get information about the actual costs of their care from their doctors but can’t get it. going forward, what things cost will no longer be the great unmentionable hanging over medicine: cost-transparency apps for your smartphone already exist and are quickly being expanded to cover lab tests, scans, procedures, hospitals and doctor visits.even bigger changes are in the works. using wearable wireless sensors, you can use your smartphone to generate your own medical data, including measuring your blood-oxygen and glucose levels, blood pressure and heart rhythm. and if you’re worried that your child may have an ear infection, a smartphone attachment will let you perform an easy eardrum exam that can rapidly diagnose the problem without a trip to the pediatrician.these innovations are just the start. in the next year or two (depending on approval by the fda), many americans will probably start sporting wristwatches that continuously and passively capture their blood pressure and vital signs with every heartbeat, without even having to press a start button.such wristwatch sensors could do enormous good. by having the equivalent of intensive care unit monitoring on your wrist, hospital rooms—those $4,500-a-night risk zones for serious infections and other complications—can be replaced by our bedrooms. as a result, except for icus, operating rooms and emergency rooms, hospitals of the future are likely to be roomless data surveillance centers for remote patient monitoring.other wearable sensor tools now being developed include necklaces that can monitor your heart function and check the amount of fluid in your lungs, contact lenses that can track your glucose levels or your eye pressure (to help manage glaucoma), and head bands that can capture your brain waves. someday, socks and shoes might analyze the human gait to, for instance, tell a parkinson’s patient whether his or her medications are working or tell a caregiver whether an elderly family member is unsteady and at risk of falling.we know that our health is highly influenced by our environment, which has been difficult to quantify. but smartphone sensors under development will be able to monitor your exposure to radiation, air pollution or pesticides in foods. and your medications could soon be digitized to provide you with reminders to ensure that you’ve taken them as prescribed.it isn’t just hospitals’ rooms that are on their way out; so are their labs. smartphone attachments will soon enable you to perform an array of routine lab tests via your phone. blood electrolytes; liver, kidney and thyroid function; analysis of breath, sweat and urine—all can be checked with small fluid samples in little labs that plug directly into smartphones. and you can do your own routine labs at a fraction of the current cost.smartphone selfies are all the rage, but smartphone physical exams are just taking off. the ability to make a definitive diy diagnosis of an ear infection with a phone is just the first step. apps are now being developed to handle all aspects of the eye, the throat and oral cavity, and the lungs and heart. meanwhile, nearly all sophisticated medical imaging devices are being miniaturized: hand-held ultrasound devices are already available, and some medical schools have begun issuing them in the place of the old-school stethoscope. hand-held mri (magnetic resonance imaging) machines aren’t far behind, and engineers at ucla have come up with a smartphone-sized device that can generate x-rays. it won’t be long before you can take a smartphone x-ray selfie if you’re worried that you might have broken a bone.in the next decade, you—under select circumstances, involving high risk or major medical need—will be able to monitor almost every organ system, no matter how difficult to access, as firms start to produce nanosensors to be embedded in your bloodstream. these microscopic sensors within your body can float in blood or be fixed to a microstent in a tiny blood vessel. you’ll then be able to keep your blood under constant surveillance for the first appearance of cancer, autoimmune attacks on vital tissues or the tiny cracks in artery walls that can lead to heart attacks or strokes.with all these new tools, it is no surprise that we’re talking about the possibility of “doctorless” medicine. let’s not get too carried away. you’ll still be seeing doctors—but you’ll have a lot more control.that change is badly overdue. medicine has long been dominated by a priestly class, beginning with imhotep, the first physician (and a priest), in egypt some 4,600 years ago. things had hardly changed two millennia later when hippocrates, widely considered the father of medicine, held that most medical information should be concealed from patients.hippocrates’s paternalistic sentiments survive today in our culture’s pervasive sense that “doctor knows best.” physicians obviously tend to think so, but that sentiment is also powerfully reinforced by the top-down way medical information flows (or clogs). the vast majority of doctors are unwilling to email patients or share their office notes. getting a copy of a report after lab tests or medical scans seems impossible—and don’t even think about getting the results or images themselves. that is all about to change.we’re often told that the u.s. faces a big looming shortage of physicians. the expansion of diy medical capabilities certainly challenges that notion: we may end up not having a physician shortage at all.but one discipline already has an unequivocal dearth of health-care professionals: mental health, which is also the leading cause of disability in the u.s. and many other developed countries. smartphones can be particularly helpful here. new apps aim to quantify your state of mind by a composite of real-time data: tone and inflection of voice, facial expression, breathing pattern, heart rate, galvanic skin response, blood pressure, even the frequency and content of your emails and texts.we may soon take an even bigger step forward, thanks to the unexpected advantages of virtual psychiatrists. recent studies, including a paper by gale lucas and others published last year in the journal of computers in human behavior, have demonstrated that people are more willing to disclose their inner thoughts to a computer avatar or “virtual human” than a real one. with machines working to quantify moods and even offering virtual counseling to help make up for our current profound shortage of mental health professionals, we can glimpse a new approach to improving mental health.
 
rt @emmanuelamber: @balajis http://t.co/dgfio6plfz cc @pmarca 
 jubin mehta |  january 18, 2015 at 10:21 ami live in dharamsala, himachal pradesh and frequent bangalore or any of the metros every month. two places at two different ends of the spectrum in terms of culture, climate, technology penetration and probably everything else. but a short visit back home in vadodara at the onset of 2015 got me thinking about the impact startups have started making.we, at yourstory, started writing about startups back in 2008 when it wasn’t even a word in india. likes of customer facing companies like flipkart , redbus , ola , faaso’s hardly had a recall in mainstream. but after close to seven years, it has become easier to explain what a startup is and why do people start up. here are three glaring examples that show that startups have truly become mainstream and how your mom or aunt’s friend probably know about it when you speak:my mom and aunt can now spell flipkart. their friends had bought a few items like purses with the help of their kids and hence, they also wanted to do it now. the confidence to make an account and buy is still lacking, and so is the capacity to grab concepts like a play store but a small nudge and they’d become ‘internet buyers’.i helped them download the app and now they intuitively scan through products and have placed their first order via cod. but how does all this work? how can they afford to sell at such low rates?imagine you like making cushions and want to sell them. what would you do? make them and sell the cushions in your locality. for this, you’d need to rent a shop, pay the bills, hire employees and all this takes money. now imagine your shop goes online! all of your cushions are on the net, anyone sitting in bangalore or anywhere else can have a look and order one.when anyone orders, you get a mail telling you about the customer. all you need to do is pack and ship! the person who has ordered, pays flipkart and flipkart pays you after taking a small cut.doesn’t this bring down costs? wouldn’t you be able to reach more customers and price your products at a lower rate?well, that should do it (concepts of scale, data, advertising can come in later)during my visit, i was supposed to reach the railway station at 3 am. usually, my dad comes to pick me up but this time, i get a message giving me the driver details! taxiforsure with it’s flat inr 50 campaign had done the trick.autos charge a bomb at nights but this taxi service is doing it at inr 50. this is all my dad had to know. billboards, tv ads, and a reccomendation is what it took to build the confidence. my father is a regular taxiforsure user and recommends them to every other person. but he is baffled about how do they manage it?there are two kinds of people- one who can fathom the power of scale and understand the risk investors take. and there is another section for whom the entire space of scale and technology is a bit too grey. i try to explain with the power of brand-we have been writing about these companies when no one knew them. but there are very few people like us. this has never happened before in india. young people daring to start up something small and trying to make it big. 1000 start and only 1 succeeds but they take the risk. and if the risk pays off, the returns are huge! this taxiforsure, ola and others are such companies.starting from bangalore, mumbai, etc, they have now grown and are also available in places like vadodara. there are investors who believe in them and give them money to grow. (not as goodwill). they ask this company to get 2 lakh users in vadodara and if they do it, they’ll get more money to go in rajkot. get users and build a brand, that is the key.everyone is used to getting flyers from dominos. but faaso’s is a qsr chain (quick service resturant) that is backed by sequoia and started from pune but has now opened up in multiple cities across india. their bet was using technology in the qsr segment and scale rapidly.they have been able to do that by giving capabilities like ordering via a tweet and automated systems for delivery but when it comes to real india, everyone has to take an offline play.faaso’s now has a street army that is going from door to door to explain who they are! yes, my grandparents were listening to the guy who came at our doorstep to explain about faaso’s and the world of wraps. it has been a long ride for faaso’s but it is heartening to see them surviving and trying out all means to grow.some key points that emerge or are implications of the above post:– this post has been purely written from the point of view that startups have truly become mainstream in india and it a very heartening thing for all startup enthusiasts.– 2014 has truly been mobile and people are coming online but lot needs to be done in terms of education. how can concepts like a playstore be made easier to understand? (mobile phone shops charge to download ‘free apps’) how can people be made more comfortable on the internet?– offline can not be neglected atleast for the next decade. startups will have to do tv ads, they will have to hand out flyers, they will have to do events. period.jubin is an old timer at yourstory. deeply entrenched in the indian startup ecosystem, he has written about more than 1000 startups. with an engineering background and a keen interest in data analysis, his passion for writing and entrepreneurship makes him a perfect match for yourstory. he operates from the mountains in dharamshala where he also runs a hackbase. he can be reached on twitter @jub_in and on mail at jubin@yourstory.com
 there has been an uptake of tech incubators/accelerators in the african techosystem™. while i applaud the great work that has been done so far, i am yet to see an incubator on this continent run the way i’d love to do it. rather than just criticise, i’ll use this post to give my own perspectives and suggestions using an example.i have to point out that this is merely postulation and in real life, things hardly turn out the way you postulate.between the incubator and the accelerator.there seems to bit of confusion between what incubators and accelerators are. my own definition is simple: the incubator takes the idea to product/market fit; the accelerator takes it from product/market fit to where it needs to scale.i am talking about running an incubator.the incubator will be pro founder and looking to fund commercial viable businesses.i am not one of those that ridicule mbas. but there seems to be a difference between business and tech head founded incubators. my guess is the tech heads are better placed to empathize with a fellow tech head. while pure business heads are guided solely by numbers.in addition, i see a lot of incubators that view their investor position as being benevolent. they see it like they are doing the entrepreneur a favour. i see it as a partnership at worst and at best, the founders are doing me a favour helping me make money.in reality, we both need ourselves to make money while solving problems.i like the y combinator setup. if i were running an incubator, i’d have a core partnership structure. the partners made up of “specialist generalists” e.g operations, would all have a stake in the incubator and must have contributed to the fund.i am not a fan of incubators/accelerators that stockpile “mentors”. it ends up confusing people. there are many ways to cook soup. what ends up happening is each mentor in a bid to justify their existence insist their way is the best. of what use is a mentor that tells you “what that other guy said is good enough”the partnership will have one primary person that covers an area of expertise. e.g product, finance, technology, design legal and operations. the partnership will not be bigger than 6 people. of course industry experts will be welcome to play an ad hoc mentoring role but it will be after the startups have been selected.more on that in my example to come.we’ll focus on ideas that are relevant to the continent but applicable globally, generate revenue from the very first user and can scale to millions of dollars in revenue with a team of 20 or less and at worst can survive without follow-on funding even if it does not succeed in scaling.founders will be able to apply with their ideas or ours.since we will be focused on incubating, we will be looking for teams that are “complete”. the core tech must be internal and part of the team. same as the core operations (more on that in my example). they must have proven at some point in their past that they have the resilience and focus to execute a project for a long period of time.we will also recruit our founders. the best employees are sought out and not waited on to apply for the job. i believe same applies to founders. i see most incubators putting out application forms and waiting for the applications to roll in.like the ceo of a startup, i as the promoter of the incubator will use applications but will also spend a lot of time trying to recruit founders. many of the best people are already doing something else with their time. that does not in anyway mean that those that apply are not good more like there a lot of great people that will not apply.we’ll look to cap it at 5 teams per set and 2 sets per year.there will be a residential place available for all founders. this may not be a big deal in other climes but here in lagos, having a place where you have 24 hours light is luxury.for the 3-4 months incubation period, every other distraction will be taken care of. at least it will be an offer left for you to take or not depending on circumstance.once of my biggest criticisms of african incubators is that they do not begin with the end in mind. they have this idea of holding on to the startup from the beginning to ipo. i view the startup funding funnel more like an assembly line. before starting, it has to be clear who you want to hand over to and pitch those people before you start. after hand off, you move to the next batch.y combinator’s accelerator program ends with them handing over to venture capitalists and seed investors on demo day. were i to do an incubator, my plan will be to hand over to the accelerators and that means discussing with the likes of yc, techstars and co before i start to know the type of metrics and growth that will get them interested.sometimes, the startup might scale beyond your next planed step. in that case you work and hand them to the vcs. but at worst they have great accelerators to be handed over to.for the above to work, there has to be a clearly defined time scope. if startups think they can stay forever they will work like they have a cushion. like strict and loving parents, they have to know the nest is available for just 4 months. that’s it. it would help them have an urgent mindset. it does not mean after 4 months you kick them out in the rain if they are stuck.off my head i am looking to spend $25-35k per startup for 10% “founder shares”. $15-20k cash and $10-15k for facilities/operational expenses depending on team size. i think it is fair because we’ll be acting as co founders taking practically the same risks as founders.for the funding of such a scheme, we’d will be looking to raise about $2 million that will last over 4 classes (5 startusp per class) and 2 years. a fraction of the money (say $100k) would come from the partners, much more(say $400k) from the promoter i.e me and the rest, from strategic limited partners. e.g venture capital firms and accelerators interested in deal flow and say telco companies interested in not being left behind.raising money from external parties is the hardest part. but then, that’s why we have the finance person in the startup :). also see epilogue.funding a startup that wants to build an on-demand platform for building artisans (painters, plumbers, etc). customers request jobs and the startup gets a trained artisan to do the job and takes a part of the revenue.the team would need to have someone that can build the platform but more importantly, a person that has practical industry experience. say whose parent or self is/was an artisan, or has experience in the industry e.g has worked in a building maintenance company.if we do not see such a person applying we’ll seek them out. maybe someone doing such a business on an analogue scale or sweet talk that person out of their building maintenance job where they do all the work but the owner takes all the upside.i am not saying a founder without such experience cannot learn on the job. i just believe the risks of failure are much higher without practical experience.our work as an incubator is to ensure that at the end of 4 months, there is traction which we’ll define in revenue terms before the class starts.in the first few days, we will work with the founders to define the scope. e.g focus on painters and painting jobs in lagos.as a product person in conjunction with our tech partner (say ope obembe), in two weeks, we can work hands on with the technical guy to get the version one of the platform ready. our operation partner say mark essien (top lad) will work with the operational co founder to work on recruiting 5 painters that will execute the first jobs and maybe a strategy for scaling recruitment and training.everyone will work hand in hand to get the first set of jobs.at the end of the incubation period, we would expect that 30-40 painting jobs must have been done with say 8 new jobs a week coming through and growing weekly. growth is extremely important.that will be the core focus. that is what we will hand over to be accelerated. if per chance it is moving much faster, then we’ll seek higher level of funding or if sustainable, no funding at all.it all depends on circumstance.after selection of such a startup, we’ll seek mentors that have experience in the building maintenance space. say an executive in berger paints or someone that has executed on something similar in a different country like adaora, the co founder of homejoy (no, she’s not igbo) . such people can be a source of finance or important strategic partnerships later onthis differs from the popular model of pooling mentors for the numbers before knowing if their skills will be relevant to the starups selected. although someone that has scaled and exited a web hosting company is cool to have around, that experience is most likely irrelevant in the case of building an artisan on demand company.the above captures the high level of my general idea. while still very theoretical and easier to write than execute, it is the way i’d try to do it if i were doing it.my retirement plan was always to fund and run an incubator after my first exit. it is so much easier for two reasons, i would have the money to kick-start the process and secondly, i would have the authority and trust when speaking and convincing founders, potential investors, partners and most importantly myself.but since that is taking much longer, i’ll brain dump my theory until it’s timeps: do check out callbase , one of the products of the startup where i’m co founder.thanks to ope, banke and mark for feedback.
 by alan kurtz on november 25, 2014edward snowden's leaks of tens of thousands of secret nsa documents, author jeremy duns observes, "may be simultaneously the most significant exposure of illegitimate activities by western intelligence agencies in recent history and the most significant exposure of legitimate ones." this book--the first of its kind--applies overdue skepticism to the telling of that story by the world's media. having examined 290 primary reports published over 18 months based on snowden's leaks, jeremy duns concludes that this coverage has poorly served the public interest.among the problems producing a darker picture of the nsa's activities than the raw material justifies, duns identifies confirmation bias among those privileged few insiders with access to the closely held trove of snowden documents--journalists so tight with their source as to represent a major conflict of interest. as exemplars of searching for and interpreting information not with an open mind but so as to confirm their preconceptions, duns cites laura poitras, whose "bias against the nsa isn't just political, but deeply personal;" her colleague, encryption expert jacob appelbaum, for whom "a large part of the nsa/snowden story is payback against the intelligence agencies who have hounded him and people he knows;" and glenn greenwald, who shared with the other two "a strong assumption going in that the agency would be proved to be corrupt/malign." before they'd ever heard of edward snowden, duns writes, "poitras, appelbaum and greenwald all believed that the united states was, if not a totalitarian state, on the verge of becoming one." small wonder that everything they discerned in snowden's leaks and reported with such delirium certified their paranoia. read more ›comment was this review helpful to you? yes no sending feedback...thank you for your feedback. if this review is inappropriate, please let us know.sorry, we failed to record your vote. please try again
 how to surf the wave of good news and land a new job, expanded role or big raisecompanies are hiring, and in some fields the number of open jobs exceeds the number of qualified or available workers—big opportunities for someone willing to switch careers or acquire new skills. reuters
 caracas jan 6 (reuters) - venezuelan fast-food lovers are mourning the disappearance of mcdonald's golden staple: the french fry.a recent shortage at the u.s. fast food chain comes as socialist venezuela grapples with shortfalls of basic goods ranging from medicines to flour due to strict currency controls that stymie imports.mcdonald's restaurants are coping by replacing the spuds with salad or local fare such as fried yuca or "arepa" corn pancakes - but golden arches fans are none too happy about the new meal."hamburgers don't go with arepas and this salad i accepted doesn't taste of anything," moaned student indira silva, 27, at a fast-food outlet in affluent eastern caracas.two cashiers at separate restaurants said fries had been missing for two weeks and that business had dropped as a result. one said french fry imports had ground to a halt for lack of hard currency.arcos dorados s.a., mcdonald's corp's key operator in latin america, did not reply to queries about whether venezuela's byzantine three-tiered exchange rate system was to blame."there is currently a temporary issue with distribution, which we are trying to resolve," said sonia ruseler, senior director for corporate communications at arcos dorados.a protracted labor dispute at u.s. west coast ports forced mcdonald's to ration fries in japan last year.fries sold at mcdonald's restaurants in latin america are imported from argentina, canada or the united states, according to ruseler.weary venezuelans were quick to blame the country's currency controls, implemented more than a decade ago to stem capital flight and viewed as the root of the current economic crisis."fries are definitely imported and there are no dollars to bring them in," said patricia, whose granddaughter, arantxa, ran off to play when she learned there were no fries on offer."a month ago we came and she did eat, because there were fries," said patricia, who declined to give her last name.
 people follow the development of courses in zurich after the turbulence at the stock exchange on jan. 15, 2015.today the swiss national bank shocked the world when it announced it would remove the cap it had in place to prevent the swiss franc from rising too high against the euro.here's what that means and what it's all about.switzerland has a long reputation for having an incredibly stable financial system (everyone knows about its legendary banks). in 2011, during the scariest times for the euro zone, the country's safe-haven status turned the nation into an island of tranquility. money poured into it from elsewhere in the euro zone as investors sought a safe place to park their cash.of course, with everyone wanting to have their money in switzerland, the franc exploded in value. in early 2010 one franc was less than 0.7 euro. by the middle of 2011 the franc was nearly at parity against the euro, a massive move in a very short period.countries typically don't like it when their currencies zoom like that. the most obvious reason is that it's bad news for domestic exporters, whose goods become less competitive abroad. switzerland is known for its high-value exports, such as watches and pharmaceuticals, so a surging currency isn't helpful. there are other reasons related to financial-system plumbing that create a problem for a country when a huge slug of foreign cash rushes in.so in the summer of 2011, the swiss national bank announced a cap on the exchange rate between the euro and the franc. the euro wouldn't be allowed to weaken below 1.20 against the franc. the bank maintained the cap by printing francs on a regular basis to buy euros in the market to ensure that the currencies wouldn't breach that line. the cap held without a hiccup for more than three years.without any hint that it was coming, the bank removed the cap, causing the franc to soar against other currencies.in a statement, the swiss national bank explained the move . essentially, it says the crisis period of 2011 has passed, but it's clear the euro is headed for further weakness:"the minimum exchange rate was introduced during a period of exceptional overvaluation of the swiss franc and an extremely high level of uncertainty on the financial markets. this exceptional and temporary measure protected the swiss economy from serious harm. while the swiss franc is still high, the overvaluation has decreased as a whole since the introduction of the minimum exchange rate. the economy was able to take advantage of this phase to adjust to the new situation. recently, divergences between the monetary policies of the major currency areas have increased significantly – a trend that is likely to become even more pronounced. the euro has depreciated considerably against the us dollar and this, in turn, has caused the swiss franc to weaken against the us dollar. in these circumstances, the snb concluded that enforcing and maintaining the minimum exchange rate for the swiss franc against the euro is no longer justified."in a note to clients, société générale currency strategist kit juckes explains that the snb came to the conclusion that it didn't make sense for it to keep on an endless path of buying more and more euros just to keep the currency down. and that perhaps the bank felt that all the euros it was accumulating on its ballooning balance sheet were becoming a liability.furthermore, the european central bank is seemingly on the verge of launching its own quantitative easing program, which should put more downward pressure on the euro and further increase the cost of holding the peg.but don't expect the snb to just do nothing now. here's juckes explaining that now we can simply expect them to change tactics (chf is the swiss franc):the snb is not ‘giving up' but rather, changing tack. after allowing the markets to clear, further intervention is likely—but possibly, in usd/chf rather than eur/chf, with added emphasis on the chf trade weighted index. after all, the marginal buyer of swiss luxury goods nowadays is more likely to be in beijing or shanghai than frankfurt or paris. after that, the snb will see what the effect of the new interest rate stance is, after all, such deeply negative rates will have an impact on the appetite of anyone to keep money on deposit in swiss francs. the snb must hope that the eur/chf, after settling at a much lower level initially, then drifts back upwards towards 1.20. a more realistic hope might be that the usd/chf rate gets back above parity later this year.so what does it matter to the world?well, whenever there are gigantic moves in any market, you can expect that a lot of people just lost a ton of money. there are other big ramifications in eastern european countries, where many people have mortgages denominated in francs . those mortgages just got a lot more expensive.this shocker comes at a time when financial markets are experiencing a level of volatility not seen in a while. the collapse in commodities has already caused lots of pain. now there's another out-of-the-blue move to add stress to the system.joe weisenthal is a managing editor at bloomberg digital.
 this post is all about the only thing that matters for a new startup.if you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you.first obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success — some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup — team, product, and market. at any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose.and so you start to wonder — what correlates the most to success — team, product, or market? or, more bluntly, what causes success? and, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what's most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?let's start by defining terms.the caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the ceo, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them. you look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? i focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full of highly successful startups that were staffed primarily by people who had never "done it before".the quality of a startup's product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: how easy is the product to use? how feature rich is it? how fast is it? how extensible is it? how polished is it? how many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?the size of a startup's market is the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product. (let's assume for this discussion that you can make money at scale — that the cost of acquiring a customer isn't higher than the revenue that customer will generate.)some people have been objecting to my classification as follows: "how great can a product be if nobody wants it?" in other words, isn't the quality of a product defined by how appealing it is to lots of customers?no. product quality and market size are completely different.here's the classic scenario: the world's best software application for an operating system nobody runs. just ask any software developer targeting the market for beos, amiga, os/2, or next applications what the difference is between great product and big market.if you ask entrepreneurs or vcs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. this is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn't been built yet, or the market, which hasn't been explored yet.plus, we've all been raised on slogans like "people are our most important asset" — at least in the us, pro-people sentiments permeate our culture, ranging from high school self-esteem programs to the declaration of independence's inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — so the answer that team is the most important feels right.and who wants to take the position that people don't matter?on the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. this is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products. apple and google are the best companies in the industry today because they build the best products. without the product there is no company. just try having a great team and no product, or a great market and no product. what's wrong with you? now let me get back to work on the product.personally, i'll take the third position — i'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.in a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.the market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.the product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. and, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.in short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy.and when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.this is the story of search keyword advertising, and internet auctions, and tcp/ip routers.conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter — you're going to fail.you'll break your pick for years trying to find customers who don't exist for your marvelous product, and your wonderful team will eventually get demoralized and quit, and your startup will die.this is the story of videoconferencing, and workflow software, and micropayments.in honor of andy rachleff , formerly of benchmark capital, who crystallized this formulation for me, let me present rachleff's law of startup success:the #1 company-killer is lack of market.andy puts it this way:when a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.when a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.when a great team meets a great market, something special happens.you can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. market matters most.and neither a stellar team nor a fantastic product will redeem a bad market.well, first question: since team is the thing you have the most control over at the start, and everyone wants to have a great team, what does a great team actually get you?hopefully a great team gets you at least an ok product, and ideally a great product.however, i can name you a bunch of examples of great teams that totally screwed up their products. great products are really, really hard to build.hopefully a great team also gets you a great market — but i can also name you lots of examples of great teams that executed brilliantly against terrible markets and failed. markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are.in my experience, the most frequent case of great team paired with bad product and/or terrible market is the second- or third-time entrepreneur whose first company was a huge success. people get cocky, and slip up. there is one high-profile, highly successful software entrepreneur right now who is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers — because there is virtually no market for what he is building.conversely, i can name you any number of weak teams whose startups were highly successful due to explosively large markets for what they were doing.finally, to quote tim shephard: "a great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product."second question: can't great products sometimes create huge new markets?absolutely. this is a best-case scenario, though.vmware is the most recent company to have done it — vmware's product was so profoundly transformative out of the gate that it catalyzed a whole new movement toward operating system virtualization, which turns out to be a monster market.and of course, in this scenario, it also doesn't really matter how good your team is, as long as the team is good enough to develop the product to the baseline level of quality the market requires and get it fundamentally to market.understand i'm not saying that you should shoot low in terms of quality of team, or that vmware's team was not incredibly strong — it was, and is. i'm saying, bring a product as transformative as vmware's to market and you're going to succeed, full stop. short of that, i wouldn't count on your product creating a new market from scratch.third question: as a startup founder, what should i do about all this?let's introduce rachleff's corollary of startup success:the only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.you can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. the customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.and you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. the customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. you're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. you start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from harvard business school. investment bankers are staking out your house. you could eat free for a year at buck's.lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens.my contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit.carried a step further, i believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this "bpmf") and after product/market fit ("apmf").when you are bpmf, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit.do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.when you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. i'm not suggesting that you do ignore everything else — just that judging from what i've seen in successful startups, you can. whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit — and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the ceo sleeping with the venture capitalist. and the startup is still successful.conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, hr policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier vcs on the board — heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit. ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. people are terrible at understanding causation. but in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit.because, really, what else could it possibly be?[this post obviously raises way more questions than it answers. how exactly do you go about getting to product/market fit if you don't hit it right out of the gate? how do you evaluate markets for size and quality, especially before they're fully formed? what actually makes a product "fit" a market? what role does timing play? how do you know when to change strategy and go after a different market or build a different product? when do you need to change out some or all of your team? and why can't you count on on a great team to build the right product and find the right market? all these topics will be discussed…]this post was published over 7 years ago, in june 2007. there’s now an ebook available of the pmarca blog archives if you would like to read more and download it here .
rt @balajis: the new @genius lets you put http://t.co/fsgrq6baex in front of any url to annotate it:
 add an image, video, or tweet by pasting in the url:add a link like this:show more formatting help (lists, blockquotes, etc)[genius](http://genius.com) is my favorite site, [kanye west's "power"](http://genius.com/kanye-west-power-lyrics) is my favorite song and [from whippin' the bacon rolls to outside whippin' the bacon rolls](1256) is my favorite line  [[kanye west]] auto-links his artist page [[scarface "my block"]] auto-links to the song
 books.google.com - the recent financial crisis had a profound effect on both public and private universities, which faced shrinking endowments, declining charitable contributions, and reductions in government support. universities responded to these stresses in different ways. this volume presents new evidence on the nature...https://books.google.com/books/about/how_the_financial_crisis_and_great_reces.html?id=ykeybqaaqbaj&utm_source=gb-gplus-sharehow the financial crisis and great recession affected higher education
 the national front leader says ‘we are the only ones to solve the problem’ of the country’s islamist threat.following last week’s terror attacks in paris on journalists at the satirical newspaper charlie hebdo and on a kosher supermarket, many western leaders have been reluctant to say the motive was at all religious. french president françois hollande said charlie hebdo had been targeted by “obscurantism,” whatever that is. and...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 48 hours giveaway - win free tickets to "nightcrawler" preview!italian police looks at migrants aboard the ezadeen ship at corigliano harbour after the boat was intercepted by the italian coastguard. photo: epasmugglers who bring migrants to europe by sea appear to have adopted a new, more dangerous tactic: cramming hundreds of them onto a large cargo ship, setting it on an automated course to crash into the coast, and then abandoning the helm. it happened twice last week in the space of three days, and both episodes could have ended in tragedy if the vessels had not been intercepted at sea.in the latest such incident, the cargo ship ezadeen was stopped with about 450 migrants aboard after smugglers sent it speeding toward the coast in rough seas with no one in command. italian authorities lowered engineers and electricians onto the wave-tossed ship by helicopter to secure it, and the icelandic coast guard towed it to the italian port of corigliano late on friday."the use of larger cargo ships is a new trend," said vincent cochetel, the un refugee agency's europe bureau director.children and pregnant women were among the migrants, most of whom were believed to be from war-ravaged syria. the sierra leone-flagged ship apparently set sail from turkey.their requests for asylum will be evaluated; the authorities said.an italian coastguard patrol plane had spotted the 66-metre ezadeen on thursday about 145km east of italy's calabria region and contacted it to see if it needed assistance."there was no crew, and one migrant, a woman, took the call," commander filippo marini of the italian coastguard said. "she said: 'we are alone. please help us. we are in danger.'"two days earlier, the blue sky m, a moldovan-flagged cargo ship carrying about 800 migrants, was abandoned by smugglers who locked the ship on automatic pilot and set it on a collision course for a stretch of italy's southern coast, authorities said.despite strong winds and high waves, coast guard officers were lowered onto the ship's bridge and managed to regain control of the steering about a half-hour before it was due to strike the coast, marini said.in the past few years, there have been increasing cases of smugglers overturning motorised dinghies or fishing boats and then speeding off in motorboats, leaving many migrants to drown. in other cases, they just fled, leaving their passengers to fend for themselves.syrian migrants told italian investigators that their smugglers wore hoods to avoid identification before putting their cargo ship on automatic pilot and abandoning it in choppy mediterranean waters.in november, greek authorities rescued nearly 600 migrants from a 70-metre cargo ship that lost engine power off the greek island of crete. greek authorities arrested 19 of those on board as suspected smugglers. most of the passengers were syrians fleeing war in their homeland and were believed to have been charged us$2,000 to us$8,000 for passage to italy.william spindler, a spokesman for the un agency, said: "the money involved is huge. people are desperate, and they are willing to pay huge amounts of money for the privilege of travelling in these awful conditions and reaching europe, where they hope to find safety and a better life."
 by anna fifield december 30, 2014 follow @annafifieldseoul — clasping his headphones and closing his eyes as he sang into the studio microphone while performing a peppy duet with one of south korea’s hottest actresses, spiky-haired cha kil-yong looked every bit the k-pop star.but cha is not a singer or actor. no, he’s a unique kind of south korean celebrity: a teaching star.and the song he was singing with clara, a korean mega celebrity, in a music video that wouldn’t be out of place on mtv? it was called “sat jackpot!”in this education-obsessed country, cha is a top-ranked math teacher. but he doesn’t teach in a school. he runs an online “hagwon” — or cram school — called sevenedu that focuses entirely on preparing students to take the college entrance exam in mathematics.here, teaching pays: cha said he earned a cool $8 million last year.cha keeps many masks and props in his sevenedu filming studio. (shin woong-jae/for the washington post)“i’m madly in love with math,” said cha, looking the height of trendiness in his crimson shirt and pants and tweed jacket, in his office in gangnam — a wealthy part of seoul famous for its conspicuous consumption and featured in the song “gangnam style.”it’s hard to exaggerate the premium south korea places on education. this is a society in which you have to get into the right kindergarten, so that you can get into the right elementary school, then into the right middle school and high school, and finally into the right college. which, of course, gets you the right job and scores you the right spouse.there’s even a phrase to describe the korean version of a helicopter mother: “chima baram” — literally “skirt wind,” to describe the swish as a mother rushes into the classroom to demand a front-row seat for her child or to question grades.many korean families split and live on opposite sides of the world in pursuit of a better education: the mother and children live in the united states or some other english-speaking country, the better to secure entry to a prestigious university (preferably harvard). the “goose father” continues working in south korea, flying in to visit when he can.all of this combines to make south korea’s equivalent of the sat the most important event in a young person’s life.as such, the vast majority of teenagers here do a double shift at school: they attend normal classes by day but go to hagwons for after-hours study. increasingly, online hagwons are replacing traditional brick-and-mortar cram schools. the hagwons have become a $20 billion industry.this devotion to studying is credited with helping south korea consistently rank at the top of the developed world in reading, math and science, although the latest rankings from the organization for economic cooperation and development also show that korean students come last when asked whether they are happy at school. south korea also has the highest suicide rate in the developed world , which many suggest is related to a high-stress focus on education.some politicians and educators are questioning whether things have gotten out of hand. but even parents opposed to this punishing system find it difficult to opt out — their children complain that they can’t keep up if they don’t go to a hagwon.that’s good news for instructors like cha, who started teaching at a hagwon to pay his way through his phd program.about 300,000 students take his online class at any given time, paying $39 for a 20-hour course (traditional cram schools charge as much as $600 for a course). he teaches them tricks for taking the timed exams, including shortcuts that students can take to solve a problem faster.asked what makes him stand out, cha said: “suppose you give the same ingredients to 100 different chefs. they would make different dishes even though they’re working with the same ingredients. it’s the same with a math class. even though it’s all math and all in korean, you can use different ingredients to come up with different results.”his studio is set up with a green chalkboard and desks, and behind the camera are piles of props — including hippo and batman masks and a gold sequined jacket.“you’re not only teaching a subject, you also have to be a multitalented entertainer,” said cha, declining to give his age and offering only that he’d been working for 20 years.on sat day, he visits schools to offer encouragement to test takers. he also does television ads, endorsing products such as a red ginseng drink meant to boost brain power.kwon kyu-ho, a top-ranked literature teacher, also appears with k-pop stars and has a lucrative side business in celebrity endorsements, lending his name to a chair meant to help people study better.maintaining his position doesn’t require just good lessons. kwon, 33, also gets regular facials and works out, and he said some teachers even have stylists..“i always wanted to be a teacher, but i feel that regular school teaching has its limits. there is a certain way you have to teach,” said kwon, whose lessons appear on the sites etoos and vitaedu. “and, of course, i’m making a lot more money this way.”he wouldn’t disclose how much he earned, only that it was “several millions” of dollars a year. the secret of his success, kwon said, was finding the parts of tests that make most students stumble. he focuses lessons on those problem areas.this style of education has its upsides, he said.“i think one of the benefits of private education is that teachers compete with each other and try to develop higher quality content,” he said. “we have money. we can invest in ways that normal schoolteachers can not.”as president park geun-hye promotes a “creative economy” as the key to taking south korea to the next level in its development, many analysts say the country would do well to take a more creative approach to education.lee ju-ho, who was minister of education until last year, is among them.“all this late-night study could lead to problems in enhancing their other skills, like character, creativity and critical thinking,” he said. “hagwon is all about rote learning and memorization.”lee said all the problems stem from the college admissions procedures, which have been slow in looking beyond test scores to other criteria such as extracurricular activities and personal essays, as is common in many western countries.“we really need to change,” said lee, who is now a professor at the korea development institute’s school of public policy and management.anna fifield is the post’s bureau chief in tokyo, focusing on japan and the koreas. she previously reported for the financial times from washington dc, seoul, sydney, london and from across the middle east.
 price gauges have hovered below the fed's 2 percent goal for much of the economic expansion that began in june 2009. closeprice gauges have hovered below the fed's 2 percent goal for much of the economic... read moreprice gauges have hovered below the fed's 2 percent goal for much of the economic expansion that began in june 2009.economists are slashing u.s. inflation forecasts for 2015 as oil prices tumble. what’s not changing are predictions that the federal reserve will raise its benchmark interest rate anyway, probably around mid-year.“we’re still saying june with risks to september,” said michael gapen, the new york-based chief u.s. economist for barclays plc. the fed “can push rates higher in the middle of the year, even though visually that may look awkward if headline inflation is around zero.”a stronger dollar , slowing global growth and cheaper oil are holding down costs for goods such as televisions and autos. fed policy makers will probably look past that and see an improving labor market that will force employers to offer higher wages. those costs will soon push up the price of such things as rent and restaurant meals, no matter what happens overseas, giving the central bank room to raise interest rates that have been stuck near zero for six years.the personal consumption expenditure, or pce, price index that’s the fed’s preferred measure will be up 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2015 from the same time this year, barclays economists projected on dec. 19. that’s down from a previous forecast of 1.2 percent. the consumer-price index, a separate gauge, is projected to show a small decline in the 12 months through june.fed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge as they pave the way for the central bank’s first interest-rate increase since 2006. closefed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge... read morefed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge as they pave the way for the central bank’s first interest-rate increase since 2006.the fed’s goal is for pce inflation to climb around 2 percent a year.core prices, which exclude food and fuel, will rise 1.7 percent over the same period, according to the analysis by barclays. that compares with a previously estimated 1.9 percent.“low pass-through into core from falling energy prices, and a gradually improving labor market leads to some wage and services inflation” in 2015 that will help assuage any concern the u.s. is catching a disinflation bug, said gapen, a former fed economist.too-low inflation hurts debtors by making it harder to pay off loans. also, the longer central banks undershoot their price targets, the more their ability to deliver stability will be questioned, undermining expectations further and putting even more downward pressure on prices.fed chair janet yellen and her colleagues probably will face a communications challenge as they pave the way for the central bank’s first interest-rate increase since 2006. policy makers have said they believe the plunge in fuel prices will prove temporary, which will be more difficult to substantiate as inflation gauges keep sliding six months from now.energy “is going to be pushing down headline inflation and may even spill over to some extent to core inflation,” yellen said in a dec. 17 news conference after the central bank’s policy meeting. “but at this point, although we indicated we’re monitoring inflation developments carefully, we see these developments as transitory.”an improving economy and labor market will help “inflation to move gradually back toward its objective,” she said.the commerce department reported last week that the core pce price index climbed 1.4 in the year ended in november, which means barclays is still projecting it will move toward the fed’s goal, just take longer to get there.that’s probably enough from central bankers’ perspective to prompt a rate increase, said omair sharif , an economist with newedge usa llc, a new york-based brokerage firm.“it may take three years to get back to 2 percent, but as long as we’re not going back to 1 percent, they seem ok with it,” said sharif.regional fed bank gauges are signaling inflation will be slow to accelerate. the dallas fed’s “ trimmed mean ” index, which eliminates the components in the pce price gauge that show the biggest changes in any month, increased 1.6 percent in november from a year earlier, holding within the 1.6 percent to 1.7 percent range it’s been in since april.including food and fuel, the pce price index rose 1.2 percent in the 12 months ended in november, the smallest gain since march, according to commerce department figures issued last week. the rule of thumb is that it will converge toward the trimmed mean reading over the next 12 months, pointing to a gradual pickup, according to the dallas fed’s report.the dallas measure featured the biggest one-month drop in goods prices excluding food and fuel in data dating back to 1977, according to the report . it was “fairly broad-based” with clothing and footwear, furnishings and household durable equipment, and recreational goods and vehicles all showing price declines of about 10 percent at an annualized rate, senior economist jim dolmas wrote.meanwhile, core services climbed at an annualized 2.4 percent last month, exceeding the 2.2 percent gain over the past year. the increase was paced by gains in the costs of paramedical services, rent and dining out, the report showed.economists at goldman sachs group inc. are among those forecasting core inflation won’t show signs of moving toward the fed’s goal next year as the upward pressure on prices from an improving economy will be more than offset by the impact of the drop in oil and stronger dollar. an appreciating currency makes goods produced by the nation’s trading partners less expensive to u.s. shoppers.the goldman economists maintain that september will be the most likely month for the fed to begin raising rates even as they now project the core pce price index will rise 1.3 percent by next year’s second quarter, down from a prior estimate of 1.5 percent.if it’s lower than 1.5 percent by june, as they predict, and wages show only a modest pickup, then the central bank will probably hold off, jan hatzius , goldman’s new york-based chief economist, wrote in a dec. 26 note. should inflation undershoot even their below-consensus forecast, the fed could wait until 2016, he said.while barclays’s gapen acknowledges a rate liftoff could be delayed, the fed has to make decisions based on where policy makers think the economy and inflation will be in 12 to 18 months, he said. and by june, the jobless rate will already be close to the 5.2 percent to 5.5 percent that fed officials say is consistent with full employment, a sign bigger pay increases are in store.“if you can run the domestic economy hot enough, then you can have services inflation that offsets a weak global backdrop,” said gapen. “what we would be looking for is just broad-based services inflation related to wages.”to contact the reporter on this story: michelle jamrisko in washington at mjamrisko@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: carlos torres at ctorres2@bloomberg.net mark rohnerpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
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 people walk past ecb headquarters in frankfurt in december. the bank is expected to try to boost the economy by buying bonds. reuters
 the author chose to make this story unlisted, which means only people with a link can see it. are you sure you want to share it?there’s a blockchain for that!the code that secures bitcoin could also power an alternate internet. first, though, it has to work.there’s this hopelessly geeky new technology. it’s too hard to understand and use. how could it ever break the mass market? yet developers are excited, venture capital is pouring in, and industry players are taking note. something big might be happening.that is exactly how the web looked back in 1994 — right before it exploded. two decades later, it’s beginning to feel like we might be at a similar liminal moment. our new contender for the next big thing is the blockchain — the baffling yet alluring innovation that underlies the bitcoin digital currency.wait a minute and i’ll explain exactly how the blockchain works. (or at least try.) for now, think of it as a way of transferring a digital message from one party to another, where both parties can count on the integrity of the message, even when they don’t trust, or even know, each other. right now, these messages are mostly virtual cash. but they could be any kind of information.on an internet where your inbox is besieged with spam, your credit card number’s about to be poached, and you can’t possibly remember all your passwords, this could be extremely useful. but it could be even more.there is a contingent on today’s internet—a minority, perhaps, but influential—who believe that the industry took a wrong turn over the past decade. that an internet dominated by a few big companies is an unhealthy one. that the centralized-computing paradigm—of privately owned data silos housed in giant server farms that harvest our personal data in order to sell ads—is one that needs to change.the entrepreneurs, coders and crypto experts leading the blockchain charge — i shall call them blockchainiacs, because they need a name — see this new technology as an antidote, and they are hopped up on dizzying visions of a disrupted future. (one sure sign that this technology has achieved geek-cred critical mass: the tech publisher o’reilly just announced a new conference on the topic.)listen, for instance, to mike hearn, a u.k.-based bitcoin developer who used to work at google and now gives talks imagining a future economy driven by something called the tradenet — a kind of giant automated marketplace, a crypto-secure mashup of yelp, craigslist, uber, and ebay. here’s hearn describing how a young woman in this future might hail a ride:jen goes to her computer [or phone] and says, i’m here, i want to go into the city. and it goes out onto this network and posts a request for bids. and the message that’s posted says, “here i am, here’s where i want to go, give me your best offer.” and all the different taxis out there, they actually start making offers: i can do it for this price, i can do it for that price. behind the scenes, jen’s computer looks at what’s available and figures out what the best offer really is.the car jen hires, in turn, makes deals for road space with other cars, depending on her hurry level. all these cars, of course, drive themselves. but more than that, they’re autonomous business entities — they own themselves. if they prosper, they have “children,” by commissioning more vehicles; if they don’t, hearn says, “they can’t recharge their batteries, and they die.”you will not be shocked to hear that a full-on tradenet is not even remotely visible on the tech horizon, although tiny parts of it may be beginning to emerge. hearn admits tradenet is an “experimental concept” and jokes, “we’ll easily have this nailed, like, 50 years from now.” the key to implementing such a system is, you guessed it, the blockchain—a distributed method of tracking and transferring assets online without need of a trusted third party (such as a bank). today, there is only one blockchain-based system that has been widely used in the field — bitcoin itself. and despite its embrace by enthusiasts for several years, it remains punishingly complex for the uninitiated to use.still, letting yourself get giddily far ahead of reality may be a requirement for participation in the blockchain revolution. some blockchainiacs imagine a relatively modest insurrection—just overturning the global financial system, cutting costs and speeding up commerce, killing off the banks and credit-card giants along the way. others see a broader revolution that also engulfs the entire universe of telecommunications—elbowing out interlopers such as the nsa and facebook, restoring privacy to our communications and autonomy to our interactions. for the hardcore blockchainiacs, even that’s not enough; they expect to dissolve governments, rewire daily life, and pour civil society a whole new foundation made of math.you probably know that bitcoin is a digital-only currency backed not by a commodity like gold, or by a government or central bank, but rather by cryptography. the blockchain is the ingenious scheme that makes bitcoin work. invented by satoshi nakamoto—the mysterious, possibly pseudonymous inventor who whipped up bitcoin and then vanished—it’s a solution to an old game-theory chestnut called the byzantine generals’ problem . say you’ve got a bunch of officers planning an attack, communicating by messenger, and one or more might be traitors; how do the loyal leaders eliminate sabotage and make sure they’re all on the same, correct page?this problem turns out to resemble the challenges of reliably exchanging assets on a network while resisting fraud. solving it is how bitcoin cures the biggest e-money headaches: counterfeiting, double spending, and reliance on an authoritative central server (which can always fail, or turn traitorous).in a world where every computer is a copying machine , if you want computers to store your cash without placing your trust in some institution, then somehow you have to prevent people from going down to their figurative basements and copying that money like any other file. here’s how the blockchain does that.you know what a ledger is, right? debits and credits; who got what from whom, when. think of the blockchain as a shared ledger — one that records every transaction back to the very beginning of bitcoin, or whatever else it is you might be using the blockchain to track. (that initial-transaction moment of creation is known, with a scriptural flourish, as “the genesis block.”) every bitcoin user has a personal copy of the entire blockchain ledger. every time some bitcoin changes hands, the deal is recorded in the blockchain, every copy of which gets a little bit lengthier. each of these additions is verified by cryptographic problem-solvers — the “miners” who are rewarded in bitcoin for their efforts.so: as one leading blockchainiac puts it , the blockchain is a ledger that anyone can add things to but no one can remove anything from. in other words, when you’re using a blockchain, every new transaction carries with it an unforgeable record of the entire history of the currency and all previous transactions — like a kind of financial dna. crazy, huh?to make sense of all this, you have to distinguish carefully between bitcoin and the blockchain (an effort that, i fear, will prove as futile as trying to differentiate between the internet and the web). you can — as has been widely suggested — think of bitcoin as a single application, the blockchain as the whole platform. bitcoin is a browser, or email; the blockchain is the underlying protocol, like http or tcp/ip. (for a fuller explanation of how it all works, this post is a good place to begin.)at root, the blockchain is all about replacing the servers that power today’s online world with computing power and storage that we all share. every network requires what programmers call a “single source of truth” — the authority that says, “this is real,” “this user is who she claims to be,” “this transaction occurred.” to date, we have depended on servers run by corporations and governments to provide our single sources of truth. even the internet itself uses a handful of root servers to make the domain-name system work.the blockchain turns the entire network into its source of truth. it’s a mechanism for us to collectively confer legitimacy on one another. that’s why it appeals to the same people who fell in love with the internet and the web 20 years ago: no individual or company owns it, and anyone can participate in it.blockchainiacs expect that this innovation will detonate a big bang of new, secure, decentralized services and markets — not replacing today’s internet but extending its reach and capabilities. critics , of whom there are multitudes, argue that it could usher in an ayn-randian nightmare of inequality and property rights uber alles. the deflationary ideology encoded in the design of projects like bitcoin — which permanently caps the money supply — makes progressive economists gag. no need to get too worked up, however; technical skeptics predict that the technology will collapse in a heap of impracticality long before we get anywhere close to these dire futures, anyway.but let’s just say, for now — for fun! — that bitcoin doesn’t fall prey to hordes of black-hat hackers. or prove to have some fatal mathematical flaw at its cryptographic heart. or run afoul of the governments of the world as they protect their rights of coinage.let’s say the blockchain becomes the latest bengali typhoon to reshape our lives. what could we look forward to in a blockchain world? what might we actually do there?when pressed, proponents list ideas such as “fraud-free voting systems, digital rights management systems, new types of air miles or freebies, and festival coins for buying drinks.” but there are many competing versions of a blockchained future. here are three scenarios, in order of escalating unlikelihood, for the triumph of the blockchainiacs — along with the projects and companies that are trying to make them real.in the nearest term, blockchain developers have trained their sights on the finance industry. and why not? since the banking crisis of 2007–8, it is widely detested, and its fat margins are tempting targets.yet we need not limit ourselves to plain old digital cash. the natural next steps are bitcoin-like stocks and bonds, and even digital derivatives. of course the conventional versions of these financial instruments are already at least partially digital today; we track them and buy and sell them online. what difference does a blockchain make? it renders transactions unique and accountable — and that could let us remove their remaining tethers to our existing terrestrial financial system.who would want that? plenty of people, judging by the bubbling startup scene surrounding these ideas. what some might see as just the latest scheme to make the financial system even more complex and impossible for normal people to understand, others view as our best hope to wrest power from too-big-to-fail banks — and to claw back the two or three percent tax visa and mastercard levy on every transaction they process. this is why there’s so much talk of the blockchain as a “ napster for finance ,” humbling the big financial institutions the way digital music has beggared music publishers.in this brave new financial world, the blockchain backs not only currency but agreements to do things with that e-cash — “smart contracts” that enforce themselves, by performing transactions when certain conditions are met, or through hardware interfaces to internet-of-things style devices. the most-repeated example of this is a car that “knows” when you miss a payment on it and — oh joy! — won’t start till you pony up.entrepreneurs have chosen between two different routes toward a blockchain-based financial system: building on bitcoin itself, or using bitcoin-style principles as the foundation for an entirely new financial-software ecosystem.one effort that’s squarely inside the bitcoin camp, and that has rallied a number of core bitcoin developers to its cause, is a startup called blockstream. with $21 million backing from investors that include reid hoffman and khosla ventures, blockstream is betting it can stretch and mutate bitcoin itself, leveraging the momentum of the most popular digital currency.right now it’s difficult to make changes to the way bitcoin works: since the currency is already in wide use, many different parties have to agree on any new wrinkle. if you want to experiment, you have to start a new currency, an “altcoin,” with a new blockchain — but then you have to find users for your new-money playground, and you risk landing in the shadier nether-regions of the altcoin world. as these bitcoin knockoffs have multiplied, they have too often suckered and fleeced their investors (which blockstream ceo austin hill is fond of pointing out in interviews ).blockstream sidesteps these problems by using a technique it calls “pegged sidechains.” essentially, you create a new blockchain with its own sandbox and rules. you are not playing directly with bitcoins, but you can move them in and out of your new alternate universe; the standard-issue bitcoins back the money circulating on your sidechain. blockstream is structured as a for-profit company that intends to build and support sidechains as an open-source platform; its backers cite the mozilla corporation, which sponsors firefox and associated projects, as their model.the technical details that make sidechains work are intricate; there’s a white paper you can read for more. (in the land of the blockchain, behind every startup there’s a white paper.) right now, though, that’s all there is: as one of blockstream’s developers explained in a recent interview on reddit, “we’re already working on a testing prototype, but it’s hard to tell when those will be ready. for a fully operational sidechain it’s even harder to tell.”the other approach to building a blockchain-based finance world is to leave bitcoin behind and start your own blockchains from scratch. that’s what a college-dropout entrepreneur named vitalik buterin is doing. last summer — not long after turning 20 — he launched ethereum, a switzerland-based nonprofit; an online auction raised about $15 million (in bitcoin, of course, so hang an asterisk on that sum) by selling 60 million units of “ether.”“bitcoin is very good for transferring money, but it was not designed as a foundational layer for any kind of protocols to be built on top,” buterin explained as he introduced ethereum at a bitcoin conference last year. “that’s what i hope to bring to the world of crypto-currency.” ethereum has its own built-in programming language that buterin imagines powering a world of apps as rich as the panoply of web apps that javascript enabled. ether, buterin and his collaborators promise, will be the “cryptofuel” powering this world, eventually providing “one-click app install” for “law, cloud storage, prediction markets, trading decentralized hosting, your own currency.”but wait, don’t click yet! ethereum’s vision — a new internet organized around programmable blockchains instead of servers — is awfully complex, and o ne does not simply build such a thing overnight. the strategy here is for ethereum to build the tools programmers need to make the blockchain power everything. buterin’s idea list includes crop insurance, gambling, reputation systems, decentralized social networks — “and perhaps maybe even skynet.”ethereum is equal parts fascinating and kooky; some observers fear that the skynet joke masks a deeper political danger, while others just see it as an over-ambitious, boil-the-ocean project that will founder on the rocks of implementation. as bitcoin lead developer gavin andresen wrote on his blog, “i suspect they’re trying to do too much — ‘complexity is the enemy of security’ — and will end up either radically reducing the scope of what they’re trying to do or will get tired of playing whack-a-mole with security and dos [denial-of-service] vulnerabilities.”another well-funded effort that’s working outside the bitcoin tent is ripple labs, a san francisco startup that’s building a digital currency-based platform for banking services. ripple began life as an altcoin named opencoin and has evolved into a protocol for transactions that operates a little more loosely, and quickly, than bitcoin. (bitcoin transactions can take as long as ten minutes to be verified; ripple promises to take just seconds.) in the short term ripple’s developers see it powering international remittances , moving money around the world cheaply and quickly. down the road, its creators envision more innovative applications — such as a system for the music business that rolls together artists’ rights management and royalty payments, with a blockchain securing the complex ownership data to automate all of the who’s-owed-what.micropayments! the concept predates the web, yet the reality remains elusive. meanwhile, though, crowdfunding a la kickstarter has become commonplace. there’s a blockchain for that, too: mike hearn, the tradenet visionary, has spearheaded it in the form of the lighthouse project , which lets you run a crowdfunding campaign (using bitcoins, of course) on your own, instead of through an intermediary such as kickstarter. lighthouse isn’t yet available, but hearn describes it as “virtually done.” he sees the open-source software not only as a means for individuals and organizations to raise funds, but also as a prototype for how citizens of the future could support public goods and services — without all the messy governments and taxes such efforts currently require.not that anyone expects said governments to roll over so easily. every dream of ousting the incumbent money regime faces the very real possibility that the disruptees will put up a nasty fight. which is why projects to reform finance inevitably mutate into schemes to reinvent wider swaths of our social and informational system — beginning online.there’s a whole tribe of blockchainiacs who see their new technology as the key to fixing deep-rooted problems that have plagued our online lives for decades. in this view, the internet’s founders made a key error at its inception: when they laid the network’s foundations, they failed to include a reliable system for personal identity, which could in turn serve as the basis of a payment economy. into this void leapt the privately owned social networks of our era — facebook, twitter and company — which have happily offered their services as guarantors of our digital identities, as long as they get all our data.what if, when we wanted to be sure of who we were dealing with, we relied instead on distributed computing power and the magic of crypto? today a host of small companies and projects are jockeying to usher pieces of this world into existence. a lot of the efforts focus on twitter rather than facebook — probably because it’s much easier to clone a network that delivers brief messages than one that serves as the hub for all things social.these new crypto-twitters eliminate the middleman central server that every large-scale social service today requires. they don’t store the content of messages themselves in the blockchain ledger — that wouldn’t work, since each user would end up storing the entire global database of messages. instead, the blockchain verifies all the contributors’ identities, their relationships to the messages under their names, and the integrity of the messages.twister , an open source project led by a developer in brazil named miguel freitas, is one such effort, announced a year ago. designed to encrypt private posts safely against nsa snoops and repressive governments, and to authenticate public posts using a blockchain to verify authorship, twister is still in early development. freitas says he’s already seen a flurry of interest from users in china.trsst is a similar anti-censorship project that aims to provide tools for “secure blogging on the open web,” for both private and public posting, using encryption and a novel blockchain-inspired scheme for guaranteeing the integrity of a blog’s posts (called, naturally, “the blogchain”). michael powers launched trsst in 2013 with a $65,000 kickstarter and shipped an alpha version of the software last year; he says he’s now working on rebooting the project with a new focus on mobile users.then there’s the alexandria project , which you could think of as a kind of tamper-resistant seal for tweets. a technical-proof-of-concept effort from a company called blocktech , it promises to provide “a ledger for an unalterable record of history.” its tools will “preserve the integrity of the historical record” by helping users create collections of tweets that are cryptographically “sealed” to ensure that they haven’t been edited.as bitcoin’s andresen suggested about ethereum, many of these projects will vanish into the, er, ether long before they reach that threshold. security flaws will stymie them; usability problems will cripple them; they will sink in the mire of large-scale software development. even those projects that persevere and prosper will need to prove their utility. why go to all this extra trouble to do stuff online? sure, you could use the alexandria software to, say, document all the tweets surrounding a big protest that a government might wish to pretend never happened. but for most everyday purposes, blockchain techniques might be overkill.then again, there are still tons of public and private needs that the internet has failed to serve. for instance, thor muller, a writer-entrepreneur who has written lucidly about the distributed-ledger concept at the heart of bitcoin, imagines the benefits of applying the blockchain to the records of public court proceedings — liberating them from the antiquated storage methods the u.s. still relies on, and making them widely and reliably available. “it’s not going to happen at the level of the federal government any time soon,” muller says. “but maybe with the state courts you could leapfrog all that.”the blockchain could swap out our existing financial and information systems, but the most ardent blockchainiacs go further: they foresee what ethereum’s stephan tual calls a “decentralization singularity.”in this scenario, the irresistible power of crypto-fueled disintermediation dissolves and rebuilds our whole society. “decentralized autonomous organizations” emerge, cryptographically hatched and blockchain-fueled, and replace today’s companies and enterprises. governments can’t tax transactions they can’t see; so maybe they’ll just vanish, as they do in neal stephenson’s the diamond age. those government services we might actually want and need? well, we can always use the blockchain to crowdsource them.this is where the decentralization hand-waving really gets frenetic. but the ideas can also be unsettlingly cool, in a william gibson-ish sort of way. of course, whether this libertarian fever-dream looks enticing or terrifying to you — whether your reaction is “why can’t we have that now?” or “what are they thinking?” — will probably depend on where your pre-blockchain-era political sympathies lay.ethereum’s creators, for example, foresee a world in which autonomous blockchain-based entities pick up where governments and corporations have failed and lead us into a glorious future. the people behind the scotland-based maidsafe are similarly thinking big: they aim to rebuild the whole net along peer-to-peer lines. under their scheme, we all store our data, encrypted of course, on one another’s machines; we all share our processing power; and we pay one another for the privilege. the server farms will fall fallow, and the internet will get back its inter-ness.the hurdles these visions would have to overcome are those any blockchain-decentralization scenario faces: the challenge of finding people to begin using and moving their own assets into new, unproven systems; the “discovery problem” — figuring out how users of anonymous, crypto-secured networks can find one another to transact business; and the fear that all this crypto-secured, anonymous-transaction-based tech will simply power illegal enterprises and antisocial activities.so is the blockchain really 1994 all over again — or just frothy over-investment in harebrained technodreams? one warning sign: many of the most ardent blockchainiacs are venture capitalists. one hopeful sign, for believers: crowdfunding, which didn’t exist in the ’90s, can fuel a thousand experiments, and many entrepreneurs are using digital cash itself to propel new ideas.still, the near future will more likely be prosaic than revolutionary. that’s the prediction of tim swanson, author of great chain of numbers: a guide to smart contracts, smart property, and trustless asset management, a thorough e-book surveying the post-bitcoin financial landscape. “most of the actual use cases, especially with blockchains in general, will be very mundane and will be related to proof of existence, so things like notary services” or audit trails for asset trades, swanson recently wrote .a blockchain-powered economy is most likely to take root far away from the u.s., many observers believe — either in the developing world, where there’s less of a reliable financial system in place, or in places where property rules and contract law have shaky foundations (think russia or china). wherever it starts to take off, it will face the twin hurdles of complexity overload and government pushback.the blockchain literature is packed with graduate dissertations from the rube goldberg school of systems design — ideas that not only borrow from bitcoin but also patch together big hunks of bittorrent, tor, and other concepts in a desperate effort to attain distributed autonomy. meanwhile, the record of net history shows, over and over again, how reliably we users run screaming from hard things and default to convenience.the reason one keeps stuff in a central database is not just for trust and value, but also because large-scale applications that don’t use a central database model are exponentially harder to get right, and keep properly synchronized, to be able to do valuable work in a timeframe that humans find acceptable.maciej ceglowski presenting on webstock 2014. photo by webstock .that all makes plenty of sense. but the profoundest objection to the blockchain-powered future i’ve heard is not technical but philosophical. it comes from maciej ceglowski, the writer-developer and founder of pinboard. earlier this year, in a dazzling talk titled “ our comrade the electron ,” ceglowski lamented that “we’ve centralized the bejesus out of the internet.”i wanted to know what ceglowski thought of our friend the blockchain. did it raise his hopes of reversing that situation? could it move the digital world down an alternate road of privacy, peer-to-peer empowerment, and freedom?he emailed me with a depressing but persuasive reply: it’s the wrong fight on the wrong turf.“there is a tendency in computer-land to seek technical solutions to political problems,” ceglowski says. “in my opinion, the focus on the blockchain (and related ideas) falls into that misguided category. the idea that we should look to algorithms and technology to reclaim our freedoms is fundamentally undemocratic. it presupposes a technical elite who would ‘fix the internet’ for everyone else. while i can see how this appeals to romantic ideas of hacking the system, i see it as a dangerous trend at worst, and a distraction at best.“we are terrible at predicting the social outcomes of technological innovation. there’s no reason bitcoin-like distributed systems would be immune from that rule. i say let’s wise up and actually fight this battle on the level where it belongs.”ceglowski’s argument is surely worth braking for as we race down the blockchain road. a world in which math secures all our property, communications and identities looks cool. maybe it will solve some of our problems. it might even be better than what we have now.the question to ask is, do these blockchain-based enhancements of our technologies end up giving us more freedom and initiative? or will a world of “distributed autonomous organizations,” empowered financial algorithms and bots that own themselves only hem in our human sphere of control?it could be exciting to sit back and watch the future drive itself. but it might be smart to keep our eyes on the road and our hands on the wheel.
 i am going to speak about what may the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. violence has declined by dramatic degrees all over the world in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals.stevin pinker is a harvard college professor and johnstone family professor of psychology; harvard university. author, the language instinct, how the mind works, and the better angels of our nature: how violence has declined  (forthcoming, october 6th).in july, edge held its annual master class in napa, california on the theme: "the science of human nature".  in the six week period that began september 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  princeton psychologist  daniel kahneman  on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; harvard mathematical biologist  martin nowak  on the evolution of cooperation; harvard psychologist  steven pinker  on the history of violence; uc-santa barbara evolutionary psychologist  leda cosmides  on the architecture of motivation; uc-santa barbara neuroscientist  michael gazzaniga  on neuroscience and the law; and princeton religious historian  elaine pagels  on the book of revelation.for publication schedule and details, go to  edge master class 2011: the science of human nature .steven pinker: believe it or not—and i know most people do not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. the decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue. but i hope to convince you that it's a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.i'm going to present six major historical declines of violence; in each case, cite their immediate causes in terms of what historians have told us are the likely historical antecedents in that era; and then speculate on their ultimate causes, in terms of general historical forces acting on human nature.the first major decline of violence i call the "pacification process." until about five thousand years ago, humans lived in anarchy without central government. what was life like in this state of nature? this is a question that thinkers have speculated on for centuries, most prominently hobbs, who famously said that in a state of nature "the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." a century later he was countered by jean jacques rousseau, who says, "nothing could be more gentle than man in his primitive state."in reality, both of these gentlemen were talking through their hats:  they had no idea what life was like in a state of nature. but today we can do better, because there are two sources of evidence of what rates of violence were like in pre-state societies.one is forensic archaeology. you can think of it as "csi paleolithic". what proportion of prehistoric skeletons have signs of violent trauma, such as bashed-in skulls, decapitated skeletons, femurs with bronze arrowheads embedded in them, and mummies found with ropes around their necks?there are 20 archaeological samples that i know of for which these analyses have been done. i've plotted here the percentage of deaths due to violent trauma. they range as high as 60 percent, and the average is a little bit more than 15 percent.let’s compare that rate with those of modern states, and let's stack the deck against modernity by picking some of the most violent eras that we can think of. this is the united states and europe in the 20th century. this is the entire world in the 20th century—and i've thrown in not only the wars, but also the genocides and the manmade famines. it's about three percent, compared to the 15 percent rate in pre-state societies. and here is the world in the first decade of the 21st century. the bar in the graph would be less than a pixel, about a three one-hundredths of one percent.the other method of measuring violence in pre-state societies is ethnographic vital statistics. what is the rate of death by violence in people who have recently lived outside of state control, namely hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists, and other tribal groups?there are 27 samples that i know of, where ethnographic demographers that have done the calculation. i've plotted them as war deaths per 100,000 people per year. they go as high as 1500, but the average across these 27 non-state societies is a little bit more than 500. again, let's stack the deck against modernity by picking some of the most violent modern societies for comparison, such as, for example, germany in the 20th century, with its two world war: its rate is around 135, compared to 524 for the non-state societies. russia in the 20th century, with two world wars, a revolution, and a civil war, is about 130. japan in the 20th century, about 30. united states in the 20th century, with two world wars plus five wars in asia, is about a pixel.now, here is the world as a whole in the 20th century. this is another version of the figure that i alluded to earlier, which includes all the wars, genocides and man-made famines; it amounts to around 60. and this is the world in the first decade of the 21st century, which again is far shorter than one pixel.so: not to put too fine a point on it, but when it comes to life in a state of nature, hobbs was right, rousseau was wrong.what was the immediate cause? it was almost certainly the rise and expansion of states. anyone who is familiar with world history knows about the various paxes—the pax romana, pax islamica, pax hispanica, and so on. it's the historian's term for the phenomenon in which, when a state expands or an empire imposes hegemony over a territory, they try to stamp out tribal raiding and feuding. that is what drives the statistics down.it's not that these early states had any benevolent interest in the welfare of their subjects, but rather, that tribal raiding and feuding is a nuisance to imperial overlords.  for the same reason that a farmer will take steps to prevent its cattle from killing each other —it's a dead loss to the farmer—imperial overlords tend to frown on tribal battles that just shuffle resources and destroy the tax base at a net loss to them.the second major historical decline of violence can be captured in this woodcut of a typical day in the life in the middle ages. the decline has been called the "civilizing process."it's best illustrated by looking at homicide statistics, which go back in many parts of europe to the 13th century. the historical criminologist manual eisner has assembled every estimate that he could find of homicide rates from records in england going back to about 1200.i've plotted them here on a logarithmic scale, so that the scale goes from 100 homicides per 100,000 per year, to ten, to one, to a tenth of a homicide. and as you can see, there's an almost two order-of-magnitude decline in homicide from the middle ages to the present.so a contemporary englishman has about a 50-fold less chance of being murdered than his compatriot in the middle ages. (by the way, this high point here of 100 per 100,000 per year comes from oxford.)this is a phenomenon that is not restricted to england. it is true of every european country for which statistics are available. again, here is a logarithmic scale, and the homicide rates goes from between ten and 100 down to a very narrow window of about one per 100,000 per year.here is an average of the five western european regions. and just to connect it to the previous historical development, i've plotted the non-state societies average up here, which is about 500 per 100,000 per year. (this gap is what i called the pacification process.) then the civilizing process consists of this additional 30- to 50-fold reduction in the rate of homicide to the present.the immediate cause was first identified by norbert elias in his classic book the civilizing process, from which i got the name for this development. in the transition from middle ages to modernity there was a consolidation of centralized states and kingdoms throughout europe. criminal justice was nationalized, and warlords, feuding, and brigandage were replaced by "the king's justice."simultaneously, there was a growing infrastructure of commerce: a development of the institutions of money and finance, and of technologies of transportation and time keeping. the result was to shift the incentive structure from zero-sum plunder to positive-sum trade.the third historical decline of violence pertains to the fact that those first states, though they did bring down rates of feuding and vendetta and blood revenge, were rather nasty contraptions, which kept people in a state of awe with techniques such as breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, sawing in half, impalement, and clawing. in a process that historians call the "humanitarian revolution", these forms of institutionalized violence were eventually abolished. the momentum for this movement was concentrated in the 18th century.this graph shows the abolition of judicial torture (that is, torture as a form of punishment) in the major countries of the day, including the famous prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment by the 8th amendment to the united states constitution.also during this period there was a reduction in the use of the death penalty for non-lethal crimes. in 18th century england there were 222 capital offenses on the books, including poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren, being in the company of gypsies, and "strong evidence of malice in a child seven to 14 years of age." by 1861 the number of capital crimes was down to four.similarly, in the united states in the 17th and 18th centuries, the death penalty was prescribed and used for theft, sodomy, bestiality, adultery, witchcraft, concealing birth, slave revolt, counterfeiting, and horse theft. we have statistics for capital punishment in the united states since colonial times. as you can see, in the 17th century a majority of executions were for crimes other than homicide. in current times, the only crime that is punished by capital punishment other than homicide is conspiracy to commit homicide.the death penalty itself, of course, has been abolished in most of europe. most of the abolitions were concentrated in the last fifty years. this is the number of european countries with capital punishment. currently, only russia and belarus have it had on the books.but interestingly, even before capital punishment was abolished by the stroke of a pen, it had fallen into disuse. you can see that the percentage of european countries that actually carry out executions has always been far lower, and the decline began much earlier.now the united states, of course, notoriously is the only western democracy that has capital punishment (though only in two-thirds of the states), a number that has been dwindling. and to say that the united states has the death penalty is a bit of a fiction. if you look at the number of executions as a proportion of the population, it has been plunging since colonial times. today, out of about 16,500 homicides per year, there are about 50 executions, and that rate has been in decline as well.other abolitions during the humanitarian revolution include witch hunts, religious persecution, dueling, blood sports, debtors prisons, and of course most famously, slavery.this graph shows the cumulative number of countries that abolished slavery. for the first time in history, slavery is illegal everywhere in the world. the last countries to abolish it were saudi arabia in 1962, and mauritania in 1980.what were the immediate causes of the humanitarian revolution? a plausible first guess is affluence. one might surmise that as one's own life becomes more pleasant, one places a higher value on life in general. however, i don't think the timing works.this is a graph of per capita income in england over the last 800 years. most economic historians say that the world saw virtually no increase in affluence until the time of the industrial revolution starting in the early decades of the 19th century. but most of the reforms that i've been talking about were concentrated in the 18th century, when income growth was pretty much flat.however, there is one technology that showed a precocious increase in productivity before the industrial revolution, and that was printing. here's a graph showing the efficiency in book production, which increased 25-fold by 1700. the efficiency was put into use, and resulted in an exponential growth in the number of books published per year in england, france, and other western european countries.and there were more literate people around to read them. by the 18th century a majority of men in england were literate.why should literacy matter? a number of the causes are summed up by the term "enlightenment." for one thing, knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance: beliefs such as that jews poisoned wells, heretics go to hell, witches cause crop failures, children are possessed, and africans are brutish. as voltaire said, "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."also, literacy gives rise to cosmopolitanism. it is plausible that the reading of history, journalism, and fiction puts people into the habit of inhabiting other peoples' minds, which could increase empathy and therefore make cruelty less appealing. this is a point i'll return to later in the talk.the fourth historical decline of violence has been called the "long peace." it speaks to the widespread belief that the 20th century was the most violent in history, which would seem to go against everything that i've said so far. peculiarly, one never sees, in any of the claims that the 20th century was the most violent in history, any numbers from any century other than the 20th.there's no question that there was a lot of violence in the 20th century. but take, for comparison, the so-called peaceful 19th century. that "peaceful"  century had the napoleonic wars, with four million deaths, one of the worst in history; the taiping rebellion in china, by far the worst civil war in history, with 20 million deaths; the worst war in american history, the civil war; the reign of shaka zulu in southern africa, resulting in one to two million deaths; the war of the triple alliance, which is probably the most destructive interstate war in history in terms of percentage of the population killed, namely 60 percent of paraguay; the african slave raiding wars (no one has any idea what the death toll was); and of course, imperial wars in africa, asia and the south pacific.these remarks are all qualitative, meant to damp down the tendency to think that just because in europe there was a span of several decades without war, that the world as a whole was peaceful in the 19th century as a whole.now, it is undoubtedly true that the second world war was the deadliest event in human history in terms of number of lives lost. but it's not so clear that it was the deadliest event in terms of percentage of the world population. here is a graph that i've adapted from a forthcoming book by matthew white entitled the great big book of horrible things: the definitive chronicle of history's 100 worst atrocities. white calls himself an "atrocitologist." he tries to fit numbers to wars, genocides, and manmade famines throughout history.here we see 2500 years of human history, with white's top 100 atrocities, which i have scaled by the estimated size of the world population at the time. as you can see, world war ii just barely makes the top ten. there are many events more deadly than world war i. and events which killed from a tenth of one percent of the population of the world to ten percent were pretty much evenly sprinkled over 2500 years of history.now this funnel-like concentration of points in the last few centuries does not mean that in ancient times they only committed big atrocities, whereas now we commit both big and little atrocities. it's rather an artifact of "historical myopia": the closer you get to the present, the more information you have. the smaller atrocities in the past were trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them, or not even deemed worthy of being written down.let's zoom in now on the last 500 years. there is a data set from jack levy on trends in great power war. these are wars that involve the 800-pound gorillas of the day, that is the countries that can project military power outside their boundaries, which account for a disproportionate amount of the damage due to war (because wars fall along a power law distribution of damage).the first graph shows the percentage of time that the great powers were at war. we see that five hundred years ago, the great powers were pretty much always at war with one another, and then the proportion of each quarter-century filled with great-power wars declined steadily. the next one shows the duration of wars involving the great powers—also a decline. here is one that shows the number of great-power wars initiated per year, and that figure, too, declines steadily over the half-millennium.but now we see a graph of the deadliness of war, which shows a trend that goes in the opposite direction—though wars involving great powers were fewer in number, they did more damage per country per year. even that trend, though, did an about-face after 1950, when for the first time in modern history, great-power wars became simultaneously fewer in number, shorter in duration, and less deadly per unit time. now let’s zoom in on the last century, the 20th century. here is a graph showing deaths in war all over the world, not just those involving the great powers. it shows that the increase in deadliness of war did indeed result in two horrific spikes of bloodletting centered on the two world wars. but since then there has been a long stretch without that degree of bloodletting. the fact that the 20th century comprises 100 years, not just 50 years, is one of the reasons why it's misleading to say that the 20th century was the most violent in history.the denominator here is the world population, not the population size of countries involved in each war. there are arguments for doing it either way. the problem is that you can make the numbers go all over the place depending on the choice of the denominator, whether you choose the country that initiated the war, the collateral damage in other countries, the neighboring countries, and so on. so in all cases i've plotted deaths as a proportion of world population.the extraordinary 65-year stretch since the end of the second world war has been called the "long peace", and has perhaps the most striking statistics of all, zero. there were zero wars between the united states and the soviet union (the two superpowers of the era), contrary to every expert prediction. no nuclear weapon has been used in war since nagasaki, again, confounding everyone's expectations. there have been no wars between any subset of the great powers since the end of the korean war in 1953. there have been zero wars between western european countries. the extraordinary thing about this fact is how un-extraordinary it sounds. if i say i'm going to predict that in my lifetime france and germany will not go to war, everyone will say, "yeah, yeah; of course they won't go to war." but that is an extraordinary statement when you consider that before 1945, western european countries initiated two new wars per year for more than 600 years. that number has now stood at zero for 65 years.and there have been zero wars between developed countries at all. we take it for granted nowadays that war is something that happens only in poor, primitive countries. that, too, is an extraordinary development; war used to be something that rich countries did, too. europe, which traditionally has been the part of the world with the biggest military might, is no longer picking on countries in other parts of the world, or hurling artillery shells at one other with the rest of the world suffering collateral damage. this change has been extraordinary.now, what about the rest of the world? what has happened in the other continents while europe has been racking up its peaceful zeros?first let’s look at the number of wars. these graphs start at 1946 and they span the entire globe. i'll divide it into the different categories of war.one kind of war has vanished off the face of the earth. the colonial war (red), which used to be quite destructive, no longer exists, because the european powers have given up their colonies. (this is, by the way, a stacked layer graph, so the relevant visual variable is the thickness of the layers.)here (blue) we see the fate of interstate wars, wars between two sovereign states. these have also been dwindling since the end of the second world war. however, the number of civil wars—both pure civil wars within a country (green) and internationalized civil wars (orange), where some foreign country butts in, usually on the side of the government defending itself against an insurgency—increased until about 1990, and then has shown somewhat of a decrease as well.so since 1946 there have been fewer wars between states, but there been more civil wars, mainly because newly independent states with inept governments were challenged by insurgent movements, and both sides were armed by the cold war powers. but even civil wars declined after 1991 with the end of the cold war and the stoking of these proxy wars by the superpowers.the crucial question now is: what kills more people, the fewer number of wars between countries, or the greater number of wars within countries? this graph shows the deadliness of interstate wars since the 1950s, that is, how many people are killed in a particular year of war. as you can see, the numbers has plummeted (i've already talked about that fact).the tall blue bars represent deaths in interstate war, and as you can see they have plummeted over the decades. much shorter are the internationalized civil wars (orange) and the civil wars (green). the fact that we have more civil wars and fewer interstate wars means that the total number of people has gone down, because the interstate wars of the past killed far more people than the civil wars of the present.now let's put the numbers back together, and instead of looking at the number of wars, look at number of deaths, again scaled by world population. this stacked-layer graph shows the number of people killed in wars since 1946. here are the colonial wars (red). here we see the number of people killed in interstate wars (blue), with spikes corresponding to the eras of the korean war, the vietnam war, and the iran/iraq war. these are the numbers of people killed in civil wars (green) and internationalized civil wars (orange).the trajectory has been, to be sure, bumpy, but in the first decade of the 21st century, we are actually living in a time that even in comparison to recent decades is comparatively peaceable. in fact, one could almost say that the dream of the 1960s folk singers is coming true: the world is putting an end to war.what about genocide? the last couple of graphs plot what are called "state-based conflicts, where you have two organized armed forces fighting, at least one of which is a government. what about cases in which governments kill their own citizens? again, there's a cliché that the 20th century was the age of genocide. but the claim is never made with any systemic comparison of previous centuries.historians who have tried to track genocide over the centuries are unanimous that the notion that the 20th was "a century of genocide" is a myth. frank chalk and kurt jonassohn, their the history and sociology of genocide, write on page one, "genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history."what did change during the 20th century was that for the first time people started to care about genocide. it's the century in which the word "genocide" was coined and in which, for the first time, genocide was considered a bad thing, something to be denied instead of boasted about.as chalk and jonassohn say of ancient histories, "we know that empires have disappeared and that cities were destroyed, and we suspect that some wars were genocidal in their results. but we do not know what happened to the bulk of the populations involved in these events. their fate was simply too unimportant. when they were mentioned at all, they were usually lumped together with the herds of ox and sheep and other livestock."to give some examples: if old testament history were taken literally, there were genocides on almost every page; the amalakites, amarites, canaanites, hivites, hitites, jevasites, midianites, parazites and many other. also, genocides were committed by the athenians in melos; by the romans in carthage; and during the mongol invasions, the crusades, the european wars of religion, and the colonization of the americas, africa and australia.we have something even resembling numbers only for the 20th century. but if we plot those numbers, they refute the impression that the massacres in bosnia, rwanda and darfur are indications that nothing has changed, that the world has learned nothing since the holocaust. this graph shows the best estimates that we can find of rates of death in genocide. is certainly true that there was a burst of genocides from the 1930s to the early '50s in europe, and from the '20s through the '70s in asia. but the trend since world war ii has been downward. it is definitely not the case that "nothing has changed" since the era of the second world war. even with the rwanda genocide, a small proportion of the world’s population, compared to earlier decades, is massacred by their governments.so what are the immediate causes of the long peace, and what i call the new peace (that is, the post-cold war era)? they were anticipated by immanuel kant in his remarkable essay, "perpetual peace" from 1795, in which he suggested that democracy, trade and an international community were pacifying forces. the hypothesis has been taken up again by a pair of political scientists, bruce russett and john oneal, who have shown that all three forces increased in the second half of the 20th century. in a set of regression analyses, they showed that all of them are statistical predictors of peace, holding everything else constant.specifically, the number of democracies has increased since the second world war, and again since the end of the cold war, relative to the number of autocracies. there's been a steady increase in international trade since the end of the second world war. there's been a continuous increase in the number of intergovernmental organizations that countries have entered into. and especially since the end of the cold war in 1990, there's been an increase in the number of international peace-keeping missions, and even more importantly, the number of international peace keepers that have kept themselves in between warring nations mostly in the developing world.the final historical development i call the rights revolutions. this is the reduction of systemic violence at smaller scales against vulnerable populations such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals.the civil rights revolution saw a reduction in the once socially-sanctioned practice of lynching. there used to be 150 lynchings per year in the united states, over the course of the 20th century the number has gone down to zero. hate crime murders of blacks, which started to be recorded in the mid-1990s, went down from the single digits to one per year. non-lethal hate crimes such as intimidation and assault have also been in decline since they were first measured.also, the kinds of racist attitudes that encourage violence against minorities, such as the percentage of americans saying that they would move if a black family moved in next door, or believe that black and white students should go to separate schools, has now fallen into the noise—the range of crank opinion—and is basically indistinguishable from zero.this is a trend that has taken place not just in the united states, but worldwide. the number of countries that have laws on the books that discriminate against ethnic, religious, or racial minorities has been in steady decline. in fact, the number of countries that have tried to tilt the scale in the other direction with affirmative action and remedial discrimination policies has increased. so now more countries in the world discriminate in favor of disadvantaged minorities than discriminate against them.the women's rights movement has seen an 80 percent reduction in rape since the early '70s when it was put on the agenda as a feminist issue. there has also been a two-thirds decline in domestic violence, spousal abuse, or wife beating, and a 50 percent decline in husband beating. in the most extreme form of domestic violence, namely uxoricide and matricide, there's been a decline both in the number of wives that are murdered by their husband's and the number of husbands that have been murdered by their wives. in fact, the decrease is much more dramatic for husbands. feminism has been very good to men, who are now much more likely to survive a marriage without getting murdered by their wives.the children's rights movement has seen a decline in the united states of the number of states that permit corporal punishment in schools, such as "paddling" and "hiding." in much of europe, it's been abolished outright. but even in the united states, it's been in decline. the approval of spanking and the implementation of spanking have been in decline in every country in which they have been measured. here are data from the united states, new zealand and sweden. in fact, spanking, even by parents, is illegal in many european countries now. child abuse, too, has been in decline since statistics were recorded in the early 1990s. and violence in schools, such as fighting and bullying, has been in decline.the gay rights movement has seen an increase in the number of states in the world, and american states, that have decriminalized homosexuality (it used to be a felony). anti-gay attitudes have been in steady decline, such as whether homosexuality is "morally wrong," whether it should be made illegal, and whether gay people should be denied equal opportunity. hate crimes of intimidation against gays have been in decline since they were first measured.the animal rights movement has seen a decline in hunting, an increase in vegetarianism, and a decrease in the number of motion pictures in which animals have been harmed.the key question now is: why has violence declined over so many different scales of time and magnitude? one possibility is that human nature has changed, and that people have lost their inclinations towards violence. i consider this to be unlikely. for one thing, people continue to take enormous pleasure, and allocate a lot of their disposable income, to consuming simulated violence, such as in murder mysteries, greek tragedy, shakespearean dramas, mel gibson movies, video games and hockey.but perhaps more to the point are studies of homicidal fantasies, which ask people the following question: "have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like?" when you ask that question of a demographic with a very low rate of actual violence, namely american university students, you find that about 15 percent of the women and a third of the men frequently fantasize about killing people they don't like; and more than 60 percent of women and three-quarters of men at least occasionally fantasize about killing people they don't like. (and the rest of them are lying—or at least might sympathize with clarence darrow when he said, "i've never killed a man, but i've taken great pleasure in reading many obituaries."a more likely possibility is that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and inclinations that counteract them—what abraham lincoln called the "better angels of our nature." historical circumstances have increasingly favored these peaceable inclinations.what are the parts of human nature that militate toward violence? i count five, depending on how you lump or split them.there's raw exploitation, that is, seeking something that you want where a living thing happens to be in the way; examples include rape, plunder, conquest, and the elimination of rivals. there’s nothing particularly fancy in the psychology of this kind of violence other than a zeroing out of whatever inclinations would inhibit us from that kind of exploitation.there's the drive toward dominance, both the competition among individuals to be alpha male, and the competition among groups for ethnic, racial, national or religious supremacy or pre-eminence.there's the thirst for revenge, the kind of moralistic violence that inspires vendettas, rough justice, and cruel punishments.and then there's ideology which might be the biggest contributor of all (such as in militant religions, nationalism, fascism, nazism, and communism), leading to large-scale violence via a pernicious cost- benefit analysis. what these ideologies have in common is that they posit a utopia that is infinitely good for infinitely long. you do the math: if the ends are infinitely good, then the means can be arbitrarily violent and you're still on the positive side of the moral ledger. also, what do you do with people who learn about an infinitely perfect world nonetheless oppose it? well, they are arbitrarily evil, and deserve arbitrarily severe punishment.now let's turn to the brighter side, our so-called better angels.they include the faculty of self-control: the ability to anticipate the consequences of behavior, and inhibit violent impulses. there’s the faculty of empathy (more technically, sympathy), the ability to feel others' pain. there’s the moral sense, which comprise a variety of intuitions including tribalism, authority, purity, and fairness. the moral sense actually goes in both directions: it can push people to be more violent or less violent, depending on how it is deployed. and then there is reason, the cognitive faculties that allow us to engage in objective, detached analysis.now we face the crucial question: which historical developments bring out our better angels? i'm going to suggest there are four.the first implies that hobbes got it right: a leviathan, namely a state and justice system with a monopoly on legitimate use of violence, can reduce aggregate violence by eliminating the incentives for exploitative attack; by reducing the need for deterrence and vengeance (because leviathan is going to deter your enemies so you don't have to), and by circumventing self-serving biases. one of the major discoveries of social and evolutionary psychology in the past several decades is that people tend to exaggerate their adversary's malevolence and exaggerate their own innocence. self-serving biases can stoke cycles of revenge when you have two sides, each of them intoxicated with their own sense of rectitude and moral infallibility.historical evidence that the leviathan is a major pacifying force includes the first two historical developments that i spoke of, namely the pacifying and civilizing processes, both of which were consequences of the rise of states. also the fact that reversals in the trends, where violence re-erupts, tend to take place in zones of anarchy, like the american wild west, failed states, collapsed empires, and mafias and street gangs that deal in contraband (so they can't call in the court system to enforce their interests in business disputes but have to resort to intimidation and revenge). a final kind of evidence is the demonstrable effectiveness of international peace-keepers, who use a kind of soft power on the international stage to keep warring parties apart.the second pacifying force is identified by the theory of "gentle commerce." plunder is a zero-sum or even a negative sum game: the victors' gain is the loser's loss. trade, in contrast, is a positive-sum game. (we will hear more from both leda and martin that reciprocal altruism, such as gains in trade, can result in both sides being better off after an interaction.) over the course of history, improvements in technology have allowed goods and ideas to be traded over longer distances, among larger groups of people, and at lower cost, all of which change the incentive structure so that other people become more valuable alive than dead. to be concrete: i doubt that the united states is going to declare war on china (though there's much that we don't like about that country), because they make all our stuff. and i doubt china will declare war on us, because we owe them too much money.some historical evidence comes from statistical studies showing that countries with open economies and greater international trade are less likely to engage in war, are less likely to host civil wars, and have genocides.a third pacifying force is what peter singer called the "expanding circle," although charles darwin in first stated the idea in the descent of man. according to this theory, evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy. that's the good news; the bad news is that by default, we apply it only to a narrow circle of allies and family. but over history, one can see the circle of empathy expanding: from the village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to more recently to other races, both sexes, children, and even other species.this just begs the question of what expanded the circle. i think one can argue that the forces of cosmopolitanism pushed it outward: exposure to history, literature, media, journalism, and travel encourages people to adopt the perspective of a real or fictitious other person. experiments by daniel batson and others have shown that reading a person’s words indeed leads to an increase in empathy, not just for that person, but also for the category that the person represents.historical evidence includes the timing of the humanitarian revolution of the 18th century, which was preceded by the republic of letters, the great increase in written discourse. similarly, the long peace and rights revolutions in the second half of the 20th century were simultaneous with the "electronic global village." and perhaps—this is highly speculative—but it's often been stated that the rise of the internet and of social media might have been behind the color revolutions and the arab spring of the 21st century.i think the final and perhaps the most profound pacifying force is an "escalator of reason." as literacy, education, and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally, and that will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. people will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others. reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. and it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.what's the evidence for reason being a pacifying force which has helped to propel the decline of violence? we do know that abstract reasoning abilities (as measured by the most abstract components of an iq test) have increased in the 20th century. the so-called flynn effect consists of an increase of about three iq points per decade since the beginning of the 20th century, and the gains have been concentrated not in factual knowledge such as vocabulary and information, but rather, in abstract reasoning (such as in similarities questions, like "what do an egg and a seed have in common?" and  "what do an inch and a pound have in common.")it's been shown that people (both at the level of individuals and of entire societies) who have higher levels of education and measured intelligence commit fewer violent crimes, cooperate more in experimental games (we'll hear today from martin nowak and leda cosmides about these games), have more classically-liberal attitudes, are less likely to be racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and are more receptive to democracy.whatever the causes of the decline of violence, it has profound implications. one of them is it calls for a reorientation of our efforts toward violence reduction from a moralistic mindset to an empirical mindset. it leads us to ask not just the question "why is there war?" but, what might be a better question, "why is there peace?" not just "what are we doing wrong?" but "what have we been doing right?" because we have been doing something right, and it seems to me that's it’s important to understand what it is.in addition, the decline of violence has implications for our assessment of modernity: the centuries-long erosion of family, tribe, tradition and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason and science.now, everyone acknowledges that modernity has given us longer and healthier lives, less ignorance and superstition, and richer experiences. but there is a widespread romantic movement which questions the price. is it really worth it to have a few years of better health if the price is muggings, terrorism, holocausts, world wars, gulags, and nuclear weapons?i argue that despite impressions, the long-term trend, though certainly halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing. this calls for a rehabilitation of a concept of modernity and progress, and for a sense of gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible.benedict carey: you mentioned at the beginning that there's no guarantee that this will continue. what are some of the things that you think are most likely to upset the trend and bump it up again?steven pinker: one is the "unknown unknowns", to quote donald rumsfeld. things that could come out of the blue. some fanatical dictator under the sway of a new ideology festering somewhere in the world who will gather supporters, take over a country, and decide that it's a good idea to re-conquer the neighbors. that kind of thing can happen. we don't know where, we don't know when, and it's unwise to predict that current trends will continue smoothly.it's also possible that some fanatic who gets his hands on a stray nuclear weapon could send the statistics skyward. one guy or one radical cell or one group could do a lot of damage. it’s then almost a philosophical question whether this would constitute a counterexample to the world becoming less violent. no one else might think that the violence is a good idea, but one person or small groups could rack up big numbers.it's also conceivable that climate change will cause a struggle over land or water. i might add that that is not a given.  studies that have tried to correlate resource scarcity and climate shocks at time 1 with violence at time 2 (everything else held constant) have found virtually no correlation. famines can cause a lot of misery, and they can sometimes cause local skirmishes over watering holes, but in general, they don't lead to wars, because wars require the decision of some organized government or militia, whose leaders may not care about whether the population are starving or not in the calculations that lead them to declare war.the united states, for example, during the dust bowl and the great depression, didn't have a civil war. the civil war that we did have was over quite another matter.nicholas pritzker: i've heard, probably on bad authority and a small sampling, that there's no evidence of violence among cro-magnon populations. is there any proof to that rumor?steven pinker: we don't have enough skeletons to know. there's some indirect evidence that violence goes back earlier than cro-magnon. for one thing, depending on how you interpret the evolutionary continuity, common chimpanzees engage in what we would call genocide if it occurred among humans—perhaps we should call it chimpicide—and probably the common ancestor of humans and chimps did as well.there is evidence for violent trauma and cannibalism in homo heidelbergensis, which is close to the common ancestor of neanderthals and sapiens. also, in our genome, there are genes that defend us against the prion diseases that are transmitted through cannibalism, suggesting that cannibalism goes back several hundred thousand years. and the fact that we're a sexually dimorphic species, with the males bigger than the females, which you tend to find, on average, in species that have more violent male/male competition. all of this is indirect evidence that say that violence goes back a long way.and while i think you're right that there's no direct evidence of violence in cro-magnon, there are cave paintings showing war, though the oldest that we know of is from about 6,000 years ago.stewart brand: i imagine there are some people that are quite offended by your thesis. i'm wondering, whom are you hearing from and what are you hearing?steven pinker: there are a number of people for whom this is an unwelcome message. activists of various kinds don't like to hear good news because, by their reckoning, it encourages complacency: "oh, so you’re saying the world is okay. then why bother stamping out human trafficking?"  and so on. i actually think they're mistaken even in the practical implications. it's much more likely that people reading about nothing but horrific events, say in africa, would write off the whole continent as a hell hole. "why throw money into a snake pit? maybe they were better off when they were colonized, and independence was a bad idea." the fact that some peace-building measures actually work, i argue, is more of a reason to put effort and money into africa.  i think good news will actually encourage the right kinds of activism,  rather than discourage them.on the other side is a kind of conservative romanticism about pre-modernity: the enlightenment was a terrible mistake, things were better when people had the moral clarity of church and family and community. this communitarian romanticism has both right-wing and left-wing flavors: religious romanticism and green romanticism.then there is an americocentric theory of world history that says that everything bad happening in the world can be attributed to the actions of the united states. in that vaguely chomskyan theory of politics, if you say that there's anything good about western civilization, that's considered reactionary.finally, there’s a belief among many anarchists and radical libertarians who that all evil is caused by the state. to them, leviathan theories are highly offensive.daniel kahneman: i'm just curious whether you see a decline in the ability to dehumanize categories of people? if we look at genocides in the 20th century, nazi germany, srebrenica, you get people who are fairly normal in every way and they can become convinced that there is no difference between other people and animals. and it happens, clearly, can be made to happen, intelligence is no defense against it; literacy is no defense against it. and what are the forces do you think that...steven pinker: i would put it the other way around. the default probably is that you do dehumanize out of your small circle, and what we are seeing are the remaining pockets of default dehumanization, or of backsliding.there are two mindsets that allow these atrocities to happen. one is dehumanizing, where you consider other groups of people less than human. then there's demonizing, where you consider them to be fully human, which makes them all the more contemptible because of the evil choices that they've made. daniel goldhagen has set up a 2 x 2 taxonomy of genocides according to whether the victims were demonized, de-humanized, or both.for example, well before the 20th century one sees descriptions of native americans by settlers, colonists, and governments that use the metaphor of vermin. when it was asked, for example, after various massacres, "why kill all the children, if it's just the warriors that have been harassing you; why kill the babies?," the answer, independently offered by a number of colonists was, "if you want to get rid of the lice you have to kill the nits." this is the same language that was used by oliver cromwell in his genocides during the re-conquest of ireland.i do agree that literacy, and certainly intellectualism, are not guarantees against a dehumanizing mindset, but they are probably statistical forces that push against it.  cosmopolitanism, including reading accounts of what it's like to be a native american or a vietnamese peasant, are likely to reduce the probability of de-humanization. but it is a tendency we naturally backslide into.jaron lanier: i'd like to hypothesize one civilizing force, which is the perception of multiple overlapping hierarchies of status. i've observed this to be helpful in work dealing with rehabilitating gang members in oakland. when there are multiple overlapping hierarchies of status there is more of a chance of people not fighting their superior within the status chain. and the more severe the imposition of the single hierarchy in people's lives, the more likely they are to engage in conflict with one another. part of america's success is the confusion factor of understanding how to assess somebody's status.steven pinker: that's a profound observation. there are studies showing that violence is more common when people are confined to one pecking order, and all of their social worth depends on where they are in that hierarchy, whereas if they belong to multiple overlapping groups, they can always seek affirmations of worth elsewhere. for example, if i do something stupid when i'm driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it's not the end of the world: i think to myself, i’m a tenured professor at harvard. on the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, i might have road rage and pull out a gun.modernity comprises a lot of things, and it's hard to tease them apart. but i suspect that when you're not confined to a village or a clan, and you can seek your fortunes in a wide world, that is a pacifying force for exactly that reason. also, projecting upward to the way we intellectualize our affairs, an interesting development over the 20th century is the concept that you can be, say, jewish and american, and this is not a conflict. you can be italian-american, and the hyphen doesn't compromise either identity.we take it for granted that we may have loyalties that go in different directions, but it's surprising how recent this appreciation is. there's a quote from that great "progressive" president woodrow wilson (who kin fact purged the federal government of black employees, and re-segregated princeton when he was president of the university). he said, "any american who carries around a hyphen is wielding a dagger aimed at the heart of the republic." it seems neanderthal today, but he obviously was a smart man, and it made sense to him and to other people at the time. today we think, "well, you go to knights of columbus and that's the italian part, and you salute the flag and that's the american part, and what's the big deal? these are two overlapping polities that we belong to." but that involves some cognitive sophistication. the default is to essentialize people, and you can't have two essences—it's not an essence if there are two of them. and so this style of abstract thinking with overlapping matrices may be part of the flynn-effect driven increase in tolerance and classical liberalism.leda cosmides: i was wondering two things. one is very odd. you were talking about dehumanization, and there's starting to be evidence that people who frame things more in terms of in-group and out-group have more outward fear, and also have a greater perceived vulnerability to disease. they feel that they're more vulnerable to disease and since you're living in close contact with your family and friends, you already have their germs. but the people who you're most likely to catch diseases from are people from other groups.i was wondering, in looking at these trends, if you're seeing any trends in decline in the fear of groups and the kinds of war that can go along with increases in public health that would decrease people's perceived vulnerability to disease?steven pinker: randy thornhill claims that there is such a correlation.leda cosmides: well, it's not just randy. there have been more and more people who are finding that kind of link between pathogen fears and ingroup-outgroup psychology.steven pinker: it's certainly possible. i suspect that it's more driven cognitively by who you naturally categorize as on the outside of your circle of group identity. but it's possible that the size of that circle is driven by some kind of fear of contamination.leda cosmides: right, i think that's the claim. but the real question i had was about the cosmopolitanism, because i'm puzzled by that in a certain sense. it almost sounds, like "come be an undergraduate and everything is going to be okay." i'm wondering if that is a real factor that's contributing to this. it must be driven a lot by popular culture because you don't have massive numbers of people reading proust and etc.steven pinker: it's a rising tide that lifts all the boats. it sounds elitist to say this, but attitudes toward women, homosexuals, and racial minorities, and the tolerant attitudes that we celebrate of not beating up your kids, tend to start among the most educated strata,  and you can see the rest of the country being dragged behind. with a lot of these statistics, the red states today have attitudes that the blue states had 30 years ago—toward women, towards spanking, towards homosexuals, towards animal rights, and so on.what starts out at the universities and the pundits can trickle down and become conventional wisdom. that probably happens worldwide as well. this is another thing i'll probably get flak for saying, but very roughly you can see a continuum in the world in a lot of variables related to the decline of violence: western europe, then the american blue states, then the american red states, then latin america and asian democracies, and the islamic world and africa pulling up the rear. we can look, say, at the criminalization of homosexuality in africa, or human trafficking, and say the world is in a terrible state, which of course it is. but the historical trend is that the other parts of the world eventually catch up. slavery is a concrete example: just fifty years ago, slavery was still legal in saudi arabia.leda cosmides: but that's the legal part. i thought there was, quantitatively, an increase in slavery, alarming increase in slavery recently.steven pinker: no, i don't think there is. for one thing, human trafficking can't be compared to african slavery in terms of the death rate, the suffering inflicted on the people, or the amount of time that it lasts in a person's life. and even human trafficking involves a fraction of the percentage of people that used to be slaves when slavery was legal and ubiquitous. probably there have been centuries in the past in which the majority of the world's population could be classified as slaves. what you're seeing here is a common dynamic:  there's a sudden increase in concern, which looks like an increase in incidence. we care about it now. fifty years ago people didn’t.george dyson: a question about when you speak to nuclear weaponeers they like to take a lot of credit. they'll say, look what we did may have been bad, but look, we had no major war. they like to take your graph and make a very different conclusion and take the credit for it. do you think they're taking more credit than they deserve?steven pinker: yes. someone else [elspeth rostow] proposed that the nuclear bomb be given the nobel peace prize! but i suspect not. for one thing, if you actually check to see whether the distribution of nuclear weapons predicts peace through deterrence, it rarely, if ever, does. for example, the soviet union established its hegemony over eastern europe in exactly the era in which the united states was a nuclear monopoly, the late 1940s. you also find lots of cases where a non-nuclear power challenged a nuclear power, like argentina challenging britain in the falklands, egypt challenging israel in 1973, many countries challenging the united states, colonial algeria seceding from france, and so forth.there are two reasons that nuclear weapons probably haven’t been a critical factor. since 1962, but probably growing before that, there has been a "nuclear taboo," the idea that nuclear weapons live in a sphere of hypotheticals, that you use them to defend yourself against an existential threat but in actual battlefield calculations it's not a live option. the last time it was breathed as a live option was when barry goldwater mused that there was no reason not to use tactical nuclear weapons in vietnam, which led to the "daisy" ad, and to lyndon johnson winning the biggest landslide in electoral history.nuclear weapons, paradoxically, are so militarily useless that they haven't really affected balance of power considerations. this is not to deny that deterrence has been important, just that the massive amount of destruction that countries like the u.s. and the ussr could inflict with conventional weaponry made each very nervous about the other even if neither side had had nuclear weapons. world war ii in europe didn't involve nuclear weapons, but was a kind of destruction that no one wanted to see again. the theory of the nuclear peace is quite popular, but i’m skeptical.george dyson: it's important for you to say that.jennifer jacquet: do you think it's possible that we've shifted the violence toward one another toward other life forms? especially through mechanization—the idea that now we have factory farming and industrial fishing and things like that.steven pinker: i suspect not. cruelty and indifference to animals go back probably as far as our species goes back. what has changed is efficiency — we can scoop up fish faster than we used to —and certain changes in habits. starting in the '60s, people got the idea that white meat is healthier than red meat. but if you switch your meat from beef to poultry, you need 200 chickens to provide the same amount of meat as one cow. that creates the demand for a vastly larger number of sentient lives to be brought into being and snuffed out to meet the same demand. people are no crueler; they just have come to prefer white meat and until recently have been indifferent to the source of their dinner. there's been a constant level of callousness and indifference, but there's been an increase in industrial efficiency.now, of course, there's also, for the first time in the west, a widespread concern about the welfare of the animals that gave their lives for our dinner. you see both an increase in vegetarianism, an increase in the number of laws passed that protect the rights of farm animals, and an increase in the efforts by the industrial farmers to at least project an image of caring for animals, which probably has led to improvements in their welfare.there are still enormous unrealized gains to be made in reducing cruelty. but the historical direction is we care more rather than less, even if below people’s radar a lot more bad things were happeningmichael gazzaniga: everybody's always worried about the coming uptick in violence. last week the supreme court tossed out this case brown versus the gaming industry in violence, a seven to two decision. the minority opinion was written by justice breyer, who is generally viewed as the science judge. he goes into a long discussion, 50 references, about how it is demonstrated that watching violent games, video game playing, and so forth, leads to much greater violence in children, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. and so therefore, this is so bad that it should trump fee speech aspects of the issue.do you have any thoughts on that? the things that the culture is doing, are there things out there boiling out around that may change this calculation? that may increase people's tendency toward violence for solutions problems, et cetera?steven pinker: the supreme court made the right decision. in fact, i signed on to an amicus brief in california when the law was first challenged, because the science that attempts to show that watching violent video games makes kids violent is bad science. most of it is blank-slate science: they do correlations showing that the kids who like violent entertainment are also kids who commit more violence, and they leap from cause to effect without factoring in the possibility that violent people like violent entertainment.in terms of cause and effect, there's little, if any, evidence for a causal relationship, aside from irrelevant findings like, if you show kids the three stooges, they run around the lab a lot more—that's the "science." and historically, the great age of video game violence, which has been since the 1990s (and it is gruesome stuff) are exactly the decades in which violence in the united states plummeted.violent crime in all western countries has declined. there was an opposite trend i haven’t talked about, but you may have noticed in the graphs: when i plotted the rate of violence in european countries from the middle ages to the present, it went way down, and then there was a little uptick in the 1960s. it was a little bounce in violence that lasted through the '60s, '70s and '80s then got reversed in the '90s. this decade has brought us back to some of the lowest rates of violence in american history, 4.8 per 100,000 per year. (the lowest was 4.0, in the late '50s.) the new decline took place exactly when video games exploded. and there's a reason for the lack of a causal relationship.violent entertainment goes way back, including special effects by shakespearean actors who would have concealed bladders filled with pig blood, so that when one stabbed the other, there would be a big spurt of gore. people have always liked violent entertainment. the correlation with behavior is poor because of the way human motivation works. when are people violent? it's when they want someone else to come to harm. that accounts for most of the variance in violence. how often you see it done, whether you see it done in your imagination, is separate from how many other people in the world you want dead. and that's why i think that video games are a red herring.daniel kahneman: have you commented on what happens on the statistics of soldiers firing their guns?steven pinker: yes. there is a widely spread factoid that most soldiers are inhibited from firing their guns in a battle.daniel kahneman: there has been training that is very effective so that soldiers currently do fire their guns.steven pinker: yes. and this is sometimes used in the service of the idea that we have innate inhibitions against killing.there is, i agree, such a feature of human psychology: we don't physically harm another person, particularly an innocent stranger,  lightly. the reason that this feature of human psychology is misleading is that it's an inhibition that is not only easy to overcome, but pleasurable to overcome. it's in the same category as an aversion to eating spicy foods or strong cheese or rock climbing. there is an innate tendency to avoid it but there's tremendous pleasure taken in overcoming that avoidance. and of course, the history of hand-to-hand combat going back to homeric greece shows that people very easily lose whatever inhibitions they have against causing direct bodily harm.the second reason that an aversion to hands-on killing is misleading is that most human violence is not mano-a-mano physical conflict, but "cowardly violence." it's pre-dawn raids, it's ambushes, it's drive-by shootings. the inhibition we have works as follows: if you meet an adversary, then since on average he will be as big and strong and mean as you are, you should not give him reason to kill you by attacking him when there’s nothing in it for you (as in a conscript army in battle against a national enemy). but when you can get away with violence without fear of reprisal, inhibitions are gone. in tribal conflict, that's where the big numbers pile up—sneaky ambushes and raids.one reason i think anthropologists were misled about non-state violence, until they started counting rates of death in primitive warfare, is that they only looked at "pitched battles," where you have the two sides in war paint with spears and drums and they make a lot of noise and then one side backs down. that led to the conclusion that primitive violence is only ritualistic. but the observers didn't count all the times in which one tribe would tiptoe into another village before dawn, then fire arrows through people as they left their huts in the morning to pee, and then annihilate the entire village. that's what gives rise to the high counts.john tooby: as you know, i'm in agreement with almost all of your argument, especially about very long term trends. very well founded are the events that are aggregated over large populations. but when you start to enter a world with small numbers of nation states, individual events count, individual decision makers count, as you say. and so if you look at world war ii, right before world war ii, fascism independently took control in italy and portugal, spain, germany, hungary, on and on. add in the marxian, soviet celebration of a certain type of war. then essentially, all of continental europe except the netherlands and switzerland and a few small places went in that direction.then, if you look at the outcome of the war, it was a very close thing, that is, for a while it was only britain against the continent of europe and it could have very easily gone in the george orwell direction. …steven pinker: in fact it did in half of europe, the eastern half ...john tooby: exactly. that's one cautionary element to me. and then i think about what's the likelihood that every conceivable trend would be in the right direction. for example, it's hard to look at what i think of as the writ of the enlightenment, liberal democracy as spreading inevitably when in fact it was spread by the armies of the english-speaking peoples—imposed by force on japan and continental europe in world war ii. and then if you look at other places—you would like to think, and when i was young, i used to think that spontaneously, everybody would vote for democracy if they could. but you look at places like africa or the middle east, and they've proven remarkably resistant, and high levels of warfare go on with this resistance.one also wonders whether the world has now crossed a threshold with, for example, the rise of automatic weapons. could the u.s. have formed a liberal democracy if everybody had had automatic weapons? or is it the same kind of thing as the colonies, even though every teenager in africa, 13 year olds—not everyone, but large numbers—have automatic weapons. you have this hellish circumstance, and you wonder, would it have been similar here?i'm also worried that the initial sort of liberal revolution that led to this sort of openness and a cosmopolitan direction also leads culturally to people in these democracies who are now largely unwilling to defend themselves. if you look at europe, secretary of defense gates said they are unable to sustain a campaign of more than a few weeks outside of europe.john tooby: but even in the u.s., blue-staters are european. if you look at who goes into the army, there are all of these myths that it is stupid people or ignorant people or the poor, but it's not.  it's middle class, rural people who are slightly better educated than average and who are religious. those people are getting fewer in the liberal cosmopolitan revolution. dennis miller has the line that we have our pet medications federal expressed to our front doors, and al-qaeda looks at that, and thinks, we can take those guys.  steven pinker: those are both excellent questions. okay, the first one. it is certainly true that there can be enormously contingent events where a small number of people can do a lot of damage, and those uncommon but consequential events can blindside you. and that was why, in answer to ben's question, i cited that as the kind of thing that could go wrong.but there are two ways of thinking about it. you could say we've been amazingly lucky and it could all blow at any moment. but you could also say that the world just went through an extraordinary run of bad luck. if hitler had been gassed a little bit more thoroughly in the trenches in world war i, there probably would have been no world war ii in europe, there probably would have been no nuclear arms race, et cetera, et cetera.so it goes both ways. the question is, how have the odds been shifting? is the probability of hitler coming to power in germany now the same as it was in the '30s? it's not zero. but it's probably less.a few years ago you could have worried that large parts of the world just couldn't stand the idea of liberal democracy. with the arab spring we have to reassess even that. and the arab spring did not just come out of the blue in the last six months. a gallup poll of the islamic world conducted in 2005 had a lot of surprises. there was a large current of liberalism that was seething beneath the surface of the ayatollahs and theocrats on the one side, and the oily kleptocrats on the other side. i wouldn't say a majority—the numbers depend on the country—but support for democracy, freedom of speech, women's rights was found in a substantial proportion of the islamic world, in some of the countries a majority, which makes the arab spring not a total surprise.now, i wouldn't go so far as, say, francis fukuyama, who suggests that history has a momentum in that direction, that we’re seeing a grand dialectical process culminating in "the end of history." i would localize it to more circumscribed processes like technology, cosmopolitanism, and the spread of ideas. but we can't discount the possibility that liberal democracy ultimately is a pretty attractive vision. and that maybe, like cell phones, when it's available it becomes a gadget that most people find appealing. i wouldn't predict with confidence that that's going to happen, but i wouldn't be surprised if it happened.
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 the real digital revolution hasn’t happened in the nineties. we are experiencing it right now. what we’ve seen in recent years; it was only the beginning. and that’s this year's theme of dld.the internet permeates every corner of our everyday life. and that will put everything in flux. media, work, medicine, politics and our social activities, privacy, and yes, even our university landscape: every bit and atom of our life will be altered by technology in the next years. since the mobile revolution, the web is everywhere, embedded in everything surrounding us. digitality is becoming omnipresent. just like electricity.let’s look at the working environment, for instance. not only the boundaries between work and private life are dissolving. we have to be / are increasingly flexible. at the same time we are experiencing entirely new modes of cooperation. some are early in the office. others work on the road. and we’ll communicate via innovative tools that enable a whole new way of co-working.entire career paths will have to reinvent themselves. cab drivers are becoming dispensable in times of uber and other services. hoteliers are challenged by entrants like airbnb. generally, it holds true that non-cognitive jobs are increasingly marginalised.  bear the assembly line in mind. the rise of robots has been heralded by many. they can build machines, extinguish fires, write simple text and drive cars. back in the days, computers and television sets were ruling the international electronics shows – today it’s driverless cars. along with any new cultural technique, new career paths are born, old ones disappear, new patterns are replacing traditional ones. without the right reactions, this will result in severe social problems. thus, it’s urgent urgent to reinvent yourself in times of change.do we have to be afraid? quite the contrary. i am convinced that these developments predominantly yield opportunities. for innovation. but also, for being more human again. after centuries of simulating the mechanic logic of classic capitalism. those technological developments are presenting us with the gift of time. elaborated tools are going to support journalists, for instance, to deal with huge data sets. this way, they are gaining time for other things. this is similar in other fields, too. in the future, we will have a lot more time for the stuff that really matters in life. and this will have a positive impact. one of the consequences we are witnessing already is that people all around the world are keen to engage socially. and by that, i do not refer to a slack mouseclick but to specific platforms, which allow to make significant contributions remotely and on location.nonetheless, a lot of people are frightened by this change. also because media is stoking fear – especially in germany. one reason is that they are in flux themselves. but we have to recognise that we cannot stop it. instead, we have to design this revolution. before it molds us. therefore, we have to reclaim a few qualities, which once made germany to be an important location of technology. we have to be more curious about everything technological, more courageous and – most of all – more passionate.a lot of people in germany perceive everything digital as the necessary evil. at least that’s my impression. but the connected world will help us all. transmitting drones will soon deliver internet access to the darkest corners of the poorest countries. dldsters like sebastian thrun or shai reshef are facilitating excellent education for millions of people with online universities, who had no chance whatsoever to study at a top-notch university.the developments in medicine are fascinating me the most. think of the groundbreaking diagnostic imaging systems or the potential of personalised medicine, accelerated by the genetic engineering. it’s within healthcare, where algorithms are showing full strength – and save lives. for instance, computer analyze the data of preterm infants in the united states. as they can collect the information of thousands of babies, they can discover emerging patterns of sprouting diseases and complications - and warn doctors, before problems have gotten severe.all these examples highlight the enormous potential that new technologies are offering us. we should talk a lot more about that. and with all skepticism: my glass is not half empty. it’s half full. at least! there’s a lot we don’t know yet. we have to learn how to learn it. it’s only the beginning!
 a confluence of trends has boosted lending club and its peers. demand for loans from creditworthy borrowers has held up even as banks have retrenched in the face of mounting regulation. there is no shortage of willing lenders: once provided mainly by the internet-browsing public, three-quarters of loans are now offered by yield-hungry institutional investors such as hedge funds.technology has also made the process of cutting out the middleman that much easier, for example by gauging the creditworthiness of potential borrowers through their musings on social media (best not to tweet about walking away from your electricity bill).doing banking without the expensive bits of the industry—branches, creaking it systems and so on—means that peer-to-peer loans offer lower rates, reflecting their reduced costs (see chart). most borrowers are refinancing their credit-card debt, swapping a loan on which they paid 16-18% for 12% or so at lending club. the company’s focus has been on smaller loans (up to $35,000) to individuals with decent credit ratings, although it is also catering to businesses now.peer-to-peer lenders use credit scores as a starting-point to establish a borrower’s creditworthiness in the same way as banks and credit-card companies do. but they say their snazzy credit-scoring algorithms will enable them to weed out probable defaulters better than conventional financial firms do, leading to smaller losses. that is plausible but unproven. doling out cash in good times is far easier than getting it back in a recession, as seasoned bankers know.the most appealing feature of lending club for those buying its shares may be that it is not a bank. it makes its money by charging fees to both borrowers and lenders but does not take any risk itself. better yet, if borrowers do not repay their loans, those who advanced them the money do not expect to be made whole, unlike bank depositors. there is no government guarantee, explicit or otherwise.lending club is hardly the scrappy insurgent that it is sometimes painted to be: its board includes john mack, a former boss of morgan stanley, and larry summers, once america’s treasury secretary, along with a slew of prominent venture capitalists. sustained future profitability will depend on the accuracy of the premise that banks are no better at gauging a customer’s creditworthiness than this new breed of newcomers and their crowd-sourced insights. if that proves to be more than boom-era bluster, banking deserves to be disrupted.
 yields on government bonds in the u.s., germany and japan plunged tuesday as anxiety over global growth intensified and investors sought havens from widening financial-market turmoil.economists and investors are increasingly concerned that the stagnant economies of the eurozone may be headed for a prolonged bout of deflation—a damaging spiral of falling prices and reduced spending and investment. that, in turn, has sparked worries about the resilience of the u.s. economy, which thus far has managed to accelerate in the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 cannabis startups have been raking in funding long before privateer. hits high in q4 2014.canna-businesses raised a total of $104m on 59 deals in 2014. privateer holdings could be the spark the industry needs to really hit new highs.this week, peter thiel’s founders fund announced that it was participating in a $75 million dollar investment round into cannabis venture privateer holdings  reportedly at a $425m valuation. given thiel and founders fund’s prominence and the size of the round, there was a lot of hype around the deal, but the reality is that deal activity and funding have been steadily increasing to cannabis and marijuana related startups and ventures for the last two years.using cb insights data, we aggregated all funding (both institutional and non-institutional) to companies in the cannabis industry, and it’s clear canna-business is booming. 2014 saw investors light up the space as marijuana related ventures raised a total of $104m across 59 deals.get free reports, data and graphs on emerging industries, startups & vc.the chart below highlights total funding to cannabis-related companies over the last five years.while privateer is by far the most well-funded of the bunch, we’ve highlighted 5 cannabis startups that have raised funding in the last year. these companies range from medical marijuana distributors to social networks for medicinal cannabis patients to care technologies for the industry.
 one of the fundamental problems that killed nokia, palm and rim was that in 2000 or so they designed their platforms around presumptions and tradeoffs that were correct for the time but which made it very difficult to compete with ios and android 5-10 years later. they presumed slow cpus, little memory, and slow networks, as well as only resistive touch screens or no touch at all, and they traded off performance and a richer experience for battery life. these were the correct tradeoffs and assumptions in 2000, but not in 2007. that meant that they had to change platforms, and changing your platform is almost always a near-death experience, as both apple and microsoft could testify. this raises a question: what assumptions and tradeoffs did apple and google make that would also cause them problems further down the road? it was 5 years from the first nokia series 60/symbian phone (the 7650 - i think i might have one somewhere) to the iphone's launch in 2007, but 8 years since then. a lot of what we've seen recently could be described as attempts to change some of those tradeoffs. the original iphone had a fixed resolution, couldn't run third-party apps and had no multi-tasking. some of this was philosophical (we're told steve jobs didn't want apps, if you believe that) and some was about the iphone being an mvp in many ways (basic camera and no copy/paste, 3g or picture messaging, for example). but most of it was about what it took to get a device that achieved the desired base level of experience at all at that cost and power budget - exactly the issues nokia, palm and rim faced years earlier. secure, sand-boxed multi-tasking third-party applications were more than the first generation hardware could manage, at least with a battery that would get you through the day. that is, a lot of what apple has been doing in the past few releases has been about rebuilding the operating system to shift the balance of those trade-offs over time as performance has gone up 50x or so. hence we did get sandboxed, secure multi-tasking and extensions and (in a slightly hacky way) a move away from fixed resolutions for both iphone and ipad, 8 years later. apple has been replacing the engine in flight, and has, more or less , got away with it. it changed all the assumptions. you can see something similar in android, where the key trade-off was in openness. google built/bought an open-source operating system with a very basic ux and very little central control, and again, that was the right trade-off for the time. it resulted in a hugely successful platform with unprecedented scale - there are almost certainly now more android devices in use than pcs (if you include both google's closed android and the open variants that dominate in china) and twice as many as consumer pcs, which is the more relevant comparison. of course, it also, inherently, led to fragmentation, a splintered and sub-par user experience and, increasingly, third parties (amazon, perhaps xiaomi, perhaps samsung) trying to take over the user experience.in 2007 that was the right trade-off - you can see the alternative path in windows phone. but over time the balance changed. if you want to attract app developers then fragmentation needs to be addressed, and as the os itself became a service aggregation layer before the browser, and as user data became as important as raw web search reach, google's control of the ux mattered more and more. hence, google can now be seen to be pushing back significantly on some of the 'open' parts of android. by putting its own services and apis into gms it ensures that a larger proportion of the base can have the latest 'version', for example, and it pushes ever harder to retain control over the ux and stop oems from changing too much. it's not yet clear where this will stabilize, with open android starting to spread outside china and the android oem space in flux, but google is clearly revisiting those assumptions about 'openness'.one way to look at this is that ios and android have been converging - they arrived with more or less the same capabilities despite starting from opposite ends. apple has given up control where google has taken it. and of course google has had to add lots to android just as apple had to add lots to ios (and they've generally 'inspired' each other on the way), and just as apple has added cloud services google has redesigned the user interface (twice, so far). but the underlying philosophies remain very different - for apple the device is smart and the cloud is dumb storage, while for google the cloud is smart and the device is dumb glass. those assumptions and trade-offs remain very strongly entrenched.  meanwhile, the next phases of smartphones (messaging apps as platforms and watches as a dominant interface?) will test all the assumptions again.
 new haven – since the global financial crisis and recession of 2007-2009, criticism of the economics profession has intensified. the failure of all but a few professional economists to forecast the episode – the aftereffects of which still linger – has led many to question whether the economics profession contributes anything significant to society. if they were unable to foresee something so important to people’s wellbeing, what good are they?indeed, economists failed to forecast most of the major crises in the last century, including the severe 1920-21 slump, the 1980-82 back-to-back recessions, and the worst of them all, the great depression after the 1929 stock-market crash. in searching news archives for the year before the start of these recessions, i found virtually no warning from economists of a severe crisis ahead. instead, newspapers emphasized the views of business executives or politicians, who tended to be very optimistic.the closest thing to a real warning came before the 1980-82 downturn. in 1979, federal reserve chair paul a. volcker told the joint economic committee of the us congress that the united states faced “unpleasant economic circumstances,” and had a “need for hard decisions, for restraint, and even for sacrifice.” the likelihood that the fed would have to take drastic steps to curb galloping inflation, together with the effects of the 1979 oil crisis, made a serious recession quite likely.nonetheless, whenever a crisis loomed in the last century, the broad consensus among economists was that it did not. as far as i can find, almost no one in the profession – not even luminaries like john maynard keynes, friedrich hayek, or irving fisher – made public statements anticipating the great depression.as the historian douglas irwin has documented , a major exception was the swedish economist gustav cassel. in a series of lectures at columbia university in 1928, cassel warned of “a prolonged and worldwide depression.” but his rather technical discussion (which focused on monetary economics and the gold standard) forged no new consensus among economists, and the news media reported no clear sense of alarm.interestingly, contemporary news accounts reveal little evidence of public anger at economists after disaster struck in 1929. so why has the failure to foresee the latest crisis turned out so differently for the profession? why has it – unlike previous forecasting failures – stoked so much mistrust of economists?one reason may be the perception that many economists were smugly promoting the “efficient markets hypothesis” – a view that seemed to rule out a collapse in asset prices. believing that markets always know best, they dismissed warnings by a few mere mortals (including me) about overpricing of equities and housing. after both markets crashed spectacularly, the profession’s credibility took a direct hit.but this criticism is unfair. we do not blame physicians for failing to predict all of our illnesses. our maladies are largely random, and even if our doctors cannot tell us which ones we will have in the next year, or eliminate all of our suffering when we have them, we are happy for the help that they can provide. likewise, most economists devote their efforts to issues far removed from establishing a consensus outlook for the stock market or the unemployment rate. and we should be grateful that they do.in his new book trillion dollar economists , robert litan of the brookings institution argues that the economics profession has “created trillions of dollars of income and wealth for the united states and the rest of the world.” that sounds like a nice contribution for a relatively small profession, especially if we do some simple arithmetic. there are, for example, only 20,000 members of the american economic association (of which i am president-elect); if they have created, say, $2 trillion of income and wealth, that is about $100 million per economist.a cynic might ask, “if economists are so smart, why aren’t they the richest people around?” the answer is simple: most economic ideas are public goods that cannot be patented or otherwise owned by their inventors. just because most economists are not rich does not mean that they have not made many people richer.the fun thing about litan’s book is that he details many clever little ideas about how to run businesses or to manage the economy better. they lie in the realm of optimal pricing and marketing mechanisms, regulation of monopolies, natural-resource management, public-goods provision, and finance. none of them is worth even a trillion dollars, but, taken together, litan’s conclusion is plausible indeed.the 2010 book better living through economics , edited by john siegfried, emphasizes the real-world impact of such innovations: emissions trading, the earned-income tax credit, low trade tariffs, welfare-to-work programs, more effective monetary policy, auctions of spectrum licenses, transport-sector deregulation, deferred-acceptance algorithms, enlightened antitrust policy, an all-volunteer military, and clever use of default options to promote saving for retirement.the innovations described in litan’s and siegfried’s books show that the economics profession has produced an enormous amount of extremely valuable work, characterized by a serious effort to provide genuine evidence. yes, most economists fail to predict financial crises – just as doctors fail to predict disease. but, like doctors, they have made life manifestly better for everyone.
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 chances are that you’ve heard of bitcoin, the digital currency that many predict will revolutionize payments – or prove to be a massive fraud – depending on what you read. bitcoin is an application that runs on the blockchain, which is ultimately a more interesting and profound innovation.the blockchain is a secure transaction ledger database that is shared by all parties participating in an established, distributed network of computers. it records and stores every transaction that occurs in the network, essentially eliminating the need for “trusted” third parties such as payment processors. blockchain proponents often describe the innovation as a “transfer of trust in a trustless world,” referring to the fact that the entities participating in a transaction are not necessarily known to each other yet they exchange value with surety and no third-party validation. for this reason, the blockchain is a potential game changer.in 2008, satoshi nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or group of people credited with developing bitcoin, released a whitepaper describing the software protocol. since then, the network has grown and bitcoinhas become a recognized unit of value around the globe. bitcoin is extremely important because it provides a mechanism for accessing the blockchain - but it’s not the only application that can leverage the platform.bitcoin has also been on the receiving end of some bad press, such as around the collapse of the mt. gox bitcoin exchange earlier last year. the mt. gox story is not necessarily an indictment of bitcoin. for the purposes of this post, simply remember this: bitcoin is just a mechanism for transacting on the blockchain and the blockchain is the key innovation.the blockchain enables the anonymous exchange of digital assets, such as bitcoin, but it is not technically dependent on bitcoin. the elegance of the blockchain is that it obviates the need for a central authority to verify trust and the transfer of value. it transfers power and control from large entities to the many, enabling safe, fast, cheaper transactions despite the fact that we may not know the entities we are dealing with.the mechanics of the blockchain are novel and highly disruptive. as people transact in a blockchain ecosystem, a public record of all transactions is automatically created. computers verify each transaction with sophisticated algorithms to confirm the transfer of value and create a historical ledger of all activity. the computers that form the network that are processing the transactions are located throughout the world and importantly are not owned or controlled by any single entity. the process is real-time, and much more secure than relying on a central authority to verify a transaction.there are many analogous concepts both ancient and modern. technology has and will continue to transfer power and control from central authorities and distribute them to the masses. for example, time used to be determined and communicated by large clock towers that were expensive to build and maintain. engineering innovations ultimately decentralized the quantification of time to the individual. likewise, whatsapp, a popular cross platform messaging app, cut the transaction cost of sending messages globally – and cut profits for the carriers. the central authority (phone carriers) lost to the application (whatsapp) built on a decentralized network (i.e. the internet).similarly, third parties that currently verify transactions (the central authority) stand to lose against the blockchain (the decentralized network). as such, the blockchain essentially disintermediates these third-party transaction verifiers: auditors, legal services, payment processors, brokerages and other similar organizations.while you may not be convinced that exchanging bitcoin is an invaluable service, there are many other examples of value transfer that are critical – and currently very slow and expensive. consider the exchange of property: numerous intermediaries are currently involved in this process, such as a third-party escrow service that works for both parties to ensure a smooth transfer. the escrow service, like other services built solely on trust and verification, collect fees that would be mitigated by performing the transaction on the blockchain – as would wire transfer fees, third party financial auditing, contract execution, etc.the use case of the blockchain enabling a decentralized currency exchange – such as bitcoin – is well defined and will likely be the dominant use case near term, however there are a multitude of innovative and disruptive use cases. companies are already building their own blockchains for various applications such as gridcoin that leverages the blockchain to crowdsource scientific computing projects. gridcoin uses its own protocols that require much less computing power and electricity to manage than traditional bitcoin networks.the blockchain is a foundational technology, like tcp/ip, which enables the internet. and much like the internet in the late 1990s, we don’t know exactly how the blockchain will evolve, but evolve it will.similar to the internet, the blockchain must also be allowed to grow unencumbered. this will require careful handling that recognizes the difference between the platform and the applications that run on it. tcp/ip empowers numerous financial applications that are regulated, but tcp/ip is not regulated as a financial instrument. the blockchain should receive similar consideration. while the predominant use case for the blockchain today is bitcoin currency exchange that may require regulation, this will change over time.had we over-regulated the internet early on, we would have missed out on many innovations that we can’t imagine living without today. the same is true for the blockchain. disruptive technologies rarely fit neatly into existing regulatory considerations, but rigid regulatory frameworks have repeatedly stifled innovation. it’s likely that innovations in the blockchain will outpace policy, let’s not slow it down.
 the venezuelan tourism ministry has denied reports that a shortage of milk is behind the closure of a famous ice-cream shop in the city of merida.the shop, called coromoto, is famous for offering more than 850 flavours of ice cream ranging from beer to beans.but the ministry says there is no shortage of ingredients and that other local ice-cream shops remain open.venezuela, which depends on imports for many products, is experiencing shortages of some staples, such as corn oil and powdered milk.according to the latest official figures released by venezuela's central bank, the scarcity index stood at 29,4% in march.this suggests that out of 100 goods, 29 were not always available everywhere at the time.while this does not mean that venezuelans cannot get access to food, it does mean that they may have to go to different supermarkets and search over several days to get everything on their shopping list.critics of socialist president nicolas maduro say government mismanagement is behind the scarcity.the government blames unscrupulous businesspeople, who it says hoard goods to drive up prices.officials also point to the fact that up to 40% of goods venezuela subsidises for its domestic market are being smuggled into neighbouring colombia, further exacerbating the shortages.in a statement published on its website (in spanish) , the tourism ministry said on monday that "despite the manipulation spread by a number of national and international media and the sign posted by the coromoto ice-cream shop, in which they blame their closure on a 'lack of ingredients', paradoxically the rest of these businesses is serving more and more tourists and residents as they have all that's needed to prepare ice cream".the statement goes on to quote the managers of two ice-cream shops in merida who say they are open for business.
 shanghai (reuters) - china will set up a government venture capital fund worth 40 billion yuan ($6.5 billion) to support start-ups in emerging industries, in its latest move to support the private sector and foster innovation."the establishment of the state venture capital investment guidance fund, with the focus to support fledging start-ups in emerging industries, is a significant step for the combination of technology and the market, innovations and manufacturing," china's state council, the cabinet, said in a statement."it will also help breed and foster sunrise industries for the future and promote (china's) economy to evolve towards the medium and high ends," it said in the statement published in the government's website, www.gov.cn, referring to sectors which the government is promoting such as technology and green energy.the government issued the statement after a meeting on wednesday. it did not give a timetable, but past experience has shown that such a fund could be established within a few weeks after an announcement.china's venture capital market remains small, the legacy of the country's decades of the planned economy in which private sector's development is largely subject to a great variety of restrictions.in the first half of 2014, 83 new funds were set up in china's venture capital market, with fresh capital eligible for investment in the mainland surging 157 percent from a year earlier, but remaining at a moderate $6.76 billion, according to a research by zero21po capital, a service provider and investment institution in china’s private equity industry.during the period, 517 investment cases occurred in the market, with details of 440 made public on a combined investment capital of $5.3 billion, the research showed.still, the government is increasingly supporting the expansion of the industry since two years ago when mapped out a strategy to let market forces to eventually play a "decisive" role in china's economy.last month, for instance, regulators issued new rules to allow insurance companies to invest their huge pool of premiums in venture capital funds for the first time.the cabinet said in wednesday's statement that the planned fund would be funded by the government's existing capital designated for expansion of emerging industries and by state corporates, while also inviting private partners to participate in.the fund will render public tenders to invite high processional asset managements to operate, with returns giving priority to private investors, it said.
 at 9:30 a.m. on thursday, trading floors across the city of london erupted.outbursts of obscenities and confusion followed the swiss central bank’s surprise decision to abolish its three-year-old policy of capping the swiss franc against the euro, according to traders in london’s financial district. the u-turn sent the franc as much as 41 percent up against the euro, the biggest gain on record, a move that one trader estimated may cause billions of dollars of losses for banks and their customers.dealers at banks including deutsche bank ag (dbk) , ubs group ag (ubsg) and goldman sachs (gs) group inc. battled to process orders amid a flood of customer calls and trade requests, according to people with direct knowledge of the events. at least one electronic currency-trading system temporarily halted transactions, adding to the mayhem.“this is the biggest currency shocker in years and it’s likely to create more volatility in the short term,” said james stanton, head of foreign exchange at devere group, a financial adviser that oversees about $10 billion. “trading positions are extremely vulnerable and volume has gone through the roof.”deutsche bank was among currency dealers to suffer disruptions to electronic trading, with its autobahn platform temporarily ceasing to provide quotes, according to a dealer from outside the bank. the frankfurt-based lender is among the four biggest dealers in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market, along with citigroup inc., barclays plc (barc) and ubs, according to euromoney institutional investor.spokesmen for deutsche bank, zurich-based ubs and new york-based goldman sachs declined to comment. some of the bankers interviewed for this story asked not to be identified as they weren’t authorized by their firms to speak publicly.sitting in front of their screens, dealers around the globe watched the franc hit 1.10 versus the euro, before surging to parity and reaching a record 0.8517 as the snb dropped its commitment to defend the ceiling introduced in 2011. the swiss currency jumped as much as 38 percent against the dollar while volatility climbed to the highest in more than a year.“the move caught everyone off guard,” said david madden, an analyst at ig group holdings plc (igg) , which takes bets on financial markets under the ig index name. “the swiss central bank has sent the markets into a tailspin.”as the franc spiked, investors said they found themselves unable to trade it amid a lack of price quotes.“there was a good hour when euro-swiss was untradeable,” said chris morrison, london-based head of strategy at omni macro fund, a hedge fund which oversees $550 million. “clearly there was no liquidity.”forex.com, a currency-trading website, said it halted services briefly. hsbc holdings plc (hsba) is investigating reports that customers in hong kong bought the franc below market rates when an online banking system failed to keep up with the currency’s gains after the removal of the cap.the turmoil forced top bankers to clear their diaries. at citigroup inc. (c) , steven englander, global head of g-10 foreign-exchange strategy, had all his meetings canceled following the central bank’s decision, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.with the franc largely frozen against the euro since the snb introduced the ceiling, the turmoil may have left some investors with losses so large they could even be forced to close, according to a trader at one bank who asked not to be identified.fxcm inc. (fxcm) , which handled a record $1.4 trillion of trades by individuals last quarter, said clients owe $225 million on their accounts after the snb’s decision. global brokers nz ltd. said losses from the franc’s surge are forcing it to shut down.anthony peters, a broker at swiss investment corp., said firms that were selling options tied to the swiss franc may be among losers. they would have lost money as volatility surged.“selling puts or vol on the franc was deemed to be snb guaranteed money for old rope,” he wrote in a note to clients. “there will be some very red faces around as it begins to transpire who should not have been playing that game.”to contact the reporter on this story: julia verlaine in london at jverlaine2@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: simone meier at smeier@bloomberg.net ; edward evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net keith campbellpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 mario draghi, president of the european central bank, intends to expand the ecb’s balance sheet to as much as 3 trillion euros through asset purchases and loans to banks.mario draghi is likely to announce a 550 billion-euro ($640 billion) bond-purchase program this week and won’t skimp too much on the details, economists say.the european central bank president will make his biggest push yet to steer the euro area away from deflation by announcing quantitative easing on jan. 22, according to 93 percent of respondents in a bloomberg news survey. the median estimate of the size of the package tops the 500 billion euros in models presented to officials this month.draghi’s goal at a press conference after the governing council gathers will be to convince investors he has a strategy big and bold enough to reinvigorate the moribund economy. speculation over his plans has already sent the euro to an 11-year low, with the fund flows probably contributing to the swiss national bank ’s shock decision to end a cap on the franc.“market expectations now are stellar,” said attilio bertini, head of research at credito valtellinese sc in sondrio, italy . there must be “no disappointment” and “the ecb’s next move should be pervasive, risk-transferring and long-lasting,” he said.shouldn't the ecb buy bonds, too?the proportion of economists predicting qe at this week’s meeting has risen from 37 percent in a survey carried out after the last monetary-policy meeting on dec. 4. this month’s survey polled 60 economists and was conducted from jan. 9 to jan. 16.with plunging oil prices tipping the euro-area inflation rate below zero for the first time in more than five years, policy makers have been arguing in media interviews and speeches over how to react. much of that has been in germany , where criticism of qe is strongest.bundesbank president jens weidmann has claimed that while cheaper energy weighs on inflation in the short term, it also provides stimulus to the economy. that position was reiterated by the german central bank in its monthly bulletin today. executive board member benoit coeure says it might not be enough.“anything that happens to headline inflation rates has potential to feed into long-term inflation expectations and that’s what we have to be wary of,” coeure said in comments published on the ecb’s website last week. while no decision has been taken on qe, “for it to be efficient it would have to be big,” he said.about half of economists in the bloomberg survey forecast the ecb will announce a total purchase size, and 15 percent said it’ll limit itself to a monthly amount. monthly buying could continue for a predetermined period, or until inflation is back at the ecb’s goal of just under 2 percent. consumer prices fell an annual 0.2 percent last month.fifty-seven percent of respondents said qe will largely focus on government bonds, with some other debt instruments included. a quarter predicted a broad mix of sovereign debt and other securities, and 14 percent said the program will exclusively purchase sovereigns.draghi intends to expand the ecb’s balance sheet to as much as 3 trillion euros through asset purchases and loans to banks. the central bank currently has assets of 2.2 trillion euros, though that’s likely to shrink in coming weeks as 200 billion euros of crisis-era loans to banks mature.he met with german chancellor angela merkel on jan. 14 for “regular informal talks,” a german government spokesman said last week, declining to comment on the topic. spiegel magazine reported on jan. 16 that draghi told her the latest qe plans.those plans include limiting risk-sharing by having national central banks buy the debt of their own countries, spiegel said, without stating where it got the information. purchases would be based on the ecb’s capital key , or roughly equivalent to the relative size of each economy. the key is 18 percent for germany, 14 percent for france , 12 percent for italy, and 9 percent for spain . all other nations are below 5 percent and eight are under 1 percent.purchases would be limited to 20 percent to 25 percent of each country’s debt, and greece would be excluded because its bonds don’t meet quality criteria, spiegel said.frankfurter allgemeine sonntagszeitung reported yesterday that national central banks would be liable for at least half of any losses that may arise from buying bonds issued by their own country. the german newspaper didn’t say where it got the information.more than two-thirds of respondents in the bloomberg survey said the ecb will use the capital key to set asset-buying, and 27 percent said national central banks will shoulder at least some of the risk on their own.“to have any significant effect on periphery bond rates, which we think is considered an important implicit policy target by the ecb, the program would have to include periphery government bonds ,” said christopher matthies, an economist at sparkasse suedholstein in neumuenster, germany.officials have also floated ideas such as the ecb buying debt only above a certain rating threshold or only making purchases up to a certain amount, leaving national central banks to decide if they want to go further.dutch central-bank governor klaas knot told spiegel that the decision to share risk is a matter for elected politicians, not central bankers.“we have to avoid that decisions are taken through the back door of the ecb balance sheet,” he said in an interview.that debate is colored by a european court of justice opinion last week on an earlier bond-buying plan, outright monetary transactions. the non-binding opinion, which will be followed by a ruling in four to six months, said the ecb should have “broad discretion” when framing monetary policy, while still pointing to limits to its powers.ultimately, some level of risk separation might be what it takes to mute the strongest opponents of qe at this week’s meeting and help draghi show investors that the governing council is committed to its task.“there’s already a majority in favor of qe and even purchases of government bonds,” said kristian toedtmann, an economist at dekabank in frankfurt . “but the ecb stands in a tradition of broad consensus.”to contact the reporters on this story: alessandro speciale in frankfurt at aspeciale@bloomberg.net ; andre tartar in london at atartar@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: fergal o’brien at fobrien@bloomberg.net ; joshua robinson at jrobinson37@bloomberg.net paul gordon
 kahara village, kenya —the wife of a cow herder recently switched on a light in her home for the first time ever, all thanks to a mobile phone.rokoine tipanoi used the mobile phone in november to make a tiny down payment on a solar panel on her roof that provides electricity to her home. the payment was so small, in fact, that it’s cheaper to...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 can a smartphone tell if you’re depressed?huntersville, n.c.—toward the end of janisse flowers’s pregnancy, a nurse at her gynecologist’s office asked her to download an iphone app that would track how often she text messaged with friends, how long she talked on the phone and how far she traveled each day.the app was part of an effort by ms. flowers’s health-care provider to test whether smartphone data could help detect symptoms of postpartum depression, an underdiagnosed condition affecting women after they give birth. the app’s developer, san francisco-based...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 the interactive transcript could not be loaded.ratings have been disabled for this video.rating is available when the video has been rented.this feature is not available right now. please try again later.airs fri, june 20 at 6am et/3am pt & sat, august 9 at 8pm et/5pm pt. you can also look for the film on watch tcm at http://tcm.com/watch .introduction of nick charles (william powell), soon buttonholed by worried dorothy (maureen o'sullivan), then interrupted by his wife nora (myrna loy) with a famous entrance, in mgm's "the thin man", 1934, the original, from the dashiell hammett novel. subscribe at http://spr.ly/6017ctbt to watch more great classic film clips every day.
 local entrepreneurs hope to spark a technological revolution by manufacturing android tablets to show that, “you can do different things in haiti,” despite the country’s history of producing only low-value goods.sûrtab employees work on circuit boards in the clean room at the factory. instead of hiring based on education, the company instead had applicants take psychological and dexterity tests reflecting the precise, disciplined work they do.click to enlarge | gregory casimir uses a soldering iron on a circuit board at sûrtab. employees here can make more than three times haiti’s minimum daily wage.click to enlarge | sûrtab, a local tablet maker, is proving haiti can make more than t-shirts. this android tablet assembled in haiti sells for $100 to $310.
 a subreddit devoted to the field of future(s) studies and evidence-based speculation about the development of humanity, technology, and civilization.be respectful to others - this includes no hostility, racism, sexism, bigotry, etc.support original sources - avoid blogs/websites that are primarily rehosted content.for details on moderation procedures, see the transparency wiki .if history studies our past and social sciences study our present, what is the study of our future? future(s) studies (colloquially called "future(s)" by many of the field's practitioners) is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to hypothesize the possible, probable, preferable, or alternative future(s).one of the fundamental assumptions in future(s) studies is that the future is plural rather than singular, that is, that it consists of alternative future(s) of varying degrees of likelihood but that it is impossible in principle to say with certainty which one will occur.
 
 greek national flags decorate the ceiling of a euro store above christmas decorations for sale in athens, greece. adding to the pressure is concern that ecb president mario draghi won’t be able to hold the currency bloc together amid signs greece may quit the euro area after its jan. 25 election. closegreek national flags decorate the ceiling of a euro store above christmas decorations... read moregreek national flags decorate the ceiling of a euro store above christmas decorations for sale in athens, greece. adding to the pressure is concern that ecb president mario draghi won’t be able to hold the currency bloc together amid signs greece may quit the euro area after its jan. 25 election.central banks and reserve managers are breaking from past practice by showing little appetite to add euros as the currency tumbles.the total amount of reserves held in euros fell 8.1 percent in the third quarter, more than the currency’s 7.8 percent decline in that period against the dollar, according to the most recent figures from the international monetary fund . the last two times the euro depreciated 7 percent or more in a quarter -- in 2011 and 2010 -- holdings declined far less.the data suggest reserve managers are passing up the chance to buy euros while they’re cheap, removing a key pillar of support. in august, european central bank president mario draghi cited the drop in other central banks’ euro holdings as a factor that would help weaken the exchange rate and ultimately boost the region’s faltering economy.“central banks have found new reasons not to feel comfortable with the euro,” stephen jen, managing partner and co-founder of slj macro partners llp in london , said by phone on jan. 6. “nobody wants to have a negative yield. you’re not keeping a currency to lose money.”the euro fell to as low as $1.1802 today, its weakest level since january 2006, after a report showed consumer prices fell 0.2 percent in december from a year earlier, more than the 0.1 percent decline forecast by economists. the data stoked speculation that a sovereign-bond purchase program, aimed at drawing money out of safe government debt and into the broader economy, is now all but inevitable.the ecb is already experimenting with negative interest rates on deposits, with the same goal of getting more cash pumping through the economy where it can stoke growth and boost prices. that’s one reason reserve managers are increasingly shunning the 19-nation currency, which traded at $1.1831 as of 1:08 p.m. in new york .today’s inflation report “surely set the seal on the ecb’s much-anticipated introduction of quantitative easing,” nick beecroft, a strategist at saxo bank a/s in london, wrote in a note.a spokesman for the frankfurt-based ecb, who asked not to be identified, said yesterday by e-mail that the international role of the euro is primarily determined by market forces and the central bank neither hinders nor promotes it.the amount of euros held in allocated reserves -- or those where the currency is specified -- fell to $1.4 trillion in the third quarter, or 22.6 percent of the total, from $1.5 trillion, or 24.1 percent, at the end of june, according to figures published by the imf on dec. 31. the proportion is the lowest since 2002 and down from as much as 28 percent in 2009.the decline in reserves allocated to the euro was more than four times the combined drop in holdings of yen, swiss francs, pounds and canadian and australian dollars. the u.s. dollar was the only currency in which reserves rose, with a $23.9 billion jump to $3.9 trillion, or 62.3 percent of the total.with the euro’s decline versus the dollar in the third quarter taken into account, the slide in holdings totaled only about $2.5 billion, according to a report by bnp paribas sa on jan. 6.“it was both active euro selling and valuation effects which drove the fall in the euro’s allocation,” anezka christovova, an analyst at credit suisse group ag in london, wrote in a report jan. 5. central banks reverting to dollar reserves “should add to the euro’s troubles,” she said.in the third quarter of 2011, the common currency slid 7.7 percent, while its reserves fell 2.8 percent. a deeper plunge of 9.4 percent in the euro in the second quarter of 2010 only prompted a 1.3 percent loss in holdings, the imf data showed.the euro will fall more than 1 percent to $1.17 by year-end, according to the median forecast of more than 50 strategists compiled by bloomberg. separate surveys suggest it will weaken against 24 of its 31 major peers.credit suisse is more pessimistic than the consensus, predicting a slide to $1.15 this year, according to a dec. 17 forecast. deutsche bank ag, the world’s second-largest currency trader, also targets $1.15 for year-end.the washington-based imf’s figures “suggest that there’s been genuine off-loading of euro reserves,” alan ruskin , the global head of group of 10 foreign exchange at deutsche bank in new york, said by phone on jan. 6. “the share has dropped very steadily. there’s definitely a trend in place.”to contact the reporter on this story: lananh nguyen in new york at lnguyen35@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: dave liedtka at dliedtka@bloomberg.net paul armstrong , robert burgesspress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
rt @dandolfa: my post on how to make money the next time the swiss attempt to fix their exchange rate ;)
 believe those who are seeking the truth. doubt those who find it. andre gidewas there an easy way to bet on a chf/eur appreciation? because if there was, we must all be kicking ourselves for not exploiting that trade!the difference between winning and losing in the fx market is usually just a matter of luck. to a first approximation, floating exchange rates seem to follow a random walk ( see here ). but the trade i'm describing here is one i think we should have expected to pay off for reasons beyond pure luck. that is, there is a pretty sensible theory of currency crises that might have guided our investment strategy in the present context. in particular, i'm thinking of paul krugman's (1979) model, which he describes here .the basic idea is as follows. suppose that a central bank wants to peg its currency relative to some other currency. suppose that it does so unilaterally. the success of the peg will depend critically on its perceived credibility. this credibility may depend on, among other things, the amount of foreign reserves held by our intrepid central bank. to defend the peg, the central bank must stand ready to buy its own currency on the fx market, which it does so by selling off its stock of foreign reserves.a unilateral peg of this sort is just ripe for speculation. the two most likely outcome in this case are (1) the peg holds or (2) the peg fails (the domestic currency depreciates). the trade in this case is to go short on the pegging bank's currency and long in the foreign currency. a speculator either breaks even if (1) or wins if (2). it's a can't lose proposition (but please don't try this at home kids). rational speculators, recognizing the opportunity, start shorting the pegged currency. if they do so en masse, our little central bank will soon run out of reserves and be forced to abandon the peg--a self-fulfilling prophecy.i didn't spot this in the case of the snb because, well, switzerland is not a banana republic--the swiss franc is considered a safe-haven security. and the snb was pegging because it was worried about currency appreciation--not the usual concerns about excess volatility or depreciation. of course, there was never any danger of the snb running out of reserves--they can print all the francs they want! so what was the danger?central bankers are by nature a highly conservative bunch. they become uncomfortable with things that are unfamiliar. like balance sheets the size of the moon, for example. with an ecb qe policy on the horizon, there was the prospect of eur for chf conversions proceeding at an even more rapid rate--leading to a very, very large snb balance sheet. my claim is this: we should have guessed that the snb would have at some point in this process lost its nerve and abandoned the peg, allowing their currency to appreciate (and if it didn't lose its nerve, the peg would have been maintained, so we would not have lost on the other likely outcome of my proposed bet). rational speculators anticipating this should have ... oh well, forget it. (let's try it next time and see what happens?).as for the snb abandoning its peg, especially the way it did, well, it just seems crazy to me. it would have made sense if one thought that eur inflation was likely to take off. but all the worry at present is directed toward the prospect of eur deflation. yes, that's right, the snb is stocking up on a currency whose purchasing power is projected to increase. and as for being concerned about eur inflation because of qe, it seems unlikely to me that the ecb wouldn't be willing and able to defend its low inflation target.in short, i think the snb could have let it's balance sheet grow much larger without any significant economic repercussions. instead, by removing the peg as they did, they suffered a huge and needless capital loss on their eur assets. strange move. but how can we argue against the past success of swiss bankers?
 pedestrians cross a street illuminated with neon signs in tokyo, japan. prime minister shinzo abe’s efforts to revive the world’s third-largest economy by cutting borrowing costs have only just started to revive the pace of lending, while deposits have swollen to a record every year since 2007. closepedestrians cross a street illuminated with neon signs in tokyo, japan. prime minister... read morepedestrians cross a street illuminated with neon signs in tokyo, japan. prime minister shinzo abe’s efforts to revive the world’s third-largest economy by cutting borrowing costs have only just started to revive the pace of lending, while deposits have swollen to a record every year since 2007.japanese bonds rose in the latest leg of a worldwide surge in government securities , with five-year yields matching germany (gdbr5) ’s at zero percent, as falling oil costs indicate inflation will slow.the effective yield on the bank of america merrill lynch global broad market sovereign plus index dropped to 1.21 percent yesterday, a record low in data starting in 1996. australia’s 10-year yield declined to its lowest level ever. germany’s have touched negative levels every day this month. switzerland’s closed yesterday at a record-low minus 0.127 percent.“it’s all about oil,” saidali jalai, a bond trader at bank of nova scotia in singapore. “inflation expectations keep coming down. that’s forcing the bond market to rally.”u.s. 10-year yield , the benchmark for company and sovereign borrowing costs, declined one basis point to 1.90 percent as of 12:14 p.m. in tokyo, according to bloomberg bond trader data. the 2.25 percent note due in november 2024 rose 1/8, or $1.25 per $1,000 face amount, to 103 6/32.japan’s 10-year yield fell one basis point to 0.265 percent, matching a record low. australia ’s dropped as much as nine basis points to an unprecedented 2.608 percent. a basis point is 0.01 percentage point.the bank of america sovereign index has returned 3.1 percent in the three months ended yesterday. the msci all-country world index of shares advanced 2.8 percent, including reinvested dividends.government bonds have surged as oil tumbled and as traders prepared for the european central bank to start buying government debt as soon as its jan. 22 meeting.crude oil has slumped 14 percent this year, after tumbling 46 percent in 2014.the difference between yields on 10-year treasuries and similar-maturity treasury inflation protected securities, a gauge of expectations for consumer prices, was at 1.56 percentage points. the figure slid to 1.54 last week, the least since 2010.ecb president mario draghi has said policy makers are making “technical preparations” to combat deflation, raising speculation he is preparing a bond-buying program similar to japan’s to pump money into the economy.the bank of japan’s purchases of as much as 12 trillion yen ($102 billion) a month are about equivalent to what the government issues in coupon-bearing securities.to contact the reporters on this story: kevin buckland in tokyo at kbuckland1@bloomberg.net ; shigeki nozawa in tokyo at snozawa1@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: garfield reynolds at greynolds1@bloomberg.net nicholas reynolds, tomoko yamazakipress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
rt @d_blanchflower: policymakers have no idea how to create any inflation
my indy column
 note: we do not store your email address(es) but your ip address will be logged to prevent abuse of this feature. please read our legal terms & policiesthe uk isn’t in deflation yet. while central bankers know what to do about stopping inflation, they don’t know what to do about halting deflation. the swiss national bank last week abandoned its attempt to defend a currency floor, which caused a sharp appreciation in its currency, which will exacerbate the deflationary forces it has already been hit by. this was largely a response to the prospect of the european central bank doing large-scale quantitative easing after a positive ruling on its legality from the european court of justice. this caused funds to rush into switzerland from the eurozone, which has also fallen into deflation, with the latest estimate showing prices falling at 0.2 per cent a year. there is deflationary contagion in the air.according to oecd data, inflation in japan averaged minus 0.23 per cent between 1999 and 2013, compared with plus 2.2 per cent in the uk and plus 2.4 per cent in the us. over that 15-year period japan had eight years where there was deflation and two when price rises averaged zero. the uk had none where price rises were negative, while the us had one (2009). once you have deflation it is extremely hard to get rid of it. policymakers have no idea how to create any inflation.in a famous speech* entitled “deflation: making sure ‘it’ doesn’t happen here”, given in 2002, the former fed chairman ben bernanke warned about the destructive nature of sustained deflation, which he argued should be strongly resisted. prevention of deflation is preferable to a cure. america’s worst encounter with deflation was in the 1930s, when the price level fell about 10 per cent per year, which mr bernanke notes caused massive financial problems, including defaults, bankruptcies, and bank failures.but he noted that a little bit of deflation is also bad. speaking about japan, he said: “where what seems to be a relatively moderate deflation – a decline in consumer prices of about 1 per cent per year – has been associated with years of painfully slow growth, rising joblessness, and apparently intractable financial problems in the banking and corporate sectors.”he argues that deflation is in almost all cases a side-effect of a collapse of aggregate demand. the economic effects of a deflationary episode, he argues, for the most part, “are similar to those of any other sharp decline in aggregate spending, namely, recession, rising unemployment, and financial stress”. do not enter here!the latest office for national statistics release showed that the uk cpi had fallen from 1.0 per cent to 0.5 per cent, largely driven by the fall in the oil price, which has more than halved since the summer, but there is a broader story. the bloomberg commodity index, which tracks exchange-traded commodity futures contracts on 20 commodities, including oil, but also food, metals and gold, is down by a quarter since the summer.the prime minister in a tweet, though, celebrated the fall in inflation, which he said was “good news for families. our long-term economic plan is on track and helping hardworking taxpayers”. it remains unclear how the coalition’s long-term economic plan, which produced the worst recession in 300 years, and lowered real wages by around 10 per cent, was able to lower world oil and commodity prices.in its latest report on global prospects, the world bank has argued that “the global economy is still struggling to gain momentum as many high-income countries continue to grapple with legacies of the global financial crisis and emerging economies are less dynamic than in the past”. china, they argued, is “undergoing a carefully managed slowdown”. as a consequence, they lowered their forecast of world growth in 2015 to 3 per cent, down 0.2 per cent since june 2014. of particular note is the lowering of their forecast for china, down from 7.7 per cent in 2013 to 7.4 per cent for 2014; 7.1 per cent in 2015; 7.0 per cent in 2016; and 6.9 per cent in 2017. china continues to export deflation, with factory prices falling at over 3 per cent per annum.mark carney for some time has insisted that the uk isn’t heading to deflation, but this week in a bbc interview he conceded that it is a possibility. he apparently wants to draw a distinction between what he says is “the persistently low inflationary pressures” faced in the eurozone and the situation in the uk, where tumbling oil prices have pushed the inflation rate to its lowest level since 2000.the chart, which plots comparable consumer price inflation rates in the eurozone and the uk since the start of the recession, suggests that is a highly complacent view. the two series move very closely together; for the technically minded, the correlation is 0.74. the uk series is approximately a percentage point above that in the eurozone, and both series have moved steadily downwards together since september 2011, although with a broad flattening in the uk between around june 2012 to september 2013.both have fallen in tandem since june 2013, well before the collapse in the oil price. the uk looks to be about 6 months behind the eurozone. currently inflation is 0.5 per cent in the uk, and it was 0.5 per cent in the eurozone in june 2014. deflation is coming. it may well be here just in time for the election in may.the chancellor will presumably insist that very low inflation is good for the economy and all part of his “long-term economic plan”. but if very low inflation was such a good thing, then it doesn’t make much sense for the government to give the mpc a 2 per cent symmetric target. it would be better for it to have a 0.5 per cent target or even zero.in its review of the monetary policy framework published in may 2013, the treasury argued “the main reason why zero inflation is not pursued as a policy goal is because, in the event of shocks, it can result in deflation, or negative inflation, which is highly undesirable. for example, deflation can impose large economic costs, in the form of low growth and high unemployment, as experienced during the great depression of the 1930s. in addition, deflationary expectations can limit how effective monetary policy is in accommodating large negative shocks”.mr carney insisted that the mpc has tools to deal with the problem of deflation. the main one he has is more quantitative easing. the prospects of a rate rise in the uk before 2020 look remote. the uk isn’t in deflation … yet.*“deflation: making sure ‘it’ doesn’t happen here” speech to the national economists club, washington, 21 november 2002
 the share of people under age 30 who own private businesses has reached a 24-year-low, according to new data, underscoring financial challenges and a low tolerance for risk among young americans.roughly 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned stakes in private companies, according to an analysis by the wall street journal of recently released federal reserve data from 2013. that compares with 10.6% in 1989—when the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 ukraine has had its fair share of troubles this year, with political turmoil in the east of the country making headlines around the world. however, that doesn’t seem to have harmed the country’s tech sector.a new report [ pdf link ] from ukraine digital news and aventures paints a picture of an ecosystem with an exploding venture capital market (going from almost nothing five years ago to at least $80 million in 2013), a growing angel scene and a new generation of entrepreneurs for them to invest in.as ukraine digital news’ adrien henni notes in the report, “in the minds of many ukrainians, technology shines as a promise for highly-skilled and well-paid jobs for the new and next generations; of the country’s stronger integration into the global economy; of improved life conditions in virtually everything from online services, to e-government, to smart homes and cities.”in other words, just like in other parts of the world, tech equals hope and a better tomorrow in ukraine.it’s worth noting that the report is backed by aventures, a venture capital firm that invests in ukrainian companies and with an interest in making the country look attractive. still, the report stands up as worthwhile read, backed by data and interviews with vcs and entrepreneurs. it depicts a tech sector growing with strength despite challenging circumstances.
 we’re releasing an addition to coinbase’s client library family, this time for python. this library has been a popular request, and is now available thanks to peter downs, a coinbase intern, who built the library from the ground up with the assistance of the api team. here are his reflections on building the library and on interning at coinbase. if you’re interested in growing coinbase’s api, visit our open positions .i’m happy to announce the release of coinbase-python , the official python api client for the coinbase api . when i sat down with the team at the beginning of my internship, we set a goal of releasing an airtight library that would make it as easy as possible for python developers to get started with the api. after two weeks of research, planning, and testing, i’m very proud of the end result – i believe those goals have been met.in the past i’ve worked as a full-time software engineer but this is my first internship in the field. i admit, i was worried: that the work wouldn’t teach me any new skills; that it would be too difficult; that it would languish internally and i’d never get to show it off. but on the very first day my mentor sat me down and we figured out a project that would meet the company’s goals and my own. the whole team has been awesome about making things run smoothly from the moment i signed the offer letter. if you’re thinking about applying for an internship with coinbase, do it!although i’ve open-sourced a fair amount of code , there’s always more to learn. the new python client is the first library i’ve written to run on python 2 and python 3; it was great to work through all the details of making the code compatible with both versions of the language.releasing code to the public means making sure that it works; this is where unit tests come in. although i’ve written tests before, this is the first time i’ve used tox to run the test suite. tox makes it convenient to run the tests against multiple versions of python, which was absolutely essential in making sure the code worked on python 3. combined with ned batchelder’s coverage.py tool , i was able to make sure that the tests i wrote exercised all the important parts of the library code. and thanks to travis ci , the test suite is run automatically on every pull-request we receive as well as every commit to the main repository.writing the library also gave me a chance to play around with some cool programming techniques to make developers' lives a little easier.all of the python models that you get out of the api (for example, a transaction object representing an exchange of bitcoin between two parties) are directly json-serializable. what do i mean?transaction = coinbase_account.get_transaction('54a710dd25dc9a311800003f') # instead of this: transaction_dict = transaction.to_dict() json_formatted_data = json.dumps(data) # you can just write: json_formatted_data = json.dumps(transaction)it can feel unnecessarily verbose to have to use ['item'] notation to get at nested information in api responses, so we allow .attr style notation as well as standard dictionary ['item'] access. for example, getting the email of the person who sent money in a transaction:# the following lines are equivalent: email = transaction['sender']['email'] email = transaction.sender.emailsome of the api responses return multiple items, such as getting a user’s available accounts . these responses include paging data to let you know how many items came back and how many there are in total. but because of this, accessing an individual item can be a little repetitive. we fixed this for every pages response in the api:accounts = coinbase_client.get_accounts() # getting the first account the normal way wallet = accounts.accounts[0] # getting the first account the easy way wallet = accounts[0] # oh, and slices work too, even weird ones accounts_in_reverse_order = accounts[::-1]it’s nice for developers to be able to understand the data they’re working with. we made sure every api response has a well-formatted string representation to make it easier to see all the details.>>> account <account @ 0x1099a43c8> { "active": true, "balance": { "amount": "10.80000000", "currency": "btc" }, "created_at": "2015-01-02t13:42:53-08:00", "id": "54a710dd25dc9a311800003f", "name": "my wallet", "native_balance": { "amount": "130.31", "currency": "cad" }, "primary": true, "type": "wallet" }ipython is one of my favorite tools in the python ecosystem. among other features, it allows for tab-completion of method and member names. this is great for playing around with a new api and figuring out what’s available. all of our api responses fully support tab completion:python-coinbase is registered on pypi so installation is a one-liner:the package is versioned with a semantic versioning scheme so developers can make sure they’re getting the latest possible version of the library that they know how to use.this project has been a fantastic experience. i’ve gotten to tune up my python skills, learn more about releasing python libraries, and ultimately build something i can be proud of. huge thanks to the rest of the coinbase team, who have been extremely helpful the entire time, from helpign me flesh out the developer ux, reviewing my code, and letting me work for them in the first place :)a special thanks for helping us out to release on pypi goes to george sibble who maintained unofficial coinbase python library for two years and let us take over the pypi ownership.in 2015 we plan to make substantive improvements to our developer platform, making it easier for you to build bitcoin apps and to successfully grow your users. this is the first post in our brand new developer blog and going forward we’ll be using this blog to announce changes and improvements among other updates.during the last several weeks we have been hard at work improving api documentation, adding new endpoints, and making significant security improvements. here’s a short update on the latest changes.we redesigned and updated our api reference which is now available over at developers.coinbase.com/api . along with a new design, more information about api usage and libraries can be found from the documentation.to improve user and developer experiences, we’ve improved our oauth2 flow and we have made several security related changes.all scope has been removed from oauth and is only available with api key authentication. this makes it easier for users to understand which permissions and actions your application can perform on their accounts.when requesting access to send scope you need to supply daily, weekly or monthly limit. this will be visible for the user when authorizing the application and they can later change the limits from their settings. read more .2fa has been added to post /transactions/send_money endpoint and the user is required to supply a correct 2fa code when making certain requests. it works similarly to sending money at coinbase’s web application and the token is only required when the user has 2fa enabled. applications may bypass 2fa with special permission, but 2fa is strongly recommended for most apps. read more .these changes only affect newly created oauth applications (after 04 dec 2013) so no changes are required to legacy apps but we encourage you to update your applications now. we may require an update to all legacy apps in the future.to keep up with future announcements, subscribe to this blog and follow @coinbaseapi on twitter.
 i never had a problem with mitt romney’s use of the phrase “binders full of women.” remember that awkward 2012 statement about his proposed cabinet’s lack of women? he said, “i had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men … i went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘can you help us find folks?’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.” romney realized that he was seeing no women candidates for his cabinet and reached out to people he thought could help him. instead of congratulating him for his realization and his attempt to (awkwardly) rectify the situation, we crucified him for not already having a network of accomplished women.if we punish men who publicly admit they need more gender diversity in their companies and try to hire more women, we’ll be closing off a great avenue for women to succeed, and closing off diverse viewpoints from the people who need it most. most americans in positions of wealth and influence are white men, and sometimes they stumble and make mistakes. screaming at them for it won’t help women get jobs. compassion, clear-sightedness, and advocacy will.large seattle companies are hiring tens of thousands of tech workers with no thought to gender diversity. seattle is shifting to a place where men have the well-paid jobs, and women work in support positions. even when women set out to create a tech career for themselves, they’re faced with profound barriers and bias at every point in their struggle. women leak from every joint in the tech career pipeline.why should this matter to you if you’re a tech ceo like me and trying to build a company? we know now that adding women at every stage of a tech company’s growth (and most especially in the earliest stages) improves profits, stabilizes revenue, decreases legal costs for financial malfeasance, reduces public relations fiascoes, improves product quality and decreases marketing missteps, and creates a better working environment . it’s stupid on every level not to acknowledge the obstacles women face when they try to join a tech company. it’s stupid on every level not to acknowledge the obstacles women face when they try to join a tech company.women will already be discouraged at every point along the way to working at tech companies. eliza rawlings, chief business officer at cloud direct, shared an experience she had while studying electronic engineering. she said one of the male lecturers walked into the lecture theatre and, seeing only a handful of girls amongst mostly male students, very seriously said: “ladies, what are you doing here? you are wasting your time. there is no place for you in this industry. i mean it – don’t waste your time here. the industry doesn’t want women.” so, if a woman makes it to a technical interview, she’s already overcome huge obstacles. don’t make your interview a horrifying steeplechase through careless and non-people-oriented technologists who want to put your potential technical talent through a gauntlet.amazon has recently been justifiably criticized for its interview processes that turn off applicants with diverse perspectives and filters for sameness in all its technologists. one applicant “ didn’t get an offer , but by the time she ran (screaming?) to her car she didn’t want one.” a company that interviews this way is discouraging to women seeking any camaraderie or support in the workplace, and advertises that it will be a bad place to work. women who made it through interviews at tech company zillow allegedly got jobs that have been equated to actual sexual torture . zillow has fired two of the employees embroiled in the recent scandal and has said that it doesn’t tolerate this behavior, which is a decent first step to fixing a toxic culture. no tech ceo wants to run a toxic company.so why don’t we, as the founders of tech companies, provide every opportunity for women to join our companies? we’re all fighting against a mostly unconscious social bias that keeps us from envisioning women as productive tech workers. humans live, work, and play in tribes, and if your tribe only looks like you, that doesn’t make you a terrible person—but it does make you someone who is only hearing part of the story. founders share a shorthand of shared experience with the people they know and likely hired at early stages. it makes for rapid and easy communication, but it also means everyone shares the same blind spots. let’s encourage and reward people who admit they need gender diversity rather than shaming them publicly. this gets us all much further towards economic equality than vicious attacks and ignoring the situation.how can we overcome this obstacle? burning the system down only makes us all poorer and stupider. it’s also been proven false that (as i’ve been repeatedly and condescendingly informed) if women wanted to be in tech, they’d just, you know, be in tech. instead, let’s start conversations with companies to improve their hiring and retention of women and encourage tech founders and hiring managers to deliberately seek out female candidates for roles that have only male candidates. let’s encourage and reward people who admit they need gender diversity rather than shaming them publicly. this gets us all much further towards economic equality than vicious attacks and ignoring the situation.i’d personally love it if tech companies hired women because they’re qualified and the best person for the position even if they’re not perfect at self-promotion or don’t show stereotypical confidence in their abilities. still, i really only care about results. if a tech founder hires a spectacular female candidate for a senior technical management position and she’s paid, treated, and mentored well, i don’t particularly care if the motivation for hiring her was partially cynical. cs lewis (in the closest he ever approached to machiavellian realist ethics) once said that “the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive.” i have every faith that people who start hiring women will not just hope, but realize fully, that it was a good decision for their bottom line as well as their company ethics.many male founders are praying they’ll avoid some random blogger noticing that their company has thirty male engineers and leaders, five female marketers, and three female secretaries. i discovered klout had these kinds of numbers in 2013, and the huffington post blared out my findings , forcing them to make a public statement. it takes a special kind of idiocy to think that a tech company can make a billion dollars in an ipo while avoiding federal oversight of company demographics and equal opportunity reporting. a thoughtful founder and ceo starts planning for a diverse and successful company instead of hoping it will magically appear.fortunately, like albus dumbledore said, “help will always be given to those who ask for it.” if you have realized you need gender diversity in your company, here are three specific steps you can take.first, the statistical existence of the tipping point of diversity is over 20%, and coincidentally enough, that’s an average percentage of women in tech specialties (e.g. more in web design, less in sysadmin). if your company has twenty developers, you need to hire at least four women coders. ask yourself if, like mitt romney, you aren’t being presented with female candidates for open positions. reach out to tech recruiters until you see at least 20% of the resumes in front of you shift to female candidates.second, invisible internal biases are hard at work keeping us from making objective decisions. if you have a diverse candidate pool and yet your company is still not hiring women, ask yourself and your hiring managers how much “gut feeling” your hiring decisions are based on. i’ve frequently talked to hiring managers who had a hard time understanding that women and men are socialized into differing levels of confrontation. this is a direct quote from a hiring manager i was once coaching: “all she did was ask questions, even after i told her that her correct code was wrong to see if she’d stand up for herself. she just wanted to know why i thought that instead of telling me that i was the wrong one.” stepping back and thinking about it, he was eventually able to understand–too late–that she was defusing conflict instead of increasing it, while still working through the problem, and that she would have been a great hire. make sure that you and your hiring managers don’t misinterpret confrontational people as strong, and cooperative people as weak. these differing ways of thinking are vital to stimulating good discussion, company culture, and the bottom line. intel ceo brian krzanich just announced a $300 million budget to increase diversity at intel. most importantly, he understands that  “people hire people who are like them. it’s convenient, it’s comfortable, it’s what you know best.” i guarantee that the ceo of intel isn’t spending 300 million dollars to feel good about himself. he’s improving intel’s culture and approach to diversity because it makes him money.third, publicly state that you are an advocate for diversity, you understand the barriers facing women and minorities in tech, and your company will contribute in a transparent way to the solution. start talking about diversity while your company is small, and you’ll build a company where people expect the leadership to be committed to diversity. we all act within the constraints and incentives of our culture and society, as well as the constraints and incentives we’ve set up for ourselves. it’s much harder to add a commitment to diversity as a core value of a company that’s already huge, and because you started small, you’re constrained and incentivized by your own promises to make diversity in your company real, without paying huge costs later. loudly adding to the voices supporting diversity in tech helps everyone working towards the solution.if all else fails, email me at t@thetarah.com privately and we’ll talk—confidentially. i won’t mock you and i will help you. if you’ve chosen not to hire women because their lady brains cannot encompass computer programming, i would like to politely invite you to go find your public relations fix somewhere else. i’m tarah wheeler van vlack, i’m the ceo of fizzmint, i advocate for diversity in technology, and i know binders full of women.my fellow seattle tech ceos: we are the stewards of power and wealth in our city, we collectively bear responsibility for how few women are in tech, and we can and will do better.tarah wheeler van vlack  (ba, ms, csm, csd) is co-founder and ceo of  fizzmint , an end-to-end employee management company. she has led projects at microsoft game studios (halo and lips), architected systems at  silent circle , & holds  two agile development certifications through the scrum alliance.  she founded  red queen technologies, llc , and co-founded and is co-chair of  hack the people , a mentorship project focused on underprivileged people in technology. she acquired her startup funds by cleaning out poker rooms in the northwest and las vegas. follow her  @tarah .
 computers in crisis by jerome t. murray & marilyn j. murray (1984) was the first book published about the computer date problem later known as y2k. this archive currently showcases 155 books from y2k sorted into 11 categories.duis mollis, est non commodo luctus, nisi erat porttitor ligula, eget lacinia odio sem nec elit. maecenas faucibus mollis interdum. nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue.you must select a collection to display.
 
 1department of political science, university of california, los angeles (ucla), los angeles, ca, usa.can a single conversation change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage? a randomized placebo-controlled                         trial assessed whether gay (n = 22) or straight (n = 19) messengers were effective at encouraging voters (n = 972) to support same-sex marriage and whether attitude change persisted and spread to others in voters’ social networks.                         the results, measured by an unrelated panel survey, show that both gay and straight canvassers produced large effects initially,                         but only gay canvassers’ effects persisted in 3-week, 6-week, and 9-month follow-ups. we also find strong evidence of within-household                         transmission of opinion change, but only in the wake of conversations with gay canvassers. contact with gay canvassers further                         caused substantial change in the ratings of gay men and lesbians more generally. these large, persistent, and contagious effects                         were confirmed by a follow-up experiment. contact with minorities coupled with discussion of issues pertinent to them is capable                         of producing a cascade of opinion change.personal contact between in-group and out-group individuals of equivalent status can reduce perceived differences and thus                         improve intergroup relations. lacour and green demonstrate that simply a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser produced                         a large and sustained shift in attitudes toward same-sex marriage for los angeles county residents. surveys showed persistent                         change up to 9 months after the initial conversation. indeed, the magnitude of the shift for the person who answered the door                         was as large as the difference between attitudes in georgia and massachusetts.received for publication 16 may 2014.accepted for publication 7 november 2014.
 black friday, the day after thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year and this year was no exception. while 2014 in-store sales figures are still being calculated ( and debated ), online sales are available and show consumers spent over $2.5 billion online over the holiday weekend this year—a 26 percent increase over 2013. of that, consumer electronics and apparel constituted the lion’s share of sales, making up over half of all purchases.recently we described how innovation and global competition are rapidly bringing down the cost of certain goods and services and is thereby playing a critical role in combating the multi-decade stagnation of median wages. this year’s black friday sales numbers illustrate the point. because of price declines outlined in the consumer price index, on black friday the average wage earner was able to afford 42, 45, and 200 percent more apparel, electronics, and personal computers, respectively, than in 2000. that translated into over $620 million more sales over the thanksgiving weekend.now consider that because of price increases in areas such as health care and education, consumers could afford 15 and 35 percent less health care and child care/tuition in 2014 than 2000. what would have happened on black friday if the prices of electronics and apparel actually grew over the last decade as a portion of median income at the same rate as did health care? in other words, how much less value would consumers have actually got from their black friday purchases of electronics and clothes if those industries mirrored the health care industry? as the graph below shows, consumer would have effectively received less than half of the clothing, less than a quarter on new computers, and 40 percent less video and audio devices—all while spending the same amount of money.black friday spending by category, 2014 spending and spending if product prices grew at the same rate as health care between 2000 and 2013, millions of dollarssource: authors analysis of bureau of labor statistics and comscore data.the bottom line is this: prices have declined in it products because of rapid technological advancement and in commodities like apparel because of cheaper imports and innovations in supply chain management, operations and logistics modeling. in both cases consumers are better off. yet these benefits didn’t come about by accident. they are the output of public and private r&d expenditures, productive workers, and regulations that induced competition and incentivized equipment and capital investments.if we want an economy that is both growing and equitable, policy makers should consider ways to push similar innovation and competition policies throughout the entire economy.
rt @balajis: .@aantonop has written the single best reference on bitcoin.
read online or buy pdf: http://t.co/fxtsut3ulk
 andreas is a passionate technologist, who is well-versed in many technical subjects. he is a serial tech-entrepreneur, having launched businesses in london, new york, and california. he has earned degrees in computer science and data communications and distributed systems from ucl. with experience ranging from hardware and electronics to high level business and financial systems technology consulting and years as cto/cio/cso in many companies — he combines authority and deep knowledge with an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand.as a bitcoin entrepreneur, andreas has founded three bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. he often writes articles and blog posts on bitcoin, is a permanent host on let’s talk bitcoin and prolific public speaker at technology events. andreas serves on the advisory boards of several bitcoin startups and serves as the chief security officer of blockchain.mastering bitcoin tells you everything you need to know about joining one of the most exciting revolutions since the invention of the web: digital money. bitcoin is the first successful digital currency. it's instant, global, frictionless and it is changing money forever. bitcoin is still in its infancy, and yet it has already spawned an economy valued at nearly $2 billion that is growing exponentially. established companies like paypal are considering adding bitcoin as a payment method, and investors are funding a flurry of new startups aiming to stake claims in a new industry that may rival the internet in terms of scale and impact on daily life.if you're interested in learning more about the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killer­app or business, you will find this book essential reading. from the basic use of a bitcoin wallet to buy a cup of coffee, to running a bitcoin marketplace with hundreds of thousands of transactions, or collaboratively building new financial innovations that will transform our understanding of currency and credit, this book will help you engineer money. you're about to unlock the api to a new economy. this book is your key.all trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners.
 1) while useless and shitty are subjective, the robot gifs and videos you post should clearly be shitty or useless. new: funny robots are also approved for submission.2) if the video or gif is nsfw or nsfl, be sure to tag it as such.nsfw: nudity or overtly sexual content; porn*if either of the above rules are broken, the post will be removed. repeat offenders will be banned.4) please label any reposts as [repost] or it will be removed.5) please flair your post according to the categories laid out in rule 1.
 the author chose to make this story unlisted, which means only people with a link can see it. are you sure you want to share it?caring — an antidote to mindless consumerism?caring — an antidote to mindless consumerism?i disagreed with a few things that jonathan ive said in his talk at the design museum. but there was one thing he said with which i agree fully:“it’s made better. there is an integrity there.i really truly believe that people can sense care. and in the same way they can sense carelessness.and i think this is about the respect we have for each other. if you give me something, and if you expect me to buy something, and all i can sense is carelessness, it is personally offensive.”in practice, that integrity, that care, that respect all require — and drive — a few things in the process of making.the maker or craftsperson, who knows his or her materials well, their limitations, their potential, is essential to this process. the craftsperson then translates this knowledge into making, well, well-made products.these products may seem a bit pricey so we buy less of but use more of, more frequently.these products bring pleasure not just in use but in ownership too. i am thinking of the riedel wine glasses i bought over a decade ago. a flick on the edge of the wine glass creates a single note, like from a suzu gong, that reverberates for several seconds. it is not a bug, it is not a feature. but with every wine glass making the same sound, that sound is the hallmark of a design process, which deemed the beauty of the experience at least as important as the functionality.these products don’t fall apart at the seams, nor do their buttons or hemlines unravel easily. like that beautiful dvf silk dress i bought fifteen years ago. i wear it often, at every given chance, but i am yet to find a stray thread hanging loose.some of these products are so intuitively designed that they minimise the consumer’s need to “figure out” before being able to use them. take the ipad. so intuitive a baby can use it.thoughtfully made, painstakingly crafted, beautiful things spoil us. so much that one can no longer bear to engage with mass produced stuff that screams to be replaced season to season.they spoil us because we now have tasted the possibility of paying attention and putting care in the design process of a product we use daily.they spoil us because we have now experienced excellence and human endeavour to perfection.they spoil us because once we see beauty and profound care, we cannot un-see it.perhaps, this is the antidote to consumerism.uncompromising care, meticulous attention to detail, deep knowledge of sensual and practical aspects of materials, craftsmanship non-pareil and a great consumer experience — from finding, to buying, owning and using — all delivering us products that truly satisfy us.have you experienced such care and thoughtfulness in your entire interaction with businesses that sell you things? how did it make you feel?more importantly, how has it changed you? tell me your stories!
 a compilation of relevant tweets by @pmarca (& others) about secular stagnation: is capital getting commoditized?are you sure you want to delete your account?are you sure you want to change your username?changing your username will break existing story embeds, meaning older stories embedded on other web sites will no longer appear
 prospects of developing computing and communication technologies based on quantum properties of light and matter may have taken a major step forward thanks to research by city college of new york physicists led by dr. vinod menon.in a pioneering study, professor menon and his team were able to discover half- light , half-matter particles in atomically thin semiconductors (thickness ~ a millionth of a single sheet of paper) consisting of two-dimensional (2d) layer of molybdenum and sulfur atoms arranged similar to graphene. they sandwiched this 2d material in a light trapping structure to realize these composite quantum particles."besides being a fundamental breakthrough, this opens up the possibility of making devices which take the benefits of both light and matter," said professor menon.for example one can start envisioning logic gates and signal processors that take on best of light and matter. the discovery is also expected to contribute to developing practical platforms for quantum computing .dr. dirk englund, a professor at mit whose research focuses on quantum technologies based on semiconductor and optical systems, hailed the city college study."what is so remarkable and exciting in the work by vinod and his team is how readily this strong coupling regime could actually be achieved. they have shown convincingly that by coupling a rather standard dielectric cavity to exciton-polaritons in a monolayer of molybdenum disulphide, they could actually reach this strong coupling regime with a very large binding strength," he said.professor menon's research team included city college phd students, xiaoze liu, tal galfsky and zheng sun, and scientists from yale university, national tsing hua university (taiwan) and ecole polytechnic -montreal (canada).the study appears in the january issue of the journal nature photonics.(phys.org) —physicists at australian national university have engineered a spiral laser beam and used it to create a whirlpool of hybrid light-matter particles called polaritons.(phys.org) —like a spring connecting two swings, light can act as photon glue that binds together the quantum mechanical properties of two vastly different materials.semiconductor quantum dots (qds) are nanoscale semiconductors that exhibit size dependent physical properties. for example, the color (wavelength) of light that they absorb changes dramatically as the diameter ...physicists at the university of basel have developed a new cooling technique for mechanical quantum systems. using an ultracold atomic gas, the vibrations of a membrane were cooled down to less than 1 degree ...(phys.org) -- finding new connections between different disciplines leads to new – and sometimes useful – ideas. that’s exactly what happened when scientists in the department of physics, queens college, ...can a penalty kick simultaneously score a goal and miss? for very small objects, at least, this is possible: according to the predictions of quantum mechanics, microscopic objects can take different paths ...researchers at leiden university, the netherlands, showed that certain crystal defects in mechanical metamaterials can harbour topologically protected motions. these mechanical states are analogues of protected ...a quantum network requires efficient interfaces over which information can be transferred from matter to light and back. in the current issue of physical review letters, innsbruck physicists led by rainer ...an international team, including researchers from swinburne university of technology, has demonstrated that the 1935 einstein-podolsky-rosen (epr) quantum mechanics paradox may be extended to more than two ...
 keshia knight pulliam — best known for her role as adorable little rudy huxtable on the cosby show — just made her debut as a contestant on reality-tv toxic-waste barge the celebrity apprentice ... and hoo boy, did things get uncomfortable when bill cosby came up as a topic.the season premiere was filmed about a year ago, months before mounting rape allegations irrevocably ruined cosby's reputation. so when the cast found out they needed to contact rich friends in order to raise money for a bake sale, it's understandable that pulliam's teammates leaned on her to call up her (as-of-then-relatively-untarnished) former tv dad. pulliam (who was her team's project manager) awkwardly declined, cryptically saying she opted instead to reach out to "people i felt can deliver the quickest." cosby went unmentioned for much of the rest of the episode. then came the boardroom. the two teams were summoned to appear before donald trump and co-judges ivanka trump and piers morgan. pulliam's team had come up short in their fund-raising, and her teammates took aim at her.what followed was an excruciating three minutes for anyone even vaguely aware of the cosby rape scandal. the trumps, morgan, and pulliam's team took her to task for not calling bill cosby and asking him for money."did you call bill?" the elder trump asked her."i did not," pulliam said, crying. "i have not talked to bill cosby on the phone in i don't know how long. so for me to pick up the phone, having not talked to you for five years, except for when we run into each other for a cosby event — i feel that's not my place to do."that defense wasn't good enough for trump, who went on to fire her, specifically because she refused to call cosby. "i really believe, if you'd called that gentleman, he would've helped you, even if you hadn't spoken to him in years," trump said, "because you were an amazing team with one of the most successful shows ever. so i think it would've been a very good call to make for charity. but you have to take responsibility. i think you agree with that."what's truly baffling here is why the show's producers didn't edit this stuff out, trim it down, or make some kind of statement about it beforehand. sure, cosby wasn't a big topic a year ago, but he's easily one of the most loathed celebrities in america right now. in light of everything we've heard in the past few months, it's kind of insane to have an extended sequence where a female acquaintance of bill cosby gets fired from a job because she didn't beg cosby to help her get ahead.these links are a mix of vulture and sponsored (paid) links. we work hard to ensure that our recommendations produce high-quality content. to find out more about installing our widget or distributing sponsored content, please visit us at www.nrelate.com . view our privacy policy .
 
 the author is a reuters breakingviews columnist. the opinions expressed are his own.low oil prices hurt energy producers. they may hurt financial markets too.for years, energy windfalls were large enough to give major oil producing nations surplus cash. exporters accumulated foreign exchange reserves and put money into funds which aimed at stabilising economies, paying pensions or just earning a return on investments. the total assets under management of these “petrodollar” investors increased by $2.5 trillion between 2009 and 2014, according to citi analysts’ calculations.but the direction of cashflow has changed. the halving in oil prices between june 2014 and january 2015 has left energy producers with a cash shortfall. so for the first time in nearly two decades, they are more likely to dip into savings than to add to them, bnp paribas analysts forecast.saudi arabia, the largest exporter, has already announced it will draw on reserves to fund a big budget deficit. it won’t be alone. bnp expects emerging market energy producers to draw down their savings by a total of $211 billion in 2015, if oil prices stay below $70 a barrel.when big investors move from buying to selling, markets suffer. it is difficult to tell which asset prices are most vulnerable, since the petrodollar fund managers are mostly quite secretive about the size and composition of their portfolios.most analysts think that a good chunk of the money was parked in government and corporate debt, so sales would be a drag on bond prices. this might not show up clearly in a market as large and liquid as u.s. treasuries, especially when global investors are suffering from a bout of risk aversion.but such a shift might exacerbate falls in other assets. perhaps some petrodollars holders are starting their reconfiguration by trimming their riskiest liquid holdings. that means shares. no one can be sure, but the petro-drag could be part of the explanation for the stock markets’ dismal start to 2015.for saudi arabia and its rich exporting peers, a big pot of savings will defer the pain of low oil prices. markets may already be feeling the hurt.we welcome comments that advance the story through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. if you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can flag it to our editors by using the report abuse links. views expressed in the comments do not represent those of reuters. for more information on our comment policy, see http://blogs.reuters.com/fulldisclosure/2010/09/27/toward-a-more-thoughtful-conversation-on-stories/
 wengen, switzerland - january 15: (france out) kjetil jansrud of norway  competes during the audi fis alpine ski world cup men's downhill training on january 15, 2015 in wengen, switzerland. (photo by alexis boichard/agence zoom/getty images) alexis boichard/agence zoom/getty imagesget vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.the swiss franc soared almost 40 percent relative to the euro in early trading today, before settling at appreciation of "only" 14 percent.it's up relative to the us dollar by a similar amount.this came in the wake of a surprise announcement by the swiss national bank that it was abandoning a years-long peg that fixed the price of swiss francs relative to euros.in the same announcement, the snb said it would cut its key policy interest rate to negative 0.75 percent, pushing the country's negative rates experiment into some uncharted waters.switzerland's stock market promptly fell almost 10 percent on the news.why is switzerland doing this?back in the fall of 2011 with the value of the euro sagging and foreign investors pouring money into swiss francs, the snb was concerned about a weakening job market. the inflation rate had fallen to zero percent, so the bank was comfortable with the idea of aggressive monetary stimulus. so they did something much bolder than anything the us federal reserve or the european central bank has done. they formally set a target for a cheaper franc, and said they would print as many francs as it took — selling the francs for euros — to hit and maintain a fixed exchange rate between switzerland and the eurozone .initially, a few investors tried to test the bank's will. but the snb swiftly established its credibility and found it didn't need to do much of anything to maintain the peg.one is that the euro has fallen a lot relative to the dollar for reasons related to the upcoming election in greece , meaning that the pegged franc is getting cheaper in dollar terms. the bank didn't necessarily want this outcome.the other is that foreigners  started buying swiss francs again , meaning it was gut-check time for the snb. either commit to a new round of money-printing, or else decide that the peg is obsolete and go back to a floating exchange rate. they chose option #2.— jonathan ferro (@ferrotv) january 15, 2015hence the plunge. the snb believes that the swiss economy can weather this storm, and that the use of interest rate tools — including negative rates — will be enough to stabilize things without a currency peg.swiss exporters — especially watch-makers concerned about new competition from apple — are not happy about the change, which will make their products more expensive in foreign markets.but there is a whole other class of people who are going to lose out in the deal. over the years, many people who are not swiss have chosen to take advantage of switzerland's low interest rates to take out home mortgages that are denominated in terms of swiss francs. in the united states people (sensibly) almost never borrow money to buy a home in a foreign currency, so americans are largely unfamiliar with this issue. but wealthy english people do it , as do russian billionaires seeking london property.in central europe it's even more common. fully 46 percent of polish home loans are denominated in swiss francs .the problem here is twofold. polish people earn incomes that are denominated in zlotys, and polish real estate is priced in zlotys. so if you're a polish person with a swiss mortgage and the value of the franc soars, you simultaneously end up owing more on your house than the house is worth and owing more relative to your income than you are able to pay. this is why, in general, it is not wise to take out foreign mortgages. what you may gain in cheaper interest rates you lose in terms of exposing yourself to a wide new range of risks — risks that are managed by a foreign central bank that has no interest in your welfare.the flipside is that if you're a swiss person who neither works in nor owns a watch factory (or a hotel or other company that's strongly oriented toward foreign customers) a more expensive franc means more purchasing power. swiss teachers, nurses, waiters, pensioners, and plumbers will all find iphones and spanish vacations and german cars more affordable in the new paradigm.they will, that is, unless tight money goes too far and pushes the unemployment rate up sharply. exchange rate appreciation boosts living standards if it's compatible with continued labor market strength. if it's not, then pretty much everyone ends up losing out.
 list of startups with distributed teams, remote staff & multiple officesthe version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. please upgrade to a supported browser . dismissthis spreadsheet was created to crowdsource an inspiration list of startups who are successfully running distributed teams, have multiple offices or just believe in the future of remote work.please add and update whatever you see fit. see http://teleport.org for background and send any questions to: contact@teleport.org or @teleportinc on twitter
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 it’s august in modesto, and the central valley sun is blistering hot outside of the new dunkin’ donuts. nigel travis, the ceo of dunkin’, is standing at a podium on a small patch of concrete near the terminus of his company’s first drive-thru in california. a few feet away, a human being encased head-to-toe in a foam coffee-cup suit is waving at customers, who are fanning themselves at the end of a line that has spilled out of the shop. in the near distance, lunch-goers shuffle from their cars to the cool sanctuaries of mcdonald’s, jack in the box, and taco bell. despite the heat, travis, who is tall and bespectacled, with swept-back gray hair, is wearing a thick suit jacket, the checked pattern of which forecasts the fact that he’s british and softens the surprise of his heavy accent.dunkin’ donuts controls 56 percent of the nation’s doughnut market and sells more coffee by the cup than starbucks. still, it has never managed to be successful in california. the chain expanded west in the 1980s, opening a total of 15 locations across the state, but by 2002 it had shut down all of them. travis took over as ceo in 2009, and under his leadership, dunkin’ has decided to try again. in 2012, the chain opened a new location on camp pendleton, north of san diego. a short time later, travis announced a california push that made its previous attempt look puny: dunkin’ has signed 200 franchise agreements in the state and plans to add up to 1,000 more locations in the coming years.dunkin’ views california as its manifest destiny. in the mid-1950s, william rosenberg, founder of the then-tiny east coast chain, visited southern california during a nationwide fact-finding tour. he noticed that the driver’s seat, not the kitchen table, was the new breakfast battleground in the west. he also noticed that californians loved doughnuts. for the harried driver, no meal was simpler or cheaper or tastier than a doughnut, which could be eaten with one hand. california shop owners had erected garish doughnut sculptures alongside freeways and busy thoroughfares to lure hungry motorists. here indeed was the promised land, a magical place where doughnuts hung in the sky to be glazed by the setting sun.modesto’s newest drive-thru is crammed with idling cars. every 20 seconds or so, a driver, attempting to exit, must pass awkwardly through the gathered crowd. “what you’ll see here in this modesto dunkin’ donuts is our extensive array of delicious food and beverage options,” says travis. “this includes our famous hot coffee, iced coffee, iced tea, lattes, coolattas, and breakfast sandwiches. some people who have been associated with dunkin’ for years say to me, ‘wow, where did those breakfast sandwiches come from? they’re really good!’” as he says this, travis gazes at a minivan inching nervously forward.directly across the street, another doughnut shop is also jammed with customers. mr. t’s delicate donut, owned by winnie hou, has been a local favorite for more than 20 years. inside, a man in the open kitchen is turning doughnuts in the fryer with a pair of long wooden sticks. compared to dunkin’ donuts’s slick corporate branding and data-driven interior layout, which is designed to move people through the line as quickly as possible, mr. t’s looks haphazard. a few marble tables sit beside a row of large windows, and a fluorescent-lit display case focuses attention on more than 30 varieties of doughnuts.yet mr. t’s is more than it appears. it is one link in a network of nearly 1,500 independent doughnut shops that anchor strip malls and brighten main streets from san ysidro to arcata, and that for more than three decades have pummeled chains like winchell’s, krispy kreme, and, during its first california expansion, dunkin’ donuts. perhaps the most surprising thing about these ubiquitous shops, and a significant contributor to their resilience, is that almost all of them are owned by cambodian americans.at the counter in mr. t’s, i meet sandy hou, a smiley university of california, irvine, student who’s spending the summer helping out at her family’s shop. i order a doughnut and ask if she’s worried about dunkin’ coming into modesto. she shrugs, and her answer echoes what i’ve heard from cambodian shop owners all over the state. “our customers are loyal,” she says, placing a chocolate bar in a white paper bag. “we’re not going anywhere.”eight thousand miles from modesto, along the southern tail of the mekong river, the man who brought cambodians into the california doughnut business stands to make a toast. ted ngoy is 74. his graying hair has retreated to the crown of his head, and his loose slacks cut an equatorial line across his small paunch. only his doughnut-fed cheeks remain incongruously youthful. before him, about 15 members of cambodia’s upper crust nod appreciatively around a tamarind wood table. among them are the official spokesperson for the royal government, a senator, a doctor whose name adorns a university, and the owner of the upscale butchery in which they all sit. they are in phnom penh, the muggy capital of cambodia, a country of remembered atrocity and sputtering rebirth, of doughnut magnates–turned–high-society players. several of those gathered have direct ties to the doughnut industry in california, where refugees from the war-torn nation taught one another to bake in neighborhood shops up and down the state, and where a few savvy businessmen amassed fortunes that allowed them to return to cambodia and wield influence.ted ngoy, in 1977, in front of the first doughnut shop he bought, in la habra“may we all know unity and friendship,” ngoy proclaims in khmer; it’s a simple toast, but one that acts powerfully on the room. as charcuterie arrives on communal plates, the assembled dignitaries barrage ngoy with toasts of their own. from the tone of the tributes, a visitor who doesn’t speak the language can safely guess the gist: long live the doughnut king of california. long live ted ngoy.bun tek ngoy touched down at camp pendleton on a military plane in may of 1975 with his wife and three young children. he had no home and no money, and his country had been overrun by a gang of pitiless thugs.at 35, ngoy had already climbed out of poverty and into privilege once. born to a single mother in a town along the northern border with thailand, he grew up in a close-knit chinese cambodian community. ngoy wanted more, so he moved to phnom penh, where he rented a shared room and began studying french and english.he fell in love with a beautiful girl from his language classes. she belonged to one of the country’s most well-regarded families, and young men of excellent standing were already lining up for her hand. when ngoy heard her name, suganthini, which means “fragrance,” he smelled flowers. the dingy apartment where he lived happened to face her family’s villa. they began a correspondence, he remembers, and suganthini flirtatiously dared him to visit her room. ngoy climbed through barbed wire and past armed guards, alighting beside an open bathroom window in the villa. he virtually lived in her room for weeks, hiding whenever servants came to tidy it. on the 30th night, they took turns cutting their fingers under the full moon, swearing oaths of fealty. much later, ngoy would break his oath, and that betrayal, he believes, would lead to his downfall.over the strong objections of suganthini’s parents, the couple married. suganthini’s brother-in-law was a top general, and after ngoy joined the army in 1970, he was quickly promoted to major. cambodia, however, was poised to enter a sustained nightmare. a coup d’etat in march of that year unseated the prince, setting off a civil war with communist guerrilla fighters intent on ousting the new pro–united states regime.ngoy was assigned to an embassy in thailand, where he, suganthini, and their daughter and two sons went to live in relative security. but he traveled to phnom penh regularly. on his final trip, in april of 1975, he received word that the capital would fall. one of the last flights out, he remembers, was on a u.s. military plane that had dropped off a supply of rice. rockets were falling all around the airfield as ngoy ran for the plane. the communists took phnom penh the next day, he says, and pol pot’s bloody reign commenced. between 2 to 3 million people would be executed in just under four years, and famine would kill hundreds of thousands more.after a month in a refugee camp in bangkok, ngoy and his family were sent to camp pendleton, where they stayed in a barracks until congregants of peace lutheran church in nearby tustin sponsored their visas. they moved into a small rented house, and peace lutheran gave ngoy a job as a groundskeeper and custodian. his sponsor, an affable man named dean, helped him secure a second job pumping gas at a mobil station at night.one evening at the mobil, when the traffic died down, a co-worker asked ngoy to watch the station while he ran across the street to a shop called dk’s donuts. when the co-worker returned, he opened a box and told ngoy to choose a doughnut. ngoy had never had one, so he picked at random. the taste reminded him of the cambodian round cakes he ate growing up. he began stopping by dk’s after his shift, and he noticed its steady stream of customers at all hours.hakmeng and ratana tea at their shop, sunny donuts, in san diego. though his english was limited and he knew nothing about business, ngoy crossed the street one evening and asked the two women at the counter how to open a doughnut shop. they told him it would be risky for someone with no experience and recommended he look into the manager’s training program at winchell’s, the dominant doughnut chain in california at the time. dean gave him a glowing recommendation, and ngoy became the first in a long line of indo-chinese immigrants accepted into the winchell’s training program.the curriculum was rigorous. for $500 a month in wages, ngoy cleaned every inch of the teaching store in la mirada, handled the money, and baked every doughnut on the menu. he had no culinary experience and had trouble with the exacting jargon of baking, but he proved a quick study. when he completed the program, winchell’s gave him a store to manage in newport beach. he took pride in adhering to the company’s three pillars of success: cleanliness, service, and quality. he also enjoyed chatting with customers and practicing his english. they had trouble with his cambodian name, bun tek, so they called him ted.one day in 1976, a customer came in with a copy of the orange county register. the man had circled a small ad in the classifieds: doughnut shop for sale . “ted, you should buy it,” he said. the price for the business, a shop called christy’s donuts in nearby la habra, was $45,000. ngoy had saved $20,000 working at winchell’s, and the sellers loaned him the balance. just a year after ngoy arrived in the u.s., he bought a doughnut shop.he spent a month working as an employee under the old owners to get the hang of things. when he took over, he made just one operational change. instead of baking once in the morning, he decided to bake in smaller batches throughout the day. the doughnuts at christy’s would always be fresh. ngoy kept his job managing the winchell’s, and suganthini helped run the new shop. with two incomes, ngoy paid off his loan, and the next year he purchased a second shop in fullerton.to celebrate its modesto opening, dunkin’ unveiled a california doughnut, filled with bavarian kreme and decorated to look like a mellow smiley face wearing sunglasses. but the sign outside of the chain’s new modesto location carries a revealing tag line: coffee and more . “if you take our u.s. sales as a whole, 57 percent are beverages,” travis, the ceo , tells me soon after shearing a ribbon with a giant pair of pink-handled scissors. “when i came on the scene more than five years ago, we looked at our name, which is so iconic. we wanted to demonstrate that beverages are very important. that’s where ‘coffee and more’ came from. perhaps we should have added something about sandwiches, also.”dunkin’ donuts’s strategy is part of a broader shift in the fast-food industry. breakfast and beverages are selling far better than other menu items. “the restaurant industry has not been faring well since the recession,” explains bonnie riggs, an analyst at the npd group, a market-research company, “but one bright spot has been the breakfast area. it’s where the opportunity is.” according to riggs, fast food now accounts for 85 percent of all breakfast visits in the restaurant industry. as chains add to their menus to draw morning customers, seemingly disparate brands like starbucks, subway, and taco bell are competing directly with one another — and with mcdonald’s, the breakfast king.dunkin’ donuts is an obvious front-runner in the breakfast wars. as a doughnut chain, it has always catered to the morning set, and it’s well known for its coffee. the move to california is an attempt to expand its breakfast hegemony. “california gets you in market position because of density of population,” says john gordon, a restaurant-industry analyst in san diego, “and because of the presence of so many cars, because it’s a commuter lifestyle.”but the massachusetts brand is still an outsider. earlier this year, the company found itself embroiled in a local controversy when the developer of a new dunkin’ outpost in long beach announced plans to demolish a giant doughnut that had been towering over the site — the previous location of a mrs. chapman’s angel food donuts — since 1958. it was a beloved landmark and a handy guidepost for locals, who invariably referred to it when giving directions, but the developer worried that it would distract from dunkin’ donuts’s diversification strategy. “we want to be good neighbors,” dan almquist, the managing partner of the franchising company, tells me, explaining why he ended up relenting and letting the structure stand. in an interview with the los angeles times, almquist said, “the last thing we want to do is be viewed as the guys that killed the doughnut.”by 1980, ted ngoy owned 20 christy’s shops in southern california. although the locations shared a name, he made no effort to give them a cohesive brand identity. scouring classifieds, ngoy looked for existing shops for sale by owner. when he found one, he would sit out front in his car for hours, drinking coffee and tallying customers. he noted foot and car traffic and became deft at estimating a store’s approximate revenue, which helped him during negotiations. three decades earlier, william rosenberg had perfected the same technique while scouting new dunkin’ locations on the eastern seaboard.rents on ngoy’s shops varied, but properties rarely cost more than $300 to $400 per month. ngoy locked in good deals with 20-year leases. after he took over a shop, he ran it himself for one month to assess operating costs and revenues. he kept the old staff in place and made every effort to maintain the recipes just as they had been. americans, he found, didn’t like change. he did insist on using the highest-quality ingredients, and if a store’s flour wasn’t up to his standards, he would replace it with a superior product. he also always baked small batches around the clock.when he had a feel for the economics of a location, ngoy put word out that a turnkey business was available for lease. large cambodian families with a built-in labor force of siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles would come forward. christy’s stores operated as independent entities, but owners leveraged their combined purchasing power to keep the cost of ingredients low. a single shop wouldn’t make anybody rich, but it did offer a reliable way for refugees with limited english and few marketable skills to earn an independent living.throughout the early 1980s, ngoy sponsored visas for hundreds of cambodians who had fled the chaos back home. he gave them jobs in his shops, where most tasted their first doughnuts, and set them up as lessees once they got on their feet. the most ambitious struck out on their own to open new locations and develop new markets, often while continuing to lease a few shops from ngoy.incredibly, winchell’s, once the dominant brand in the region, started losing ground. immigrant families figured out how to survive on a few thousand dollars of profit a month, while large companies like winchell’s needed substantially higher returns for a location to stay viable. ngoy took over a failed winchell’s location in santa ana in the early 1980s, a sort of homecoming to the company that gave him his start. there, he met a soft-spoken young man named ning yen. like many refugees, yen had been training with a baker friend after his esl classes. ngoy hired him, and soon yen became his best employee. in 1984, ngoy cosigned a loan enabling his protégé to lease his own shop in irvine. “he helped a lot of people like that,” yen remembers. “anything you asked him for, he would help. he’s a very generous guy.” yen would go on to open dozens more shops, as well as a distributorship with ngoy’s nephew.by leasing out his holdings, ngoy kept his day-to-day involvement in the doughnut business to a minimum. he expanded his empire north, to brisbane, fresno, and san jose. he and his wife began traveling abroad and spending weekends in las vegas, where they gambled a little and saw all of the famous crooners. ngoy especially loved blackjack, which challenged his strategic mind. by the late 1980s, he had more than 50 shops across the state, and money was rolling in.the family moved to a 7,000-square-foot mansion in mission viejo, and suganthini changed her name to christy. if the old name invoked flowers, the new one brought to mind the scent of warm doughnuts. ngoy became an active fundraiser in the republican party, rallying the cambodian community around business-minded candidates. his acolytes continued marching ahead, opening new shops.by the mid-1980s, when dunkin’ was pushing into california, cambodian shops were prolific, and the east coast chain had trouble finding a foothold. chains thrive by building efficient distribution infrastructures and running effective advertising campaigns. with fewer than 20 locations spread across a vast new territory, dunkin’ donuts’s distribution and promotion costs in california were unsustainably high. the goal was to reach a critical mass in the new market, at which point the economic equation would invert — relative costs of distribution and advertising fall as the number of locations in a region climbs. but with so much competition, the expansion effort was halting. dunkin’ decided to cut its losses and began pulling out of southern california in the early ’90s.hakmeng tea, a cambodian refugee in san diego who’d chosen to run a dunkin’ location instead of an independent shop, still remembers receiving the letter from massachusetts. he was taken aback. overnight, he lost his supplier and his brand identity. the day after taking his dunkin’ donuts sign down, he listened as a longtime customer griped about the new coffee. exhausted, tea explained that he was still working his way through the old stock of dunkin’ beans. the customer was drinking the same coffee he had been the day before.today, the pink and orange décor inside tea’s shop will be familiar to many first-time visitors. other than the name — sunny donuts — tea has changed as little as possible about his restaurant. the old stools still swivel before a funky curved counter, the menu board has the same bubbly font, and even many of the customers are holdovers from the dunkin’ days. tea continues to bake his doughnuts — more than 50 varieties — by hand, the way he learned at dunkin’ donuts university.on the day i visit in june, he’s making a small batch of plain raised doughnuts. he invites me into the kitchen, where he adds a half pound of yeast, 12 pounds of doughnut mix, and water to the barrel-size bowl of his well-used hobart stand mixer, which churns the ingredients into a sticky paste. scraping the goop from the sides of the bowl, he lifts out a ball of dough and places it on a large sheet of flour-covered canvas, which is stretched over a butcher-block table. “the canvas is an old dunkin’ donuts trick,” he says conspiratorially. “it makes cleanup easier.” cleaving the dough blob in half, he sets one portion aside and starts rolling the other flat. the dough is firm and yeasty, and it pushes back against his wooden rolling pin at first.when the dough is spread to a half-inch thickness, tea uses a punch to cut out rings, deftly catching each new one on the fingers of his idle hand. when his fingers fill up, he deals the rings, like playing cards, onto a nearby wire sheet. after 15 minutes in a proof box, which delivers heat and humidity to help the doughnuts rise, the rings have doubled in size and are ready for the fryer.working with hot oil is dangerous, and tea has the scars to prove it. as he lowers the tray into a bubbling vat of 365-degree shortening, the doughnuts float to the top. anyone who’s walked by a doughnut shop knows the smell of sweet frying dough, but in tea’s kitchen it is intense, almost filling. after a few moments, he flips the doughnuts with a pair of long, delicate sticks. when they’re golden, he removes the tray from the fryer, slides it into a rack, and pours glaze over the doughnuts. the thick mixture melts off, leaving a thin, sugary sheen. the first bite of one of these newly birthed creations seems to disappear as i chew, with only a coating of sweet grease remaining.kitchens like tea’s require space, and california real estate is pricey. for its latest push, dunkin’ has decided not to make its doughnuts in stores. instead, the company is relying on a process it calls just baked on demand, in which partially baked frozen products are delivered to franchise locations and finished in their ovens. the process will fill shops with a facsimile of the smell in tea’s kitchen. dunkin’ hopes its jbod products will help to avert the supply-chain inefficiency that doomed its first california locations. but a critical mass of stores is still necessary for the expansion to be cost effective, which is why dunkin’ is racing to open as many locations as it can.by the time dunkin’ retreated from california in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the cambodian american doughnut network was also struggling. fitness and health-food crazes were sweeping the country, and doughnuts were losing some of their appeal. with thousands of independent doughnut shops in the state, the market was so crowded that cambodian owners began competing against one another to acquire promising locations. at the same time, the flow of young cambodian workers slowed to a trickle. a new generation had grown up in america and saw college as a more attractive prospect than long hours spent over a deep-fryer.ngoy’s personal life was faring even worse. by the mid-1980s, fueled by his multimillion-dollar fortune and surfeit of idle time, his gambling had started to spin out of control. he disappeared to vegas for long stretches, holing up in casinos to play blackjack and baccarat. christy and the children drove out to find him on more than one occasion. ngoy remembers hiding in the maze of card tables and slot machines at caesars palace, ashamed to face his family. his business faltered, and he began selling off shops to maintain cash flow.gambling strained his relationship with his wife, who felt helpless to intervene. in a bid to quit cold turkey, ngoy joined a buddhist monastery in d.c. he shaved his head and donned a monk’s robes, and he lived solemnly one day at a time. but when he returned home a month later, his money and his idle time were waiting. he tried a second monastery, this time in thailand, where the monks weren’t permitted to speak or wear shoes. ngoy’s feet bled after long walks over the rocky earth, and he lived in poverty, as he had years before. it was humbling, but it wasn’t enough. when he returned home, he went straight to las vegas.after two turbulent decades, cambodia planned to hold free elections in 1993. well-to-do cambodian americans rushed back to set up political parties and participate in the democratic process. ngoy enjoyed being an uncle figure, a man people turned to when they needed something, and politics would allow him to play that role on a larger scale. he also felt that public life would be good for him: with the country watching, he would have to stop gambling. he sold his remaining doughnut shops, keeping only a single hamburger stand, which he turned over to his daughter.in 1992, with about $2 million in the bank, ngoy and christy returned to cambodia. it didn’t go well. after years of atrocity, cambodians were generally distrustful of the political process, and they were especially wary of outsiders who wanted to join the government. in the 1993 elections, ngoy’s party failed to win a single parliamentary seat, though he was eventually tapped as an economic adviser to the prime minister. it was an important role, but one performed largely out of the public eye. after spending the last of his savings on a doomed bid to bring hybridized rice to cambodia, ngoy was despondent. his return to his home country had been far from the victory lap he’d imagined.at a low point, while christy was visiting california, ngoy cheated on her with a young cambodian woman, who became pregnant. christy could weather the gambling addiction, but this was too much. the couple divorced, and ngoy married his mistress. they would eventually have two children, a girl and a boy.by 2002, the doughnut king was broke. hoping that a return to the place that had made him rich might change his luck, ngoy accepted a plane ticket from an old friend and, for the second time, landed in california penniless. in 2005, a writer for the los angeles times found him living on the screened-in porch of a mobile home in long beach. he had converted to christianity, and nightly he prayed for help.later that year, racked with guilt for leaving his new family, ngoy returned to cambodia. his wife lost patience with him. she had believed he was a wealthy man with a future in politics. at the very least, she thought he would provide a good life for her and their children. she met another man, handed the kids over to ngoy, and left. chasing a possible business prospect, ngoy took the children to the seaside province of kep, but the opportunity fizzled. desperate, in his late 60s now, he asked a government minister for permission to stay in his neglected vacation home. the minister would only allow ngoy and his children to sleep on the porch.this was the wet season, and sheets of rain angled under the porch’s overhang and soaked the meager living space. each morning, ngoy carried his children to school on a rusty bike. at night, they survived on noodles. ngoy replayed his life in his head. it was like watching a movie about someone he recognized but hadn’t seen in years. staring into the gulf of thailand, he prayed a businessman’s prayer, asking jesus for people, connections.it’s early july when i land in phnom penh. at the airport, ted ngoy slaps my shoulder and pumps my hand vigorously. at 74, he is full of energy and smiling broadly. outside, he introduces me to his new girlfriend, sreypov, a beautiful 19-year-old woman with voluminous dark hair. in spite of the eye-popping age difference, they both say they’re deeply in love.we hop into a white lexus suv , and sreypov drives toward the first of ngoy’s three homes in the capital, all of which are located in a dusty section of the city called new phnom penh. the area seems half-developed and half-abandoned, and is full of concrete pillars that end abruptly in thistles of rebar. ngoy is optimistic that it will one day become the most desirable neighborhood in the city. it seems an appropriate backdrop to his unexpected final act. against all odds, he is rich again.during his destitute period in kep, ngoy began giving business advice to locals, and in particular to youngsters in whom he sensed a kindred entrepreneurial spirit. he wants me to meet a few of them, so we make the two-hour drive from the capital. on the way, we pass a fog-shrouded mountain, atop which sits a famous casino. it is like a lighthouse warning of perilous rocks ahead. “i don’t go there,” ngoy says flatly as we pass.in kep, we stop for lunch at a rustic shack perched atop pylons that disappear into the muddy waters of the gulf of thailand. rain is beating down on the palm-frond roof as we settle in, and a group of three american tourists glumly eye the stormy waters through a massive glassless window. our table, however, which is quickly strewn with the detritus of our crab feast, is festive. a few of the entrepreneurs ngoy advised during his purgatory have come to pay their respects. one is a scholarly looking travel agent named enakrith lao, whose english is strong.“i lent him an old bike,” he recalls of his first interactions with ngoy. “we began chatting and then eating lunch together.” at that time, lao had already been bankrupt once, and he was fearful of losing more money with a new business. ngoy corroborates the advice he gave the young man: “you are young, and you can always come back. you must want to be rich. if you don’t have that drive, then i can’t help you.” lao spent the last of his funds marketing his business. he has since become successful, and he credits his mentor for giving him the necessary push.as ngoy’s reputation in kep grew, people began referring to him as pou, or “uncle,” an honorific in khmer. the story of his success in the doughnut business — a story many locals had heard rumors about already — quickly spread. in the late 2000s, a wealthy businessman, now seated at our table, approached ngoy asking for help with some small land deals. ngoy was a natural at navigating the bureaucratic nuances involved in such transactions, and he cleared a commission for his services. he reinvested some of the money in speculative land purchases, but he also spent much of it on the community. he went on to fund english classes for local children and to pay for a new church building in a nearby stretch of rice paddies and muddy fields.ngoy’s big break came in 2009, when a chinese acquaintance named wang yanyu came looking for him. yanyu had been approached by a major chinese corporation that wanted to acquire land in cambodia, where many chinese factories have opened recently. hearing that ngoy was now involved in real estate in kep, yanyu drew him into the deal. the commission made ngoy a wealthy man once again, and he is currently working on several new deals with chinese corporations.twenty years after he left his network of california shops behind, and even in the face of dunkin’ donuts’s aggressive expansion plan, ngoy is optimistic about his doughnut legacy. “it’s hard to make money with a franchise in a crowded market,” he says, craning his body from the front seat of the suv , which sreypov is expertly maneuvering along a pothole-riddled road in the center of phnom penh. it is my final day in cambodia, and we’re on our way somewhere special. “you pay a big fee, and those locations cost so much to rent. independent shops don’t need much to survive.” even if dunkin’ does take hold in california, ngoy thinks customers will stay loyal to the cambodian-owned shops. it’s tough to resist the allure of doughnuts baked by hand around the clock, he says.sreypov pulls to a stop on the side of the road. the air is hot and sticky, like the inside of a proof box. opening his door during a break in traffic, ngoy points to a sign above a one-story building: usa donuts . the shop opened in 2004, the longtime dream of a doughnut baker from california. ngoy discovered it earlier this year when a reporter from the phnom penh post got in touch to see if he was that ted ngoy. the things he misses most about california, ngoy says, are the feeling of the coastal sun just before sunset, and doughnuts.the shop is undergoing renovations, and a jackhammer is pulverizing some concrete out front, but the owner assures us it’s open. in addition to doughnuts, the menu includes burgers and pizza. but ngoy is a purist. approaching the counter, he studies the glass case before making his selection: two plain glazed doughnuts. ngoy is a prodigious talker, but as he takes his first bite, he falls silent for several moments. at last he smiles. “good doughnut,” he says.greg nichols is an author and journalist in los angeles. his new book is striking gridiron: a town’s pride and a team’s shot at glory during the biggest strike in american history.stephanie gonot is a photographer based in los angeles.giulio di sturco is a photographer based in bangkok.guy wolek has been illustrating in one manner or another since the early 1980s. he is based in oxnard, california.
 europe has returned to the signature brinkmanship of the debt crisis that brought its currency union close to collapse five years ago: france and germany are again warning greece it is putting its eurozone membership at risk.with a greek election looming this month, and a party hostile to european-imposed austerity apparently poised to win, french president françois hollande on monday raised the possibility of greece exiting the...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 45% say it's good time to find quality job, highest since 2007princeton, n.j. -- serving as another indication of the public's perceptions of an improving economy, 45% of americans now say it is a good time to find a quality job, up from 36% in december, and as high as this indicator has been since may 2007.gallup has asked americans about their views of the job market on a monthly basis since august 2001, when 39% of americans agreed that it was a good time to find a quality job. these views became less positive through 2003, but then turned the corner. by january 2007, 48% said it was a good time to find a quality job -- the highest gallup has recorded. positive views of the job market began to drop that year and dropped further with the onset of the great recession, reaching the all-time low of 8% in november 2009 and again in november 2011. since 2012, these attitudes have been recovering, breaking through the 30% line in 2014 for the first time in six years, and jumping to 45% this month.these more upbeat perceptions about quality jobs accompany several other gallup measures that indicate an improved u.s. jobs situation. gallup's unadjusted unemployment rate for december was down to 5.8% -- the lowest in its five-year history -- and similar to the 5.6% reported by the government's bureau of labor statistics , which was the lowest since the early months of the recession. gallup's job creation index -- a measure of workers' perceptions of hiring trends where they work -- has been at its highest post-recession levels in the latter part of 2014. mentions of jobs or unemployment as the top problems facing the u.s. have also dropped during much of the past year, and are at only 7% in january, the lowest since october 2008.americans' views of the job market are influenced by their political orientations, with democrats (56%) significantly more positive than republicans (35%). this reflects the general tendency for americans who identify with the party controlling the presidency to be more positive when asked any number of questions about the state of the nation. prior to 2009, when republican george. w. bush was president, republicans were significantly more positive on this quality jobs question than were democrats. despite the continuing gap between democrats and republicans, both groups' attitudes are more positive compared with december's report , when 47% of democrats and 29% of republicans agreed that it was a good time to find a quality job.differences in views of the job market across population subgroups reflect these underlying political differences. young people and nonwhites are more positive than those who are older and those who are white, respectively, to say it's a good time to find a quality job. those currently employed are slightly more positive than those who are not employed.americans' views of the availability of quality jobs in the u.s. are improving, and are nearly as good as any time in the past 14 years, providing further evidence that the public is seeing significant economic improvement in the u.s. still, on an absolute basis, less than half say it is a good time to find a quality job. by comparison, when the researchers at the university of connecticut and rutgers university asked this same quality job question of those in the labor force toward the end of the dot-com boom, two-thirds or more responded that it was a good time to find a quality job. the late 1990s may have been a truly exceptional time in recent economic history, and americans in recent years may have become skeptical because of the recession and wary of becoming too optimistic about the economy. it may also be that the nature of the current jobs recovery -- with a continuing absence of higher-paying jobs even as unemployment has come down -- is putting a damper on the recovery in positive economic attitudes.results for this gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted jan. 5-8, 2015, with a random sample of 804 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 u.s. states and the district of columbia. for results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. all reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cellphone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
 most of the time, economic policymaking is about tinkering at the edges. politicians argue furiously about modest changes to taxes or spending. once in a while, however, momentous shifts are possible. from deng xiaoping’s market opening in 1978 to poland’s adoption of “shock therapy” in 1990, bold politicians have seized propitious circumstances to push through reforms that transformed their countries. such a once-in-a-generation opportunity exists today.the plunging price of oil, coupled with advances in clean energy and conservation, offers politicians around the world the chance to rationalise energy policy. they can get rid of billions of dollars of distorting subsidies, especially for dirty fuels, whilst shifting taxes towards carbon use. a cheaper, greener and more reliable energy future could be within reach.the most obvious reason for optimism is the plunge in energy costs. not only has the price of oil halved in the past six months, but natural gas is the cheapest it has been in a decade, bar a few panicked months after lehman brothers collapsed, when the world economy appeared to be imploding. there are growing signs that low prices are here to stay: the rising chatter of megamergers in the oil industry (see article ) is a sure sign that oilmen are bracing for a shake-out. less noticed, the price of cleaner forms of energy is also falling, as our special report this week explains. and new technology is allowing better management of the consumption of energy, especially electricity. that should help cut waste and thus lower costs still further. for decades the big question about energy was whether the world could produce enough of it, in any form and at any cost. now, suddenly, the challenge should be one of managing abundance.that abundance provides the potential for reform. far too many economies are littered with the detritus of daft energy policies, based on fears about supply. even though fracking has boosted america’s oil output by two-thirds in just four years, the country still bans the export of oil and restricts exports of natural gas, a legacy of the oil shocks of the 1970s—and a boondoggle for american refiners and petrochemical firms. congress also keeps handing out money to iowa’s already coddled corn farmers to produce ethanol and has not reviewed generous subsidies for nuclear power despite the fukushima disaster and ruinous cost over-runs at new western plants. instead, it has spent four long years bickering about whether to allow the proposed keystone xl pipeline to canada’s tar sands. in europe the giveaways are a little different—billions have gone to wind and solar projects—but the same madness often prevails: germany’s rushed exit from nuclear power ended up helping boost american coal and russian gas.the most straightforward piece of reform, pretty much everywhere, is simply to remove all the subsidies for producing or consuming fossil fuels. last year governments around the world threw $550 billion down that rathole—on everything from holding down the price of petrol in poor countries to encouraging companies to search for oil. by one count, such handouts led to extra consumption that was responsible for 36% of global carbon emissions in 1980-2010.falling prices provide an opportunity to rethink this nonsense. cash-strapped developing countries such as india and indonesia have bravely begun to cut fuel subsidies, freeing up money to spend on hospitals and schools (see article ). but the big oil exporters in the poor world, which tend to be the most egregious subsidisers of domestic fuel prices, have not followed their lead. venezuela is close to default, yet petrol still costs a few cents a litre in caracas. and rich countries still underwrite the production of oil and gas. why should american taxpayers pay for exxon to find hydrocarbons? all these subsidies should be binned.that should be just the beginning. politicians, for the most part, have refused to raise taxes on fossil fuels in recent years, on the grounds that making driving or heating homes more expensive would not only annoy voters but also hurt the economy. with petrol and natural gas getting cheaper by the day, that excuse has gone. higher taxes would encourage conservation, dampen future price swings and provide a more sensible way for governments to raise money.an obvious starting point is to target petrol. america’s federal government levies a tax of just 18 cents a gallon (five cents a litre)—a figure that it has not dared change since 1993. even better would be a tax on carbon. burning fossil fuels harms the health of both the planet and its inhabitants. taxing carbon would nudge energy firms and consumers towards using cleaner fuels. as fuel prices fall, a carbon tax is becoming less politically daunting.that points to the biggest blessing cheaper energy brings: the chance to inject some coherence into the world’s energy policies. governments have a legitimate role in making sure that energy is abundant, clean and secure. but they need to learn the difference between picking goals and deciding how to reach them. broad incentives are fine; second-guessing scientists and investors is not. a carbon tax, in other words, is a much better way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases than subsidies for windmills and nuclear plants.by the same token, in the name of security of supply, governments should be encouraging the growth of seamless global energy markets. scrapping unfair obstacles to energy investments is just as important as dispensing with subsidies. the more cross-border pipelines and power cables the better. america should approve keystone xl and lift its export restrictions, while european politicians should make it much easier to exploit the oil and gas in the shale beneath their feet.this ambitious to-do list will drive regiments of energy lobbyists potty. but for the first time in years it is within the realm of the politically possible. and it would plainly lead to a more efficient and greener energy future. so our message to politicians is a simple one. seize the day.
 no growth or a fear bubble?the most striking feature of financial markets today is low government bond yields.i’ve been staring at the charts for a while now and the more i look at them, the more i worry that one of two things is happening: either growth prospects in the developed world are the lowest they’ve been in decades or the world is experiencing one of the biggest financial bubbles in history.i’m not sure which idea terrifies me the most.across the advanced economies — with the notable exception of greece — government’s borrowing costs are either at or very near to historic lows.so why are yields (which move inversely to the price — a lower yield means the price of bonds is high) so low?various explanations can be offered.it could be as simple as supply and demand being out of balance. investors in turbulent times want to hold safe assets , but the global supply of safe assets has fallen since 2008. much of what was once seen as ‘safe’ is now viewed as ‘distinctly risky’ — the debt of the us mortgage giants freddie and fannie mae for example, or the debt of much of the so-called eurozone periphery.but as an explanation for low yields across the board, this doesn’t quite work. it may explain the low level of yields in the uk, us and germany and some others but the issue is much, much broader. spanish government 10 year bonds are currently yielding just 1.7% and the italian equivalent just 1.8%.or this could be about qe. investors’ expectations that the european central bank is about to starting buying soveriegn debt is a strong reason to get ahead of that buying by purchasing such bonds themselves. this pushes the price up and the yield down. qe in the uk and us has no doubt been a large factor in pushing down yields on us treasuries and uk gilts.but again with us qe seemingly finished and uk qe at the very least on pause, i’m not quite sure this can explain the global phenomena being seen.some point to the possibility that ‘financial repression’ is under way. this would mean that government’s (through a combination of qe and regulation) are creating a false market in their debt. forcing financial institutions to hold debt at low interest rates and hoping to use inflation to bring down it’s real value.again, there may — in some parts of the world — be some truth in this, but it doesn’t work as an explanations for global developments.as citi’s steven englander has pointed out , the average 10 year yield of the g3 countries (the us, germany and japan) recently slipped below 1% for the first time on record.and crucially as he argues:“this is not happening during the panic phase of a crisis, but after the panic is over… a sign that investors think we are going nowhere for a long time”that’s an important point. during an acute crisis, one would expect investors to put their money into safe havens like government debt. investing becomes less about the return on capital and more about the return of capital — in other words it’s less about making money and more about not losing it.but we are not in an acute phase. englander’s remarks point to the first possible explanation for low yields across the board.weak growth for a very long time?this is fast becoming the popular explanation for low borrowing costs across the west. one endorsed by an ft leader this week .the argument is that low yields simple reflect the bond markets belief that interest rates are going to remain very low for a very long time. uk thirty year yields at just 2.4%, us at 2.6% and german at an almost unbelievable 1.3%.expectations of low central bank rates for years ahead imply explanations of low inflation and weak growth.that might reflect what some have called secular stagnation . the idea that aggregate demand is weak and that the rate of interest required to generate full employment and decent growth is now negative.or it could be a belief in a supply side driven explanation of weak growth. the kind of argument associated with tyler cowen or robert gordon that the technological progress that drove growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has slowed.whether the source of this stagnation and low growth is to be found on the demand side or the supply side of the economy matters hugely for policy but in terms of living standards the prognoses are equally grim.if low yields do indeed reflect a view that interest rates are going to remain low for years to come, that inflation will be weaker in the future and that growth is going to be materially slower that’s a reason to be pretty gloomy.it essentially reflects what could be thought of as ‘japanificiation’ of the west. lost decades of low growth and potentially deflation*.if that all sounds too gloomy, consider the other explanation.one of the biggest bubbles in financial history?the other global explanation that works in explaining low yields is what could thought of as a bubble in fear.maybe growth prospects are not as weak as they appear, central banks will be able to return interest rates to more normal levels in the years ahead and inflation will not remain so low.if that is the case then the current price of government debt — and the interests rates attached — are fundamentally wrong.what, in effect, has happened is that investors have become too gloomy and in their desire to avoid anything risky have pushed up the price of anything that could be perceived as ‘safe’ (and remember something is safe until it isn’t) to unsustainable levels. qe may have at an impact in driving this.as with any other bubble there is a plausible story to be told that this isn’t a bubble — that this time is different. “the internet is going to fundamentally change the economy and business” justified buying tech stocks at inflated values, just as “the economy is going to be very weak” can justify buying german ten year bonds with a yield of 0.5%.and that story can be true even if there is a bubble — the internet did fundamentally change the economy and business but tech stocks in the late 1990s where still over-valued and in bubble territory.that might not sound too bad. bubbles happen — in tech stocks, in houses, in the debt of subprime borrowers in the us, etc.but a bubble in government debt would be something else entirely. first as these are some of the deepest and most liquid markets in the world, a bubble here should be less likely. second as a bubble in something perceived to ‘safe’ could have a much more profound impact and finally because government bond yields are the benchmark against which other assets are priced.if the price of the benchmark is wrong, then a lot of other prices could be wrong.a long term weakness in global growth is something to fear, a bubble in global bonds might be even more scary.* japanese government bonds have continued to hit new lows over the last two decades even as the government’s debt pile has soared. not for nothing as japanese government bonds often called the widow-maker trade. obviously ‘mispriced’ (how can the interest rate be so low given the outstanding stock of debt is rising?) and so something that should obviously be shorted (i.e. the price of the bonds should go down and the interest rate up). the problem for those entering that trade is that ‘mispriced’ bonds keep getting more mispriced.
 workers install a residential grid-tied solar array on a hillside in malibu, california, usa. (photo by universal images group via getty images)get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.putting solar power on rooftops is pretty labor-intensive. you need people to design and manufacture the panels. then people to market the panels to homes and businesses. then people to come and install them.that's a lot of jobs. even though solar power provides just a tiny fraction of electricity in the united states — about 0.4 percent — the solar industry now employs roughly 174,000 people, according to  a survey from the non-profit solar foundation. and the industry is expected to add another 36,000 jobs in 2015, as rooftop installations keep rising  at a rapid clip .to put this in perspective, 174,000 is roughly comparable to the number of workers employed by the us coal industry,  if you add up all the workers in coal mining (about  80,000 ), plus coal transportation and coal power plants.** yet coal still provides  39 percent of america's electricity — far, far more than solar does.now, mind you, this isn't a perfect comparison. solar is still growing, which means there's a lot of installation work, whereas no one's building new coal plants in the us anymore. (quite the contrary, many older coal plants  have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas.) still, it's interesting to look at the two industries side-by-side.are all these solar jobs a good thing?there are a few different ways to look at the boom in solar jobs.from an employment perspective, it's great. the us has been reeling from a brutal recession, and any source of new jobs is welcome. in 2014, solar companies added positions  20 times faster than the rest of the economy. and these are relatively decent-paying jobs, with average wages around $20 to $24 per hour. about 55 percent were installation jobs, 19 percent were manufacturing, and 12 percent sales.a more pessimistic way to look at these numbers, however, is to point out that solar power looks like a relatively inefficient way of creating energy. as one 2012 university of tennessee  study found , it takes far more manpower to generate one megawatt-hour of electricity from solar than it does from any other energy source.and that's not a good thing. if the world  wants to avoid drastic global warming , we'll need to replace dirtier sources of energy, like coal, with cleaner sources — solar, wind, nuclear, say — and fast. and the higher cost of solar is a real impediment to doing so. here's michael liebreich, head of bloomberg new energy finance, making this point on twitter:. @scalinggreen do clean energy boosters understand: boasts about how many jobs a technology "creates" also show how expensive it is.— michael liebreich (@mliebreich) january 14, 2015if anything, liebreich added, a solar industry that created fewer jobs could be a positive development:. @guyshrubsole automated #pv plants, modern installation systems, self-cleaning glass... that's how you get cost down, not by carrying jobs.— michael liebreich (@mliebreich) january 14, 2015the more encouraging news is that, in some ways, this is already starting to happen. analysts expect residential solar systems  to keep getting cheaper through 2017 , thanks to reductions in "balance of systems" costs — things like installation, financing, engineering, and so on.one example: as the solar market expands, word of mouth will spread, and it will become easier to find new customers without the need to hire as many people in sales. solar power, in essence,  is contagious . and that makes the industry more productive:if power plants had to internalize all their social costs, clean energy would fare betterthere's another angle here: solar is far more expensive than coal if you only look at the direct costs of producing electricity. but there are  indirect social costs, too . coal plants produce lots of pollution — soot, mercury, coal ash — that foul the air and water and make people sick. these costs don't show up on electricity bills. instead, they're dumped on the broader public, in the former of shorter lives or higher hospital bills. coal plants are also a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, causing damage through global warming .if power plants had to internalize all these social costs, then sources like wind, solar, or even nuclear power would be far more competitive — as this 2012  paper by economists michael greenstone and adam looney explained. (one way to do that might be through  a carbon tax on fossil fuels.)in other words: it would be a major boon for clean energy if solar power keeps getting cheaper and less labor-intensive over time. but getting fossil-fuel users to pay for all the external costs they impose would also make a huge difference.as the solar industry expands, will it have more clout?brookhaven national laboratory is developing a new northeast solar energy research center (nserc) on its campus that will serve as a solar energy research and test facility for the solar industry. ( brookhaven national laboratory/flickr )for years, many us politicians have opposed action on climate change or stricter regulations on air pollution. often this opposition comes in the form of jobs talk: obama  is waging a "war on coal" and killing coal jobs. that worry isn't wholly unfounded. the combination of cheap natural gas and new air pollution regulations really is shrinking the coal industry. and, in areas like west virginia or eastern kentucky, that really does mean fewer jobs.as the coal industry shrinks, its defenders cite jobs as a reason to protect itbut as the solar foundation's report points to, measures to bolster cleaner energy are also creating jobs elsewhere. over time, that may end up creating a bigger constituency for further clean-energy policies. a us solar industry that employs more people as the still-influential coal industry could have a lot more sway — in washington and elsewhere.but it's still unclear how that will all play out. right now, the solar industry is still growing rapidly thanks to  a 30 percent federal tax credit for rooftop solar systems. but that tax credit is set to expire in 2016 unless congress extends it in some shape or form. and if the credit does lapse, the solar boom is likely to slow (though it probably won't stop entirely in states that are sunny and have high electricity costs, like california).it'll be worth watching how the solar industry deals with that over the next few years — and whether all those jobs translate into extra political clout or not.** note on numbers: over at climate desk, tim mcdonnell argued that solar employs twice as many people as coal, although he's only counting coal miners. i've also folded in  2006 estimates of people employed in transporting coal and working at coal power plants, which brings coal roughly even with solar. (it might even put solar ahead, since a number of coal plants have closed since 2006.)but even this estimate isn't entirely perfect. as jonathan adler pointed out on twitter, my coal jobs numbers may be an undercount, since they don't include people working on things like regulatory compliance. fair enough. the broader point still holds: the solar industry and coal industry employ a roughly comparable number of people despite the fact that the coal industry generates a much, much bigger fraction of the country's electricity.
 macau’s prospects as the world’s casino capital depend on policy makers in beijing, a reality that—if ever in doubt—was made clear in 2014 as china’s antigraft crusade dealt the coastal city its first annual decline in gambling revenue.last year gambling revenue in macau fell 2.6% to 351.5 billion patacas (us$44 billion), government data showed friday. it was the first decline since a public accounting of such data began in 2002....to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 buenos aires—argentines have long bemoaned trade barriers that occasionally led to shortages of imported car tires, iphones and medicine. but these days, women here are ruing the scarcity of a much more personal item: tampons.on friday, retailers and tampon distributors said they were scrambling to arrange the delivery of fresh shipments, possibly from brazil, as early as next week. for now, women are finding it nearly impossible to find tampons at pharmacies and smaller supermarkets around the country—an embarrassing...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 steven brill's new book about the process of passing the affordable care act is so meticulously reported, i found myself surprised by many details of a process i myself was deeply involved in. i learned from “ america's bitter pill ,” for example, that in october 2009 one of my white house colleagues apparently wrote a memo arguing that i had misled president barack obama in highlighting the potential for the legislation to slow the growth of u.s. health-care costs. brill approvingly quotes a staff member saying that the point of the memo was that “peter overstated to the president how great the bill was on costs.”if the reporting is accurate, the anecdote is not just surprising but also telling. a substantial amount of skepticism, perhaps even within the white house, existed about whether the health-care legislation did enough on costs. yet the cost curve in health care is bending more drastically than even i believed possible in the fall of 2009. that’s because the collective impact of the legislation’s individual measures, along with similar changes in the private sector, has produced a shift in perspective and therefore behavior among health-care leaders.this is a significant point that brill fails to acknowledge -- to the great detriment of his thesis. ironically, though, it's noted toward the end of the book by gary gottlieb, the outgoing chief executive of partners healthcare in boston, who says, “there are a lot of problems with obamacare. but the attention it focused, at least in the industry, on costs with those pilots made a lot of us realize we have to change how we operate.”change is indeed happening. the results thus far have been astonishing. in 2014, medicare spending per beneficiary fell, in inflation-adjusted terms. total medicare spending was $126 billion, or a whopping 18 percent below what the congressional budget office, in 2009, projected for last year, according to a recent kaiser family foundation analysis . and this medicare deceleration has substantially affected the long-term u.s. budget outlook.why have medicare costs stopped rising as fast as expected? the biggest explanation is the direct effect of policy changes, including reductions in how much medicare pays hospitals and medicare advantage plans, according to the kaiser report. the rest of the effect is unexplained, but i suspect it is tied to the indirect effects of obamacare. (the analysis for total health spending is more complicated, because it has been affected by the weak economy. not so for medicare.)in particular, as i have written for several years now, three big trends are affecting the health-care sector. the first is the expectation, along with the growing if modest reality, that we are moving away from fee-for-service payment and toward paying hospitals and doctors for value. the second is that the u.s. health-care system is rapidly digitizing; in 2013, almost 60 percent of hospitals had at least a basic electronic health record, up from only 10 percent in 2009. and the third trend is that consumers are being presented with more information about how much their treatments cost and more incentives to avoid unnecessarily high charges.while these developments are not due solely to the health legislation, obamacare (and the 2009 stimulus) contributed, by varying degrees, to each of them. one clear aim of the law, for instance, was to shove health care away from the practice of paying for each test and procedure, because when we pay for quantity that’s what we get.as this shift is undertaken through accountable care organizations and other mechanisms, providers are given the incentive to provide better care, rather than more care. this process results in blurring the distinction between a provider (a hospital, say) and a payer (an insurance company). after all, when a hospital benefits from lower-than-expected utilization, it has the incentive to effectively act as an insurance company. brill himself recommends that, in order to control costs, hospitals be turned into insurance companies. he doesn’t seem to realize that that’s effectively what occurs when the payment system is reformed.to be sure, the measures we were finally able to include in the affordable care act that promote paying for value were not all that i or others wanted. but they were apparently enough to generate the response noted by gottlieb. and his point -- that the legislation shifted expectations -- was both the basis for my guarded optimism in the fall of 2009 and also something that could never be modeled by the congressional budget office.an important note of caution is in order: we are still early in this process. medicare payments, in particular, are still dominated by fee-for-service. more progress is now being made outside medicare. indeed, in 2014, 40 percent of commercial payments to doctors and hospitals contained value-based provisions, according to catalyst for payment reform. that's up from only 11 percent in 2013. unless medicare leads the way, though, even these efforts may falter. the obama administration therefore needs to forcefully apply the authority the law provides to make the shift toward value-based payment irreversible. it should, for example, declare a clear timetable with specific goals for value-based payments within medicare. and it should act over the next few months, before the upcoming presidential campaign causes people to assume, again, that fee-for-service is here to stay. if that happens, the progress made to date would probably dissipate.brill has written an outstanding book about the administration’s efforts to pass obamacare. now it is up to the administration to prove him wrong about what the legislation does to the trajectory of health-care costs.to contact the author on this story:to contact the editor on this story:peter r. orszag is a bloomberg view columnist. now vice chairman of corporate and investment banking and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group at citigroup, he was previously director of the office of management and budget. read more.
 drop in rouble value not only decimating amount sent home by workers from caucasus and central asia, but could lead to political unrestaccording to data projections based on world bank figures, nine countries that rely heavily on roubles sent home from russia could collectively lose more than $10bn in 2015. photograph: jussi nukari/rex featuresrussia’s rouble crisis is posing a major threat to countries along its southern fringe, whose economies rely heavily on billions of dollars shipped home every year by their own citizens working within russia .the 50% drop in the rouble has not only decimated the value of remittances sent home by workers from the caucasus and central asia, but is discouraging migrants from staying in russia to earn a salary for themselves and their families. according to data projections by the guardian, based on world bank figures, nine countries that rely heavily on cash sent home from russia for their economic buoyancy could collectively lose more than $10bn (£6.6bn) in 2015 because of the weak russian currency.“i’ve sacrificed starting a family, i’ve sacrificed any kind of normal life to work here, and now i’m only able to send home a few hundred dollars a month,” said aziz, who works at a car repair plant in northern moscow. his regular job and some moonlighting as a cab driver has typically earned him around £600 per month to send home to his parents and sisters, who live in the fergana valley in uzbekistan . now he is lucky to earn half that sum. “i’m starting to think there is not much point in staying. life is miserable enough here anyway, the only reason to be here was for the money. i think it could be time to go home.”aziz is not the only person thinking about leaving. as the economic situation in russia deteriorates, authorities have also introduced a new harsher system for obtaining work permits for migrant workers. currently, there are millions of citizens of former soviet countries working illegally in russia.“so far people are not leaving en masse, mainly because they are worried they won’t be able to come back,” says gavkhar dzhurayeva, who runs an organisation offering free legal support to migrant workers. “however, lots of people are talking about it, if things don’t improve.”the tendency could be problematic for russia too, which is expected to rely on immigrant labour for the formidable building projects as the country prepares to host the 2018 world cup.according to the world bank , 21% of armenia’s economy, 12% of georgia’s, 31.5% of kyrgyzstan’s, 25% of moldova’s, 42% of tajikistan’s, 5.5% of ukraine’s, 4.5% of lithuania’s, 2.5% of azerbaijan’s and 12% of uzbekistan’s, rely on remittances.these are some of the highest rates in the world. of the five countries globally whose gdp is most reliant on these payments, three are former soviet republics. in most of these cases money from immigrants in russia comprises a significant portion of these inflows. about 40% of remittances to armenia, georgia, moldova and ukraine are from russia, rising to 79% for kyrgyzstan .already, the sharp decline in the rouble has forced currency devaluations in turkmenistan this month, and speculation that kazakhstan’s tenge may need a further devaluation against the dollar after a 19% move last february.the economies of the region are strongly tied together, with belarus sending more than half of its exports to russia, and the nascent eurasian economic union supposedly tying together russia, belarus and kazakhstan as a single bloc. armenia and kyrgyzstan have also joined. in addition to the plummeting rouble, these countries will also have to deal with a potentially huge shortfall in remittances, which cannot but have an effect on gdp.in october 2014 the world bank estimated that remittances for the year to the nine countries mentioned earlier would have totalled $33.3bn by the end of 2014. of this figure, about $19bn would have been outflows from russia.at the time of the world bank estimate, one us dollar exchanged for 40 roubles. by the end of the year, the currency had lost about 50% of its value. if that new rate held steady throughout this year – and remittances were otherwise unchanged – their value would drop precipitously in 2015, to just $7.6bn.it is also worth noting that the figures given are the official numbers, sent via bank transfers. the real amounts, which include wads of dollars brought home in person by migrants or given to friends to carry, are likely to be much higher.a weak rouble over a sustained period of time would have a minimal impact in the baltics, but in several other countries the effects could be felt far more. in those countries where gdp relies so heavily on migrants sending money back home, a prolonged currency crisis throughout 2015 would, all other factors remaining the same, potentially even lead to double-digit economic contraction.most vulnerable are the central asian countries of kyrgyzstan, tajikistan and uzbekistan, where the ailing economies and dictatorial political systems are in large part propped up by the money from its nationals working in russia.in uzbekistan, ageing dictator islam karimov said in 2013 that migrant workers who went to russia were “lazy” and should find a job at home, but in reality, there is little work in uzbekistan, where £100 per month is considered a good salary and many towns simply have no opportunity for work at all. regional experts say that if the money flow from migrant labourers dries up, rulers like karimov would be in serious trouble.“if oil continues falling and the rouble continues falling, then migrants will begin to return home,” says daniil kislov, who runs fergana.ru, a central asia news portal. “there are 2.4 million uzbek migrants in russia, and those are just the official figures. these people and their families are all surviving because of money made in russia. essentially russia has saved uzbekistan and tajikistan from revolution, and if all these people return it will cause a social explosion. not today, but maybe in a year, or two, or five.”
 
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 furnaces from minnesota to maine are running full-blast as frigid temperatures descend from the arctic. but the natural-gas market is still ice cold.prices for the fuel, used to heat half of u.s. homes, hit a more-than two-year low this week and are down 35% since mid-november. the arrival of freezing weather across most of the country hasn’t revived the market.normally, plunging temperatures are a cue for traders to make...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 italy's manufacturing pmi took an unexpected drop in december, down to a 19-month low of 48.4 . in november, italy's manufacturing pmi came in at 49, and economists expected a rise to 49.6 in december. it's now the third month in which the figure has been below 50, signalling contraction.
 paris—french president françois hollande said monday the european central bank will decide to buy government debt later this week, reinforcing expectations the frankfurt-based institution will follow other major central banks into so-called quantitative easing.“on thursday, the ecb will take the decision to buy sovereign debt, which will provide significant liquidity to the european economy and create a movement that is favorable to...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 today, 23andme announced what forbes reports is only the first of ten deals with big biotech companies: genentech will pay up to $60 million for access to 23andme's data to study parkinson's. you think 23andme was about selling fun dna spit tests for $99 a pop? nope, it's been about selling your data all along.since 23andme started in 2006, it's convinced 800,000 customers to hand over their dna, one vial of spit at a time. personal dna reports are the consumer-facing side of the business, and that's the one we're most familiar with. it all seems friendly and fun with a candy-colored logo and quirky reports that include the genetic variant for asparagus pee.but 23andme wasn't going to find a big business by selling spit kits at the cut rate of $99. instead, it's always been about enticing customers to hand over their dna sequences along with details of their lives in a questionnaire to build a giant database—one that academic researchers and biotech companies alike are, well, salivating over.big data has—excuse the metaphor—been in 23andme's dna from the beginning. the company was founded by anne wojcicki, who's married to (though now separated from) google co-founder sergey brin. last year, wojcicki told the new york times that the inspiration for 23andme came from watching google: "i remember in the early days of google, larry [page] would say, 'i just want the world's data on my laptop.' i feel the same way about health care. i want the world's data accessible."while wojcicki has been open about her larger ambitions for 23andme, none of that language is apparent in the marketing for its dna test kits to customers—for sneaky but obvious reasons. its privacy policy notes that it will share aggregated data to third parties (read: sell to pharma and biotech companies) for scientific research if customers sign a consent document . wojcicki told the san jose mercury news that 85 to 90 percent of 23andme's customers do.this particular genentech deal for parkinson's is actually limited in scope, though it is a harbinger of things to come. wojcicki and brin have been vocal about advocating for parkinson's research in the past, according to forbes, and this deal involves the whole genome sequencing of 3,000 patients or their immediate relatives. because genentech is interested in individual-level information, 23andme would need additional consent from these 3,000 customers. genentech will pay $10 million to start and up to $50 million more if benchmarks are met down the line.this single deal with genentech, with more pharma company deals to come it seems, already represents a big chunk of 23andme's revenue. likening 23andme to google is uncomfortably apt. if you're paying a cut rate to have 23andme sequence your dna, you are 23andme's product.
 thirty-four years ago, at the launch of ted turner's cable news network, the founder made a grandiose and specific promise about his newly created round-the-clock operation. "barring satellite problems, we won't be signing off until the world ends," turner declared. and in anticipation, he prepared a final video segment for the apocalypse:we'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event. we'll play the national anthem only one time, on the first of june [the day cnn launched], and when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'nearer my god to thee' before we sign off.people thought he was joking. we have proof, acquired from a source, that he wasn't. below is the never-before-seen video the last living cnn employee will be required to play before succumbing to radiation poisoning, the plague, zombies, or whatever crazy end turner saw coming.ted always worries: cnn's ex-ceo and employees on the doomsday tape ted always worries: cnn's ex-ceo and employees on the doomsday tape ted always worries: cnn's ex-ceo and employeesyesterday the world got a premature look at the cnn apocalypse video, cable news' very own… read more read moreit lives on cnn's mira archive system, under the name turner doomsday video. reflecting its status as an artifact, not to be used except in the ultimate emergency, it's in standard definition, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, perfect for the cathode-ray tube televisions of the 1980s.the video has already outlasted ted turner's ownership and the rise and fall of aol. if it has not yet had the chance to serve as the capstone of all human experience, it nevertheless stands as a quiet monument to the globe-girdling ambitions behind cnn.cnn may be the human centipede of journalism at this point, its bloated corpse stumbling through the supposed middle ground of the wasteland that is american cable news, but it wasn't always that way. it was founded almost as an ideal, and much of the media world owes its very nature to the first cable news network.before cnn, a regular person could absorb the news only in restricted doses, at specific times of day. turner's innovation was in the idea of news without boundaries, night into day into night again, allowing anyone to be an obsessive media nut, every single second of every single minute of every day.from 1980 on, news would always be there for you, right until the very end. at its birth, the now-moribund news giant operated like many of the new media organizations of today—hiring young people with little experience and plenty of drive, people who wanted the breathing space to explore every story that couldn't fit into a 30-minute news segment.since those early years, cnn has grown into a ponderous object in the background, immovably entrenched on cable even as it has been tossed from corporate merger to corporate merger. born as part of ted turner's turner broadcasting system, in 1996 it became a part of time warner. in 2000 america online bought time warner for $164 billion, and in 2006 ted turner himself left the time warner board. in 2009, the biggest corporate mistake in history reached its inevitable conclusion, and aol was spun off from the company it once attempted to dominate.through it all there have been monumental culture shifts and budget re-adjustments, ideas tried out and tossed aside. there are few vestiges left of its original promise.but there is still the video, awaiting its deployment. i was an intern at cnn back in 2009. specifically, i worked at the situation room with wolf blitzer. wolf was a nice enough guy, as people from buffalo tend to be, but that's not really so weird. what was weird was seeing the apocalypse video.i was originally told about it by a college professor of mine, who had worked at cnn for over 20 years. it sounded mostly like a mythic joke, the kind of thing that ted turner, the all-around "eccentric billionaire" archetype, would mention offhand. bison ranches, the america's cup, four girlfriends at once, the last word on the last day on earth—why not?turner's boast about broadcasting through the end of the world is the kind of thing you hear, in one form or another, from every startup founder. my idea is the best, it will beat all the others, it is here to stay, forever and ever. no, we won't get bought by aol. and turner was known for being blustery.so when ted turner said that cnn was going to be playing "nearer my god to thee"—the song the band supposedly played when the titanic went down—as the heavens opened up, as the fiery finger of god rained salt and brimstone from the sky, as the earth beneath our feet opened from below and swallowed everything above, as the last cnn employee, in the last surviving cnn studio in the world, witnessed the end of existence before them, he meant it.rumors of the doomsday tape's existence have popped up from time to time, as early as 1988, in the case of the new yorker , and as late as 2001, in the daily news .few internal projects in media companies have that sort of staying power, but despite all the whiz-bang tech cnn likes to display on air, everything behind the scenes isn't so new.in contrast to cnn's ideas of what to put on television, all flashy smiles, enormous screens, and the occasional hologram, behind the scenes things can still be a little archaic.  i don't remember the exact day that i saw it, but it must've been a slow day in between all the regular intern duties of cueing up tapes and distributing mail. maybe i should've been busier, but this was back in the situation room's days of covering the balloon boy saga, and so there weren't many obstacles in front of a bored college student looking to indulge his overcharged sense of curiosity.the video didn't take long to find; it turned up after a quick search in the database. there is no date attached, but the title reads "turner doomsday video."should you find yourself watching the apocalypse live on cnn, the last thing you see will emphatically not be in 4k resolution.it's kept behind its own proverbial glass case. angry, bold red letters are rendered on the computer screen of anyone who comes near it on cnn's intranet video database, reminding whoever accesses it that there is a grave restriction:hfr till end of the world confirmed.hold for release. cnn, once ever so thorough in its factchecking, knew that the last employee alive couldn't be trusted to make a call as consequential as one from the book of revelation. the end of the world must be confirmed.that leaves open a whole host of unanswered questions. if this is the last cnn employee alive, in the last cnn bureau on earth, who do they confirm it with? what does confirmation look like? who can be the one to make that determination, to pronounce the universe itself dead? is it wolf blitzer himself, ever a fan of the washington wizards, and thus a man who would know death when he saw it? would it be rick davis, cnn's head of standards of practices, who has been with the company since its birth and who thus would know cnn's journalistic practices better than anyone?or would it be some sort of living embodiment of cnn itself, ready to proclaim its own demise, as judgment day is truly the only thing able to bring about the long-anticipated death of cable news?and who would be around to watch it?all we have is this bleak yet romantic farewell, showcasing both the best and the worst of humanity with all of its unsettled questions. like nuclear weapons or the little safety card they give you on the plane, it's the fact that we don't know why or how exactly we'd need it that stands as the most unsettling thing about the doomsday video. this may just be the last thing that whoever is left sees, watching on whatever device remains, when humanity's last remnant winks out of existence.so, in one small regard, this is actually the way the world ends. this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with one melancholy little band, and a quick fade to black.note: since this article has gone up, we've been getting a number of questions as to how we obtained the footage. while we can't go into specifics, it's not something we've been sitting on since i was an intern in 2009. while i've been aware of its existence since then, it was only acquired after i came onboard here at jalopnik.illustration/video thumbnail by jim cooke, video assistance from nick stango and chris person
 the author chose to make this story unlisted, which means only people with a link can see it. are you sure you want to share it?the plight of the german saver is now a hardy perennial of financial news stories. as the ecb gets ready for a qe programme that could further reduce interest rates on a range of financial assets, the drumbeat of stories on the topic has accelerated. german publications are also taking an increasingly aggressive tone in interviews with mario draghi, with handelsblatt accusing him of “consciously putting german savings at risk to save the euro” and die zeit pleading with him that “the most pain is caused by the low interest rates.”underlying this steady barrage of media commentary and attacks on the ecb is an assumption that german savers are somehow particularly special in keeping a large amount of their assets in deposit accounts that now yield minimal interest. for example, handelsblatt tells draghi that the german peopledid not invest money, like goldman sachs, in shares, options and highly controversial bonds, but focused with your majority — rather conservatively — on savings books, german government bonds and life insurance policies.because germans tend to be risk-averse, they invest most of their money in savings deposits, life insurance and fixed-income products.bloomberg gets an expert to describe the issue:“it’s not going to be an easy year for savers,” michael seufert , an analyst at norddeutsche landesbank, said by phone from hanover last week. “germans are so conservative already that it’s hard to imagine they can get any more so.”however, like many popular stories, it turns out that the special conservative german saver is a myth.for instance, everyone knows that germans have their savings particularly concentrated in bank deposits, right? well, take a look at the graph below from a presentation by the impeccably conservative german firm allianz. it shows bank deposits as a percentage of total financial assets in 2013.so how special is germany? not so much. deposits were 40 percent of german financial assets in 2013, well behind the figures for greece and spain and only marginally ahead of the figures for portugal and ireland.of course, these kinds of aggregated figures could be hiding other differences which show that germans are actually far more risk-averse in their financial decisions than people in other countries. a useful source for a more detailed comparison is the information in the eurosystem household finance and consumption survey (hfcs). this is a cross-country survey that has collected information on the asset positions of households across the euro area. the first report from this survey provides a large amount of comparable information on asset allocations, mainly from data collected in 2010.let’s start with how people allocate their financial assets. see below for the euro area averages. we see that, on average, bank deposits account for 43 percent of the financial assets of euro area households while “speculative” investments like mutual funds and shares account for a combined 16.6 percent of these assets.what are the figures for germany? see below. bank deposits account for 44 percent of the financial assets of german households while mutual funds and shares account for a combined 16.9 percent of these assets. given that these are survey estimates that are subject to sampling error, these figures are consistent with the german allocation of assets to deposits and speculative assets being effectively identical to the european average.furthermore, the hfcs figures show that, contrary to the popular image, the german fraction of assets held in “speculative” mutual funds and shares is higher than in greece, spain, italy, portugal, austria and the netherlands.it is possible that these averages just reflect large asset holdings of a small number of wealthy germans but the data in the hfcs report suggest there is also nothing remarkable about the distribution of financial asset holdings in germany. for example, see below for the euro area figures on the participation rates of households in various asset classes. this shows that 11 percent of euro area households own mutual funds and 10 percent own shares.for germany, the corresponding figures are below: about 17 percent of germans own mutual funds and 10.6 percent own shares. thus, the perfectly average allocation of mutual fund and shareholding wealth in germany is actually spread across a wider number of households than in most euro area countries.finally, a comparison of the asset holdings of the median participant in the various asset classes shows little difference between germany and the euro area as a whole. here’s the euro area.the median german household has larger financial assets than the median euro area household, so it’s not too surprising that the median german depositor has more money in the bank than the median euro area depositor but it’s a small difference given the gap in median financial assets (note: because these are medians across different groups, the figures in the rows won’t add up). the median german holder of mutual funds has the same amount as the median euro area household investor in these funds while the median german share owner has slightly higher holdings than their euro area comparators.what does all this mean? despite the flood of stories suggesting germans are a very special breed of people who invest their money in a particularly conservative fashion, it turns out the germans are basically regular people who invest their money in pretty much the same fashion as the average european.i don’t expect these dastardly facts to play much role in german and european debate about interest rates in the coming months but i figured they were worth sharing.
 princeton – since the european sovereign-debt crisis erupted in 2009, everyone has wondered what would happen if a country left the eurozone. at first, the debate focused on crisis countries – greece, or maybe portugal, spain, or italy. then there was a rather hypothetical discussion of what would happen if strong surplus countries – say, finland or germany – left.through it all, a consensus emerged that an exit by one country could – like the collapse of lehman brothers in 2008 – trigger a wider meltdown. now, in switzerland, we have a demonstration of just some of the risks that might emerge were a surplus country to leave the eurozone.in september 2011, switzerland pegged its currency to the euro to set a ceiling to the swiss franc’s rapid appreciation in the wake of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008. the country thus became a temporary adjunct member of the european monetary union. but, on january 15, the swiss national bank (snb) suddenly and surprisingly abandoned the peg.obviously, exiting a real currency union is far more complex and legally fraught than ending a temporary exchange-rate arrangement; the effects of such a move would be greatly magnified. nonetheless, the swiss move reveals at least some of the uncertainties that a full-fledged exit could create.the snb was not forced to act by a speculative run. no financial crisis forced its hand, and, in theory, the snb’s directorate could have held the exchange rate and bought foreign assets indefinitely. but domestic criticism of the snb’s large buildup of exchange-rate reserves (euro assets) was mounting.in particular, swiss conservatives disliked the risk to which the snb was exposed. fearing that eurozone government bonds were unsafe, they agitated to require the snb to acquire gold reserves instead, even forcing a referendum on the matter . though the initiative to require a fixed share of gold reserves failed, the prospect of large-scale quantitative easing by the european central bank, together with the euro’s recent slide against the dollar, intensified the political pressure to abandon the peg.whereas economists have modeled financial attacks well, there has been little study of just when political pressure becomes unbearable and a central bank gives in. the snb, for example, had proclaimed loyalty to the peg just days before ending it. as a result, markets will now hesitate to believe central banks’ statements about future policy, and forward guidance (a major post-crisis instrument) will be much more difficult.there is historical precedent for the victory of political pressure, and for the recent swiss action. in the late 1960s, the bundesbank had to buy dollar assets in order to stop the deutsche mark from rising, and to preserve the integrity of its fixed exchange rate. the discussion in germany focused on the risks to the bundesbank’s balance sheet, as well as on the inflationary pressures that came from the currency peg. some german conservatives at the time would have liked to buy gold, but the bundesbank had promised the fed that it would not put the dollar under downward pressure by selling its reserves for gold.in 1969, germany unilaterally revalued the deutsche mark. but that was not enough to stop inflows of foreign currency, and the bundesbank was obliged to continue to intervene. it continued to reduce its interest rate, but the inflows persisted. in may 1971, the german government – against the wishes of the bundesbank – abandoned the dollar peg altogether and floated the currency.politics had prevailed over central-bank commitments. within three months, the fallout destroyed the entire international monetary system, and us president richard nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. the credibility of the entire system of central bank commitments had collapsed, and international monetary policy became extremely unstable. the deutsche mark appreciated, and life became very hard for german exporters.today, the global ramifications of a major central bank’s actions are much more pronounced than in 1971. when the bundesbank acted unilaterally, german banks were not very international. but now finance is global, implying large balance-sheet exposures to currency swings.big swiss banks fund themselves in swiss francs, because so many people everywhere want the security of franc assets. they then acquire assets worldwide, in other currencies. when the exchange rate changes abruptly, the banks face large losses – a large-scale version of naive hungarian homeowners’ strategy of borrowing in swiss francs to finance their mortgages.though the snb had given many warnings that the euro peg was not permanent, and though it had imposed a higher capital ratio on banks, the uncoupling from the euro came as a huge shock. swiss bank shares fell faster than the general swiss index.the risks created by the snb’s decision – as transmitted through the financial system – have a fat tail. the negative effects for the swiss economy – through the decreased competiveness of its export industries (including tourism and medicine) – may already be showing that abandoning the euro peg was not a good idea.but the consequences will not be limited to switzerland. after years of wondering whether the exit of a small, fiscally weak country like greece could undermine the euro, policymakers will have to deal with an even bigger shock stemming from the exit of a small, fiscally strong country that is not even a member of the european union.
rt @datarade: @pmarca english as a start-up: explosive growth, highly disruptive, complex
 software is eating the world and it’s mostly written in english.english wins because it is the language of chaos and poetry. the grammar is germanic in english because german is the most functional. but german is a horrid dog language. nobody wants to read german poetry. the normans softened up english with the provençal influence and brought it the nordic spirit of fierceness. middle english was the most beautiful language on earth when it arrived and everyone knew it.andrew auernheimer aka weev. he’s a scripturient and very talented at writing and communication. that being said, he is known for being a troll. i took this quote from him with his permission.“english is simpler than german (and old english); modern persian is a breeze next to old persian and modern pushtu; modern spoken arabic dialects have lost much of the grammatical curlicues of classical arabic; modern mandarin is simpler than other modern chinese languages; and malay is simpler than related austronesian languages.”in 1950, india had 750 languages. 50 years later it has 250.the greatest thing nations can do to increase prosperity is decrease complexity. they can eliminite the amount of hurdles required for communication across borders and within countries.this makes it impossible to traverse the continent and do business in it without an extreme level of competence in many languages.english for the world is a worthy campaign.it equates to greater communicability, transferability of knowledge, and accessibility to knowledge bases of science, math, and human behavior.the content is also extremely rich in english making it easier and faster to retain than for content outside the bounds of english.hollywood prolifically makes movies in english that are world famous.a world with english is coming soon, languages will die in the process, and it’s a net positive.
 deer are invading new york city, and we don't know how to stop themjust before christmas of last year, john caminiti, who lives in staten island, new york city’s least populated borough, watched traffic come to a standstill outside the staten island mall. "it got quiet all of a sudden," caminiti told me. "i look around, and there was a big buck, standing right on the fringe of the wilderness and the mall. a calm came over people."staten island is located a half-hour by ferry off the southern tip of manhattan, and the caminitis have lived here for almost a century. "my grandmother was a baby when my great-grandfather brought her over here," he said. at that time, the island had practically no deer. then the island had a few deer. now there are a lot of deer, and they are everywhere.nobody really knows where the herds came from. the staten island advance reported sightings as far back as 1991 ; according to the new york times , deer began appearing "with some frequency" around 2000.in 2008, the new york department of environmental conservation conducted a survey of staten island’s deer population. the biologist who searched the woods estimated there were approximately 24 white-tailed deer in the borough. last winter, the new york city parks department conducted an aerial, infrared survey of the island and found 793 individuals — an apparent 3,304 percent increase in just six years.deer on the island have gone from a rarity to a delight to a problem with no immediate solution. "i never saw a deer until i went away to college," sam immo, a 23-year-old staten island native, told me. "when my friends and i were learning to drive, driving at night was a non-issue," she said. "the first time i almost hit a deer, i was flabbergasted."the consequences of white-tailed deer overabundance extend beyond trampled gardens, the spread of tick-borne disease, or even car collisions. (the department of sanitation had a contractor remove 34 " large dead deer " from staten island’s roads in 2013.) too many deer will ruin an ecosystem for years to come, leaving forests barren; eventually, the deer’s insatiable appetite will lead to its own starvation. while staten island, new york city’s greenest borough, hasn’t quite reached that point, without management efforts in place, the island will get there soon enough. under favorable conditions, deer populations can double every two to three years . staten island — an area just shy of 60 square miles — might expect its deer population to reach 3,000 by 2017.it’s a pattern that has unfolded across the american northeast and midwest over the past 30 years. white-tailed deer — once on the brink of extirpation in the united states — find refuge in the parks, backyards, and golf courses of suburban and exurban america. humans are largely at fault: the way we develop things, with our fondness for cultivated, abrupt treelines, wide-open soccer fields, and the absence of hunters and predators are ideal for deer. as far as they are concerned, staten island — best views of the manhattan skyline in the tri-state metropolitan area! — is as nice a place to live as any. unmanaged, however, the population will become an increasingly expensive problem, with any semblance of balance difficult to restore. that one of new york city’s five boroughs will soon be overrun with hundred-pound pests (some with horns), at this point, seems inevitable.three times larger than manhattan, staten island is home to less than a third as many people — just over 472,000, according to the last census. the island is densely built up at its hilly northeastern end, where commuters board ferries bound for downtown new york city, a few miles away. but away from the city, sloping southwest towards new jersey and southeast towards the atlantic, the island becomes increasingly depopulated — a landscape of gutted factories, empty prisons, and parks. "nothing down here but the deer," john caminiti told me as we drove in his car. caminiti and his friends feed the deer at staten island’s charleston cemetery. sometimes, he said, they eat out of his hand.charleston cemetery sits along the side of arthur kill road at the southern end of staten island — just about as far from manhattan you can get while still remaining within the confines of the five boroughs. staten island has some of the oldest cemeteries in new york state — legendary new yorker writer joseph mitchell even wrote a story about them. "the south shore is the most rural part of the island," he wrote in 1956, "and all these cemeteries are bordered on at least two sides by woods." today those woods and cemeteries are full of deer: during my visit at charleston, a small fawn scampered toward a doe at the sight of me.arthur kill road swings out and around the bottom of the island to the water of the arthur kill — a tidal strait separating staten island from new jersey. ("kill" being a dutch word for a stream or a creek or other such flowing body of water.) many suspect that this is ground zero for the island’s exploding deer population: deer have been videotaped swimming across the arthur kill toward staten island from new jersey towns like rahway, carteret, and perth amboy — places where sprawling industrial campuses, many abandoned, sit adjacent to marshes, forests, and swamps.a video of deer swimming across arthur kill toward staten island, uploaded in 2010.about a half-mile south of the giant mound of the freshkills landfill, the coast is littered with scuttled ships, earning it the name staten island ship graveyard. at low tide, i walked across the flats — scattered oysters sticking up out of the mud, rusting hulls sticking up out of the water a little further out — to a heavily wooded peninsula that sticks out towards jersey. the trek was not very rigorous, but it smelled bad. i saw no deer, but i saw deer shit. a lot of deer shit.mike feller, the recently retired chief naturalist for the parks department, told me that a large part of his mission as a nature advocate is to foster connections between green spaces that would otherwise be fragmented — or, as he put it, "ameliorating island biogeography." the arthur kills area is a good illustration, feller said, of that project finding success: "a glorious, contiguous system of forests, marshes, and edges." this is exactly the kind of habitat that white-tailed deer enjoy. according to caminiti, a deer (or a person) would be able to travel from the northernmost tip of the island to the southernmost without crossing more than four or five roads."trying to make things more connected has a lot of benefits, but also a lot of liabilities. you can’t filter out the species you may not want," feller told me. "before, maybe there were outliers, stragglers, but no herds," he said. (a new york times article from 1953 tells the story of a staten island farmer being gored by one such buck.) "there was a time it seemed like the deer just showed up."after leaving arthur kill, i drove back to the cemetery in hopes of catching one more glimpse of a deer before the sunset. sure enough, there she was, a doe, staring me down from between the mossy headstones. and then she turned, bounding away unhurriedly into the dim evening woods.white-tailed deer are not particularly large animals, but they are muscular and athletic, some reportedly able to jump over fences 10 feet high. the tails from which they derive their name stick up jauntily over their rears as they run away from you.before european colonization, north america was home to somewhere between 24 and 33 million white-tailed deer, most widely distributed east of the rocky mountains. in the following centuries, that population was destroyed — first by traders operating out of coastal cities, making deals with native americans for pelts; then by settlers moving out west. deer died by the hundreds of thousands as the market grew for their meat and hides.but it was the the second half of the 19th century that truly decimated animal populations across the united states. in his book nature wars, wildlife historian, journalist, and hunter jim sterba writes, "all wildlife suffered, from bison to songbirds. demand for wild products soared as immigrants poured in and the us population grew to 76 million. any wild species with any value was killed for meat, fur, or feathers."the white-tailed population plummeted to an estimated low of 350,000 animals in 1890. according to serba, "by the end of the 19th century white-tailed deer were so scarce that market hunters no longer bothered with them."then, thanks to a set of concepts and policies referred to as the north american model of wildlife conservation, the deer made a tremendous comeback. the model, encouraged by a rising american bourgeoisie that yearned for recreational hunting, established a series of principles to promote rebounding deer populations: create protected green spaces where commercial hunting was banned; foster safe and abundant spaces for regulated, recreational hunting; and further discourage predator species that had essentially already been eradicated. the logic was simple: you can’t hunt the deer if all the deer are already dead.as a result, the united states now has over 30 million white-tailed deer, much more densely populated than they ever were before europeans arrived. unchecked by wolves, cougars, and bears, the herds wreak havoc: a 2012 rutgers university study alleges that white-tailed deer are responsible for most of the $4.5 billion worth of crops that us agriculture loses to wildlife annually; they account for three to four thousand car collisions a day. new jersey alone had 31,192 deer collisions from 2011 to 2012. unchecked by predators or hunters, only starvation will limit population growth.to bring a native species back from the brink of eradication should be cause for celebration — in this respect, the revival of white-tailed deer is one of the conservation movement’s finest accomplishments. but our understanding of what is best for the deer, for people, and for the wider ecosystem is, perhaps, changing. and success is starting to resemble failure.to combat staten island’s deer, new york city has pulled together 22 people into a newly organized nyc interagency deer management task force . representatives from the environmental conservation are present, but so are employees of the department of transportation, sanitation, emergency management, nypd, usda, and others. the task force, chaired by the parks department’s director of conservation kevin heatley, had its first official meeting this past december. there, the team came to two conclusions: the deer are a problem. the city needs to do something about the deer."it’s not the number of deer, it’s the density," heatley told me. at 41 deer per square mile of staten island, he said, "the numbers are four times as high as we’d like them to be." the task force will aim to lower that density to fewer than 15 animals per square mile. but no one can agree on when this will happen, or how.the task force has three priorities: monitor the animals and their impact; educate the public about deer behavior; and manage the population. it is this last goal that’s the most difficult and controversial. communities like staten island — largely developed, if not entirely urban, with plenty of green space — have essentially four primary management methods available to them: two lethal and two non-lethal. lethal methods include regulated culls (i.e. hiring government sharpshooters) and recreational hunting. non-lethal methods include the application of a contraceptive and surgical sterilization. the fifth option — which isn’t really an option but rather the current state of affairs — is to do nothing at all."pursuing, shooting, killing, or capturing" as well as "disturbing, harrying, or worrying" wildlife is prohibited in all five boroughs of new york city and carries a penalty of a year in jail, a $2,000 fine, or both. that hasn’t stopped some: in 2007, the new york times reported hunters roaming staten island’s clay pit pond state park."to just come up and start killing them seems cruel. they’re innocent — they don’t know."margherita grancio-rubertone lives near freshkills park, across the street from a cemetery where a deer was once found impaled on the fence (the victim of an unfortunate jumping accident). "it’s not a good idea, hunting," she told me. "to just come up and start killing them seems cruel. they’re innocent — they don’t know." the relative density of staten island would also make hunting difficult, or at least uncomfortable. "it would be pretty dangerous, with the deer right across from your house," grancio-rubertone said. "god forbid, whatever might happen."in february of 2013, a staten island advance reporter asked republican mayoral candidate joe lhota, a former head of the metropolitan transportation authority who hunts deer in upstate new york, what he made of the growing deer sightings on staten island. lhota was in town to pick up an assemblyman’s endorsement. "the next mayor is going to have to figure out how hunting is going to work," lhota said, adding that if hunting were to be permitted on the island, it would have to be bowhunting. "not everybody believes in hunting," lhota said. "so we need to have a public debate." lhota later denied making the comments; the advance reporter stuck by his story, and the paper ended up running an editorial condemning the idea of allowing hunting in the borough anyway.the task force does not consider hunting to be a viable option for staten island, and just as well — recreational hunting on its own has been found to be an insufficient means of population control. one study even found that bowhunters in new jersey and pennsylvania who were permitted unlimited tags, could shoot deer over bait, and were working during extended seasons still could not reduce the size of deer herds to sustainable levels.an accident report showing a driver hitting two parked cars in order to avoid a deer collision on staten island. credit: silive.comone of the study’s co-authors was anthony denicola, founder of a non-profit called white buffalo, which provides wildlife control services using lethal and nonlethal methods. denicola’s doctoral dissertation at purdue university was on deer contraceptives ; he claims to have killed more than 10,000 deer since he founded white buffalo in 1995. "people have a hard time accepting ‘responsibility’ for taking an animal’s life, but at what cost to the animal’s quality of life?" he asked when we spoke. communities hire white buffalo to manage their wildlife when that wildlife has run amok.denicola is not optimistic that the residents of staten island or legislators in a city like new york are going to accept widespread lethal deer culls. "when you’re dealing with people who live in the new york metropolitan area, they have no day-to-day exposure to nature, to living with nature. the idea of killing animals like deer has a very visceral impact," denicola said. "given the degree of urbanization, your ability to educate, to sway public perception becomes very hard — to get people to understand the need to cull? good luck. ideally, you’d pursue an integrated solution" — a mix of lethal and non-lethal methods. "practically? not. gonna. happen."white buffalo has experimented with surgical sterilization, which denicola believes will play a greater role in deer management as time goes on. "most locations that have deer problems have firearm restrictions," he observed. "the data keep reinforcing that sterilization may have some utility." but labor-intensive sterilization is an expensive proposition: you have to catch the deer, and you need someone who is competent in the surgical sterilization process available to perform the act — the bill comes out to around $1,000 per doe."tony’s been doing a lot of the surgical sterilization work, and he has a great team to do that," allen rutberg, director of tufts university’s center for animals and public policy, told me. "i just don’t think that his team can be replicated in an efficient manner."rutberg is researching a different non-lethal method of deer management: immunocontraception, or birth control. last year, he and his team began an experiment with this method in the town of hastings-on-hudson, just north of new york city in westchester county. hastings, a two-square-mile area, is estimated to be home to around 120 deer; there were 16 car collisions involving deer here in 2011, and the mayor, his wife, and their child all contracted deer-borne lyme disease. rutberg’s method involves tranquilizing, tagging, and applying the vaccine to each deer once every two years; similar experiments on fire island reduced deer populations in some areas by as much as 50 percent. rutberg’s contraceptive method costs around $500 per deer, though he argues that if government regulations requiring him to tag each deer were lifted, he could bring that cost down to $100.one of the things we like about the sort of contraception that we do is that it seems to be a sort of comfortable, consensus solution," rutberg said. "it doesn’t involve killing anything, it’s not too invasive, we don’t have to do surgery on the animals, but at the same time it keeps the problem under control. it seems like a nice compromise between treating them as pests and treating them as pets and treating them as nature’s gift."but building a consensus in any community can be a laborious process, especially in a place with as many stakeholders and interest groups as new york city. "a consensus-based approach is never going to work on a controversial issue," denicola told me. "you can try educating, but in the time it takes to do that you’ll have deer up to your eyeballs."the best case scenario for staten island, he said, is that five years from now a management method will be agreed on. "meanwhile, the forest is denuded, lyme disease spreads, and collisions increase," he said. "the deer are happy!" but as for the city? "they are well on their way to a major headache."heatley, the head of the nyc interagency deer management task force, shares denicola’s concern — whatever method the city decides on, time is of the essence if staten island is going to solve its deer problem. "when your house is on fire, you go get a bucket. you don’t measure the temperature of the flames," he told me. "the deer situation is a wildfire."deer aren’t the only animals adapting and flourishing in the landscapes we’ve created: in 1974, only 325 pairs of peregrine falcons were left in all of north america. today they thrive in cities, whose skylines imitate the falcon’s ancestral habitats along cliffs and canyons: the new york state dec reports that peregrine falcons nest on every bridge over the hudson river south of albany. the world’s largest urban bat colony numbering around 1.5 million — is located underneath downtown austin’s congress avenue bridge. a wolf-coyote hybrid is spreading through the northeast from above the great lakes, via the appalachians — its size and weight making it a more fearsome predator than its pure-coyote predecessors. some 2,000 coyotes have moved from the suburbs around chicago into the city’s downtown, and coyotes from westchester county — just north of manhattan — have made it as far south as tribeca . just a few days ago, one was caught on the upper west side.the distinction between nature and civilization has always been a delusional abstraction at best, and a justification for the exploitation of natural resources at worst. we are, at all times, amongst nature, and it is amongst us whether we see it or not. and now the deer, the coyotes, and others are coming back to remind us of the fact."humans have forgotten that they have a role in nature," the department of agriculture forest service’s thomas rawinski told me. "we have to take responsibility for the problem, we have to look at ourselves as part of this ecosystem." human beings shattered the landscape of this continent, only to decide that we preferred it the other way. but putting the puzzle back together is proving to be harder than we imagined.on staten island, that shattered landscape isn’t just made up of deer: the island is also struggling with a flock of wild turkeys. for the past 15 years, the birds have made the campus of the south beach psychiatric center their home. it all started with nine captive-bred birds that were released onto hospital grounds in 2000. since then, the flock has grown. meanwhile, the turkey’s fecal matter is tracked into the hospital buildings, ben rosen, a spokesperson for the office of mental health, told me. the birds are obstructing emergency vehicles making their way in and out of the hospital.in august 2013, several turkeys were captured by hand and with nets, placed into crates, and shipped to a "state-approved processing facility," according to a statement given at the time by a usda spokesperson to the staten island advance. their meat was to be frozen and its suitability for human consumption tested.but the cull sparked a public outrage and was officially halted in september; an estimated 45 turkeys remained on the psych ward grounds. the dec made accommodations for 28 of the birds to be transported to an enclosed space at the catskill environmental sanctuary instead. the usda, which is now handling the relocation process, is employing several different capture methodologies — pre-baited walk-in traps, weighted nets that are launched over turkeys by air cannons, and hand nets — over short periods of time to prevent the turkeys from catching on and finding other places to roost.it’s taken new york city 15 years to address the chaos caused by nine turkeys. one shudders to think how long it will take the city to tackle a population of 800 furiously procreating deer.denicola laughed when i told him about the island’s turkey troubles. getting rid of turkeys is easy, he scoffed. deer are another case altogether. "you’re not gonna relocate deer," he told me with a smirk in his voice. "you’re stuck with the deer. you handle them there."correction: the territory of staten island encompasses less than 60 square miles, not 100. that makes it the third largest borough in new york city.
 the continued massive growth of connected mobile devices is shaping not only how we communicate with each other, but how we look, behave, and experience the world around us. smartphones and other handheld devices have become indispensable tools, appendages held at arm's length to record a scene or to snap a selfie. recent news photos show refugees fleeing war-torn regions holding up their phones as prized possessions to be saved, and relatives of victims lost to a disaster holding up their smartphones to show images of their loved ones to the press. celebrity selfies, people alone in a crowd with their phones, events obscured by the very devices used to record that event, the brightly lit faces of those bent over their small screens, these are some of the scenes depicted below.
 attorney general eric holder is barring local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proof that a crime occurred. the post's robert o'harrow jr. explains the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago.attorney general eric h. holder jr. on friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.the program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them “adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. it allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.“with this new policy, effective immediately, the justice department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons,” holder said in a statement.holder’s decision allows limited exceptions, including illegal firearms, ammunition, explosives and property associated with child pornography, a small fraction of the total. this would eliminate virtually all cash and vehicle seizures made by local and state police from the program.while police can continue to make seizures under their own state laws, equitable sharing was easy to use and required most of the proceeds from the seizures to go to local and state police agencies. some states have higher standards of proof for forfeitures and some require seized proceeds to go into the general fund.a justice department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the attorney general’s motivation, said holder “also believes that the new policy will eliminate any possibility that the adoption process might unintentionally incentivize unnecessary stops and seizures.”holder’s announcement drew praise from some groups who have denounced the seizures and criticism from some police organizations.the decision follows a washington post investigation published in september that found that police have made cash seizures worth almost $2.5 billion from motorists and others without search warrants or indictments since the terrorist attacks of sept. 11, 2001.the post found that local and state police routinely pulled over drivers for minor traffic infractions, pressed them to agree to warrantless searches and seized large amounts of cash without evidence of wrongdoing. the law allows such seizures and forces the owners to prove their property was legally acquired in order to get it back.police spent the seizure proceeds with little oversight, in some cases buying luxury cars, high-powered weapons and military-grade gear such as armored cars, according to an analysis of justice department data obtained through freedom of information act requests.in the wake of sept. 11, 2001, an aggressive brand of policing called “highway interdiction,” which involves authorities seizing money and property during traffic stops, has grown in popularity. thousands of people not charged with crimes are left fighting legal battles to regain their money. news of the policy change surprised advocates who have for a long time unsuccessfully sought to reverse civil asset forfeiture laws, arguing that they undermine core american values, such as property rights and due process.“it’s high time we put an end to this damaging practice,” said david harris, a constitutional law scholar at the university of pittsburgh. “it has been a civil-liberties debacle and a stain on american criminal justice.”holder’s action comes as members of both parties in congress are working together to craft legislation to overhaul civil asset forfeiture. on jan. 9, sens. charles e. grassley (r-iowa) and mike lee (r-utah), and reps. f. james sensenbrenner jr. (r-wis.) and john conyers jr. (d-mich.) signed a letter calling on holder to end equitable sharing .grassley praised holder’s decision on friday. “we’re going to have a fairer justice system because of it,” grassley said. “the rule of law ought to protect innocent people, and civil asset forfeiture hurt a lot of people.”he said he planned to continue pressing for legislative reforms.“i commend the department for this step and look forward to working with them on comprehensive forfeiture reform that protects americans’ property rights,” sensenbrenner said. “equitable sharing has become a tool too often used to bypass state law. ”the new policy could become one of the more notable pieces of holder’s legacy. holder has already announced that he is leaving the department , and it is clear that he is taking steps to burnish his place in history. on thursday, he pushed in a speech for better tracking of police use-of-force incidents.but friday’s action is sure to engender its share of controversy.the policy will touch police and local budgets in every state. since 2001, about 7,600 of the nation’s 18,000 police departments and task forces have participated in equitable sharing. for hundreds of police departments and sheriff’s offices, the seizure proceeds accounted for 20 percent or more of their annual budgets in recent years, according to a post analysis.the action comes at a time when police are already angry about remarks that holder and president obama made after the police killings of unarmed black men in ferguson, mo., and new york city. some have accused them of being “anti-cop.”“it seems like a continual barrage against police,” said john w. thompson, interim executive director of the national sheriffs’ association. “i’m not saying there’s no wrongdoing, but there is wrongdoing in everything.”critics of the decision say that depriving departments of the proceeds from civil asset forfeitures will hurt legitimate efforts to fight crime, drug smuggling and terrorism.bill johnson, executive director of the national association of police organizations, said, “there is some grave concern about the possible loss of significant funding while local police and state police are being asked to do more and more each year.”over the past decade, thousands of people have had to fight the government to get their cash and property back, often hiring lawyers and spending more than a year in the process, the post found. many of them were people of color and immigrants swept up in police dragnets on the nation’s highways aimed at stopping drug dealers, money launderers and terrorists.that includes people such as mandrel stuart , who was stopped in 2012 by fairfax county police, detained without charges, handcuffed and stripped of $17,550 in cash that was to be used for equipment and supplies for his barbecue restaurant in staunton, va. he eventually hired a lawyer, and a jury gave him his money back in 2013. but he lost his restaurant while fighting the government, because he had no working capital.“a lot of people won’t be harassed the way they are harassing them now,” stuart said friday after he heard about holder’s action. “it’s some justice at last on our side.”civil asset forfeiture is one of the most powerful — and unusual — law enforcement tools. police do not need to prove a crime to use it, because it is a civil action against an object, such as currency or a car, rather than a person.as a consequence, protections common in criminal law do not apply. in fact, owners who want to recover their cash or property generally must show it is theirs and demonstrate it is not tied to crime.forfeiture has its basis in british admiralty law, but it became a part of the fight against drugs in the united states beginning in 1970, when congress allowed police to seize aircraft, boats and other property used to transport narcotics or bought by drug lords with ill-gotten gains.in the 1980s, the law was expanded to include cash. about the same time, the justice department created its asset forfeiture program and began allowing federal agencies to adopt seizures made by state and local authorities. those changes led to a massive increase in money deposited into the federal forfeitures fund as seizures by local and state police surged. allegations of police ­abuses also increased.searing reports by the orlando sentinel and other newspapers about abuses spurred congress to pass the civil asset forfeiture reform act in 2000. but a key change — ending the sharing of seizure proceeds between local police and federal agencies — was cut from the bill after fierce opposition from police and prosecutors. some lawmakers called the sharing of money a “perverse incentive” for overly aggressive police tactics.after sept. 11, 2001, the use of the asset forfeiture law and the equitable sharing program rose to new heights as federal authorities called on local, county and state police to help keep watch on the nation’s highways, not only for drug smugglers but also for terrorists.the departments of justice and homeland security paid private firms millions to train local and state officers in the techniques of an aggressive brand of policing known as “highway interdiction.” that training, developed by the firms, included methods for ferreting out suspicious drivers and coaxing them into granting warrantless searches of vehicles, according to internal company training documents obtained by the post. the files emphasized the importance of targeting cash.the federal government also encouraged police to collect and share intelligence about drivers. one training firm started a private intelligence system called black asphalt that enabled thousands of police to share tips about drivers across state lines and funnel raw reports about drivers to federal authorities.civil asset forfeiture has become one of the few public policy and social issues that united activists and lawmakers across the political spectrum.after the post series, john yoder and brad cates, two directors of the justice department’s asset forfeiture office under president ronald reagan, said the program should end. in an opinion piece , they said the program began with good intentions. “over time, however, the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.”the institute for justice and other libertarian-leaning groups teamed up with the american civil liberties union and left-leaning groups to press for changes in the wake of the post’s investigation.“this is a profoundly important and path-breaking change in the ability of the government to take property of americans,” said scott bullock, a senior attorney at the institute for justice, which produced a study about civil asset forfeiture five years ago called “policing for profit: the abuse of civil asset forfeiture.”in recent months, grassley, the new chairman of the senate judiciary committee, and sen. patrick j. leahy (vt.), the panel’s ranking democrat, joined the effort, along with sensenbrenner and others.holder said seizure adoptions will continue to be employed by local and federal authorities, but only in limited circumstances when public safety is at risk and where local and federal authorities are collaborating in cases clearly involving criminal activity.most of the money and property taken under equitable sharing since 2008 — $3 billion out of $5.3 billon — was not seized in collaboration with federal authorities, the post’s analysis found.in announcing the new justice department policy friday, holder said there is also less need for federal seizure adoptions. in the 1980s, when the policies took effect, few states gave police the authority to make civil seizures and forfeit the assets of criminals in the way that federal law allowed.“today, however, every state has either criminal or civil forfeiture laws, making the federal adoption process less necessary,” holder’s statement said. “indeed, adoptions currently constitute a very small slice of the federal asset forfeiture program. ”some police departments have shown an apparent preference for federal law over state laws. equitable sharing allowed many departments to make or benefit from seizures in ways they could not have under state law. the program required the seizure proceeds to go back to the departments, while some state asset forfeiture programs mandate that the money go into general funds.the treasury department is also changing its asset forfeiture program to follow the same guideline included in holder’s order, the statement said.federal agencies make larger seizures of cash and property through avenues other than equitable sharing, typically in cases involving defendants ranging from drug cartel kingpins to bernard l. madoff, whose fraud case has resulted in more than $9 billion in forfeitures in recent years.those programs are not affected by the changes to equitable sharing, but holder also said the new policy is the first step in a “comprehensive review” of civil forfeiture in general.justice department officials noted that civil asset forfeiture has hurt criminals and their organizations. it also has enabled the government to refund money to crime victims — about $4 billion over the past 15 years.“asset forfeiture remains a critical law enforcement tool when used appropriately — providing unique means to go after criminal and even terrorist organizations,” holder said. “this new policy will ensure that these authorities can continue to be used to take the profit out of crime and return assets to victims, while safeguarding civil liberties.”robert o’harrow jr. is a reporter on the investigative unit of the washington post. he writes about law enforcement, national security, federal contracting and the financial world.sari horwitz covers the justice department and criminal justice issues nationwide for the washington post, where she has been a reporter for 30 years. follow her @sarihorwitz.steven rich is the database editor for investigations at the washington post. while at the post, he’s worked on investigations involving tax liens, civil forfeiture, cartels and government oversight. he was also a member of the reporting team awarded the pulitzer for nsa revelations. pgp fingerprint: 69fa 5730 addd 5488 24fe 6eb2 b727 d930
 by corinne iozzio posted dec 30th, 2014 at 4:00pmglaucoma is a leading cause of blindness, affecting some 60 million people worldwide. it’s also highly treatable, if caught early. the disease typically occurs when fluid pressure inside the eye rises, choking the optic nerve and causing irreparable damage. to detect this often sudden shift, a team of doctors at the university of washington is developing a wireless sensor small enough that it can be attached to a lens and implanted in the eye. it will send data to clinicians in real time through a peripheral device. (currently, doctors screen at-risk patients every three to four months.) the system may be ready for human trials in as few as five years.a. a silicone replacement lens, similar to the ones used in cataract surgery, contains the device’s electronics.b.  a sensor on a printed circuit board (pcb) continually monitors fluid pressure inside the eye.c. a microchip, also located on the pcb, converts pressure data into a radio-frequency signal.d. a stabilizing tension ring encircling the device holds the antenna, which acts as both a power receiver and a data transmitter via radio waves.e. data is sent to an external receiver, which will be a dedicated device or a phone peripheral. a doctor will interpret the data and look for pressure spikes."anything that produces a display—a phone, a computer, a game driver—can produce that same display in our eyewear," says jerome legerton, co-founder of innovega. the contact lens lets the wearer see within the normal field of vision as well as the up-close media in the glasses. the 60-degree view can even feature 3-d content. unlike existing video eyewear, ioptik is visible in both eyes; it appears along the top of one's vision, less obtrusively than a baseball cap. it's slated for clinical trials in early 2015.the smart lens has a glucose sensor that will measure sugar levels in a person’s tears and wirelessly transfer the data to a smartphone, helping some of the 21 million americans with diabetes better manage the disease. eventually, it could even provide immediate feedback on the effects of food and exercise. franck leveiller, a vice president of r&d at alcon, says the lens could be on the market in less than a decade. “it’s a platform,” he says, “so we see it as something that can go far beyond glucose-sensing.”this article was originally published in the january 2015 issue of popular science.
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 this is hms dreadnought. it was launched by the royal navy in 1906 and was the first modern battleship, such that all previous battleships are known retrospectively as 'pre-dreadnought'. amongst other innovations, it was the first to have turbine engines and the first to have a single large-calibre battery. rather like the iphone, it contained few things that were fundamentally new - most of the key features had been around for a while and considered elsewhere - but it was the first to put all of them together in one place in the right way, and, like the iphone, this changed everything. every other warship afloat was obsolete. the dreadnought also created a problem. the royal navy had been funded since 1889 on the 'two power' rule - that it would not only be the strongest in the world but that it would also be stronger than the next two largest navies combined. hence, the day before the dreadnought was launched it had 32 battleships where germany had 11 - a huge lead. the day after, it effectively only had one. it had to start again. the naval supremacy question was reset. this is rather what the iphone did, to both the mobile business and the entire consumer technology industry. all the existing parameters and entrenched advantages went away and the whole market was reset to zero. again like the iphone, the dreadnought was followed by a period of frenzied iteration. dreadnought-type battleships got much bigger, faster and more powerful, as every innovation was extrapolated to its conclusion. hence you got oddities like hms nelson, the phablet of battleships (the curious layout was partly a function of naval treaties - regulation distorting product design). but the dreadnought was also launched three years after the wright brothers' first flight. it was the apotheosis of 400 years' development of naval gunnery , but the last battleships were built only 40 years later. aircraft and aircraft carriers were the future, though no-one saw it at the time. and though the royal navy ended ww2 with 55 aircraft carriers of various form factors, ultimately carriers for squadrons of jets were so expensive that the uk economy could not support building a fleet of them and (for this and other reasons) ceded naval supremacy to the us navy. this is a common theme, incidentally - 'disruptive' military technology has almost always been more expensive, not cheaper, and the higher cost tended to be as disruptive to the broader environment as the technology itself. the iphone was the first time that personal computing got reset to zero since, well, ever, arguably. the result for microsoft, which dominated the pc era but which unlike the royal navy missed the big shift, was a total change in its market position.  but we're not done yet. i doubt, for example, that we'll be using black glass rectangles as our main computing device in, say, 20 years. one of the things i think we can see in the aggression of google and facebook in particular, and their sometimes perplexing m&a, is a determination to navigate the next such shift by finding it first - jumping over the horizon in a conscious attempt to find something that looks as laughable as the idea that an aircraft posed a threat to a battleship, or that the iphone would be a success . 
 investors are beginning to see the problems with this storybook stock, and those problems are likely to worsen. a threat from stephen king?
 the u.s. last year racked up its smallest budget deficit since 2007, marking an economic shift of fortunes as president barack obama and congressional republicans prepare to face off over legislative priorities this year.capped off by a $2 billion surplus in december, the government ended the calendar year with a deficit of $488 billion, $72 billion less than the 2013 tally, according to data from the u.s. treasury. the federal government uses a fiscal year that begins in october; on that basis, the 2014 fiscal year ended in september saw a deficit of $483 billion, also the lowest of mr. obama’s presidency.the government’s fiscal outlook has improved markedly since the 2007-09 recession, when government tax revenues withered as the national unemployment rate climbed toward 10%. the obama white house responded to the economic collapse with a more-than-$800 billion stimulus package, designed to defibrillate the economy even as it added further to the deficit.that combination of falling taxes and increased spending caused annual deficits to balloon to 10% of the economy’s gross domestic product in 2009, a level not seen since world war ii.since that peak deficit-to-gdp ratio, repeated partisan fights over how to reduce the deficit rattled markets and led to a credit-rating downgrade in 2011. but those debates ended with measures that capped and even reduced many federal outlays.“this hysteria and crisis that surrounded the discussion in 2010 and 2011 have thankfully dissipated,” said joel friedman, the vice president for fiscal policy at the center for budget and policy priorities, and a former democratic staffer on the senate budget committee. mr. friedman said that lawmakers have an opportunity to focus on near-term priorities such as infrastructure, education or national security, and no longer worry only about slashing spending.the result of the twin forces of rising payroll employment and the spending caps has been a steady improvement in the country’s fiscal balance sheet. also driving improvement has been the federal reserve, which stepped in with unprecedented monetary policies, holding rates near zero and launching a bond-buying program aimed at restoring economic growth.“the improvements in the short-term deficit are positive, and importantly, reflect the improving economy,” said maya macguineas, the president of the committee for a responsible federal budget. “but the longer-term debt situation remains unsustainable, and policy makers should not take the short-term respite as an excuse to hide from these issues.”though still large in absolute terms, government spending and deficits have both decreased dramatically since 2010 as a share of the nation’s economy. the deficit in 2014 was just under 3% of gdp, using the most recently available figures for the size of the economy. that’s below the average since the 1980s.the recent budget numbers are among several signs of an improving economy that could boost prospects for legislative cooperation this year on trade and other fronts. the economy last year recorded its best year of job growth in 15 years, helping push government revenue above $3 trillion for the first time as more americans with jobs lead to more revenue in income taxes.the recent budget numbers are among several signs of an improving economy that could boost prospects for legislative cooperation this year on trade and other fronts. above, a statue of former treasury secretary albert gallatin outside the treasury building in washington. associated pressdoug holtz-eakin, a former director of the congressional budget office, said lawmakers should use the improvement in the deficit picture to take such steps as changing the country’s tax code and addressing spending on benefit programs that would prevent deficits from rising in the future.“but there’s nothing driving action now. it would require a proactive approach,” mr. holtz-eakin said.the white house and congress will face a litany of budget fights in coming months as soon as mr. obama submits his plans for 2016 spending. congress must also wrestle with continued funding for the department for homeland security and another vote to raise the federal debt limit. republicans have vowed to propose a range of spending cuts in their own budget resolution this spring.mr. obama met tuesday with congressional leaders from both parties to discuss legislative priorities a week before the annual state of the union address. while the white house and republicans have already clashed over policy, their debates have centered on the keystone xl pipeline, immigration policy and changes to the affordable care act, not how to rein in deficits.though the discussion may be less heated, wrangling over deficits is unlikely to fade from washington’s agenda. the cumulative national debt has climbed above $18 trillion, according to the treasury.rep. brad wenstrup (r., ohio) said he’d like to see the deficit continue to shrink. “i want to see our country get on a course where there is a potential for a balanced budget down the road and that we don’t leave the next generation more and more debt.”meanwhile, the nonpartisan congressional budget office has projected the deficit for 2015 will narrow even further but begin widening again in 2016 due to increased spending on social security and health care as the u.s. population ages.in its most recent projections, the cbo forecast that under current policies the annual deficit will climb to $960 billion in 2024. the cbo has said that “the large and increasing amount of federal debt would have serious negative consequences,” including the burden of higher interest payments, an increased risk of fiscal crisis, and a lack of flexibility for lawmakers to respond to unexpected challenges.—siobhan hughes contributed to this article.
 having seen numerous fluctuations in the energy markets over the years, many analysts and policy makers have a natural tendency to “look through” the latest drop in oil prices -- that is, to treat the impact as transient rather than as signaling long-term changes.i suspect that view would be a mistake this time around. the world is experiencing much more than a temporary dip in oil prices. because of a change in the supply model, this is a fundamental shift that will likely have long-lasting effects.through the years, markets have been conditioned to expect opec members to cut their production in response to a sharp drop in prices. saudi arabia played the role of the “swing producer.” as the biggest producer, it was willing and able to absorb a disproportionately large part of the output cut in order to stabilize prices and provide the basis for a rebound.it did so directly by adhering to its lowered individual output ceiling, and indirectly by turning a blind eye when other opec members cheated by exceeding their ceilings to generate higher earnings. in the few periods when saudi arabia didn't initially play this role, such as in the late 1990s, oil prices collapsed to levels that threatened the commercial viability of even the lower-cost opec producers.yet in serving as the swing producer through the years, saudi arabia learned an important lesson: it isn’t easy to regain market share. this difficulty is greatly amplified now that significant non-traditional energy supplies, including shale, are hitting the market .that simple calculation is behind saudi arabia’s insistence on not reducing production this time. without such action by the no. 1 producer, and with no one else either able or willing to be the swing producer, opec is no longer in a position to lower its production even though oil prices have collapsed by about 50 percent since june.this change in the production model means it is up to natural market forces to restore pricing power to the oil markets. low prices will lead to the gradual shutdown of what are now unprofitable oil fields and alternative energy supplies, and they will discourage investment in new capacity.  at the same time, they will encourage higher demand for oil.this will all happen, but it will take a while. in the meantime, as oil prices settle at significantly lower levels, economic behavior will change beyond the “one-off” impact.as costs fall for manufacturing and a wide range of other activities affected by energy costs, and as consumers spend less on gas and more on other things, many oil-importing nations will see a rise in gross domestic product. and this higher economic activity is likely to boost investment in new plants, equipment and labor, financed by corporate cash sitting on the sidelines.the likelihood of longer-lasting changes is intensified when we include the geopolitical ripple effects. in addition to creating huge domestic problems for some producers such as russia and venezuela, the lower prices reduce these nations’ real and perceived influence on other countries. some believe cuba, for example, agreed to the recent deal with the u.s. because its leaders worried they would be getting less support from russia and venezuela. and for countries such as iraq and nigeria, low oil prices can fuel more unrest and fragmentation, and increase the domestic and regional disruptive impact of extremist groups.few expected oil prices to fall so far, especially in such a short time. the surprises won’t stop here. a prolonged period of low oil prices is also likely to result in durable economic, political and geopolitical changes that, not so long ago, would have been considered remote, if not unthinkable.  to contact the author on this story:to contact the editor on this story:mohamed el-erian is the chief economic adviser at allianz se. he’s chairman of barack obama's global development council, the author of best-seller "when markets collide," and the former chief executive officer and co-chief investment officer of pimco. read more.
 california governor jerry brown delivers his inauguration address on january 5, 2015. credit photograph by hector amezcua / zuma press / corbisback in 2011, the texas economy was doing so well, and california’s so poorly, that the democratic lieutenant governor of california, gavin newsom, travelled to austin to seek advice from an unlikely mentor: the republican governor of texas, rick perry. when newsom returned, he  remarked , appreciatively, “they’re aggressive, we’re not. they know what they’re after, we don’t.”ten years earlier, in 2001, texas’s g.d.p. was equal to about fifty-six per cent of california’s. by 2011, that figure had risen to sixty-seven per cent. after newsom’s visit, the gap continued to narrow, and by 2013 it stood at seventy per cent. that year, perry took out radio ads in california,  telling  business owners there, “building a business is tough, but i hear building a business in california is next to impossible. this is texas governor rick perry, and i have a message for california businesses: come check out texas.”california governor jerry brown, a democrat, dismissed the ad as “barely a fart,” but some observers assumed that he was only feigning nonchalance. by then, a narrative had been established about the states’ differing fortunes, thanks partly to perry’s bid for the republican presidential nomination the previous year, during which he made much of the “texas miracle.” while california was struggling to recover from the recession, texas was thriving. along with faster g.d.p. growth, texas boasted a much lower unemployment rate, and from 2009 to 2012 it was responsible for the most  new business establishments  in the u.s.—more than a fifth of the country-wide total—while california’s number fell. in october, 2013, time magazine published a  cover article  by the economist tyler cowen proclaiming that texas represented “america’s future”; the accompanying illustration showed all the fifty states rearranged, like puzzle pieces, into the shape of texas. commentators chalked up the state’s success to factors like affordable housing, a business-friendly regulatory environment, and the lack of a state income tax. by contrast, california’s top income-tax rate and its housing costs were among the highest in the nation, and its business regulations—particularly those having to do with the environment—were seen as especially onerous and costly.these days, though, no one is talking about the lessons california should learn from texas. california’s economy is improving, and its  budget is finally balanced —partly because of budget cuts and a voter-approved tax hike in 2012, and partly because the stock-market boom has translated into more tax receipts from california’s wealthiest residents (the ones with those high income-tax rates). these changes happen to come as texas, the nation’s biggest oil-producing state by far, is grappling with a  collapse in oil prices , which has depressed the price of a barrel of west texas intermediate crude oil to under fifty dollars a barrel for the first time in more than five years. it will be several months before the government publishes figures on g.d.p. and business creation for the period coinciding with the drop in oil prices, but already there are signs of trouble. michael feroli, the chief u.s. economist at jpmorgan chase, said in december, “we think texas will, at least, have a rough 2015 ahead, and is at risk of slipping into a regional recession.” the texas budget, too, could be hurt by lost oil and gas taxes.brown, who was sworn in on monday for a second consecutive term as governor of california (his fourth, including a stint from the late seventies to the early eighties), must have enjoyed a moment of schadenfreude if he happened to scan the wall street journal on his way to the inauguration. in an article on how the oil slump could hurt texas, jon hilsenrath and his colleagues  wrote , “some texans sobered by memories of past energy busts are bracing for a fall. the argument among economists and business leaders isn’t whether the state will be hurt, but how badly.”the concerns about texas’s fortunes speak to a misperception of the state’s recent boom, and of california’s bust. texas’s outperformance of california had a lot to do with factors beyond the control of politicians like perry and newsom—namely, the importance of real estate to california’s economy, and the importance of oil to texas’s. in 2008, the real-estate and rental-and-leasing sectors were responsible for about sixteen per cent of california’s g.d.p., almost double the proportion in texas. so it was inevitable that california was hit harder by the housing crash that sparked the recession than texas was. at the same time, texas benefitted disproportionately from a rise in oil prices in recent years. oil and gas extraction makes up about eleven per cent of texas’s economy, compared with one per cent of california’s. in 2008, the year the recession began, the price of a barrel of west texas intermediate crude oil hit a record, topping a hundred and forty dollars a barrel; the price fell later that year, but it recovered relatively fast, reaching a hundred dollars again by 2011. mark muro, the policy director at the brookings institution’s metropolitan policy program, told me that the recent  natural-gas boom , coupled with rising oil prices, has been largely responsible for texas’s growth, in g.d.p. as well as in employment and new business establishments, since the recession. the role of policy measures like low taxes and the light regulation of businesses was probably overstated, he said.if all the booms and busts of recent years have taught states anything, muro said, it’s that it is dangerous to rely too much on one industry for economic growth—especially if that industry is as volatile as real estate or oil. after the last time oil prices crashed, in 1986, bringing the texas economy down with them, the state government made a point to  broaden its economy  into other areas. in the wake of the recent recession, the governor’s office and others claimed that texas has successfully expanded into industries outside of the oil sector—especially the kinds of newer, fast-growing ones, such as tech, that have made places like silicon valley so successful. the internet scene in austin was  particularly   celebrated . “texas has made a concerted long-term effort to build a broadly diversified economy that allows job creators from a wide variety of sectors and industries to thrive here,” lucy nashed, a press secretary for perry, told me. she said that “will allow the state economy to weather the inevitable ups and downs of the economic cycle better than less diversified economies.” but, muro noted, “the question is, given what is happening in oil and gas, how far along has that diversification proceeded in texas?”the simplest way to gauge texas’s diversification is to look at the current percentage of g.d.p. from oil-and-gas extraction compared with the level prior to the last oil crash. in 1985, the year before the crash, about fourteen per cent of texas’s g.d.p. derived from oil-and-gas extraction—three percentage points higher than the level in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. that’s not a huge change, but it’s certainly significant. muro and his colleagues at brookings wanted to explore the nature of this diversification further, though, so they compiled a list of fifty “advanced” industries—the kind that invest a great deal in research and development, and that attract highly educated workers from science, technology, engineering, and math fields—and tried to find out where these industries are concentrated geographically. (such industries are important because they tend to grow faster than more established sectors, pay high wages, and have long supply chains, which means their growth ripples into other parts of the economy.)the researchers’ findings were somewhat surprising. texas has a significant presence in five of the fifty advanced industries. that makes it the twelfth most diverse state—less diverse than california, which is involved in fourteen advanced industries, but more so than new york, the third-most-populous state. but three of the five advanced industries present in texas are related to the energy sector—for instance, manufacturing of petroleum and coal products—which means they could be vulnerable to the oil crash, too. “by this measure, texas is not monolithically tied to oil and gas, but it’s highly oriented towards it,” muro told me. “one would have to wonder about the implications of the gas crash.”to be fair, texas is better prepared than it was in 1986—partly because of policy measures by perry and his predecessors. the economy has become more diverse, even if it hasn’t progressed as far as some might hope. plus, the state gets a smaller proportion of its budget revenue from oil and gas taxes than it did before 1986. texas is also more reliant on the sales tax nowadays, which could be helpful if lower gas costs lead people to spend more money elsewhere.california, meanwhile, still has plenty of problems of its own. for all of the wealth silicon valley has produced, even since the recession, its businesses employ remarkably few people—about eight thousand at facebook, for example—and those workers tend to come from elite backgrounds. that’s one reason why, despite the success of facebook and others, california’s unemployment rate is still among the highest in the nation, and why unemployment varies so astonishingly across the state, from about four per cent in silicon valley to twenty-three per cent in imperial county, which borders mexico and arizona. the state’s cost of living also remains high. brown’s inaugural address skimmed over these issues, but newsom, standing in a hallway outside the chambers where the speech took place, was available to comment. it seemed that he was no longer concerned about california’s relative weakness when compared with texas but rather about the inequities within his own state. there are “two californias,” he told the sacramento bee —“a very wealthy coastal economy, in contrast to a struggling inland economy.”vauhini vara, the former business editor of newyorker.com, lives in san francisco and is a business and technology correspondent for the site.
 ending the swiss franc-euro peg created market turmoil and much vitriol among pundits. this column argues the that snb could and should have waited – riding along with the euro’s depreciation until swiss deflation disappeared, but the decision to end the one-sided peg was not a mistake. the peg was always meant as a temporary measure that had to be lifted one day.how should latvia exit its currency peg?last week, the swiss national bank announced it would no longer enforce the price floor that held the chf price of a euro to 1.2 or less. in the minutes following the announcement, markets panicked and the pundits lost their bearings. the move was described as a historical mistake that would impose large costs on the swiss economy.the decision is debatable, but in my view the policy conclusion is more finely balanced than these initial reactions suggest. the key questions are:whether the snb should have abandoned its one-sided peg to the euro;whether this was the right time to do it;whether the central bank should have prepared the markets;whether the accompanying measures were adequate.my answers are simple. the peg was always meant as a temporary measure that had to be lifted one day; the timing might have been wrong; the move inevitably had to come as a surprise to markets; that the alternatives were not obviously better; and that the accompanying measures are puzzling.should the peg be abandoned?when it adopted the peg in september 2011, the snb presented it as a temporary move. the franc had become massively overvalued as it was seen as a haven when fire was raging in the eurozone and we faced the prospect of several years of qe in the us and the uk. as a small open economy, switzerland could not live with such an overvaluation. as a financially integrated country, it was caught in an impossible situation purely because of what was happening elsewhere, see lamla and sturm (2012).yet, for good or bad reasons, switzerland wants to retain full policy autonomy. since september 2011, the franc has moved in a narrow margin 1.20-1.25, often very close to the floor. predictably, the one-sided peg has operated as a rigid peg. for much of this period, such was the credibility of its officially unlimited commitment that the snb did not have to intervene on the foreign-exchange market. all it had to do was keep swiss interest rates aligned on the ecb’s. the snb was waiting for the right time to recover policy autonomy.since the onset of the financial crisis, the exchange rate between the us dollar and the euro has been surprisingly stable, given the shocks and the relative policy differences. it seems that we have now entered a period of differentiation during which the dollar is expected to appreciate sizeably relative to the euro. this will make the position of third currencies ‘uncomfortable’ to say the least. about half of swiss trade is with the eu, which makes the franc-euro exchange rate a strategic matter for its economy. but what about the other half? clearly, the us dollar must matter. in addition, financial flows between the us and eurozone may well follow circuitous routes, including through the swiss franc. the euro peg will no long have the overall stabilising effect that greatly benefitted switzerland over the last three years.retaining the one-sided peg could have meant a likely effective depreciation of the franc. pegging to the dollar, instead, could have led to an effective appreciation. assuming that the franc was about right – in fact it was still somewhat overvalued – a reasonable objective would be to keep the franc in-between, hence suggestions to shift to a basket peg (more on this below). an alternative was to just let it float and thus recover monetary policy autonomy. one can discuss the policy choice, but certainly dubbing it an own goal is not warranted. 1while the predicted swing of the dollar-euro exchange rate, including a likely overshooting, means that the one-sided peg was reaching the end of its usefulness, an alternative timing was attractive.for the past three years, inflation has been negative in switzerland (without much of a fuss) and growth has been positive but unimpressive.following the euro into depreciation for a while would have helped bringing inflation into positive territory and supporting the ongoing recovery.the cost would have been possible large-scale foreign-exchange-market interventions, but there was no economic limit to such action. nor is the accompanying expansion of the central-bank balance sheet inflationary since the newly created francs are not circulating within the country. the snb could and should have waited.until the last day, the snb kept repeating that the exchange-rate floor represented the alpha and the omega of its policy. the decision to abandon it therefore came as a complete surprise, which led to panicky reactions in financial markets. clearly, many investors suffered large losses. unsurprisingly, their reaction was angry. but did the snb have any choice? surely, pre-announcing the end of the one-sided peg would have triggered a momentous speculation, forcing the central bank to absorb a huge amount of reserves on which it would have suffered losses at the time of carrying out its decision. keeping exchange-rate regime-change decisions secret is perfectly justified standard practice.the common view on the markets is that the snb has suffered a large loss of credibility. however, imagine that it would have hinted at its move. abandoning the one-sided peg after massive speculation would have been interpreted as a capitulation to market forces. that would have been a serious credibility loss.once the dust settles, the markets will come to recognise that the snb did it right. central banks are powerful because they can take important decisions, not when they are seen to bow to market pressure. remember the taper tantrum that followed president bernanke’s gentle reminder that qe was not for ever. this pre-announcement was also seen as a loss of credibility. it seems that central banks can never win when their actions cause investor losses.the snb faced a policy dilemma; it would have had to act some point. a number of alternatives were possible.one of them was to adopt a basket peg to steer the franc in between an appreciating dollar and a depreciating euro.this was suggested by ernst baltensberger in the swiss media. the benefit would the assurance that the franc would not overshoot. the cost would have been a continuing loss of policy autonomy and a seemingly technocratic arrangement. a real trade-off with no superior solution.another alternative would have been to bring the policy interest rate deeper into negative territory.how far down? no one knows, but the snb would have been obliged to explore this uncharted territory. as economists, we would have loved to observe this experiment but it is understandable that the snb was not willing to play guinea pig with the swiss economy. in addition, negative interest rates act as a tax on the banking system. given the importance of the financial sector for the swiss economy, it seems reasonable for the snb not to bind itself. little has been made so far of the accompanying measures.this is a bold move. the intention is clearly to reduce speculation that could lead to a strong overvaluation. this may be seen as a wise pre-emptive move against market overreaction. on the other side, it is a commitment that the central bank may find hard to uphold if the implicit tax on banks leads to financial instability.what would the snb do if some banks start failing? raising the interest rate could trigger capital inflows and force the snb to intervene on the foreign-exchange market, precisely what it wanted to avoid. more generally, is it wise to tax banks when the problem is excessive capital inflows? there exist other instruments like a tax on inflows. they are all broadly part of the capital control toolkit. capital controls are seen as financial repression, but so are negative interest rates. at least, capital controls are more likely to be second best than taxes on banks.the decision to end the one-sided peg cannot be described as a mistake. as most decisions, it balances various considerations. in the end, the dominating reason is the one that is untold. the snb is bound to carry out an independent monetary policy, which means a flexible exchange rate. it is also under pressure for the size of its foreign-exchange reserves. in addition, its profits represent a non-negligible resource for the cantons. it is suffering losses on its euro-denominated assets and probably did not want to accumulate more of them. as noted by brunnermeier and james (2015), political considerations must have loomed large.michael j lamla and jan-egbert sturm, “ swiss national bank under attack ”, voxeu, 9 november 2012.  1  citibank, “did the snb score an own goal? francly, yes”, global economic views, citi research, 15 january 2015.
 adam ludwin, co-founder of chain.com, differentiates between anonymity and privacy in financial tools. bitcoin is less private than credit or debit transactions but generally more anonymous. that anonymity has limits, however, and ludwin details techniques that can be employed to match identities to bitcoin transactions.our experts are ready to help you understand digital currencies and their regulatory implications. if you are a policymaker or regulatory staff looking to understand the technology, please get in touch.
 marc andreessen’s thoughtful “tweetstorm” on secular stagnation raises a number of important questions.  we are in agreement that the essence of the secular stagnation issue is not whether technology has stopped advancing; but rather whether there is a mismatch between desired saving and investment opportunities that results in low equilibrium real interest rates, precipitates financial instability, and may inhibit economic growth. here i respond to his specific questions and criticisms regarding the secular stagnation hypothesis:have there ever been periods of sustained growth with stability from levels of output reasonably close to potential? is there any normal to which we can hope to return?for the roughly 30 years after world war ii, the american economy generated consistent growth in living standards with business cycles of relatively low amplitude.  from the early 1980s until the late 1990s, the economy again preformed quite well, leading many economists to speak of “the great moderation.”  so, we have plenty of experience with satisfactory economic performance to set as an aspiration.is the apparent decline in real interest rates something fundamental or just the removal of a risk premium that was present after the high inflation 1970s?no one can be sure, but note that:(i)                 there is a similar downward trend in real short rates, where inflation uncertainty is not a large issue.(ii)               markets – in the form of 30-year indexed bonds – are now predicting that real rates well below 2 percent will prevail for more than a generation.(iii)             however we understand real interest rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s, inflation was clearly under control by the early 1990s, and indexed bond yields have steadily trended down since then – not just in the united states, but in the world at large.(iv)             i think it is quite plausible and consistent with marc’s picture that equilibrium real rates were roughly constant at around 2 percent until the mid-1990s and have trended downward since that time.is growth in the labor force and in productivity really slowing?with respect to the labor force, the facts are pretty clear.  the growth of the adult population will be much slower over the next 25 years than over the last 25 years.  female labor force participation, after trending upward for a long time, is now trending downward.  and rates of work among teenagers and among men with limited skills were trending down before the recession, and they are now trending down more rapidly.  of course the millennials are, as marc points out, a bigger generation than the boomers. but this does not deny the argument that the growth rate of the labor force is declining.there is plenty of room for debate about measurements of productivity.  it is very likely that official statistics take insufficient account of quality improvements and new products.   whether this phenomenon is increasing with the passage of time is hard to ascertain. television, for example, was a massive change in lifestyles during the 1950s. but the evolution of productivity growth is not essential to the argument about whether equilibrium real interest rates have declined.  this decline could have occurred for many other reasons – including increased foreign saving, lower priced capital goods, slower labor force growth, increased demand for safe assets, more burdens on financial intermediation, and lower rates of inflation.what to make of it all?marc writes “while i am a bull on technological progress, it also seems that much that progress is deflationary in nature, so even rapid tech may not show up in gdp or productivity stats even as it =higher real standards of living”from an economist’s point of view, this paragraph is very hard to understand.  real gdp and productivity statistics are calculated after adjusting for price changes – so they are unaffected by inflation or deflation.  it is also not clear how one would distinguish deflationary and inflationary progress.  the price level reflects the value of goods in terms of money, so it is hard to analyze without thinking about monetary and financial conditions.there is a major puzzle regarding how technological changes, which seem to be associated with so much efficiency and certainly with job displacement, do not show up more visibly in productivity statistics.  but i at least cannot understand in what sense this phenomenon can be attributed to technological progress’ deflationary character.marc and i agree that we are headed into a period of soft real interest rates, where there will be more money available than great deals.  this may, as he suggests, not be all bad; as it will make it easier for risky ideas to get funded.the danger which i think is very real is that the zero lower bound on nominal rates will prevent the attainment of full employment as desired investment falls short of desired saving.  a related danger is that the very low interest rates will encourage risk-taking and asset price inflation in ways that will ultimately give rise to financial instability.the important point to recognize is that – as the experience of the us economy in the 1930s demonstrates – even with rapid innovation it is possible for economic performance to be very poor when finances are not successfully managed.  recent good news about the state of the us economy should not blind us to this reality.
 at an it event inkarnataka, india, an attendee works on a computer in front of a poster of a farmer.don’t like your government officials? automate them!when thoreau wrote that the government is best that governs least, he was telling bureaucrats to keep their hands (and taxes) away from his cottage on walden pond. in india, however, when the bharatiya janata party , the main opposition party, says ahead of next month’s presidential elections that its 2025 vision for the country’s capital is “better governance and less government,” these words have a different import. from digitized service-delivery to computerized bureaucracy, india is illustrating how information communication technologies can redefine government by taking bureaucrats out of the picture, while at the same time showing both the promise and pitfalls of the ict4gov movement.in india, the primary motivation for taking the governors out of government is to combat corruption. after an extensive survey in 2011, transparency international reported that more than half of indians paid a bribe within the last year. what’s more, in the south asia region, 37 percent of the lowest income quintile—in india, individuals living on less than $1.50 a day—were extorted. one sure way to help these low-income households hold on to more of their scant resources is to eliminate officials who might be tempted to skim off the top.india has seen a variety of successes in this regard. for instance, in a project known as bhoomi, 20 million land records for farmers in karnataka were digitized. reliable land records are necessary for poor farmers trying to secure credit from banks and fend off legal disputes. once these records were digitized, farmers could circumvent village accounts and directly print out a signed copy at a kiosk. not only were computer-generated records more convenient to access and more accurate, but the prevalence of bribery dropped dramatically : while 66 percent of users of the manual system reported paying a bribe, only 3 percent of the digitized system did. furthermore, while the weighted average of bribes under the manual system was more than $2.75, it was just about 6 cents after digitization.along similar lines, a decade ago, a wave of computerization was initiated to reform india’s stamps and registration offices—which are known for their corruption both because they deal in high-value transactions and the opacity of the century-old rules that govern their operation. for instance, reforms in maharashtra included software to calculate and publish property valuations and clearer information boards in each office. again, the results were compelling: the number of people in maharashtra who had to seek “help” to register their documents was less than half that of neighboring karnataka. and while 77.5 percent of karnatakans felt that “people had to pay bribes to register their documents,” only 8 percent in maharashtra felt that way.but there have also been some failures. ambitious projects to computerize inter-state check-posts—which collect taxes from vehicles that cross state lines based on their permissible weight loads—in gujarat and the registration department in andhra pradesh failed to produce results because they were resisted by the politicians in power who had the most to lose from their success. recent research from the university of pennsylvania shows that those states with the highest levels of petty corruption are least likely to computerize service delivery processes.the bjp says that it hopes to use “it-enabled governance” to curb corruption by at least 50 percent by 2025. although india has had many successes with this approach, it also illustrates that the ultimate  fate of ict4gov initiatives lies in the same human hands that govern the nation.vishnu sridharan is a program associate with the new america foundation's global assets project.anjana ravi is a program associate with the new america foundation's global assets project.
 walker and company specializes in products tailored for blacks and other minority consumers in the u.s.
 i'm a fellow at the adam smith institute in london, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. an odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe i am. i have written for the times, daily telegraph, express, independent, city am, wall street journal, philadelphia inquirer and online for the asi, iea, social affairs unit, spectator, the guardian, the register and techcentralstation. i've also ghosted pieces for several uk politicians in many of the uk papers, including the daily sport.the author is a forbes contributor. the opinions expressed are those of the writer.
 over the past decade, smartphones have radically changed many aspects of our everyday lives, from banking to shopping to entertainment. medicine is next. with innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. and the end result will be that you, the patient, are about to take center stage for the first time.with the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients. digital avatars won’t replace physicians: you will still be seeing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically altered. (i consult for several companies on many of the issues discussed here.)all of this raises serious issues about hacking and personal privacy that haven’t yet been addressed—and the accuracy of all of these tools needs to be tested. people are also right to worry that the patient-doctor relationship could be eroded, diminishing the human touch in medicine. but the transformation is already under way.let’s say you have a rash that you need examined. today, you can snap a picture of it with your smartphone and download an app to process the image. within minutes, a dedicated computer algorithm can text you your diagnosis. that message could include next steps, such as recommending a topical ointment or a visit to a dermatologist for further assessment.smartphones already can be used to take blood-pressure readings or even do an electrocardiogram. ecg apps have been approved by the u.s. food and drug administration for consumers and validated in many clinical studies. the apps’ data are immediately analyzed, graphed, displayed on-screen updated with new measurements, stored and (at an individual’s discretion) shared. i thought i’d seen it all in my decadeslong practice as a cardiologist, but recently, for the first time, i had an ecg emailed to me by a patient, with the subject line, “i’m in atrial fib, now what do i do?” i immediately knew that the world had changed. the patient’s phone hadn’t just recorded the data; it had interpreted it.now, at any time of day or night, you can demand and get a secure video consultation with a doctor via smartphone at the same cost (about $30-$40) as the typical copay charge through employer health plans. this may seem exotic now, but several large consulting firms—including deloitte and pricewaterhousecoopers—have forecast that virtual physician visits (replacing physical office visits) will soon become the norm. deloitte says that as many as one in six doctor visits were already virtual in 2014. in many u.s. cities, you can even use a mobile app to request a doctor’s house call during which a physician would not only provide a consultation but could even perform procedures, such as suturing a wound, which would have usually required an expensive emergency room visit.with innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. agence france-presse/getty imagesmany surveys show that most consumers want to get information about the actual costs of their care from their doctors but can’t get it. going forward, what things cost will no longer be the great unmentionable hanging over medicine: cost-transparency apps for your smartphone already exist and are quickly being expanded to cover lab tests, scans, procedures, hospitals and doctor visits.even bigger changes are in the works. using wearable wireless sensors, you can use your smartphone to generate your own medical data, including measuring your blood-oxygen and glucose levels, blood pressure and heart rhythm. and if you’re worried that your child may have an ear infection, a smartphone attachment will let you perform an easy eardrum exam that can rapidly diagnose the problem without a trip to the pediatrician.these innovations are just the start. in the next year or two (depending on approval by the fda), many americans will probably start sporting wristwatches that continuously and passively capture their blood pressure and vital signs with every heartbeat, without even having to press a start button.such wristwatch sensors could do enormous good. by having the equivalent of intensive care unit monitoring on your wrist, hospital rooms—those $4,500-a-night risk zones for serious infections and other complications—can be replaced by our bedrooms. as a result, except for icus, operating rooms and emergency rooms, hospitals of the future are likely to be roomless data surveillance centers for remote patient monitoring.other wearable sensor tools now being developed include necklaces that can monitor your heart function and check the amount of fluid in your lungs, contact lenses that can track your glucose levels or your eye pressure (to help manage glaucoma), and head bands that can capture your brain waves. someday, socks and shoes might analyze the human gait to, for instance, tell a parkinson’s patient whether his or her medications are working or tell a caregiver whether an elderly family member is unsteady and at risk of falling.we know that our health is highly influenced by our environment, which has been difficult to quantify. but smartphone sensors under development will be able to monitor your exposure to radiation, air pollution or pesticides in foods. and your medications could soon be digitized to provide you with reminders to ensure that you’ve taken them as prescribed.it isn’t just hospitals’ rooms that are on their way out; so are their labs. smartphone attachments will soon enable you to perform an array of routine lab tests via your phone. blood electrolytes; liver, kidney and thyroid function; analysis of breath, sweat and urine—all can be checked with small fluid samples in little labs that plug directly into smartphones. and you can do your own routine labs at a fraction of the current cost.smartphone selfies are all the rage, but smartphone physical exams are just taking off. the ability to make a definitive diy diagnosis of an ear infection with a phone is just the first step. apps are now being developed to handle all aspects of the eye, the throat and oral cavity, and the lungs and heart. meanwhile, nearly all sophisticated medical imaging devices are being miniaturized: hand-held ultrasound devices are already available, and some medical schools have begun issuing them in the place of the old-school stethoscope. hand-held mri (magnetic resonance imaging) machines aren’t far behind, and engineers at ucla have come up with a smartphone-sized device that can generate x-rays. it won’t be long before you can take a smartphone x-ray selfie if you’re worried that you might have broken a bone.in the next decade, you—under select circumstances, involving high risk or major medical need—will be able to monitor almost every organ system, no matter how difficult to access, as firms start to produce nanosensors to be embedded in your bloodstream. these microscopic sensors within your body can float in blood or be fixed to a microstent in a tiny blood vessel. you’ll then be able to keep your blood under constant surveillance for the first appearance of cancer, autoimmune attacks on vital tissues or the tiny cracks in artery walls that can lead to heart attacks or strokes.with all these new tools, it is no surprise that we’re talking about the possibility of “doctorless” medicine. let’s not get too carried away. you’ll still be seeing doctors—but you’ll have a lot more control.that change is badly overdue. medicine has long been dominated by a priestly class, beginning with imhotep, the first physician (and a priest), in egypt some 4,600 years ago. things had hardly changed two millennia later when hippocrates, widely considered the father of medicine, held that most medical information should be concealed from patients.hippocrates’s paternalistic sentiments survive today in our culture’s pervasive sense that “doctor knows best.” physicians obviously tend to think so, but that sentiment is also powerfully reinforced by the top-down way medical information flows (or clogs). the vast majority of doctors are unwilling to email patients or share their office notes. getting a copy of a report after lab tests or medical scans seems impossible—and don’t even think about getting the results or images themselves. that is all about to change.we’re often told that the u.s. faces a big looming shortage of physicians. the expansion of diy medical capabilities certainly challenges that notion: we may end up not having a physician shortage at all.but one discipline already has an unequivocal dearth of health-care professionals: mental health, which is also the leading cause of disability in the u.s. and many other developed countries. smartphones can be particularly helpful here. new apps aim to quantify your state of mind by a composite of real-time data: tone and inflection of voice, facial expression, breathing pattern, heart rate, galvanic skin response, blood pressure, even the frequency and content of your emails and texts.we may soon take an even bigger step forward, thanks to the unexpected advantages of virtual psychiatrists. recent studies, including a paper by gale lucas and others published last year in the journal of computers in human behavior, have demonstrated that people are more willing to disclose their inner thoughts to a computer avatar or “virtual human” than a real one. with machines working to quantify moods and even offering virtual counseling to help make up for our current profound shortage of mental health professionals, we can glimpse a new approach to improving mental health.
 facebook founder mark zuckerberg has vowed to read a book every two weeks this year and has asked people around the world to join him. the first book selected is 'the end of power' by moises naim, who says he was surprised and thrilled by his selection.most stock quote data provided by bats. market indices are shown in real time, except for the djia, which is delayed by two minutes. all times are et. disclaimer .chicago mercantile association: certain market data is the property of chicago mercantile exchange inc. and its licensors. all rights reserved.dow jones: the dow jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by dji opco, a subsidiary of s&p dow jones indices llc and have been licensed for use to s&p opco, llc and cnn. standard & poor's and s&p are registered trademarks of standard & poor’s financial services llc and dow jones is a registered trademark of dow jones trademark holdings llc. all content of the dow jones branded indices © s&p dow jones indices llc 2015 and/or its affiliates.© 2015 cable news network. a time warner company. all rights reserved. terms under which this service is provided to you. privacy policy .
 new york – for several years, and often several times a month, the nobel laureate economist and new york times columnist and blogger paul krugman has delivered one main message to his loyal readers: deficit-cutting “austerians” (as he calls advocates of fiscal austerity) are deluded. fiscal retrenchment amid weak private demand would lead to chronically high unemployment. indeed, deficit cuts would court a reprise of 1937, when franklin d. roosevelt prematurely reduced the new deal stimulus and thereby threw the united states back into recession.well, congress and the white house did indeed play the austerian card from mid-2011 onward. the federal budget deficit has declined from 8.4% of gdp in 2011 to a predicted 2.9% of gdp for all of 2014. and, according to the international monetary fund, the structural deficit (sometimes called the “full-employment deficit”), a measure of fiscal stimulus, has fallen from 7.8% of potential gdp to 4% of potential gdp from 2011 to 2014.krugman has vigorously protested that deficit reduction has prolonged and even intensified what he repeatedly calls a “depression” (or sometimes a “low-grade depression” ). only fools like the united kingdom’s leaders (who reminded him of the three stooges) could believe otherwise.yet, rather than a new recession, or an ongoing depression, the us unemployment rate has fallen from 8.6% in november 2011 to 5.8% in november 2014. real economic growth in 2011 stood at 1.6%, and the imf expects it to be 2.2% for 2014 as a whole. gdp in the third quarter of 2014 grew at a vigorous 5% annual rate, suggesting that aggregate growth for all of 2015 will be above 3%.so much for krugman’s predictions. not one of his new york times commentaries in the first half of 2013, when “austerian” deficit cutting was taking effect, forecast a major reduction in unemployment or that economic growth would recover to brisk rates. on the contrary, “the disastrous turn toward austerity has destroyed millions of jobs and ruined many lives,” he argued , with the us congress exposing americans to “the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts.” as a result, “full recovery still looks a very long way off,” he warned. “and i’m beginning to worry that it may never happen.”i raise all of this because krugman took a victory lap in his end-of-2014 column on “the obama recovery.” the recovery, according to krugman, has come not despite the austerity he railed against for years, but because we “seem to have stopped tightening the screws: public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. and the economy is doing much better as a result.”that is an incredible claim. the budget deficit has been brought down sharply, and unemployment has declined. yet krugman now says that everything has turned out just as he predicted.in fact, krugman has been conflating two distinct ideas as if both were components of “progressive” thinking. on one hand, he has been the “conscience of a liberal,” rightly focusing on how government can combat poverty, poor health, environmental degradation, rising inequality, and other social ills. i admire that side of krugman’s writing, and, as i wrote in my book the price of civilization , i agree with him.on the other hand, krugman has inexplicably taken up the mantle of crude aggregate-demand management, making it seem that favoring large budget deficits in recent years is also part of progressive economics. (krugman’s position is sometimes called keynesianism, but john maynard keynes knew much better than krugman that we should not depend on mechanistic “demand multipliers” to set the unemployment rate.) deficits were not increased enough in 2009 to escape from high unemployment, he insisted, and were falling dangerously fast after 2010.obviously, recent trends – a significant decline in the unemployment rate and a reasonably high and accelerating rate of economic growth – cast doubt on krugman’s macroeconomic diagnosis (though not on his progressive politics). and the same trends have been apparent in the united kingdom, where prime minister david cameron’s government has cut the structural budget deficit from 8.4% of potential gdp in 2010 to 4.1% in 2014, while the unemployment rate has fallen from 7.9% when cameron took office to 6%, according to the most recent data for the fall of 2014.to be clear, i believe that we do need more government spending as a share of gdp – for education, infrastructure, low-carbon energy, research and development, and family benefits for low-income families. but we should pay for this through higher taxes on high incomes and high net worth, a carbon tax, and future tolls collected on new infrastructure. we need the liberal conscience, but without the chronic budget deficits.there is nothing progressive about large budget deficits and a rising debt-to-gdp ratio. after all, large deficits have no reliable effect on reducing unemployment, and deficit reduction can be consistent with falling unemployment.krugman is a great economic theorist – and a great polemicist. but he should replace his polemical hat with his analytical one and reflect more deeply on recent experience: deficit-cutting accompanied by recovery, job creation, and lower unemployment. this should be an occasion for him to rethink his long-standing macroeconomic mantra, rather than claiming vindication for ideas that recent trends seem to contradict.
 i always felt that the process of innovation is analogous to climbing a mountain that’s never been climbed before. reaching the summit of an unexplored mountain can be extremely rewarding (as can be a start-up ipo). but to me, even more exciting is the climb itself. it is the process of finding a path, negotiating obstacles, and learning from mistakes.there are several things that separate successful explorers from unsuccessful ones. so here are my seven things of what to do.first, you need to compose a team you can trust. your team needs to be energized, open-minded, and willing to take risks. perfectionists don’t take risks; many so-called experts are unwilling to learn. they will all slow you down. choose a team of individuals who are comfortable with risk, are eager to change the world and can’t wait to take the first step. and equally importantly, you need trust. at some point, your life will depend on your teammates and their lives will depend on yours. with mistrust in the team, you won’t get far.don't climb without a clear understanding of which peak to climb. this might sound trivial, but i am stunned how often this rule is violated in technology circles. if half your team wants to climb one peak, and the other half a different peak, then you will fail. no matter how hard you work. there has to be absolute agreement on the ultimate goal, and every member of your team has to aim for the same goal. if people on your team don't agree, help them find happiness outside your team. it may be painful to ask a trusted member to step back, but if done right she will come back and thank you for it. and remember, the taller a peak you pick, the higher you will climb.then really importantly: don't plan your route to the top. simply don’t plan! your mountain has never been climbed before. you just can't know the path. or, in corporate land, you can’t know the budget and you can’t predict when your business will succeed. arguing these things will only drag you down. instead, just aim, and take the first step. every mountain is climbed step after step after step, so you might as well start taking steps. be open minded, and ready to learn. what you will find is that the process of climbing is more gratifying than the process of arguing how to climb.on your way up, you will inevitably make poor choices. you will find yourself on false summits, or face non-traversable terrain. so you will have to retreat. in start-up speak, this is called a "pivot" - but it really is a retreat, since you have to undo past work before you can continue climbing. while descending may feel painful, you are actually getting closer to the summit. learning something new constitutes progress. get into the habit of celebrating failures and pivots (but still try to avoid them). at google[x] we threw celebratory parties when projects failed!you will also encounter bad weather. at times, fog, rain, or snow will obscure the view of the summit. if that freaks you out, you will fail. never switch to lesser mountains just because these are the only ones you can see. when the fog lifts, you will regret your decision. instead, trust that the peak hasn't gone away, and trust your intuition while your senses might be clouded. at udacity, it was always easy to pick smaller projects and gain success like creating online education for a district or for a few companies. but, the goal of democratizing education for everyone is a far bigger mountain that takes a lot more dedication and a lot more years. yet it is the only mountain that truly matters to me and my team.your team will fatigue. the higher you get, the less willing you might be to take risks. if you are running a company, the number of meetings will increase, and progress will grind to a halt. i promise you this problem affects every team. i have seen many promising start-up companies fail because of internal self-obstruction, or self-destruction. teams experiencing a slow-down in progress often hire more people, just to find more people voicing more opinions in ever-more-busy meeting rooms won't make you go faster. it is important that you spot even the earliest signs of this problem and combat them vigorously. aspiration must trump fear, and your team must be willing to risk everything, every day of the journey. shrink your team. streamline decision making. it sounds counter-intuitive, but it works.finally, you will suffer if you don't enjoy the very process of mountaineering. climbers often spend weeks to reach a summit, but then stay there for just a few minutes. if reaching the summit is your only joy, then you are in for a prolonged period of suffering. or put differently, if you are only into start-ups to get rich, you will face a lot of pain – more than money can make up for. mountain climbing is not for everyone. but if you derive your pleasure from the little things, the failures, the learnings, and your daily progress, then you are in for a fun ride.
 by alexandra jaffe and deirdre walsh, cnnhouse republican leadership is standing by rep. steve scalise, the no. 3-ranking house republican, in the wake of a firestorm of criticism surrounding his 2002 speech to a white supremacist group.scalise's position as house majority whip has been thrown into doubt by the revelation, and the congressman had been calling members to gauge the level of support he had from his party, according to a senior house republican source.but house speaker john boehner, in a statement issued tuesday afternoon, said scalise has his "full confidence" as whip."more than a decade ago, representative scalise made an error in judgment, and he was right to acknowledge it was wrong and inappropriate.  like many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, i know steve to be a man of high integrity and good character.  he has my full confidence as our whip, and he will continue to do great and important work for all americans," he said.his message came shortly before a similar message of support from house majority leader kevin mccarthy.the controversy surrounding scalise's address to a group founded by former grand wizard of the ku klux klan david duke had become a major distraction for boehner and his leadership team since the story drew national attention on monday.in a statement issued tuesday, scalise said he spoke to the group while he was barnstorming the district to build support for a piece of legislation — and that speaking to them was a "mistake i regret.""one of the many groups that i spoke to regarding this critical legislation was a group whose views i wholeheartedly condemn. it was a mistake i regret, and i emphatically oppose the divisive racial and religious views groups like these hold," he said in the statement."i am very disappointed that anyone would try to infer otherwise for political gain," he added, and decried the group's "hateful bigotry."the statement did not address how much scalise knew about the group at the time of the speech.duke himself has said he doesn't know scalise. duke's former campaign manager, who said he organized the event, also said the congressman likely wasn't aware of the controversial history of his group.however, a roll call report from 1999 suggests scalise knew duke well, and was critical of his beliefs. at that time, both were considered potential contenders in a house special election, and scalise panned him in comments to the paper."the novelty of david duke has worn off," scalise said. "the voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. duke has proven that he can't get elected, and that's the first and most important thing."in a coordinated move tuesday,  boehner and mccarthy issued statements supporting scalise within minutes of scalise's new statement. there was frustration, according to the aides, that scalise's initial statement, in which he blamed sloppy staff work for his appearance before the group in 2002, made it appear he wasn't taking full responsibility for the incident and moving to get it passed him.it is unclear at this point how much blowback scalise will get from rank-and-file republicans, and that might now be fully visible until lawmakers return to work next week after digesting the unfolding situation. while the only public expressions from republicans to this point have been supportive, the aides predicted scalise still needs to work hard in the days ahead to maintain the confidence of his colleagues.critics of scalise have been bipartisan, but so have his defenders. he's received strong support from louisiana politicians, with african-american rep. cedric richmond — the state's only democratic house member — defending him from charges of racism."i don't think steve scalise has a racist bone in his body," richmond told the new orleans times-picayune . "steve and i have worked on issues that benefit poor people, black people, white people, jewish people. i know his character."but national democrats have pounced on the episode, and as boehner remained silent on the issue for most of tuesday, ramped pressure on house republican leadership to weigh inhouse minority leader nancy pelosi's spokesman, drew hammill, said the news of scalise's speech is "deeply troubling" for a gop leader, but also declared that "actions [of the house gop caucus] speak louder than whatever" scalise said during the forum."just this year, house republicans have refused to restore the voting rights act or pass comprehensive immigration reform, and leading republican members are now actively supporting in the federal courts efforts by another known extremist group, the american center for law and justice, which is seeking to overturn the president's immigration executive actions," he said in a statement.the democratic congressional campaign committee issued a scathing statement charging scalise "chose to cheerlead for a group of kkk members and neo-nazis at a white supremacist rally" and slamming house leadership for their silence on the development."while david duke defends scalise, speaker boehner and leader [kevin] mccarthy are refusing to condemn scalise's choice of allies," said democratic congressional campaign committee national press secretary josh schwerin.schwerin said the incident made it "clear their leadership has a history of embracing anti-semitic, racist hate groups."according to an agenda for the event and notes attendees posted afterward, scalise appeared at the national/international euro workshop on civil rights, a white nationalist organization founded by david duke, a former grand wizard of the ku klux klan.the appearance was first reported on sunday on cenlamar.com, a louisiana politics blog run by lamar white jr.but scalise vehemently disavowed the group's beliefs in his interview with the times-picayune, and said he "spoke to any group that called" — comparing it, as an example, to the league of women voters, a nonpartisan group known for helping to register new voters."when you look at the kind of things they stand for, i detest these kinds of views. as a catholic, i think some of the things they profess target people like me. at lot of their views run contradictory to the way i run my life," scalise added.scalise also suggested the appearance was in part due to staffing issues."i had one person that was working for me. when someone called and asked me to speak, i would go. i was, in no way, affiliated with that group or the other groups i was talking to."cnn has learned that the staffer at the time was cameron henry, who currently holds scalise's former state house seat. henry rushed cnn off the phone monday night and declined to discuss the situation, but did not deny his work for the congressman.henry's brother, charles henry, is scalise's current chief of staff. neither responded to requests for comment on tuesday.the controversy comes just days before republicans take full control of congress with house majority whip scalise poised to play a key role in shepherding through conservatives' legislative priorities.but even conservatives have expressed frustration with scalise, who they believe hasn't stood strong on their priorities — pointing most recently to his vote for the government funding measure that drew heavy opposition from conservatives because it didn't address president obama's immigration executive action.some, however, expressed support for him tuesday. rob maness, the former louisiana senate candidate backed by the tea party, has been named as a potential primary challenger to scalise but backed him in a statement to cnn."as congressman scalise has already conceded - attending this event was a mistake.  i think we are all currently taking him at his word that this was an isolated incident that happened some 12 years ago," maness said.he added that if that's true, "this is clearly an orchestrated attack designed to distract" from the real issues, including "fighting back against president obama's executive amnesty, correcting a weak and feckless foreign policy and stopping the massive expansion of government growth and spending."more broadly, however, the establishment silence has infuriated conservatives still smarting over their loss in the mississippi senate race, when their chosen candidate, state sen. chris mcdaniel, was narrowly defeated by sen. thad cochran after establishment republicans lodged racially-charged attacks against him.mcdaniel came under heavy fire from establishment republicans for being billed as a headliner for a rally alongside a white nationalist, though he never ultimately attended the rally. in an email to cnn, mcdaniel said that "of course there is a double standard for the gop establishment."he noted that former mississippi gov. haley barbour "has a long history of despicable comments, some of them overtly racist," pointing to a politico article outlining some of the more salacious."and yet, he receives a free pass from establishment politicians because of his perceived influence.  all the while, others are forever tarnished for less serious deeds," mcdaniel said.he added: "the establishment wings of both parties are more hypocritical than fair, seeking to crush anyone -- friend and foe alike -- who would threaten their hold on power."politicians in scalise's home state of louisiana rallied to his defense on monday, however, saying they don't believe he agrees with the white supremacist group's ideology."i know congressman scalise to be a good man who is fair-minded and kindhearted. i'm confident he absolutely rejects racism in all its forms," louisiana gov. bobby jindal said in a statement.but scalise's alleged appearance at the event drew a harsh rebuke from erick erickson , the conservative redstate.com blogger and former louisiana resident who asked of the congressman: "how do you not know? how do you not investigate?""how the hell does somebody show up at a david duke organized event in 2002 and claim ignorance?" erickson wrote in a post monday.he said trent lott -- the former senate majority leader who was driven from his post after praising strom thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign -- lost his gig "for something less than this" in 2001.and he pointed to republicans who hit mississippi senate candidate chris mcdaniel in 2014 for attending events hosted by the sons of confederate veterans and for making plans to attend a rally where he was billed along with a white nationalist.
 by michael nielsen on december 6, 2013many thousands of articles have been written purporting to explain bitcoin, the online, peer-to-peer currency.  most of those articles give a hand-wavy account of the underlying cryptographic protocol, omitting many details.  even those articles which delve deeper often gloss over crucial points.  my aim in this post is to explain the major ideas behind the bitcoin protocol in a clear, easily comprehensible way.  we’ll start from first principles, build up to a broad theoretical understanding of how the protocol works, and then dig down into the nitty-gritty, examining the raw data in a bitcoin transaction.understanding the protocol in this detailed way is hard work.  it is tempting instead to take bitcoin as given, and to engage in speculation about how to get rich with bitcoin, whether bitcoin is a bubble, whether bitcoin might one day mean the end of taxation, and so on.  that’s fun, but severely limits your understanding. understanding the details of the bitcoin protocol opens up otherwise inaccessible vistas.  in particular, it’s the basis for understanding bitcoin’s built-in scripting language, which makes it possible to use bitcoin to create new types of financial instruments, such as smart contracts . new financial instruments can, in turn, be used to create new markets and to enable new forms of collective human behaviour.  talk about fun!i’ll describe bitcoin scripting and concepts such as smart contracts in future posts. this post concentrates on explaining the nuts-and-bolts of the bitcoin protocol.  to understand the post, you need to be comfortable with public key   cryptography , and with the closely related idea of digital   signatures .  i’ll also assume you’re familiar with cryptographic   hashing .  none of this is especially difficult.  the basic ideas can be taught in freshman university mathematics or computer science classes.  the ideas are beautiful, so if you’re not familiar with them, i recommend taking a few hours to get familiar.it may seem surprising that bitcoin’s basis is cryptography.  isn’t bitcoin a currency, not a way of sending secret messages?  in fact, the problems bitcoin needs to solve are largely about securing transactions — making sure people can’t steal from one another, or impersonate one another, and so on.  in the world of atoms we achieve security with devices such as locks, safes, signatures, and bank vaults.  in the world of bits we achieve this kind of security with cryptography.  and that’s why bitcoin is at heart a cryptographic protocol.my strategy in the post is to build bitcoin up in stages.  i’ll begin by explaining a very simple digital currency, based on ideas that are almost obvious.  we’ll call that currency infocoin, to distinguish it from bitcoin.  of course, our first version of infocoin will have many deficiencies, and so we’ll go through several iterations of infocoin, with each iteration introducing just one or two simple new ideas. after several such iterations, we’ll arrive at the full bitcoin protocol.  we will have reinvented bitcoin!this strategy is slower than if i explained the entire bitcoin protocol in one shot.  but while you can understand the mechanics of bitcoin through such a one-shot explanation, it would be difficult to understand why bitcoin is designed the way it is.  the advantage of the slower iterative explanation is that it gives us a much sharper understanding of each element of bitcoin.finally, i should mention that i’m a relative newcomer to bitcoin. i’ve been following it loosely since 2011 (and cryptocurrencies since the late 1990s), but only got seriously into the details of the bitcoin protocol earlier this year.  so i’d certainly appreciate corrections of any misapprehensions on my part.  also in the post i’ve included a number of “problems for the author” – notes to myself about questions that came up during the writing.  you may find these interesting, but you can also skip them entirely without losing track of the main text.so how can we design a digital currency?on the face of it, a digital currency sounds impossible.  suppose some person – let’s call her alice – has some digital money which she wants to spend.  if alice can use a string of bits as money, how can we prevent her from using the same bit string over and over, thus minting an infinite supply of money?  or, if we can somehow solve that problem, how can we prevent someone else forging such a string of bits, and using that to steal from alice?these are just two of the many problems that must be overcome in order to use information as money.as a first version of infocoin, let’s find a way that alice can use a string of bits as a (very primitive and incomplete) form of money, in a way that gives her at least some protection against forgery. suppose alice wants to give another person, bob, an infocoin.  to do this, alice writes down the message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin”.  she then digitally signs the message using a private cryptographic key, and announces the signed string of bits to the entire world.(by the way, i’m using capitalized “infocoin” to refer to the protocol and general concept, and lowercase “infocoin” to refer to specific denominations of the currency.  a similar useage is common, though not universal, in the bitcoin world.)this isn’t terribly impressive as a prototype digital currency!  but it does have some virtues.  anyone in the world (including bob) can use alice’s public key to verify that alice really was the person who signed the message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin”.  no-one else could have created that bit string, and so alice can’t turn around and say “no, i didn’t mean to give bob an infocoin”.  so the protocol establishes that alice truly intends to give bob one infocoin.  the same fact – no-one else could compose such a signed message – also gives alice some limited protection from forgery.  of course, after alice has published her message it’s possible for other people to duplicate the message, so in that sense forgery is possible.  but it’s not possible from scratch.  these two properties – establishment of intent on alice’s part, and the limited protection from forgery – are genuinely notable features of this protocol.i haven’t (quite) said exactly what digital money is in this protocol.  to make this explicit: it’s just the message itself, i.e., the string of bits representing the digitally signed message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin”.  later protocols will be similar, in that all our forms of digital money will be just more and more elaborate messages [1].a problem with the first version of infocoin is that alice could keep sending bob the same signed message over and over.  suppose bob receives ten copies of the signed message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin”.  does that mean alice sent bob ten different infocoins?  was her message accidentally duplicated?  perhaps she was trying to trick bob into believing that she had given him ten different infocoins, when the message only proves to the world that she intends to transfer one infocoin.what we’d like is a way of making infocoins unique.  they need a label or serial number.  alice would sign the message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 8740348″.  then, later, alice could sign the message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 8770431″, and bob (and everyone else) would know that a different infocoin was being transferred.to make this scheme work we need a trusted source of serial numbers for the infocoins.  one way to create such a source is to introduce a bank.  this bank would provide serial numbers for infocoins, keep track of who has which infocoins, and verify that transactions really are legitimate,in more detail, let’s suppose alice goes into the bank, and says “i want to withdraw one infocoin from my account”.  the bank reduces her account balance by one infocoin, and assigns her a new, never-before used serial number, let’s say 1234567.  then, when alice wants to transfer her infocoin to bob, she signs the message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 1234567″.  but bob doesn’t just accept the infocoin.  instead, he contacts the bank, and verifies that: (a) the infocoin with that serial number belongs to alice; and (b) alice hasn’t already spent the infocoin.  if both those things are true, then bob tells the bank he wants to accept the infocoin, and the bank updates their records to show that the infocoin with that serial number is now in bob’s possession, and no longer belongs to alice.this last solution looks pretty promising.  however, it turns out that we can do something much more ambitious.  we can eliminate the bank entirely from the protocol.  this changes the nature of the currency considerably.  it means that there is no longer any single organization in charge of the currency.  and when you think about the enormous power a central bank has – control over the money supply – that’s a pretty huge change.the idea is to make it so everyone (collectively) is the bank. in particular, we’ll assume that everyone using infocoin keeps a complete record of which infocoins belong to which person.  you can think of this as a shared public ledger showing all infocoin transactions.  we’ll call this ledger the block chain, since that’s what the complete record will be called in bitcoin, once we get to it.now, suppose alice wants to transfer an infocoin to bob.  she signs the message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 1234567″, and gives the signed message to bob.  bob can use his copy of the block chain to check that, indeed, the infocoin is alice’s to give.  if that checks out then he broadcasts both alice’s message and his acceptance of the transaction to the entire network, and everyone updates their copy of the block chain.we still have the “where do serial number come from” problem, but that turns out to be pretty easy to solve, and so i will defer it to later, in the discussion of bitcoin.  a more challenging problem is that this protocol allows alice to cheat by double spending her infocoin.  she sends the signed message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 1234567″ to bob, and the message”i, alice, am giving charlie one infocoin, with [the same] serial number 1234567″ to charlie.  both bob and charlie use their copy of the block chain to verify that the infocoin is alice’s to spend.  provided they do this verification at nearly the same time (before they’ve had a chance to hear from one another), both will find that, yes, the block chain shows the coin belongs to alice.  and so they will both accept the transaction, and also broadcast their acceptance of the transaction.  now there’s a problem.  how should other people update their block chains?  there may be no easy way to achieve a consistent shared ledger of transactions.  and even if everyone can agree on a consistent way to update their block chains, there is still the problem that either bob or charlie will be cheated.at first glance double spending seems difficult for alice to pull off. after all, if alice sends the message first to bob, then bob can verify the message, and tell everyone else in the network (including charlie) to update their block chain.  once that has happened, charlie would no longer be fooled by alice. so there is most likely only a brief period of time in which alice can double spend.  however, it’s obviously undesirable to have any such a period of time.  worse, there are techniques alice could use to make that period longer.  she could, for example, use network traffic analysis to find times when bob and charlie are likely to have a lot of latency in communication.  or perhaps she could do something to deliberately disrupt their communications.  if she can slow communication even a little that makes her task of double spending much easier.how can we address the problem of double spending?  the obvious solution is that when alice sends bob an infocoin, bob shouldn’t try to verify the transaction alone.  rather, he should broadcast the possible transaction to the entire network of infocoin users, and ask them to help determine whether the transaction is legitimate.  if they collectively decide that the transaction is okay, then bob can accept the infocoin, and everyone will update their block chain.  this type of protocol can help prevent double spending, since if alice tries to spend her infocoin with both bob and charlie, other people on the network will notice, and network users will tell both bob and charlie that there is a problem with the transaction, and the transaction shouldn’t go through.in more detail, let’s suppose alice wants to give bob an infocoin.  as before, she signs the message “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 1234567″, and gives the signed message to bob. also as before, bob does a sanity check, using his copy of the block chain to check that, indeed, the coin currently belongs to alice.  but at that point the protocol is modified.  bob doesn’t just go ahead and accept the transaction.  instead, he broadcasts alice’s message to the entire network.  other members of the network check to see whether alice owns that infocoin.  if so, they broadcast the message “yes, alice owns infocoin 1234567, it can now be transferred to bob.” once enough people have broadcast that message, everyone updates their block chain to show that infocoin 1234567 now belongs to bob, and the transaction is complete.this protocol has many imprecise elements at present.  for instance, what does it mean to say “once enough people have broadcast that message”?  what exactly does “enough” mean here?  it can’t mean everyone in the network, since we don’t a priori know who is on the infocoin network.  for the same reason, it can’t mean some fixed fraction of users in the network.  we won’t try to make these ideas precise right now.  instead, in the next section i’ll point out a serious problem with the approach as described.  fixing that problem will at the same time have the pleasant side effect of making the ideas above much more precise.suppose alice wants to double spend in the network-based protocol i just described.  she could do this by taking over the infocoin network.  let’s suppose she uses an automated system to set up a large number of separate identities, let’s say a billion, on the infocoin network.  as before, she tries to double spend the same infocoin with both bob and charlie.  but when bob and charlie ask the network to validate their respective transactions, alice’s sock puppet identities swamp the network, announcing to bob that they’ve validated his transaction, and to charlie that they’ve validated his transaction, possibly fooling one or both into accepting the transaction.there’s a clever way of avoiding this problem, using an idea known as proof-of-work.  the idea is counterintuitive and involves a combination of two ideas: (1) to (artificially) make it computationally costly for network users to validate transactions; and (2) to reward them for trying to help validate transactions.  the reward is used so that people on the network will try to help validate transactions, even though that’s now been made a computationally costly process.  the benefit of making it costly to validate transactions is that validation can no longer be influenced by the number of network identities someone controls, but only by the total computational power they can bring to bear on validation.  as we’ll see, with some clever design we can make it so a cheater would need enormous computational resources to cheat, making it impractical.that’s the gist of proof-of-work.  but to really understand proof-of-work, we need to go through the details.suppose alice broadcasts to the network the news that “i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 1234567″.as other people on the network hear that message, each adds it to a queue of pending transactions that they’ve been told about, but which haven’t yet been approved by the network.  for instance, another network user named david might have the following queue of pending transactions:i, tom, am giving sue one infocoin, with serial number 1201174.i, sydney, am giving cynthia one infocoin, with serial number 1295618.i, alice, am giving bob one infocoin, with serial number 1234567.david checks his copy of the block chain, and can see that each transaction is valid.  he would like to help out by broadcasting news of that validity to the entire network.however, before doing that, as part of the validation protocol david is required to solve a hard computational puzzle – the proof-of-work.  without the solution to that puzzle, the rest of the network won’t accept his validation of the transaction.what puzzle does david need to solve?  to explain that, letbe a fixed hash function known by everyone in the network – it’s built into the protocol.  bitcoin uses the well-known sha-256 hash function, but any cryptographically secure hash function will do.  let’s give david’s queue of pending transactions a label,, just so it’s got a name we can refer to.  suppose david appends a number“hello, world!” (obviously this is not a list of transactions, just a string used for illustrative purposes) and the nonceand hash the combination the output hash begins with a long run of zeroes.  the puzzle can be made more or less difficult by varying the number of zeroes required to solve the puzzle.  a relatively simple proof-of-work puzzle might require just three or four zeroes at the start of the hash, while a more difficult proof-of-work puzzle might require a much longer run of zeros, say 15 consecutive zeroes. in either case, the above attempt to find a suitable nonce, with, is a failure, since the output doesn’t begin with any zeroes at all.  tryingwe can keep trying different values for the nonce,this nonce gives us a string of four zeroes at the beginning of the output of the hash.  this will be enough to solve a simple proof-of-work puzzle, but not enough to solve a more difficult proof-of-work puzzle.what makes this puzzle hard to solve is the fact that the output from a cryptographic hash function behaves like a random number: change the input even a tiny bit and the output from the hash function changes completely, in a way that’s hard to predict.  so if we want the output hash value to begin with 10 zeroes, say, then david will need, on average, to trybefore he finds a suitable nonce.  that’s a pretty challenging task, requiring lots of computational power.obviously, it’s possible to make this puzzle more or less difficult to solve by requiring more or fewer zeroes in the output from the hash function.  in fact, the bitcoin protocol gets quite a fine level of control over the difficulty of the puzzle, by using a slight variation on the proof-of-work puzzle described above.  instead of requiring leading zeroes, the bitcoin proof-of-work puzzle requires the hash of a block’s header to be lower than or equal to a number known as the target .  this target is automatically adjusted to ensure that a bitcoin block takes, on average, about ten minutes to validate.(in practice there is a sizeable randomness in how long it takes to validate a block – sometimes a new block is validated in just a minute or two, other times it may take 20 minutes or even longer. it’s straightforward to modify the bitcoin protocol so that the time to validation is much more sharply peaked around ten minutes.  instead of solving a single puzzle, we can require that multiple puzzles be solved; with some careful design it is possible to considerably reduce the variance in the time to validate a block of transactions.)alright, let’s suppose david is lucky and finds a suitable nonce,. celebration!  (he’ll be rewarded for finding the nonce, as described below).  he broadcasts the block of transactions he’s approving to the network, together with the value foris a valid solution to the proof-of-work puzzle.  and they then update their block chains to include the new block of transactions.for the proof-of-work idea to have any chance of succeeding, network users need an incentive to help validate transactions.  without such an incentive, they have no reason to expend valuable computational power, merely to help validate other people’s transactions.  and if network users are not willing to expend that power, then the whole system won’t work.  the solution to this problem is to reward people who help validate transactions.  in particular, suppose we reward whoever successfully validates a block of transactions by crediting them with some infocoins.  provided the infocoin reward is large enough that will give them an incentive to participate in validation.in the bitcoin protocol, this validation process is called mining.  for each block of transactions validated, the successful miner receives a bitcoin reward.  initially, this was set to be a 50 bitcoin reward.  but for every 210,000 validated blocks (roughly, once every four years) the reward halves.  this has happened just once, to date, and so the current reward for mining a block is 25 bitcoins.  this halving in the rate will continue every four years until the year 2140 ce.  at that point, the reward for mining will drop belowbitcoins is actually the minimal unit of bitcoin, and is known as a satoshi.  so in 2140 ce the total supply of bitcoins will cease to increase.  however, that won’t eliminate the incentive to help validate transactions.  bitcoin also makes it possible to set aside some currency in a transaction as a transaction fee, which goes to the miner who helps validate it.  in the early days of bitcoin transaction fees were mostly set to zero, but as bitcoin has gained in popularity, transaction fees have gradually risen, and are now a substantial additional incentive on top of the 25 bitcoin reward for mining a block.you can think of proof-of-work as a competition to approve transactions.  each entry in the competition costs a little bit of computing power.  a miner’s chance of winning the competition is (roughly, and with some caveats) equal to the proportion of the total computing power that they control.  so, for instance, if a miner controls one percent of the computing power being used to validate bitcoin transactions, then they have roughly a one percent chance of winning the competition.  so provided a lot of computing power is being brought to bear on the competition, a dishonest miner is likely to have only a relatively small chance to corrupt the validation process, unless they expend a huge amount of computing resources.of course, while it’s encouraging that a dishonest party has only a relatively small chance to corrupt the block chain, that’s not enough to give us confidence in the currency.  in particular, we haven’t yet conclusively addressed the issue of double spending.i’ll analyse double spending shortly.  before doing that, i want to fill in an important detail in the description of infocoin.  we’d ideally like the infocoin network to agree upon the order in which transactions have occurred.  if we don’t have such an ordering then at any given moment it may not be clear who owns which infocoins. to help do this we’ll require that new blocks always include a pointer to the last block validated in the chain, in addition to the list of transactions in the block.  (the pointer is actually just a hash of the previous block).  so typically the block chain is just a linear chain of blocks of transactions, one after the other, with later blocks each containing a pointer to the immediately prior block:occasionally, a fork will appear in the block chain.  this can happen, for instance, if by chance two miners happen to validate a block of transactions near-simultaneously – both broadcast their newly-validated block out to the network, and some people update their block chain one way, and others update their block chain the other way:this causes exactly the problem we’re trying to avoid – it’s no longer clear in what order transactions have occurred, and it may not be clear who owns which infocoins.  fortunately, there’s a simple idea that can be used to remove any forks.  the rule is this: if a fork occurs, people on the network keep track of both forks.  but at any given time, miners only work to extend whichever fork is longest in their copy of the block chain.suppose, for example, that we have a fork in which some miners receive block a first, and some miners receive block b first.  those miners who receive block a first will continue mining along that fork, while the others will mine along fork b.  let’s suppose that the miners working on fork b are the next to successfully mine a block:after they receive news that this has happened, the miners working on fork a will notice that fork b is now longer, and will switch to working on that fork.  presto, in short order work on fork a will cease, and everyone will be working on the same linear chain, and block a can be ignored.  of course, any still-pending transactions in a will still be pending in the queues of the miners working on fork b, and so all transactions will eventually be validated.likewise, it may be that the miners working on fork a are the first to extend their fork.  in that case work on fork b will quickly cease, and again we have a single linear chain.no matter what the outcome, this process ensures that the block chain has an agreed-upon time ordering of the blocks.  in bitcoin proper, a transaction is not considered confirmed until: (1) it is part of a block in the longest fork, and (2) at least 5 blocks follow it in the longest fork.  in this case we say that the transaction has “6 confirmations”.  this gives the network time to come to an agreed-upon the ordering of the blocks.  we’ll also use this strategy for infocoin.with the time-ordering now understood, let’s return to think about what happens if a dishonest party tries to double spend.  suppose alice tries to double spend with bob and charlie.  one possible approach is for her to try to validate a block that includes both transactions.  assuming she has one percent of the computing power, she will occasionally get lucky and validate the block by solving the proof-of-work.  unfortunately for alice, the double spending will be immediately spotted by other people in the infocoin network and rejected, despite solving the proof-of-work problem.  so that’s not something we need to worry about.a more serious problem occurs if she broadcasts two separate transactions in which she spends the same infocoin with bob and charlie, respectively.  she might, for example, broadcast one transaction to a subset of the miners, and the other transaction to another set of miners, hoping to get both transactions validated in this way.  fortunately, in this case, as we’ve seen, the network will eventually confirm one of these transactions, but not both.  so, for instance, bob’s transaction might ultimately be confirmed, in which case bob can go ahead confidently.  meanwhile, charlie will see that his transaction has not been confirmed, and so will decline alice’s offer.  so this isn’t a problem either.  in fact, knowing that this will be the case, there is little reason for alice to try this in the first place.an important variant on double spending is if alice = bob, i.e., alice tries to spend a coin with charlie which she is also “spending” with herself (i.e., giving back to herself).  this sounds like it ought to be easy to detect and deal with, but, of course, it’s easy on a network to set up multiple identities associated with the same person or organization, so this possibility needs to be considered.  in this case, alice’s strategy is to wait until charlie accepts the infocoin, which happens after the transaction has been confirmed 6 times in the longest chain.  she will then attempt to fork the chain before the transaction with charlie, adding a block which includes a transaction in which she pays herself:unfortunately for alice, it’s now very difficult for her to catch up with the longer fork.  other miners won’t want to help her out, since they’ll be working on the longer fork.  and unless alice is able to solve the proof-of-work at least as fast as everyone else in the network combined – roughly, that means controlling more than fifty percent of the computing power – then she will just keep falling further and further behind.  of course, she might get lucky.  we can, for example, imagine a scenario in which alice controls one percent of the computing power, but happens to get lucky and finds six extra blocks in a row, before the rest of the network has found any extra blocks.  in this case, she might be able to get ahead, and get control of the block chain.  but this particular event will occur with probability.  a more general analysis along these lines shows that alice’s probability of ever catching up is infinitesimal, unless she is able to solve proof-of-work puzzles at a rate approaching all other miners combined.of course, this is not a rigorous security analysis showing that alice cannot double spend. it’s merely an informal plausibility argument. the original paper introducing bitcoin did not, in fact, contain a rigorous security analysis, only informal arguments along the lines i’ve presented here.  the security community is still analysing bitcoin, and trying to understand possible vulnerabilities.  you can see some of this research listed here , and i mention a few related problems in the “problems for the author” below.  at this point i think it’s fair to say that the jury is still out on how secure bitcoin is.the proof-of-work and mining ideas give rise to many questions.  how much reward is enough to persuade people to mine?  how does the change in supply of infocoins affect the infocoin economy?  will infocoin mining end up concentrated in the hands of a few, or many?  if it’s just a few, doesn’t that endanger the security of the system? presumably transaction fees will eventually equilibriate – won’t this introduce an unwanted source of friction, and make small transactions less desirable?  these are all great questions, but beyond the scope of this post.  i may come back to the questions (in the context of bitcoin) in a future post.  for now, we’ll stick to our focus on understanding how the bitcoin protocol works.i don’t understand why double spending can’t be prevented in a   simpler manner using two-phase     commit .  suppose alice tries to double spend an infocoin with   both bob and charlie.  the idea is that bob and charlie would each   broadcast their respective messages to the infocoin network, along   with a request: “should i accept this?” they’d then wait some   period – perhaps ten minutes – to hear any naysayers who could   prove that alice was trying to double spend.  if no such nays are   heard (and provided there are no signs of attempts to disrupt the   network), they’d then accept the transaction.  this protocol needs   to be hardened against network attacks, but it seems to me to be the   core of a good alternate idea.  how well does this work?  what   drawbacks and advantages does it have compared to the full bitcoin   protocol?early in the section i mentioned that there is a natural way of   reducing the variance in time required to validate a block of   transactions.  if that variance is reduced too much, then it creates   an interesting attack possibility.  suppose alice tries to fork the   chain in such a way that: (a) one fork starts with a block in which   alice pays herself, while the other fork starts with a block in   which alice pays bob; (b) both blocks are announced nearly   simultaneously, so roughly half the miners will attempt to mine each   fork; (c) alice uses her mining power to try to keep the forks of   roughly equal length, mining whichever fork is shorter – this is   ordinarily hard to pull off, but becomes significantly easier if the   standard deviation of the time-to-validation is much shorter than   the network latency; (d) after 5 blocks have been mined on both   forks, alice throws her mining power into making it more likely that   charles’s transaction is confirmed; and (e) after confirmation of   charles’s transaction, she then throws her computational power into   the other fork, and attempts to regain the lead.  this balancing   strategy will have only a small chance of success.  but while the   probability is small, it will certainly be much larger than in the   standard protocol, with high variance in the time to validate a   block.  is there a way of avoiding this problem?.  if this is done by all   (or even just a substantial fraction) of bitcoin miners then it   creates a vulnerability.  namely, it’s possible for someone to   improve their odds of solving the proof-of-work merely by starting   with some other (much larger) nonce.  more generally, it may be possible for attackers to exploit any systematic patterns in the way   miners explore the space of nonces.  more generally still, in the   analysis of this section i have implicitly assumed a kind of   symmetry between different miners.  in practice, there will be   asymmetries and a thorough security analysis will need to account for those asymmetries.let’s move away from infocoin, and describe the actual bitcoin protocol.  there are a few new ideas here, but with one exception (discussed below) they’re mostly obvious modifications to infocoin.to use bitcoin in practice, you first install a wallet program on your computer.  to give you a sense of what that means, here’s a screenshot of a wallet called multbit . you can see the bitcoin balance on the left — 0.06555555 bitcoins, or about 70 dollars at the exchange rate on the day i took this screenshot — and on the right two recent transactions, which deposited those 0.06555555 bitcoins:suppose you’re a merchant who has set up an online store, and you’ve decided to allow people to pay using bitcoin.  what you do is tell your wallet program to generate a bitcoin address.  in response, it will generate a public / private key pair, and then hash the public key to form your bitcoin address:you then send your bitcoin address to the person who wants to buy from you.  you could do this in email, or even put the address up publicly on a webpage.  this is safe, since the address is merely a hash of your public key, which can safely be known by the world anyway.  (i’ll return later to the question of why the bitcoin address is a hash, and not just the public key.)the person who is going to pay you then generates a transaction.  let’s take a look at the data from an actual   transaction transferringbitcoins.  what’s shown below is very nearly the raw data.  it’s changed in three ways: (1) the data has been deserialized; (2) line numbers have been added, for ease of reference; and (3) i’ve abbreviated various hashes and public keys, just putting in the first six hexadecimal digits of each, when in reality they are much longer.  here’s the data:line 1 contains the hash of the remainder of the transaction, 7c4025..., expressed in hexadecimal.  this is used as an identifier for the transaction.line 2 tells us that this is a transaction in version 1 of the bitcoin protocol.lines 3 and 4 tell us that the transaction has one input and one output, respectively.  i’ll talk below about transactions with more inputs and outputs, and why that’s useful.line 5 contains the value for lock_time, which can be used to control when a transaction is finalized.  for most bitcoin transactions being carried out today the lock_time is set to 0, which means the transaction is finalized immediately.line 6 tells us the size (in bytes) of the transaction.  note that it’s not the monetary amount being transferred!  that comes later.lines 7 through 11 define the input to the transaction.  in particular, lines 8 through 10 tell us that the input is to be taken from the output from an earlier transaction, with the given hash, which is expressed in hexadecimal as 2007ae.... the n=0 tells us it’s to be the first output from that transaction; we’ll see soon how multiple outputs (and inputs) from a transaction work, so don’t worry too much about this for now.  line 11 contains the signature of the person sending the money, 304502..., followed by a space, and then the corresponding public key, 04b2d....  again, these are both in hexadecimal.one thing to note about the input is that there’s nothing explicitly specifying how many bitcoins from the previous transaction should be spent in this transaction.  in fact, all the bitcoins from the n=0th output of the previous transaction are spent.  so, for example, if the n=0th output of the earlier transaction was 2 bitcoins, then 2 bitcoins will be spent in this transaction.  this seems like an inconvenient restriction – like trying to buy bread with a 20 dollar note, and not being able to break the note down.  the solution, of course, is to have a mechanism for providing change. this can be done using transactions with multiple inputs and outputs, which we’ll discuss in the next section.lines 12 through 14 define the output from the transaction.  in particular, line 13 tells us the value of the output, 0.319 bitcoins. line 14 is somewhat complicated.  the main thing to note is that the string a7db6f... is the bitcoin address of the intended recipient of the funds (written in hexadecimal).  in fact, line 14 is actually an expression in bitcoin’s scripting language.  i’m not going to describe that language in detail in this post, the important thing to take away now is just that a7db6f... is the bitcoin address.you can now see, by the way, how bitcoin addresses the question i swept under the rug in the last section: where do bitcoin serial numbers come from?  in fact, the role of the serial number is played by transaction hashes.  in the transaction above, for example, the recipient is receiving 0.319 bitcoins, which come out of the first output of an earlier transaction with hash 2007ae... (line 9). if you go and look in the block chain for that transaction, you’d see that its output comes from a still earlier transaction.  and so on.there are two clever things about using transaction hashes instead of serial numbers.  first, in bitcoin there’s not really any separate, persistent “coins” at all, just a long series of transactions in the block chain.  it’s a clever idea to realize that you don’t need persistent coins, and can just get by with a ledger of transactions. second, by operating in this way we remove the need for any central authority issuing serial numbers.  instead, the serial numbers can be self-generated, merely by hashing the transaction.in fact, it’s possible to keep following the chain of transactions further back in history.  ultimately, this process must terminate. this can happen in one of two ways.  the first possibilitty is that you’ll arrive at the very first bitcoin transaction, contained in the so-called genesis   block .  this is a special transaction, having no inputs, but a 50 bitcoin output.  in other words, this transaction establishes an initial money supply.  the genesis block is treated separately by bitcoin clients, and i won’t get into the details here, although it’s along similar lines to the transaction above.  you can see the deserialized raw data here , and read about the genesis block here .the second possibility when you follow a chain of transactions back in time is that eventually you’ll arrive at a so-called coinbase   transaction.  with the exception of the genesis block, every block of transactions in the block chain starts with a special coinbase transaction.  this is the transaction rewarding the miner who validated that block of transactions.  it uses a similar but not identical format to the transaction above.  i won’t go through the format in detail, but if you want to see an example, see here . you can read a little more about coinbase transactions here .something i haven’t been precise about above is what exactly is being signed by the digital signature in line 11.  the obvious thing to do is for the payer to sign the whole transaction (apart from the transaction hash, which, of course, must be generated later). currently, this is not what is done – some pieces of the transaction are omitted.  this makes some pieces of the transaction malleable , i.e., they can be changed later.  however, this malleability does not include the amounts being paid out, senders and recipients, which can’t be changed later.  i must admit i haven’t dug down into the details here. i gather that this malleability is under discussion in the bitcoin developer community, and there are efforts afoot to reduce or eliminate this malleability.in the last section i described how a transaction with a single input and a single output works. in practice, it’s often extremely convenient to create bitcoin transactions with multiple inputs or multiple outputs.  i’ll talk below about why this can be useful.  but first let’s take a look at the data from an actual   transaction :let’s go through the data, line by line.  it’s very similar to the single-input-single-output transaction, so i’ll do this pretty quickly.line 1 contains the hash of the remainder of the transaction.  this is used as an identifier for the transaction.line 2 tells us that this is a transaction in version 1 of the bitcoin protocol.lines 3 and 4 tell us that the transaction has three inputs and two outputs, respectively.line 5 contains the lock_time.  as in the single-input-single-output case this is set to 0, which means the transaction is finalized immediately.line 6 tells us the size of the transaction in bytes.lines 7 through 19 define a list of the inputs to the transaction. each corresponds to an output from a previous bitcoin transaction.the first input is defined in lines 8 through 11.in particular, lines 8 through 10 tell us that the input is to be taken from the n=0th output from the transaction with hash 3beabc....  line 11 contains the signature, followed by a space, and then the public key of the person sending the bitcoins.lines 12 through 15 define the second input, with a similar format to lines 8 through 11.  and lines 16 through 19 define the third input.lines 20 through 24 define a list containing the two outputs from the transaction.the first output is defined in lines 21 and 22.  line 21 tells us the value of the output, 0.01068000 bitcoins.  as before, line 22 is an expression in bitcoin’s scripting language.  the main thing to take away here is that the string e8c30622... is the bitcoin address of the intended recipient of the funds.the second output is defined lines 23 and 24, with a similar format to the first output.one apparent oddity in this description is that although each output has a bitcoin value associated to it, the inputs do not.  of course, the values of the respective inputs can be found by consulting the corresponding outputs in earlier transactions.  in a standard bitcoin transaction, the sum of all the inputs in the transaction must be at least as much as the sum of all the outputs.  (the only exception to this principle is the genesis block, and in coinbase transactions, both of which add to the overall bitcoin supply.)  if the inputs sum up to more than the outputs, then the excess is used as a transaction fee.  this is paid to whichever miner successfully validates the block which the current transaction is a part of.that’s all there is to multiple-input-multiple-output transactions! they’re a pretty simple variation on single-input-single-output-transactions.one nice application of multiple-input-multiple-output transactions is the idea of change.  suppose, for example, that i want to send you 0.15 bitcoins.  i can do so by spending money from a previous transaction in which i received 0.2 bitcoins.  of course, i don’t want to send you the entire 0.2 bitcoins.  the solution is to send you 0.15 bitcoins, and to send 0.05 bitcoins to a bitcoin address which i own.  those 0.05 bitcoins are the change.  of course, it differs a little from the change you might receive in a store, since change in this case is what you pay yourself.  but the broad idea is similar.that completes a basic description of the main ideas behind bitcoin. of course, i’ve omitted many details – this isn’t a formal specification.  but i have described the main ideas behind the most common use cases for bitcoin.while the rules of bitcoin are simple and easy to understand, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to understand all the consequences of the rules.  there is vastly more that could be said about bitcoin, and i’ll investigate some of these issues in future posts.for now, though, i’ll wrap up by addressing a few loose ends.how anonymous is bitcoin? many people claim that bitcoin can be used anonymously.  this claim has led to the formation of marketplaces such as silk   road (and various successors), which specialize in illegal goods. however, the claim that bitcoin is anonymous is a myth.  the block chain is public, meaning that it’s possible for anyone to see every bitcoin transaction ever.  although bitcoin addresses aren’t immediately associated to real-world identities, computer scientists have done a great deal   of work figuring out how to de-anonymize “anonymous” social networks.  the block chain is a marvellous target for these techniques.  i will be extremely surprised if the great majority of bitcoin users are not identified with relatively high confidence and ease in the near future.  the confidence won’t be high enough to achieve convictions, but will be high enough to identify likely targets.  furthermore, identification will be retrospective, meaning that someone who bought drugs on silk road in 2011 will still be identifiable on the basis of the block chain in, say, 2020.  these de-anonymization techniques are well known to computer scientists, and, one presumes, therefore to the nsa.  i would not be at all surprised if the nsa and other agencies have already de-anonymized many users.  it is, in fact, ironic that bitcoin is often touted as anonymous.  it’s not.  bitcoin is, instead, perhaps the most open and transparent financial instrument the world has ever seen.can you get rich with bitcoin? well, maybe.  tim o’reilly once   said : “money is like gas in the car – you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road – but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!” much of the interest in bitcoin comes from people whose life mission seems to be to find a really big gas station.  i must admit i find this perplexing.  what is, i believe, much more interesting and enjoyable is to think of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a way of enabling new forms of collective behaviour.  that’s intellectually fascinating, offers marvellous creative possibilities, is socially valuable, and may just also put some money in the bank.  but if money in the bank is your primary concern, then i believe that other strategies are much more likely to succeed.details i’ve omitted: although this post has described the main ideas behind bitcoin, there are many details i haven’t mentioned. one is a nice space-saving trick used by the protocol, based on a data structure known as a merkle tree .  it’s a detail, but a splendid detail, and worth checking out if fun data structures are your thing.  you can get an overview in the original bitcoin paper . second, i’ve said little about the bitcoin network – questions like how the network deals with denial of service attacks, how nodes join   and leave the network , and so on.  this is a fascinating topic, but it’s also something of a mess of details, and so i’ve omitted it.  you can read more about it at some of the links above.bitcoin scripting: in this post i’ve explained bitcoin as a form of digital, online money.  but this is only a small part of a much bigger and more interesting story.  as we’ve seen, every bitcoin transaction is associated to a script in the bitcoin programming language.  the scripts we’ve seen in this post describe simple transactions like “alice gave bob 10 bitcoins”.  but the scripting language can also be used to express far more complicated transactions.  to put it another way, bitcoin is programmable   money. in later posts i will explain the scripting system, and how it is possible to use bitcoin scripting as a platform to experiment with all sorts of amazing financial instruments.thanks for reading.  enjoy the essay?  you can tip me with bitcoin (!) at address: 17ukkkt1bnlaqdj1qqv8v9askr6vy3mztz.  you may also   enjoy the first     chapter of my forthcoming book on neural networks and deep   learning, and may wish to follow me on twitter .[1] in the united states the question “is money a form of speech?” is an important legal question, because of the protection afforded speech under the us constitution.  in my (legally uninformed) opinion digital money may make this issue more complicated.  as we’ll see, the bitcoin protocol is really a way of standing up before the rest of the world (or at least the rest of the bitcoin network) and avowing “i’m going to give such-and-such a number of bitcoins to so-and-so a person” in a way that’s extremely difficult to repudiate.  at least naively, it looks more like speech than exchanging copper coins, say.
 
 delong smackdown patrol: how worse off are we really?brad delong has a blog post at the equitable growth blog called "scene-setting for the policy discussion: the american economy stumbles." the post is far too pessimistic about america's economic performance, especially over the period from 1980-2000. here are a few points where i think brad gets it wrong.brad's thesis is the following:this is not to say other economies have done better: the american economy remains among the richest in the world. however, given the economic lead america had a generation ago, it really ought to still be well ahead of the north atlantic pack, and it no longer is.i think this is a defensible thesis, if a) you define "a generation" as 15 years, and b) you deny that solow convergence should take place at the higher levels of country income.but in any case, i do not think that brad successfully defends the thesis!first, i think brad dramatically understates the progress americans experienced during the years from 1980 through 2000:across most of the income distribution americans today are little if any better off than their predecessors back in 1979...yes, today americans have remarkable access to incredibly cheap electronic toys. but those are a small part of expenditure, and the costs of securing the standard indicia of middle-class life–a home in a safe neighborhood with good schools and a short commute, college for the children, assurance that a major illness will not lead to bankruptcy, a secure and reasonably-sized pension–have all become more costly relative to incomes. this shift is astonishing: for 150 years before 1979 americans had confidently expected that each generation would live roughly twice as well in a material sense as its predecessor, not find itself struggling against the current to stay in the same place.first of all, here is a picture of american median household income:as you can see, even if we do not adjust for household size, the median american household experienced a substantial rise in income from the 1979 business cycle peak through the 2000 business cycle peak - around a 17% rise. but if you adjust for household size, the increase is around 23%, from a higher base.of course, this does not account for a) age, and b) composition. american households got  much older  from 1980 to 2000, and old people do not work much. also, there was a boom in low-skilled immigration in the 1990s, which, although it boosted u.s. total gdp and was good for us overall, did tend to reduce the median income through composition effects.now, it is true that these figures also do not account for a) home production, and b) leisure. the entry of women into the workforce, which was not fully matched by male exit, meant that parents were spending less time with their children. and leisure did temporarily decline during the 1990s, after holding steady in the 1980s (then soared in the 2000s). so that mitigates the rise in living standards over the 1980-2000 period. but the truth is that in terms of purely material standard of living, the average american was substantially better off in 2000 than in 1980. anyway, brad claims that the price of housing has gone up. he also claims that people (even well-off people!) live in smaller houses than in 1979:the rest of the top 5% are about as rich as they might have expected. they have traded smaller houses and more burdensome commutes for more lavish vacations, cheap electronic toys, and greater social order. house size, in fact, went up substantially between 1980 and 2000:also, i would argue that rent, not the price of a house, is the key measure of the cost of housing. bubbles in the price-to-rent ratio merely offer households the opportunity for arbitrage. here, via mark thoma and robert shiller, is a graph of real rents in the u.s.:so even as house size soared, real rents stayed flat over the latter part of the 20th century. to me, that looks like a large increase in the standard of living of the average person. what about the rest of brad's "standard indicia of middle-class life," whose cost has supposedly soared? regarding "a home in a safe neighborhood," the massive crime decline in the u.s. during the 1990s probably helped the lower and middle classes a lot more than the upper classes. regarding "good schools," the performance of u.s. public schools remained flat or risen slightly relative to other countries, and in terms of naep scores , over 1980-2000 (and since). as for "burdensome commutes," this is true: average commute time increased by about 40 minutes per week from 1980 to 2000, and has been flat since 2000 - but this is an area in which new technology may be especially game-changing, since cell phones, texting, games, and podcasts/audiobooks make commuting much more fun. i get more "reading" done on my commute than during any other time.it is certainly true that college has gotten much more expensive, health care bankruptcies have become more common, and pensions have become less generous (though this last is partly a function of americans' increased consumption levels as a percentage of disposable income).but then again, life expectancy has increased by about 5 years since 1980. that is not nothing. and many social indicators, including teen pregnancy and drug abuse, have decreased substantially.of course, all these numbers are just statistics - what about the lived experiences of americans? over the last two decades of the 20th century, americans owned more cars , consumed more calories , had more tvs in their house, had bigger houses (as discussed above), and spent much less of their income on food, clothing, and shelter . these are things that mainly affect the marginal utility of the poor and middle class.brad's other main contention is that the u.s. is not doing well relative to other rich countries:if you want a single set of numbers to keep in the front of your mind to understand america’s relative position today, you cannot do better than those in the figure below, copied from the credit suisse global wealth report: the median american has only about $45,000 to his or her name, and wealth inequality as measured by the gap between the average and the median wealth is greater by far than in the typical rich country–only sweden comes close. a generation ago it would have been ridiculous to even consider that the typical middle-class or working-class american might not lose if switched with the typical inhabitant of australia or italy or japan or finland or singapore. it is not so ridiculous at all today.median net worth, of course, depends heavily on things like asset prices; the number for the u.s. dropped by more than half as a result of the housing bust. other countries, like canada, did not experience a housing bust. also, net worth depends heavily on age, and the u.s. is younger than many of the countries listed above us in the median wealth ranking.but more fundamentally, is median wealth the proper measure of living standards? wealth is a function of savings rates, and savings rates depend on consumption levels, which are a choice. during the 1980s and 1990s, americans chose to consume more of their income than our peers in most rich countries (though this has recently reversed itself in some cases, e.g. in japan). if you look at median disposable income, the u.s. was ahead of every other rich country except canada in 2010, despite some convergence:as you can see, the u.s. was still ahead of the north atlantic pack in 2010. only canada caught up (and we'll see how well that holds now that oil prices have crashed). we still comfortably beat sweden, germany, britain, the netherlands, and france. japan is not listed, but the pattern is the same.if this income disparity continues to hold, then the u.s. can climb back up the median wealth rankings whenever it feels like it - just save more out of disposable income. (note: this graph does not prove that u.s. median standards of living are higher than these other countries, since those numbers are before transfers, and also do not take into account things like transport, crime, pollution, health, nice weather, or good fashion sense . but it does show that americans could climb up the wealth rankings over time, if they wanted to.)so in conclusion: bad brad! in 2000, you believed that american economic policy and the american economy, though far from perfect, had been largely a success (right?). it's understandable to think the 15 years since then have been a big disappointment - they have! - but why should that cause you to revise your evaluation of the period from 1980 to 2000? do you think that we are now paying for excesses we enjoyed in that period, and that our prosperity increases during that period were thus illusory? i don't think you think that. so don't succumb to excessive pessimism!
rt @nicktimiraos: unemployment rate at the end of 2014

all workers: 5.6%
college grads: 2.9%
some college: 4.9%
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 digital world fuels young arabs ambition, ooredoo study findsdigital world fuels young arabs ambition, ooredoo study findsyoung people in qatar “most optimistic” in mena region, says ooredoo’s’ new horizons study; 91% of mena youth believe technology encourages them to be more entrepreneurialeight out of 10 young people in the mena region are optimistic about their prospects in the coming year, although 45 percent of employed young people are not doing the work they would like to do, according to a new study published today.the extensive new online survey, ‘new horizons: young, arab and connected’, was commissioned by ooredoo to provide a snapshot into the digital attitudes and aspirations of young people across the middle east and north africa. surveying more than 10,500 young adults in 17 countries across the region, it is one of the most in-depth research projects on the subject yet undertaken, conducted during a period of intense economic, social and political change.download the full report and infographics on dedicated microsite: www.ooredoonewhorizons.comamong the key findings of the research:nine in 10 young mena citizens believe that access to the internet and mobile digital technology can help them realise their personal aspirations for employment, entrepreneurial opportunities, education, banking and healthcare.91% also believe that technology is the basis of a modern, forward-thinking and functioning society, but that its potential as an economic tool has not yet been realised for young people across mena.81% of young arabs are optimistic about their immediate futures, despite reporting significant economic and educational hurdles.45% are not doing the work they would like to do.72% of men and 77% of women agree that women should be given equal business opportunities.the findings provide important insights into the hopes of young people in the region today, and in particular underline the extent to which young people are focused on the potential of communication technology to drive human growth and social development.h.e. sheikh abdullah bin mohammed bin saud al thani, chairman, ooredoo, said “young people in the mena region have embraced technology as a means to transform their lives. this research shows that young people remain optimistic despite the challenges they face and they are using technology to proactively seek out new opportunities for self-development. companies, governments and organisations need to recognise this creative spark, and find new ways to nurture it, so that we receive the full benefit of young people’s contribution to our societies.”  in spite of the well-publicised challenges that mena has faced in recent years, the research suggest that a  community of digitally active young adults is forging a ‘connected path’ to greater opportunity, understanding and equality via technology.  in total, 91% of respondents agree that ‘technology is the basis of a modern, forward-thinking & functioning society’ and 89% believing that ‘technology opens up communication channels to promote peace and understanding’.while the report highlights degrees of variability between different countries, there are striking similarities in responses from men and women in the study, suggesting a growing consensus in views on technology between genders. despite two thirds of internet users currently being men, the report highlights the level of encouragement for women to play a more equal role:  72% of men and 77% of women agree that women should be given equal business opportunities.one key regional difference flagged up in the study is the gap between those countries with developed infrastructure and those countries struggling to overcome more basic requirements, such as access to reliable electricity, and the impact this gap has on the hopes and aspirations of the young people affected.the report identifies the financial impact of differences in income across a broad cross-section of countries. while most respondents claim to have enough or ample financial resources to make ends meet, 20% of respondents claim their households do not have enough money for their basic needs.even in the most depressed economies, the internet emerges as a key factor for young people in terms of nurturing creative talent as an educational platform and helping prepare young people for a life in business. more than 80% believe the internet enables them to continue their education beyond what is possible in their country.one major area of insight in the study is the changing patterns of behaviour online among young arab nationals. while more than a quarter of time online is spent playing games and entertainment, there is evidence to suggest that increasingly young people are using internet access to improve their life opportunities.in a typical day, according to the study, 18% of the time on the internet is used to communicate, followed by 16% for learning, education or training, 15% on work activities and 12% looking for jobs and other employment opportunities. the report also showed that young arabs appear to prioritize speed over access restrictions, new products and customer service, with 70% of youth considering the speed of the internet as the primary consideration when selecting a provider.the study suggests that usage patterns and ways that young people access content is changing in the mena region. the use of smartphones has exceeded the use of non-internet connected mobile phones among regional youth overall. even in markets where owning a smartphone is out of reach, 90% of young people have been able to access a shared device, according to the report.the internet also emerges as a source of significant support for helping young people to find and secure employment. 91% of respondents believe the internet can nurture their entrepreneurial potential, with 83% expressing a desire to have their own company and 66% believing the internet can help source funding. however, among the potential challenges identified by respondents are the legal hurdles of establishment of a company in their respective countries. nearly six in ten think it is important to overcome the legal restrictions of setting up a business, but that it is difficult to do so.copies of the full report ‘new horizons: young, arab and connected – an ooredoo survey of digital attitudes and aspirations across the middle east and north africa’ are available on a dedicated microsite, www.ooredoonewhorizons.comresearch methodology: the research was carried out with 10,642 young adults (18-30 years old) from across mena where 3,488 completed our full online survey from 16th to 26th of august 2013. this research was conducted by fti consulting for ooredoo. for more information on the research methodology:ooredoo is an international telecommunications company with headquarters in qatar and with over 92 million subscribers worldwide. it operates networks in asia, africa and the middle east. ooredoo possesses strong experience in south east asia, with operations in indonesia, singapore, laos and the philippines.ooredoo, formerly known as qtel group, delivers mobile, fixed, broadband internet and corporate managed services tailored to the needs of consumers and businesses across markets in the middle east, north africa and south-east asia. as a community-focused company, ooredoo is guided by its vision of enriching people’s lives and its belief that it can stimulate human growth by leveraging communications to help people achieve their full potential. ooredoo has a presence in markets such as qatar, kuwait, oman, algeria, tunisia, iraq, palestine, the maldives and indonesia. the company was named ‘best mobile operator’ of 2013 at world communication awards.the company reported revenues of $9.3 billion u.s. dollars in 2012 and had a consolidated global customer base of more than 92.9 million people as of 31 december 2012. ooredoo’s shares are listed on the qatar exchange and the abu dhabi securities exchange. www.ooredoo.com
rt @sub8u: enhanced humans no longer sci-fi
"in five years you’ll see exoskeletons on the building site"
 visions of humans running around in exoskeletons able to move faster, jump higher and hit harder from films such as tom cruise’s edge of tomorrow are no longer science fiction but a hidden reality right now.what started out as a military application helping soldiers carry large loads has spawned into applications in medicine, rehabilitation, construction and in the near future, possibly even sports.“we see the world of robotics as having a giant wave of human augmentation coming right at it,” said nate harding chief executive and co-founder of ekso bionics at ces in las vegas. “people will be running faster, jumping further and grannies will be showing off their new hip exoskeleton.”harding was speaking at a conference session discussing the future of robotics and brought with him a working exoskeleton that allowed a paraplegic man confined to a wheelchair, 22-year-old shane mosko from connecticut, to simply stand up and walk stunning a hushed audience.“it’s about wrapping a robot around a person,” explained harding. “in the case of shane, he’s able to get up and walk without assistance. we know it will have a very positive affect the long term health of people who are stuck in wheel chairs.”the exoskeleton ran down mosko’s legs to feet plates, powered by a small backpack and controlled partially through two walking sticks that were used to aid balance.“i’ve been using this device for about two years, and it didn’t take long to get to where i can walk,” explained mosko while walking backwards and forwards across the stage. “i’m paralysed and i’m not supposed to be up and walking, but being at eye level with you all. with this device it’s a possibility.”“with this device i can really work on building strength where i have it. i can basically walk as long as the batteries will allow, which is not possible with some of the other fixed knee solutions. this is only the beginning and there’s so much further we can go. it can only get better.”the exoskeleton has been designed to help paraplegics gain mobility but also to help stroke victims learn how to walk again. it is controlled by buttons on a set of walking sticks, but also with the weight of the wearer.leaning forward in a natural walking stances while rocking side to side triggers the steps in a very human-like non-robotic way. the exoskeleton detects how much power a person is putting in and fills the shortfall to maintain stability, but also to help people build their strength where they have it.“our technology started in the military, carrying heavy loads and with our partners lockheed martin we’re still doing that. but we melded technologies from people for athletics and people with paralysis to aid people with stroke to walk again,” said harding.“now we’re looking at industrial applications – for construction crews holding heavy tools or working on overhead surfaces. that’s our next stage to attack. in five years you’ll see exoskeletons on the building site and on the medical side, someone with paralysis will be using one to get around a party.”
rt @mktoutperform: global 10-year yields today vs. end of 2013. race to negative yields...
 the race to negative yields: historic action in the bond marketthe race to negative yields: historic action in the bond marketthe bond market continues to make history as global deflationary pressures and record central bank easing are driving yields to unfathomable levels.back in november i wrote about “ the race to 0% .”  it has now become a race to negative yields.let’s take a look at a few examples from yesterday.1) the 30-year u.s. treasury yield hit 2.50%, an all-time low below the deflationary collapse of 2008.  a year ago this same yield was close to 4%.3) the japanese 10-year yield moved below 30 basis points to a new all-time low.4) the lowest 10-year yield in the world, in switzerland, hit an all-time low of 21 basis points.5) german bunds now show a negative interest rate from one month through five years. that’s not mistake: five years. in buying these bunds, you are locking your money up for five years and accepting a negative return for it.the list of countries with 10-year yields hitting all-time lows in the first week of trading in 2015 includes:most pundits have cheered this sharp move lower in yields but is it really is good thing?only if you believe that lower growth and plummeting inflation expectations are a positive. that sounds crazy, you say. why would anyone believe this to be a positive? very simply, because it means even more central bank “action.”italian unemployment rate at new all-time high? no problem. italian yields are at all-time lows and the ecb will do more to lift stock prices.japan slipping into its fourth recession since 2008? no problem. japanese yields are at all-time lows and the boj will do more to lift stock prices.this was the critical narrative of 2014 , where in the new regime lower (europe) and even negative (japan) economic growth is favorable because it means central banks will increase their efforts to lift stock prices.there is a limit to this reverse logic, of course, and perhaps we are getting closer to testing it. thus far in 2015 yields have fallen and stock prices have fallen as well. but the narrative will not break easily for it has been ingrained in our heads that central banks can do no wrong and can solve all problems.only when faith in these policies inevitably fade and stocks start going down will the narrative change. when this happens, stocks will indeed suffer for a while, but for the economies and people of the world it will be a beneficial change. for only then will policymakers stop focusing on boosting short-term asset prices and start focusing on the structural changes necessary to improve long-term growth.this writing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or a recommendation regarding any securities transaction, or as an offer to provide advisory or other services by pension partners, llc in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, purchase or sale would be unlawful under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. the information contained in this writing should not be construed as financial or investment advice on any subject matter. pension partners, llc expressly disclaims all liability in respect to actions taken based on any or all of the information on this writing.charlie bilello is the director of research at  pension partners, llc , an investment advisor that manages  mutual funds and separate accounts .  he is the co-author of two  award-winning research papers  in 2014 on intermarket analysis and investing. mr. bilello is responsible for strategy development, investment research and communicating the firm’s investment themes and portfolio positioning to clients. prior to joining pension partners, he was the managing member of momentum global advisors, an institutional investment research firm. previously, mr. bilello held positions as an equity and hedge fund analyst at billion dollar alternative investment firms, giving him unique insights into portfolio construction and asset allocation.mr. bilello holds a j.d. and m.b.a. in finance and accounting from fordham university and a b.a. in economics from binghamton university. he is a chartered market technician (cmt) and a member of the market technicians association. mr. bilello also holds the certified public accountant (cpa) certificate.
 annika  alexius , kathryn hart anderson , silke  anger , kate l. antonovics , janice boucher breuer , helle  bunzel , catherine  casamatta , amparo  castello-climent , jennifer l. castle , maggie  chen , gabriella  chiesa , chi-young  choi , irma  clots figueras , katrin  cremers , maria-angeles  de frutos † , elizabeth  dhuey , tatiana  didier , denise jeanne doiron , catherine  doz , faye  duchin , natalia  fabra , giulia  faggio , maria donovan fitzpatrick , nancy  folbre , raquel  fonseca , patricia  funk , ana beatriz galvão , lorna ann greening , siv  gustafsson , marie  hoerova , helena  holmlund , cornelia  holthausen , sara  horrell , gabriela  inchauste , vasso  ioannidou , keiko  ito , belén  jerez , nancy ammon jianakoplos , mireia  jofre-bonet , patricia  justino , ide muirean kearney , jennifer lynch koski , marianna  kudlyak , susan e. mayer , maria  montero , nada  mora , pamela  mueller , kathleen j. mullen , Éva  nagypál , doris  neuberger , síle pádraigín o'dorchai , sonia  oreffice , szilvia  papai , ila  patnaik , sonia  paty , alessandra  pelloni , sonja  peterson , anne morrison piehl , patricia  pollard , chiara daniela pronzato , daniela  puzzello , laura  razzolini , patricia  rice , maureen therese rimmer , marla  ripoll , joanne  roberts , lorenza  rossi , Åsa  rosén , agnieszka  rusinowska , anja k. shortland , monica  singhal , merih a. uctum , alessandra  venturini , marie-ange  véganzonès-varoudakis , tara elizabeth watson , doris  weichselbaumer , ada  wossink , rebecca  zarutskie , julie margaretta zissimopoulos , hong  zou , christine  zulehner ,the data presented here is experimental. it is based on a limited sample of the research output in economics and finance. only material catalogued in repec is considered. for any citation based criterion, only works that could be parsed by the citec project are considered. for any ranking of people, only those registered with the repec author service can be taken into account. and for rankings of institutions, only those listed in edirc and claimed as affiliation by the respective, registered authors can be measured. thus, this list is by no means based on a complete sample. you can help making this more comprehensive by encouraging more publications to be listed ( instructions ) and more authors to register ( form ). for more details on the various rankings that are available as well for documentation, follow this link .citations from citec project by josé manuel barrueco cruz , university of valencia, spain. hardware provided by instituto valenciano de investigaciones económicas (ivie), valencia, spain.abstract views and downloads statistics from logec project by sune karlsson , Örebro university, sweden.
 solar energy prices see double-digit declines in 2013; trend expected to continuedistributed solar photovoltaic (pv) system prices dropped by 12 - 19 percent nationwide in 2013, according to the third edition of a jointly written report on pv pricing trends from the energy department's (doe) national renewable energy laboratory (nrel) and lawrence berkeley national laboratory (lbnl). in addition, 2014 prices are expected to drop another 3 - 12 percent, depending on system location and market segment. industry analysts expect this trend to continue over the next couple of years, keeping the nation on track to meet the doe sunshot initiative's 2020 targets."these price drops are consistent with previous annual reductions achieved since 2010, when the energy department's sunshot initiative was established," nrel's david feldman, a lead author of the report said. "however, the report also indicates that there are significant variations in reported pricing both geographically and across market segments due to a variety of factors, including value-based pricing based on local competition within the marketplace and prevailing electric retail rates. other factors include differences in specific system configurations such as panel efficiency, mounting structure, and geographic location; and the time lags between commitments and commercial operation for utility-scale systems."the report, photovoltaic (pv) pricing trends: historical, recent, and near-term projections (2014 edition) , provides a high-level overview of historical, recent, and projected near-term pv system pricing trends in the united states and examines progress in pv price reductions to help the energy department and other stakeholders manage the transition to a market-driven pv industry.  the report shows that the general downward trend in pv system pricing continued in 2013, and is expected to continue through 2016. other key findings include:modeled utility-scale pv system prices fell below $2 a watt in 2013, and have continued to decline in 2014, to roughly $1.80 a watt, which is 59 percent below what modeled pricing showed in 2010.there is a difference of roughly $2 a watt between the median reported price of the lowest- and highest-priced states for residential and commercial systems (less than 10 kw in size); a similar price range also exists within individual states.there is a wide-range in analysts' pv pricing estimates, however a number of analysts are now projecting long-term pricing in line with the targets set by the sunshot initiative for 2020. at these pricing levels, pv is expected to reach widespread grid parity in the u.s. without federal or state subsidies. "there is still considerable uncertainty as to how low pv system prices will drop in the next five to 10 years," feldman said. "however, there appears to be an emerging consensus that the sunshot's price reduction targets are within reach and more and more likely to be realized. we see this reflected in the fact that many of the current projections are far lower than projections made in the recent past by the same sources."the report was produced as part of an ongoing collaborative research effort between the two labs focused on solar technology system-level cost analysis and modeling. this briefing draws on several ongoing research activities at lbnl and nrel, including lbnl's annual tracking the sun report series , nrel's bottom-up pv cost modeling, and nrel's synthesis of pv market data and projections.the research was supported by funding from the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy, in support of its sunshot initiative. the sunshot initiative is a collaborative national effort that aggressively drives innovation to make solar energy fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources before the end of the decade. through sunshot, doe supports efforts by private companies, universities, and national laboratories to drive down the cost of solar electricity to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour. learn more at energy.gov/sunshotnrel is the u.s. department of energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. nrel is operated for the energy department by the alliance for sustainable energy, llc.for further information contact nrel public relations at 303-275-4090.subscribe to receive new nrel releases by e-mail. subscribe to rss feed.
 naturally we can use a 2-by-2 matrix to help us think about american literature. on the horizontal axis you have earnestness & sincerity in the author's depiction of the living world. on the vertical axis you have form, ranging from realist to experimental. the earnest author loves the world and wants us to share in that love. think wal-mart realism or jennifer egan. her (or his) foil is deeply sardonic. think delillo, famously called the chief shaman of the paranoid school of american fiction. some would say it's an oversimplification to be satisfied in calling delillo sardonic but those are the critics who endlessly prowl stein's tender buttons for meaning. the sardonic author is suspicious of the world around us and wants to lead us on a tour of exactly why that suspicion is just.i would like to avoid venturing into the thorny issue of form and what exactly constitutes realism or experimentalism. though as my friend lawrence summers similarly said about idiots "they exist, look around."now as for your work. it is thoroughly in the top-right of our canonical literary matrix, and while up and to the right is the preferred direction for my technological investments. i will say, with some trepidation, and i do hope you will not carelessly repeat my words here: literature is more resistant to models. while i would be the last to say that an industry will never be modeled i will go as far as saying my investment thesis is to stray away from and ahead of the pack, while your work is trending toward fashionable drivel.i am really glad you wrote this and the ideas here support my arguments against the "robots eat all the jobs" thesis. that said i have some real concerns about your potential for viral growth. what i need to see to be on board as an investor is a hockey stick shape (up and to the right!) and i am not seeing a hockey stick in your paragraphs of baseball analogies reminiscent of the beginning pages of american pastoral. this is a very scrappy ozzie guillen and i am looking for a slick wayne gretzky. and when i say that i must also say i am not speaking about the race of any of the players in the metaphor, this is about high growth business and high growth business is a hockey stick. here in silicon valley we bring in people and ideas from all the fringes. it's a big tent. now your novel, i want you to go home and take a long hard look at what you think venture capital will do for you. if you can walk back in here on another day and make an ironclad case to me that your rumination on our generation's flyaway children who feel themselves wronged mean potential 10x returns to my fund then you have yourself a deal, otherwise this may be more of a lifestyle business.from the occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in every word of your latest "literary" pretensions, i perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. you embody a very dangerous drift in american thinking. are you familiar with the ceaseless and stunning success of the author danielle steel? your book is an insult to all that is marketable. have you given even a second of thought to how you will get placement in airport newsstands?wow! dude! i am on board with your vision here. this could really change the consumer literary space. the thing is, i have worked with a lot of colleagues of steve jobs, founder of apple, as well as playing mr. jobs in a hollywood feature film. he's a man i admire deeply. and this novel, it touches on, it really touches on, the type of artistry required to build beautiful computer interfaces and solve problems in a way that consumers of past eras have never been offered. that's true disruptive innovation. with your take on the bildungsroman you address not only the gap between consumers and the internet but the grasp of one on the other. what i'd love to see is us talking again in a month and me hearing that your female protagonist has doubled her traction within your target market, but most importantly i'm close to a green light.look i love what you're doing. i love that you have more on your mind than just marx or freud. but hey it's 2014 not 2007 and i want your prose to say that. fuck "say that," i want your prose to beat its chest and scream that at me! my goal in life is to buy the new york jets. from you i want to see prose that wants to at least buy the miami dolphins. in your last novel you wasted so much time mourning a marriage that took too much for granted and i see a big step forward here. i see that you have urgent things to say about consumerism, pharmacology, biotechnology and the “optimistic egalitarianism” of the american middle west. and yet when i look at this novel i just don't see a twitter or a tumblr or an instagram. but you know what they say: iterate! fail fast! i love your attitude, it's a fucking pleasure to be here in the room talking with you, i know you have a draft of this novel in you that is silicon valley's next billion dollar social media company.
 new york tue jan 6, 2015 5:18pm estan offshore oil platform is seen in huntington beach, california september 28, 2014.new york (reuters) - global oil markets on tuesday slumped for a fourth straight session as mounting worries about a supply glut pressured crude prices, which have fallen almost 10 percent this week to their lowest since spring 2009.traders said the trend for crude seemed lower but that prices could bounce up whenever there is a break in market sentiment. one such moment occurred on tuesday when weaker-than-expected u.s. economic data briefly pushed the dollar lower. this brought crude off session lows but only for an about an hour, as the downward path resumed.refined products such as gasoline rbc1 and heating oil hoc1 also bounced up briefly in morning trade, rallying as investors took profits on short positions. but products later succumbed to the trend, and gasoline settled 2 percent down.crude oil prices have plunged more than 55 percent since june, when benchmark brent traded above $115 a barrel and u.s. crude above $107.in tuesday's session, brent lcoc1 settled down $2.01 at $51.10 a barrel. it earlier fell to $50.52, its lowest since may 2009, and less than a dollar away from breaking below the $50 support.in the first two days of this week, brent has dropped $5.32, or almost 10 percent.u.s. crude clc1 finished down $2.11, or 4.2 percent, at $47.93, after plumbing an april 2009 low of $47.55.brent and u.s. crude extended losses in post-settlement trade after the american petroleum institute, an industry group, reported builds in gasoline and distillate stocks last week despite a 4 million-barrel drop in crude stocks. [api/s].the government's energy information administration will issue official inventory data for last week at 10:30 a.m. et (1530 gmt) on wednesday. [eia/s]"i think the likelihood of seeing $46 to $45 is quite likely," said phillip streible, senior market strategist at rjo futures in chicago. "people, i think, are further understanding that the u.s. is becoming a powerhouse in creating crude oil and that's not going to change anytime soon."the sell-off in oil began six months ago on concerns of an oversupply of high quality u.s. shale crude. it accelerated after a meeting of the organization of petroleum exporting countries in november, when saudi arabia ruled out production cuts as a means of boosting prices.on tuesday, saudi arabia's king abdullah said in a speech read for him that the country would deal with the challenge posed by lower oil prices "with a firm will," giving no signs the no. 1 crude exporter will cut supplies.on monday, the kingdom's announcement of further oil price discounts for its european and u.s. buyers added to the bearish state of oil markets already staggering from russian output at post-soviet-era highs and iraqi oil shipments near 35-year highs.(additional reporting by libby george in london and florence tan in singapore; editing by william hardy, louise heavens, david gregorio and andrew hay)
 in spite of her last name, ivanka trump is anything but a lazy little rich girl. the summa cum laude wharton grad spearheads the trump organization's development and acquisitions, all while running ivanka trump fine jewelry and the ivanka trump lifestyle collection (which makes shoes, handbags, outerwear, and sunglasses) on the side. yet somehow trump still felt like she wasn't doing enough."i loved seeing women on the streets of new york, wearing my heels or carrying one of my bags, but i wasn't completely satisfied," trump writes on her new site ivankatrump.com . "i knew there was a bigger opportunity to make an impact in their lives."so trump gathered her staff to redefine the mission of what exactly her brand was doing. "there is a new generation of women who are smart, ambitious, and passionate about their careers—but not defined by them," she writes. to that end, the new site is dedicated to such women, as a place where trump and her team will offer daily tips and tricks about style and work/life balance. and today, she answers our #techtalk10.occupation: executive vice president of development & acquisitions at the trump organization; founder and ceo of the ivanka trump collection; entrepreneurolivia pope or selina meyer?olivia pope—but i would take daenerys targaryen, mother of dragons, over both!what is your preferred instagram filter?to selfie or not to selfie?what is your favorite app?artkive—one of these days i'm going to make a coffee table book of all of [my daughter] arabella's artwork. i'm also obsessed with pinterest for gathering interior design inspirations for our various hotel and residential development projects.if you could only follow five people on twitter, who would they be?greatest piece of advice you've ever been given?my father has always told me to be passionate and love what you do. if you are deeply passionate about your work—and work incredibly hard, you will ultimately succeed.what would you tell your 16-year-old self?what was your biggest mistake?i try to live in the present. i learn from my mistakes in an effort not to repeat them, but i remain totally focused on today and tomorrow. many of my mistakes turned out to be incredible opportunities for growth, both professionally and personally, and therefore, in hindsight, they were deeply valuable.what was the last book you read?willpower: rediscovering the greatest human strength by roy f. baumeister and john tierney. i'm currently reading the invisible bridge and can't wait to start edge of eternity, book three in ken follett's century trilogy.someone gives you a crystal ball that lets you look five years into the future. what do you see?hopefully, a happy, healthy—possibly larger!—family and a business that is thriving. on a global level, i pray that the "winds of madness" (as elie wiesel once referred to these turbulent times) stop blowing and that there is peace in the world.
 by anna fifield december 30, 2014 follow @annafifieldseoul — clasping his headphones and closing his eyes as he sang into the studio microphone while performing a peppy duet with one of south korea’s hottest actresses, spiky-haired cha kil-yong looked every bit the k-pop star.but cha is not a singer or actor. no, he’s a unique kind of south korean celebrity: a teaching star.and the song he was singing with clara, a korean mega celebrity, in a music video that wouldn’t be out of place on mtv? it was called “sat jackpot!”in this education-obsessed country, cha is a top-ranked math teacher. but he doesn’t teach in a school. he runs an online “hagwon” — or cram school — called sevenedu that focuses entirely on preparing students to take the college entrance exam in mathematics.here, teaching pays: cha said he earned a cool $8 million last year.cha keeps many masks and props in his sevenedu filming studio. (shin woong-jae/for the washington post)“i’m madly in love with math,” said cha, looking the height of trendiness in his crimson shirt and pants and tweed jacket, in his office in gangnam — a wealthy part of seoul famous for its conspicuous consumption and featured in the song “gangnam style.”it’s hard to exaggerate the premium south korea places on education. this is a society in which you have to get into the right kindergarten, so that you can get into the right elementary school, then into the right middle school and high school, and finally into the right college. which, of course, gets you the right job and scores you the right spouse.there’s even a phrase to describe the korean version of a helicopter mother: “chima baram” — literally “skirt wind,” to describe the swish as a mother rushes into the classroom to demand a front-row seat for her child or to question grades.many korean families split and live on opposite sides of the world in pursuit of a better education: the mother and children live in the united states or some other english-speaking country, the better to secure entry to a prestigious university (preferably harvard). the “goose father” continues working in south korea, flying in to visit when he can.all of this combines to make south korea’s equivalent of the sat the most important event in a young person’s life.as such, the vast majority of teenagers here do a double shift at school: they attend normal classes by day but go to hagwons for after-hours study. increasingly, online hagwons are replacing traditional brick-and-mortar cram schools. the hagwons have become a $20 billion industry.this devotion to studying is credited with helping south korea consistently rank at the top of the developed world in reading, math and science, although the latest rankings from the organization for economic cooperation and development also show that korean students come last when asked whether they are happy at school. south korea also has the highest suicide rate in the developed world , which many suggest is related to a high-stress focus on education.some politicians and educators are questioning whether things have gotten out of hand. but even parents opposed to this punishing system find it difficult to opt out — their children complain that they can’t keep up if they don’t go to a hagwon.that’s good news for instructors like cha, who started teaching at a hagwon to pay his way through his phd program.about 300,000 students take his online class at any given time, paying $39 for a 20-hour course (traditional cram schools charge as much as $600 for a course). he teaches them tricks for taking the timed exams, including shortcuts that students can take to solve a problem faster.asked what makes him stand out, cha said: “suppose you give the same ingredients to 100 different chefs. they would make different dishes even though they’re working with the same ingredients. it’s the same with a math class. even though it’s all math and all in korean, you can use different ingredients to come up with different results.”his studio is set up with a green chalkboard and desks, and behind the camera are piles of props — including hippo and batman masks and a gold sequined jacket.“you’re not only teaching a subject, you also have to be a multitalented entertainer,” said cha, declining to give his age and offering only that he’d been working for 20 years.on sat day, he visits schools to offer encouragement to test takers. he also does television ads, endorsing products such as a red ginseng drink meant to boost brain power.kwon kyu-ho, a top-ranked literature teacher, also appears with k-pop stars and has a lucrative side business in celebrity endorsements, lending his name to a chair meant to help people study better.maintaining his position doesn’t require just good lessons. kwon, 33, also gets regular facials and works out, and he said some teachers even have stylists..“i always wanted to be a teacher, but i feel that regular school teaching has its limits. there is a certain way you have to teach,” said kwon, whose lessons appear on the sites etoos and vitaedu. “and, of course, i’m making a lot more money this way.”he wouldn’t disclose how much he earned, only that it was “several millions” of dollars a year. the secret of his success, kwon said, was finding the parts of tests that make most students stumble. he focuses lessons on those problem areas.this style of education has its upsides, he said.“i think one of the benefits of private education is that teachers compete with each other and try to develop higher quality content,” he said. “we have money. we can invest in ways that normal schoolteachers can not.”as president park geun-hye promotes a “creative economy” as the key to taking south korea to the next level in its development, many analysts say the country would do well to take a more creative approach to education.lee ju-ho, who was minister of education until last year, is among them.“all this late-night study could lead to problems in enhancing their other skills, like character, creativity and critical thinking,” he said. “hagwon is all about rote learning and memorization.”lee said all the problems stem from the college admissions procedures, which have been slow in looking beyond test scores to other criteria such as extracurricular activities and personal essays, as is common in many western countries.“we really need to change,” said lee, who is now a professor at the korea development institute’s school of public policy and management.anna fifield is the post’s bureau chief in tokyo, focusing on japan and the koreas. she previously reported for the financial times from washington dc, seoul, sydney, london and from across the middle east.
 from the days when monarchs over-borrowed for their mercantile adventures, to argentina’s recent failure to pay its creditors, countries have long run into trouble paying back what they have borrowed. spain’s 16th-century king, philip ii, reigned over four of his country’s defaults. greece and argentina have reneged on their commitments to bondholders seven and eight times respectively over the past 200 years. and most countries have defaulted at least once in their history. but what precisely happens when countries stop paying what they owe?when a country fails to pay its creditors on time, it is said to go into “default”, the national equivalent of going bankrupt. but sovereign defaults are quite different from business bankruptcies as it is far harder for creditors to repossess the assets of a sovereign entity than to repossess the assets of a company (an unarmed argentinian naval vessel detained in ghana for ten weeks in 2012 was an exception). in the first instance, to curry favour in international markets, defaulting countries tend to restructure their debt rather than simply refusing to pay anything at all. but these so-called “haircuts”, where the original value of a bond is reduced, can be much more painful for the holders of government bonds than a simple clip of the scissors. after its $81 billion default in 2001, argentina offered to pay its creditors a third of what it owed—93% of the debt was eventually swapped for performing securities in 2005 and 2010. but the remainder, which is held by vulture funds and other investors, is still in dispute. these “holdouts” are waiting for $1.3 billion plus interest. and when greece defaulted in 2012, bondholders were forced to take hits as high as 50%. in less severe cases, countries may choose to restructure their debt by requesting more time to pay. this has the effect of reducing the present value of the bond—so it isn’t entirely pain-free for investors. some suggest that this is the right course of action for ukraine as it struggles to balance its immediate domestic priorities against its obligations to bondholders.defaults can also be very painful for the offending country, particularly if they are unexpected and disorderly. domestic savers and investors, anticipating a fall in the value of the local currency, will scramble to withdraw their money from bank accounts and move it out of the country. to avoid bank-runs and precipitous currency depreciation, the government may shut down banks and impose capital controls. as punishment for default, capital markets will either impose punitive borrowing rates or refuse to lend at all. and credit-rating agencies will no doubt warn against investing in the country. but as history shows, in most countries yield-hungry lenders will eventually start lending again so long as they are adequately rewarded for the risk they are taking on. moreover, credit-default swaps—financial instruments which act as a form of insurance against sovereign and corporate defaults—allow bondholders to hedge their risk. but not all defaults are the same: argentina defaulted again this year by refusing to pay $1.3 billion plus interest to the “holdouts” from 2001.critically, there is no international law or court for settling sovereign defaults, which helps explain why they are so varied in length and severity. more international regulation has been proposed—including powers to prevent minority holders from hijacking the process—but such conditions ultimately remain up to the issuing country. the first bond issuances since the new proposals (by kazakhstan and vietnam) include these clauses. other countries might follow suit, but this doesn’t resolve the $900 billion of bonds outstanding that were issued under the old rules. like any messy divorce, drawn out negotiations around defaults can be costly for all parties involved. working towards better pre-nuptial terms might not be such a bad idea.
rt @sub8u: 'ownership', only for nostalgia.
us music sales:
albums - down 9%
songs - down 12%
vinyl - up 52%
streaming - up 54%
 music downloads plummet in u.s., but sales of vinyl records and streaming surgepaid downloads of albums and songs fell in u.s. in 2014, according to nielsen soundscansales of downloaded albums and songs plummeted in the u.s. in 2014, according to nielsen soundscan, offset by rises in vinyl-record sales and streaming services, such as spotify ab and google inc.’s youtube.paid downloads of albums and songs declined 9% and 12% respectively, the company said. american consumers bought 257 million albums in...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 1 of 7. students block a street as they clash with national guards during a protest against the government in san cristobal january 14, 2015.san cristobal (reuters) - masked youths are once again blocking streets and burning tires in the venezuelan city of san cristobal, the epicenter of last year's massive anti-government protests.the groups are small and the unrest contained, but dissent is rising in this volatile andean city, a barometer of frustration with nationwide shortages that are putting pressure on the socialist government of nicolas maduro.students, who also accuse the government of corruption and repression but whom maduro labels "coupsters," are threatening to unleash larger demonstrations again."it's time," deiby jaimes, 21, said from behind a barricade of burning trash as police gazed down from their hilltop perch. "there's a social, economic and political crisis. economically we're completely lost and in a delirium."but jaimes and other students said they were restraining themselves to see if other venezuelans also take to the streets.last year's protests split the opposition and failed to attract widespread support from venezuela's poor, meaning mainstream anti-government leaders like henrique capriles are calling for less radical tactics including peaceful rallies and a good showing at an upcoming parliamentary vote."people are scared," said jaimes, an accounting student, as dozens around him knocked rocks together menacingly. "but fear is disappearing due to shortages. we're expecting a social explosion."high demand and a christmas lull in distribution have aggravated shortages across the nation of 30 million people. queues sometimes snake around entire blocks, prompting isolated scuffles for coveted milk or diapers.although there has been scattered violence around the opec nation, many eyes are once again on the opposition hotbed of san cristobal, where clusters of demonstrators have been facing off with security forces since the new year.it was here that the attempted rape of a student last year prompted protests that spread into a wave of national demonstrations.major general efrain velasco lugo, who is in charge of security for the western andean region, called the protesters misguided delinquents. "they want to torch the city again."their motto, he added, can be boiled down to "because i think differently to you, i'm going to topple you."indeed, maduro says right-wing foes, encouraged by the united states and compliant foreign media, are plotting an "economic coup" to topple his socialist government. protesters retort they are decrying flawed policies, like currency controls that have crimped imports and led to shortages.army officials said on thursday 18 protesters had been arrested in san cristobal, capital of tachira state, in the last 10 days, with six currently behind bars.rights group penal forum said 56 demonstrators were arrested nationally this year, with most now released.a national guard shot a protester in the chest on thursday night during clashes in san cristobal, a student leader said. reuters could not immediately verify the information.the situation remains a far cry from unrest between february and may that left 43 dead and hundreds injured during the biggest disturbances in more than a decade. victims included demonstrators, government supporters and security officials.still, the mood is increasingly combative in san cristobal, traditionally known as the "cordial city," as life becomes a series of queues.taxi driver luis perez wakes up around 5 a.m. to wait in line for gasoline."we produce so much oil, and look how we're suffering," he said as he finally filled up his creaking blue 1982 chevrolet."we need a change of government," he added before paying less than 2 cents a liter for the world's cheapest gasoline.roughly 15 percent of fuel in tachira is smuggled out of the state, estimates nellyver lugo, a ruling party state legislator who heads a commission on gasoline. lack of spare parts for trucks and tricky contract negotiations reduced supplies this year, she added.up to 25 percent of food is smuggled out for sale at a hefty profit in colombia, the army says, citing discoveries of subsidized flour stashed in tires or rice in engines.even once-fervent "chavistas" are becoming skeptical as inflation and shortages threaten anti-poverty advances under the late hugo chavez's 1999-2013 rule."there was a lot of hope, but things didn't pan out the way we wanted," ronald, a government employee who would not give his last name, said as he stood in line clutching scarce toilet paper. "now we're paying the price. i hope they implement changes."but maduro, whose approval levels have steadily eroded since his 2013 election, has so far balked at implementing pressing but unpopular measures such as raising gasoline prices or unifying a baffling three-tiered currency control system.sinking oil prices have compounded venezuela's cash crunch, prompting fears that the nation may have to default. an impending national parliamentary election has raised the stakes further.with maduro out of the country for the last 10 days on an apparently unsuccessful trip to lobby for an oil supply cut, venezuela's perennially fragmented opposition is scrambling to unite and call for peaceful protests."the government is weaker," 24-year-old student leader reinaldo manrique said, standing next to a charred bus near the university of the andes.
 
 google may soon extend fiber, its optical fiber-based crazy-fast broadband service, which as of now is limited to a few cities in the united states to india. the search giant has been in talks with the it ministry in the country to bring its internet service as part of the ongoing digital india program, hindu business line reports .first showcased in 2012, google fiber is one of the fastest commercial internet and tv service. it offers 1000mbps (1gbps) download and upload speeds, which is more than 500 times faster than the average internet connection speeds in india. as per akamai’s report from earlier this year, the average internet speeds in india is 1.7mbps.but how soon can we expect the fiber in the country? the top officials in the it ministry said that the discussions are still at an initial stage. “we are keen to partner a company like google in furthering the digital india plan. modalities have to be worked out.”a google spokesperson only said that the company continuously engages with the centre on various programs, but didn’t confirm any plans or developments regarding the fiber project.one of the major hurdles google will have to overcome to bring fiber in india is licenses. in india, any isp who wishes to provide broadband services needs to get licenses which are auctioned. prices for these licenses can often shoot up during such auctions. another alternative is google could also partner existing isps like bsnl to start its services.competition is good for consumers as it often pushes the companies to bring down the prices and offer better services. but if google does manage to bring the fiber connection in india, it will be interesting to see how other telecom operators, who are still struggling to get 3g and 4g connections at most places compete with the search giant. telecom operators are already whining over their dwindling revenue on texts, and the largest carrier in the country has even started charging extra for voip services.the wired connection also ensures that google won’t have to fight with telecom operators over spectrum distribution. but existing broadband providers may find themselves at odds with the arrival of fiber in the country.in the united states, google also offers tv services wherein it offers a handful of channels including hbo, mtv, and nickelodeon among others for an additional charge. will google partner with indian tv networks? over the past few months, several indian tv networks have started offering their shows live on youtube, as well as on their own websites. but it failed to get the traction it deserves as a large fraction of subscribers don’t have the required connectivity speeds. adding to the misery is the present tariff rates, which makes it unfeasible for most users to watch tv using the internet. but this could eventually change when the broadband landscape improves in the country.
 pedestrians walk past buildings at night in the central business district of beijing. expansion in china’s economy will slow to 7 percent this year from an estimated 7.4 percent in 2014, according to analysts surveyed by bloomberg. closepedestrians walk past buildings at night in the central business district of beijing.... read morepedestrians walk past buildings at night in the central business district of beijing. expansion in china’s economy will slow to 7 percent this year from an estimated 7.4 percent in 2014, according to analysts surveyed by bloomberg.china local debt market reform may take a decade: shenchina ’s local government bond issuers face judgment day as authorities in the world’s second-largest economy decide which debt they will or won’t support.borrowing costs soared by a record amount last month before today’s deadline for classifying liabilities, on speculation some local government financing vehicles will lose government support after the finance ministry starts reviewing regional authorities’ debt reports. yield premiums on one-year aa notes, the most common ranking for such issuers, jumped a record 98 basis points in december.premier li keqiang has stepped up curbs on local borrowings just as lgfvs prepare to repay 558.7 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) of bonds this year amid economic growth that’s set for the slowest pace in more than two decades. the yield on the 2018 notes of xinjiang shihezi development zone economic construction co., a financing arm in a northwestern city with 620,000 people, climbed a record 63 basis points in december.“lgfv bonds that don’t get classified as local government debt will lose government guarantees and their credit risks will be re-priced,” said huo zhihui, an analyst at china credit rating co. in beijing. “those that get counted as local government debt will get definitive government support.”china’s provinces must submit their reports classifying all local borrowings within their borders including those of lgfvs as either government debt or not by today, according to a finance ministry statement in october. the announcement didn’t specify further steps after the reports.the market expectation is that the central government may release aggregate local debt figures, said zhang li, a bond analyst in beijing at guotai junan securities co., the nation’s third-biggest brokerage. there may not be any announcements on particular lgfv debt classifications, he said.local-government debt swelled to 17.9 trillion yuan as of june 2013, compared with 10.7 trillion yuan at the end of 2010, according to data compiled by the national audit office.china is encouraging cities to raise funds for sewage, road and housing through more transparent means including a trial municipal bond market, reducing reliance on more opaque debt. local authorities set up thousands of funding units after a 1994 budget law barred them from issuing notes directly. the muni program is positive for regional and local security markets, according to a report from moody’s investors service dec. 31.some lgfvs have canceled offerings in the past month, highlighting the impact of the shift. changzhou tianning construction development co. in the eastern province of jiangsu said on dec. 12 it wouldn’t go ahead with a 1.2 billion yuan planned offering after city authorities withdrew backing for the debt. on dec. 17, urumqi state-owned asset investment co. in the northwestern province of xinjiang halted a 1 billion yuan sale after the local government revoked support.expansion in china’s economy will slow to 7 percent this year from an estimated 7.4 percent in 2014, according to analysts surveyed by bloomberg. the yuan weakened 2.4 percent against the dollar last year, and the yield on benchmark 10-year sovereign notes dropped 93 basis points to 3.62 percent .“lgfvs are facing a tough financing environment because the government is cutting reliance on them,” said china credit rating’s huo. “we can’t exclude the possibility there may be bond defaults by some lower-level governments’ lgfvs or some from regions that have difficulty raising money.”primary market prices have shown investor aversion to securities from lgfvs in smaller jurisdictions and preference for notes from the highest-level administrative units including provinces and autonomous regions. shandong boxing county xinda construction investment development co., a aa+ rated county-level lgfv, sold 1 billion yuan of seven-year bonds at 8 percent on dec. 19. jilin provincial group co., a similarly rated provincial lgfv, issued 2 billion yuan of bonds at the lower rate of 5.95 percent on dec. 25.“lower-level government bonds will carry more credit risks after lgfvs lose implicit guarantees,” said qiu xinhong, a money manager in shenzhen at first state cinda fund management co., which oversees 5 billion yuan of assets. “we will shun bonds issued by city or county-level local government financing vehicles.”local government financing vehicles sold 288.83 billion yuan of notes in the fourth quarter, the least in 2014, according to data compiled by bloomberg.“differentiation between the bonds of provincial lgfvs and city or county-level lgfvs will widen,” said guotai junan’s zhang. “lower-level governments, cities or counties may find it very difficult to raise money.”liabilities in china’s counties soared 77 percent from december 2010, outpacing the 62 percent increase for provinces, according to audit bureau data.nomura holdings inc. estimated total local government borrowings may have amounted to 24 trillion yuan at the end of 2013, accounting for 40 percent of china’s economy.“the government will impose stricter controls on new local government borrowings,” said hua changchun, a china economist at nomura holdings inc. in hong kong . “some small lgfvs may default on their borrowings this year.”to contact bloomberg news staff for this story: judy chen in shanghai at xchen45@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: sandy hendry at shendry@bloomberg.net ; katrina nicholas at knicholas2@bloomberg.net andrew monahanpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 i know a brilliant young kid who graduated from college a year ago and now works at a large investment bank. he has decided he hates wall street and wants to work at a tech startup (good!). he recently gave notice to his bosses, who responded by putting on a dog and pony show to convince him to stay. if he stays at the bank, the bosses tell him, he’ll get a raise and greater responsibility. joining the technology industry, he’d be starting from scratch. he is now thinking that he’ll stay, despite his convincing declaration that he has no long term ambitions in finance.over the years, i’ve run into many prospective employees in similar situations. when i ask them a very obvious question: “what do you want to be doing in 10 years?” the answer is invariably “working at or founding a tech startup” — yet most of them decide to remain on their present path and not join a startup. then, a few years later, they finally quit their job, but only after having spent years in an industry they didn’t enjoy, and that didn’t really advance them toward their long term ambitions.how can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions? i think a good analogy for the mistake they are making can be found in computer science.a classic problem in computer science is hill climbing . imagine you are dropped at a random spot on a hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction due to fog. the goal is to get to the highest hill.consider the simplest algorithm. at any given moment, take a step in the direction that takes you higher. the risk with this method is if you happen to start near the lower hill, you’ll end up at the top of that lower hill, not the top of the tallest hill.a more sophisticated version of this algorithm adds some randomness into your walk. you start out with lots of randomness and reduce the amount of randomness over time. this gives you a better chance of meandering near the bigger hill before you start your focused, non-random climb.another and generally better algorithm has you repeatedly drop yourself in random parts of the terrain, do simple hill climbing, and then after many such attempts step back and decide which of the hills were highest.going back to the job candidate, he has the benefit of having a less foggy view of his terrain. he knows (or at least believes) he wants to end up at the top of a different hill than he is presently climbing. he can see that higher hill from where he stands.but the lure of the current hill is strong. there is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one. he ends up falling for a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists: people tend to systematically overvalue near-term over long-term rewards. this effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.people early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.
 from right, new york city mayor bill de blasio and police commissioner bill bratton smile in conversation during a new york police academy graduation ceremony, monday dec. 29, 2014.in response to growing tensions between the new york police department and the city, police unions encouraged officers last week to not make arrests “unless absolutely necessary,” resulting in a 66 percent drop from the same period last year. while the protests have drawn scrutiny for “squandering the department’s credibility” and leaving the city’s streets virtually unattended , they have also had the unintended effect of benefitting new york’s low income residents who are usually the target of the city’s tough-on-crime practices.the work stoppage is a result of outrage by police officers — led by union chief patrick lynch — over how mayor bill de blasio responded to a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed eric garner, an unarmed african american man. the brutal murders of two new york city officers by a troubled man from maryland in an apparent retaliation for the garner killing has only inflamed tensions, leading lynch to blame de blasio for the killing and scores of police officers to engage in protest actions against the mayor.the signs of tension first became apparent when some police officers turned their backs to de blasio when he spoke in the hospital following the assassinations and then engaged in a mass back-turning when the mayor spoke at the funeral of officer rafael ramos. last week, the police went a step further and stopped arresting new yorkers for small crimes or ticketing people for minor offenses like parking violations, carrying open containers of alcohol or public urination.as a result of what the new york post is calling a “virtual work stoppage,” tickets and summonses for minor offenses have plummeted by 94 percent and overall arrests have fallen 66 percent. theoretically, the practice will strain police budgets, which rely on fines from tickets to make-up for funding shortfalls.although it’s not the intended goal of the work stoppage, the decline in arrests could save new yorkers money. the city residents who are normally hit with tickets for minor violations tend to be low income individuals who are forced to pay up a hefty portion of their paychecks.the city began following the broken-windows style of policing in the early 1980s, a strategy championed by nypd commissioner bill bratton which focuses on eliminating low-level crime to prevent more violent offenses in the city’s neighborhoods. but a report earlier this year by the john jay college of criminal justice in manhattan found that the nypd’s practice of arresting more people for minor offenses since 1980 has disproportionately affected young black and latino men.while de blasio and bratton have followed through on their promise to reform the city’s stop and frisk practices and the mayor announced in november that police would stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possessions, there are still racial biases in police practices throughout the city that result in a tougher financial burden on those already struggling to make ends meet.and new yorkers of all income levels are also saving money on one of the most consistent ways the city can slam people with tickets— parking violations are down by 92 percent, from 14,699 to just 1,241 this year.nypd officers have long spoken about quotas which require them to issue a certain number of summons per month to maintain statistics showing a reduction of crime in the city’s neighborhoods. although bratton promised an end to arrest quotas when he took office in january, the city’s police are still operating under a quota system which is illegal under state law , according to a recent report by the police reform organizing project. the group called on bratton and de blasio to end the quota system in its october report, which described how police are still using the quota system, as evidenced by the number of misdemeanor arrests and the poor quality of those arrests under bratton.
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 it also might cut back on the amount of overtime that the city pays to cops.and if overtime is affected, i would guess that this will be a very temporary job action.i’ve heard and understand the arguments from some libertarian friends that most of the ticketing was bad news and new yorkers are better off without it. but the question is a different one, whether the officers should be turning on or off the ticket flow against the orders of their civilian supervisors for perceived advantage. whatever the right level of ticket-writing, it should not be a question we delegate to pba president patrick lynch and friends, for use as leverage against the city’s taxpayers and voters.parking tickets (as distinct from towing fees if inflated) are much less resented as a revenue source than moving violations.  they are moderate (perhaps twice the amount of a commercial parking garage, no court fees, and no insurance surcharges), predictable, and do not involve a potentially dangerous interaction with a cop.  iirc, boston ma gets about 25% of its revenue from parking tickets.by including a mention of governor coolidge breaking the boston police strike in a paragraph about republican sympathies for the police, you’re implying that he acted against a republican interest group.  this, of course, is completely wrong as the boston police of 1919 were overwhelmingly democratic, as would be expected from an irish catholic dominated group at that time.no such implication was intended. coolidge is one of the 20th century presidents most admired by committed republicans, so the episode serves to remind us that a strong stand on this issue was historically popular within the gop during one of its times of greatest national ascendancy, as opposed to more recently.it is a shame that police union rhetoric  suggests that a mayor has an obligation to defend his police officers like a defense attorney. the mayor’s obligation is to defend the rule of law. i mentioned early on the mr. garner’s ability to say “i can’t breath” 11 times proves that air was getting into his lungs to be expelled over his vocal chords. but the decisive observation for me was that the ambulance crew did not give mr. garner cpr. thus the police officer did not chock mr. garner to death as was asserted by many protesters and cnn pundits. the video of mr. garner’s arrest shows a very efficient take down of a very large man who was resisting arrest. mr. garner received no baton blows a la rodney king. the mayor had an obligation to speak against mob rule and tribalism. he failed miserably! commissioner bratton talked sense in this matter.i wish that the grand jury session  transcripts were publicized.put yourself in a pre rule of law community in africa or iraq. if an opposing community gets hold of you you are in trouble. i believe that inherent fear leads to blacks resisting cuffing at arrest and makes black parents have that talk with their sons about surviving an encounter with police. for the mayor of new york to go along with this tribalism is shameful. same way with our president and ag.the rule of law is a great improvement over tribalism – think iraq, think pogrom. but as is proven in this blog, rule of law is fragile and has taken a beating recently.i hope and pray that you never get in a situation where you cannot get enough air and feel as if you are suffocating.  those who suffer from asthma can still talk and are in danger.  people who suffer heart attacks can talk but are in danger because of a lack of air.  furthermore, why would the emt’s perform cpr as garner’s heart had not stopped beating?the officer may not have been guilty of a crime in his use of a hold that was banned by the nypd, but he should lose his job over it.  that is above and beyond the question of why garner had to be taken to the ground to begin with.i agree with you that both “sides” have behaved as if there is only one resolution – that of vindication for their point of view.  the fact of the matter is that there are too many officers that are out of control and power hungry.  at the same time, there are too many wanna be lawyers and agitators who aren’t interested in making the situation better, but seeking only to ramp up the tension because they want to be on youtube or whatever.if the police are saying “we aren’t going to issue parking tickets,” they are acting like petulant children.  they are being no better than the petulant children who block a road or store and scream when the police try to move them.we seem to be living in a nation of whiners and perpetual victims all armed with lawyers.god. there’s nothing to see here. police unions with the power of the purse punish political opponents. the headline writes itself. the startling thing is that actual grownups let this happen. and further, now they’re complaining about it.my understanding is that arrestees complain a lot while being cuffed or subdued, but i will take that mr. garner was under rel duress. that does not overcome the fact that the ambulance crew did not provide cpr, and that says absolutely that the officer did not chock mr. garner to death. by cpr i mean any procedure to induce normal breathing.the new york city police department was concerned enough about excess deaths that a particularly bright young man was assigned to figuring out some way to get the death rate down. that young man became a professor and testified at the amadou diallo trial. he wrote the book on how to police. while the homicide rate for new york city dropped from 2,500 a year under david dikins to about 500 under rudy giuliani, police killings dropped even more percentage wise. so any suggestion that the new york city police department is fascistic is calumny.as to some officers being too aggressive is probably so. but the best that can be done is to minimize such officers. the civilian review board and other mechanisms are in place. commissioner bratton tells the truth that the new york city police department is terrific. in my opinion, the protests against police is simple minded tribalism, equivalent to the acquittal of oj simpson.i am trying to follow your thinking on the cpr and the emt’s actions.  the police call the emts which would seem to me that they realized that garner was in distress.  so which is it?  was garner in distress and in need of medical attention?  or was he not?secondly, the idea that there was not a choke hold used is contrary to the video as well as the coroner’s report which said the choke hold and the compression of garner’s chest exacerbated other medical conditions.there was a choke hold used on garner which was against nypd policy.  i have read that this was the second time this officer had used the hold against policy.  please explain why he is still employed because i cannot figure it out.  if someone in my company does something wrong, gets reprimanded for it and does it again, they no longer have a job.  that is on regular actions – not actions like the officer’s who are going to cost the city of new york and taxpayers millions of dollars.citizen review boards are despised by the police and police unions.  as we speak a couple hours south of new york, the city of baltimore is dealing with a fight between the mayor and city council who want to increase the influence of the citizen review board and the police department / police union who wants the crb abolished.  as it stands right now, the crb cannot demand officers appear before it, can only make recommendations and is a toothless paper tiger.even ny city’s ccrb has massive problems with accountability when officers are found to have violated policy or committed what may be considered a crime.  for more on this, please read: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/30/nypd-accountability_n_5630665.htmlwhile you may be correct in saying the protests against police are nothing but tribalism, what about the protests by the police?  what about their attitude to not enforce the law as the original post indicates?  isn’t that tribalism as well?the real problem is that it is always the “other guy” who is wrong and needs to change.  police say that the protesters, the mayor and citizens are wrong.  citizens say the police are wrong.  the reality is more in the middle where there are bod cops and bad citizens.what we have to do is come up with a better way of getting rid of bad / rogue cops and support those who are good in their daily interactions with people.  we have to support people who are harassed by the police for simply not bowing down to the cops and at the same time, tell criminals to get out of communities and have the police arrest them.the sad part is that incidents have led to the point where police no longer trust citizens in their communities and citizens no longer trust the police carte’ blanche.has anyone verified these statistics that show a “virtual work stoppage”? i’m just curious. the new york post reported it but didn’t substantiate it, and i don’t mean to concern troll here but i haven’t seen any verification of these supposed drops in tickets, arrests, etc. outside the post. maybe i missed something.yes, the police take down occurred before mr. garner ran into medical problems. but we must beware the post hoc ergo propter hoc error. there is no reason to believe that the very quick take down of mr. garner was fatal in itself. chock holds used to be used as a matter of course for many years. almost every person subjected to that technique was ok. the hold was discouraged because there were occasional deaths. but the “chock hold” was a non material part of the arrest. because the grand jury procedure is under seal and local media have no interest in questioning the mob, we do not know about the fight involving mr. garner. couldn’t the excitement from the fight have contributed to his resistance to arrest?there is some tribalism among those who hold that the mayor has to defend one of  their own no matter what. but the mayor did the exact opposite when he too readily went along with the mob’s tribalism.my tribalism theory explains the strange talk every black parent has with his son. the talk does not stress good citizenship, but stresses instead the problem of being captured by a foreign tribe. that talk would be appropriate if isis was the opposing tribe.  the new york city police department is not isis.eric garner´s death was ruled a homicide  by the medical examiner.pantaleo was and is a loose cannon who should have been assigned to the rubber gun squad pending the outcome of investigation.you are free to create whatever fiction you want to justify the actions of the police in the garner death.  the fact of the matter is the medical examiner concluded the choke hold and the compression of garner’s chest led directly to medical complications which caused garner’s death.  the death itself was labeled a homicide, which is defined as “death at the hands of another.”we cannot know whether the choke hold alone led the to death of garner or whether the chest compressions alone led to the death of garner.  we do know the two combined led to his death.  the choke hold and the compression of the chest were actions done by the nypd.  the choke hold was against policy because of the exact reason you gave – it lead to the deaths of others.yet pantaleo (who used the hold) is still on the job.  why is that?  how can that possibly be justified?it is ludicrous that you only see “some tribalism” in those who defend the police at all costs but see tribalism in those who want the police held accountable for their actions.    an example of that “tribalism” you seem to support is here:the new york times notes that, from 2009 to 2013, the citizen complaint review board (an independent agency tasked with investigating the behavior of nypd officers) has received 1,022 chokehold claims. of those, only nine resulted in administrative trials. former nypd chief ray kelly declined to discipline the cops involved in eight out of those nine cases. the punishment of the last officer was the loss of some vacation days.it is clear that the police in some cases see themselves as being above the law.  when police violate their own policies without repercussions, how can the average citizen have any confidence in them?  why shouldn’t a parent have a talk with their child that in essence says “be careful when the police approach you because they are not only above the law, they are above their own policies?”how bad is the “protection” the police demand and receive?  in my little town, it is against city council policies to speak out against the police in a public city council meeting.  you can make comments about your neighbors, services, the beach, etc, but you cannot say anything negative about the police.  if you do, you will be removed from the meeting – by a police officer of course.you are correct that the police are not isis and no one ever claimed they were.  such an argument is a red herring.your claim of “tribalism” may be true, but you seem to dismiss what happened in the garner case and others.  while you are condemning the “tribalism” in others, you are failing to see that the police themselves have contributed to this fiasco, and continue to contribute to it.   in short, the police are adding to the “tribalism,” not addressing it.southern beale — the ny post is not alone in its reporting. here is a jan. 6 new york times story saying that “parking and traffic tickets…dropped by more than 90 percent.”
 at california's san quentin prison, inmates who never even used a computer before are learning software development and planning their apps.like everyone else in the san francisco bay area, jason jones has an idea for a new app. called "in touch," the app would automatically upload information about a student's schoolwork, so that busy parents can make sure that their kids aren't flunking. jones has a personal stake in this. he has three kids himself, and says his parents never cared whether he paid attention at school. "as a result, i was able to cheat my way through high school and college," he explains.jones is going through a coding bootcamp, so he will soon have the skills necessary to start working on his app. but the 31-year-old has never actually used a smartphone, and his internet experience is limited to casual web browsing. he's an inmate at california's san quentin state prison—incarcerated since 2006 for assault—who is participating in code 7370, a six-month intensive computer programming class developed by the last mile , a nonprofit program that offers entrepreneurship training for prisoners.once jones and his fellow students graduate, they'll have the opportunity to take real projects from clients. that way, when they're released from prison, they'll already have portfolios. theoretically, they should be able to get work that pays in the six figure range.i recently visited san quentin to see the code 7370 initiative in action. walking through the gates of the prison, my first thought was that the landscaping of san quentin made it look more like a slightly down-on-its-luck college campus than a place housing death row. my visit to the code 7370 classroom—a formerly decrepit space that was once used as a printing shop—reinforced that initial impression. the well-lit space is filled with refurbished computers that were previously used by state employees.inside the classroom, a group of 18 san quentin inmates, culled from an applicant pool of 100 people, are learning javascript, css, and html for eight hours a day, four times a week. three instructors from hack reactor, a coding bootcamp in san francisco, donate their time virtually and in-person two days a week, from 6:30 am to 2:30 pm. the rest of the time, inmates get to practice their new-found programing skills under the watchful eye of jonathan gripshover of the california prison industry authority (calpia), which partnered with the last mile to develop the program.as the only one in the room with an internet connection, gripshover is the designated keeper of google—whenever inmates have a coding question that can't be answered offhand or through an on-site intranet, he looks it up. prisoners aren't allowed to use the internet, so the code 7370 students do their work in a custom off-line coding environment.on the day i visited, students were programming a tic tac toe game. marcus phillips, the cto and head of instruction at hack reactor, taught the inmates via a google hangout that was projected onto a screen in front of the class. two volunteers from hack reactor, including cofounder shawn drost , were in the room to provide personalized instruction. the students were one month through the course, which is modeled after a hack reactor bootcamp (three months of that bootcamp in the outside world costs upwards of $17,000).when students normally enter a hack reactor program, they have some coding experience. not so at san quentin, where at least six men in the coding class had never even used a computer before the program began. that meant that the hack reactor volunteers had to alter the pacing of the bootcamp, starting it out with lessons on how to operate a computer. but by the time i visited, the students were already going beyond my rudimentary coding abilities.it would have been easy enough for all three hack reactor volunteers to show up in person, but chris redlitz and beverly parenti, the creators of the last mile program, see this first class of 18 students as a pilot version of what could be done elsewhere, in more rural prisons where coding bootcamp instructors aren't so easy to come by. in those locations, all instruction could be done through google hangouts.code 7370 is a natural outgrowth of the last mile, which has been running for four years under redlitz and parenti's leadership. in the original program, inmates go through a six-month entrepreneurship program and emerge with a business plan, though they can only start a business once they leave prison. some graduates, including tulio cardozo, who we profiled here , land promising jobs in the tech industry.a handful of last mile graduates are also in the code 7370 class. damon cooke, a well-spoken inmate who has been locked up 24 years for attempted murder, is one of them. a former financial advisor, cooke is up for parole in six weeks. "i had an anger problem, but i've done a lot of anger management. i'm better now," he says.his last mile startup idea, active alternatives, is for a better quality adult daycare experience—one where people could drop off their parents and keep an eye on them through video conferencing and live video feeds to make sure they aren't being mistreated by staff. he's hoping that his programming skills will help him start his business when he's released for prison. damon says that he's already pitched his ideas to a large california adult daycare network, and they've been receptive."everyone speaks about the [computer programmer] salary. it's not about that for me," he says. "i want to create my dreams and give back to help those who are less fortunate."jerome boone, another last mile graduate, just wants a good job that he enjoys. boone has been in prison since 2006 and has 3.5 years left on his sentence for possessing drugs for sale. before incarceration, he was a certified nurse's assistant, but says that programming is the first position he's had where he can stay engaged all day. "i want to be a junior developer," says the father of three. "my oldest son thinks it's real cool. my kids are just happy that i'm happy."code 7370 is the first software engineering program in a prison, but it's certainly not the first attempt to teach inmates job skills. calpia, the state-run agency that helped start the program, trains 8,000 inmates throughout the state in manufacturing, agricultural, and service positions. a look at the calpia website reveals the varied products that inmates help produce, including flags, license plates, and gloves. they also provide services, including commercial laundry and e-waste recycling. according to the agency, calpia participants have a recidivism rate that's 26% to 38% lower than offenders from the general prison population.calpia's products and services can only be bought by other state agencies, with one exception: the joint venture program (jvp) . implemented in 1990, the calpia program allows private businesses to hire inmates, who are paid a "fair wage," as determined by the agency. deductions are taken out for everything from victim compensation to room and board.prison labor programs often only go so far in helping prisoners gain work on the outside. "a lot of the skills that are provided by prison labor programs are ones that are unlikely to contribute to a job upon release in the united states," says carl takei, staff attorney at the aclu’s national prison project. "they in some cases would provide useful job skills if the inmates were going to work at a sweatshop in bangladesh."once the first class of code 7370 students graduate, the last mile will set up an in-house web development firm in the prison, where private companies will hire the inmates through the jvp at a cost of what they'd pay for the same services in the outside world (about $30 to $70 an hour).  after deductions are taken out, the prisoners will have 20% of their paychecks placed into their personal accounts. another 20% will be available upon parole.the firm will be different from many prison labor programs, because it could provide inmates a real pathway to white-collar work. while they're in prison, though, the inmates are still being paid less than the going rate. and as takei notes, prison commissaries charge more for goods than shops in the outside world, because profits are split between the commissary company and the prison itself. that means the wages inmates receive don't go as far as they would elsewhere."on the other hand, if this program does provide real useful job skills that would create job opportunities when they’re released back into the community, that is beneficial," he says.exactly who will hire the inmates to do software engineering work while they're still in prison, however, is unclear. when asked this question, drost demurred. his only response: "good question."there are other hurdles, too. some of the inmates in the program have been incarcerated so long that they have completely missed the technology advances that have defined recent decades. when cooke was locked up, people still used dial-up modems to access bulletin board systems. aol did not yet exist. nonetheless, program organizers said that they expect the students will be able to make the six-figure salaries that are commonplace among software engineers when they get out.when code 7370 graduates are released from prison, they will once again have to deal with the question of who will hire. businesses are often wary of hiring former inmates, and in most states, it's legal to discriminate against people with a felony record.but there are initiatives throughout the country that could help the graduates. in the grand rapids, michigan, area, for example, cascade engineering is leading the 30-2-2 initiative, which is working with 30 local organizations that will each hire two people with criminal background and track them for two years.plus, the code 7370 graduates have the benefit of possessing job skills that are ideal for remote work. according to takei, former felons are not usually required to disclose their criminal history for freelance jobs if they aren't asked.no matter whether they get jobs immediately upon release, the code 7370 program is giving inmates something that they didn't necessarily have before: hope for the future. "i get these a-ha moments where a concept or certain element of what we're learning makes sense," says aly tamboura, who has 23 months of his 14-year prison sentence left to go. "when i get out, i'll have a marketable skill."
 the mouse was conceived by the computer scientist douglas engelbart, developed by xerox parc, and made marketable by apple. credit paul rogers. he was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in cupertino. his name was steve jobs.was the innovation arm of the xerox corporation. it was, and remains, on coyote hill road, in palo alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of silicon valley. to the northwest was stanford university’s hoover tower. to the north was hewlett-packard’s sprawling campus. all around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. a visitor to, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. in 1970, xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. if you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with xerox—which was why the young steve jobs had driven to coyote hill road.apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. everyone in the valley wanted a piece of it. so jobs proposed a deal: he would allow xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated i.p.o. was just a year away—ifwould “open its kimono.” a lot of haggling ensued. jobs was the fox, after all, andwas the henhouse. what would he be allowed to see? what wouldn’t he be allowed to see? some atthought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, xerox went ahead with it. onescientist recalls jobs as “rambunctious”—a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. he was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a xerox alto,an engineer named larry tesler conducted the demonstration. he moved the cursor across the screen with the aid of a “mouse.” directing a conventional computer, in those days, meant typing in a command on the keyboard. tesler just clicked on one of the icons on the screen. he opened and closed “windows,” deftly moving from one task to another. he wrote on an elegant word-processing program, and exchanged e-mails with other people at, on the world’s first ethernet network. jobs had come with one of his software engineers, bill atkinson, and atkinson moved in as close as he could, his nose almost touching the screen. “jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time,” tesler recalled. “he was very excited. then, when he began seeing the things i could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, ‘why aren’t you doing anything with this? this is the greatest thing. this is revolutionary!’ ”xerox began selling a successor to the alto in 1981. it was slow and underpowered—and xerox ultimately withdrew from personal computers altogether. jobs, meanwhile, raced back to apple, and demanded that the team working on the company’s next generation of personal computers change course. he wanted menus on the screen. he wanted windows. he wanted a mouse. the result was the macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of silicon valley.“if xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its real opportunities,” jobs said, years later, “it could have been as big as i.b.m. plus microsoft plus xerox combined—and the largest high-technology company in the world.”. jobs is the biblical jacob and xerox is esau, squandering his birthright for a pittance. in the past thirty years, the legend has been vindicated by history. xerox, once the darling of the american high-technology community, slipped from its former dominance. apple is now ascendant, and the demonstration in that room in palo alto has come to symbolize the vision and ruthlessness that separate true innovators from also-rans. as with all legends, however, the truth is a bit more complicated., he met with a man named dean hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known ason a wednesday or a thursday, and i saw him on the friday afternoon,” hovey recalled. “i had a series of ideas that i wanted to bounce off him, and i barely got two words out of my mouth when he said, ‘no, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ i was, like, ‘what’s a mouse?’ i didn’t have a clue. so he explains it, and he says, ‘you know, [the xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. here’s your design spec: our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. it needs to not fail for a couple of years, and i want to be able to use it on formica and my bluejeans.’ from that meeting, i went to walgreens, which is still there, at the corner of grant and el camino in mountain view, and i wandered around and bought all the underarm deodorants that i could find, because they had that ball in them. i bought a butter dish. that was the beginnings of the mouse.”i spoke with hovey in a ramshackle building in downtown palo alto, where his firm had started out. he had asked the current tenant if he could borrow his old office for the morning, just for the fun of telling the story of the apple mouse in the place where it was invented. the room was the size of someone’s bedroom. it looked as if it had last been painted in the coolidge administration. hovey, who is lean and healthy in a northern california yoga-and-yogurt sort of way, sat uncomfortably at a rickety desk in a corner of the room. “our first machine shop was literally out on the roof,” he said, pointing out the window to a little narrow strip of rooftop, covered in green outdoor carpeting. “we didn’t tell the planning commission. we went and got that clear corrugated stuff and put it across the top for a roof. we got out through the window.”he had brought a big plastic bag full of the artifacts of that moment: diagrams scribbled on lined paper, dozens of differently sized plastic mouse shells, a spool of guitar wire, a tiny set of wheels from a toy train set, and the metal lid from a jar of ralph’s preserves. he turned the lid over. it was filled with a waxlike substance, the middle of which had a round indentation, in the shape of a small ball. “it’s epoxy casting resin,” he said. “you pour it, and then i put vaseline on a smooth steel ball, and set it in the resin, and it hardens around it.” he tucked the steel ball underneath the lid and rolled it around the tabletop. “it’s a kind of mouse.”the hard part was that the roller ball needed to be connected to the housing of the mouse, so that it didn’t fall out, and so that it could transmit information about its movements to the cursor on the screen. but if the friction created by those connections was greater than the friction between the tabletop and the roller ball, the mouse would skip. and the more the mouse was used the more dust it would pick up off the tabletop, and the more it would skip. the xeroxmouse was an elaborate affair, with an array of ball bearings supporting the roller ball. but there was too much friction on the top of the ball, and it couldn’t deal with dust and grime.at first, hovey set to work with various arrangements of ball bearings, but nothing quite worked. “this was the ‘aha’ moment,” hovey said, placing his fingers loosely around the sides of the ball, so that they barely touched its surface. “so the ball’s sitting here. and it rolls. i attribute that not to the table but to the oldness of the building. the floor’s not level. so i started playing with it, and that’s when i realized: i want it to roll. i don’t want it to be supported by all kinds of ball bearings. i want to just barely touch it.”the trick was to connect the ball to the rest of the mouse at the two points where there was the least friction—right where his fingertips had been, dead center on either side of the ball. “if it’s right at midpoint, there’s no force causing it to rotate. so it rolls.”hovey estimated their consulting fee at thirty-five dollars an hour; the whole project cost perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. “i originally pitched apple on doing this mostly for royalties, as opposed to a consulting job,” he recalled. “i said, ‘i’m thinking fifty cents apiece,’ because i was thinking that they’d sell fifty thousand, maybe a hundred thousand of them.” he burst out laughing, because of how far off his estimates ended up being. “steve’s pretty savvy. he said no. maybe if i’d asked for a nickel, i would have been fine.”here is the first complicating fact about the jobs visit. in the legend of xerox, jobs stole the personal computer from xerox. but the striking thing about jobs’s instructions to hovey is that he didn’t want to reproduce what he saw at. “you know, there were disputes around the number of buttons—three buttons, two buttons, one-button mouse,” hovey went on. “the mouse at xerox had three buttons. but we came around to the fact that learning to mouse is a feat in and of itself, and to make it as simple as possible, with just one button, was pretty important.”so was what jobs took from xerox the idea of the mouse? not quite, because xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. theresearchers got it from the computer scientist douglas engelbart, at stanford research institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical “animal” back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. his mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. if you lined up engelbart’s mouse, xerox’s mouse, and apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. you would see the evolution of a concept.the same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured jobs’s imagination. xerox’s innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. but when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user’s intention and the computer’s response. jobs’s software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. it emphasized “direct manipulation.” if you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. the apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can—all features that radically simplified the original xeroxthe difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial. it is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what xeroxhad in mind, and something that’s appropriate for a mass audience, which is what apple had in mind.was building a personal computer. apple wanted to build a popular computer.in a recent study, “the culture of military innovation,” the military scholar dima adamsky makes a similar argument about the so-called revolution in military affairs. r.m.a. refers to the way armies have transformed themselves with the tools of the digital age—such as precision-guided missiles, surveillance drones, and real-time command, control, and communications technologies—and adamsky begins with the simple observation that it is impossible to determine who invented r.m.a. the first people to imagine how digital technology would transform warfare were a cadre of senior military intellectuals in the soviet union, during the nineteen-seventies. the first country to come up with these high-tech systems was the united states. and the first country to use them was israel, in its 1982 clash with the syrian air force in lebanon’s bekaa valley, a battle commonly referred to as “the bekaa valley turkey shoot.” israel coördinated all the major innovations of r.m.a. in a manner so devastating that it destroyed nineteen surface-to-air batteries and eighty-seven syrian aircraft while losing only a handful of its own planes.that’s three revolutions, not one, and adamsky’s point is that each of these strands is necessarily distinct, drawing on separate skills and circumstances. the soviets had a strong, centralized military bureaucracy, with a long tradition of theoretical analysis. it made sense that they were the first to understand the military implications of new information systems. but they didn’t do anything with it, because centralized military bureaucracies with strong intellectual traditions aren’t very good at connecting word and deed.the united states, by contrast, has a decentralized, bottom-up entrepreneurial culture, which has historically had a strong orientation toward technological solutions. the military’s close ties to the country’ high-tech community made it unsurprising that the u.s. would be the first to invent precision-guidance and next-generation command-and-control communications. but those assets also meant that soviet-style systemic analysis wasn’t going to be a priority. as for the israelis, their military culture grew out of a background of resource constraint and constant threat. in response, they became brilliantly improvisational and creative. but, as adamsky points out, a military built around urgent, short-term “fire extinguishing” is not going to be distinguished by reflective theory. no one stole the revolution. each party viewed the problem from a different perspective, and carved off a different piece of the puzzle.in the history of the mouse, engelbart was the soviet union. he was the visionary, who saw the mouse before anyone else did. but visionaries are limited by their visions. “engelbart’s self-defined mission was not to produce a product, or even a prototype; it was an open-ended search for knowledge,” michael hiltzik writes, in “dealers of lightning” (1999), his wonderful history of xeroxwas the united states: it was a place where things got made. “xerox created this perfect environment,” recalled bob metcalfe, who worked there through much of the nineteen-seventies, before leaving to found the networking company 3com. “there wasn’t any hierarchy. we built out our own tools. when we needed to publish papers, we built a printer. when we needed to edit the papers, we built a computer. when we needed to connect computers, we figured out how to connect them. we had big budgets. unlike many of our brethren, we didn’t have to teach. we could just research. it was heaven.”but heaven is not a good place to commercialize a product. “we built a computer and it was a beautiful thing,” metcalfe went on. “we developed our computer language, our own display, our own language. it was a gold-plated product. but it cost sixteen thousand dollars, and it needed to cost three thousand dollars.” for an actual product, you need threat and constraint—and the improvisation and creativity necessary to turn a gold-plated three-hundred-dollar mouse into something that works on formica and costs fifteen dollars. apple was israel.xerox couldn’t have been i.b.m. and microsoft combined, in other words. “you can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market,” the tech writer harry mccracken recently wrote. “they’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both.” he was talking about the decision by the networking giant cisco system, this spring, to shut down its flip camera business, at a cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. but he could just as easily have been talking about the xerox of forty years ago, which was one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology the world has ever known. the fair question is whether xerox, through its research arm in palo alto, found a better way to be xerox—and the answer is that it did, although that story doesn’t get told nearly as often.steve jobs visited was an optical engineer named gary starkweather. he is a solid and irrepressibly cheerful man, with large, practical hands and the engineer’s gift of pretending that what is impossibly difficult is actually pretty easy, once you shave off a bit here, and remember some of your high-school calculus, and realize that the thing that you thought should go in left to right should actually go in right to left. once, before the palatial coyote hill road building was constructed, a group that starkweather had to be connected to was moved to another building, across the foothill expressway, half a mile away. there was no way to run a cable under the highway. so starkweather fired a laser through the air between the two buildings, an improvised communications system that meant that, if you were driving down the foothill expressway on a foggy night and happened to look up, you might see a mysterious red beam streaking across the sky. when a motorist drove into the median ditch, “we had to turn it down,” starkweather recalled, with a mischievous smile.lasers were starkweather’s specialty. he started at xerox’s east coast research facility in webster, new york, outside rochester. xerox built machines that scanned a printed page of type using a photographic lens, and then printed a duplicate. starkweather’s idea was to skip the first step—to run a document from a computer directly into a photocopier, by means of a laser, and turn the xerox machine into a printer. it was a radical idea. the printer, since gutenberg, had been limited to the function of re-creation: if you wanted to print a specific image or letter, you had to have a physical character or mark corresponding to that image or letter. what starkweather wanted to do was take the array of bits and bytes, ones and zeros that constitute digital images, and transfer them straight into the guts of a copier. that meant, at least in theory, that he could print anything.“one morning, i woke up and i thought, why don’t we just print something out directly?” starkweather said. “but when i flew that past my boss he thought it was the most brain-dead idea he had ever heard. he basically told me to find something else to do. the feeling was that lasers were too expensive. they didn’t work that well. nobody wants to do this, computers aren’t powerful enough. and i guess, in my naïveté, i kept thinking, he’s just not right—there’s something about this i really like. it got to be a frustrating situation. he and i came to loggerheads over the thing, about late 1969, early 1970. i was running my experiments in the back room behind a black curtain. i played with them when i could. he threatened to lay off my people if i didn’t stop. i was having to make a decision: do i abandon this, or do i try and go up the ladder with it?”then starkweather heard that xerox was opening a research center in palo alto, three thousand miles away from its new york headquarters. he went to a senior vice-president ofxerox, threatening to leave for i.b.m. if he didn’t get a transfer. in january of 1971, his wish was granted, and, within ten months, he had a prototype up and running.starkweather is retired now, and lives in a gated community just north of orlando, florida. when we spoke, he was sitting at a picnic table, inside a screened-in porch in his back yard. behind him, golfers whirred by in carts. he was wearing white chinos and a shiny black short-sleeved shirt, decorated with fluorescent images of vintage hot rods. he had brought out two large plastic bins filled with the artifacts of his research, and he spread the contents on the table: a metal octagonal disk, sketches on lab paper, a black plastic laser housing that served as the innards for one of his printers.“there was still a tremendous amount of opposition from the webster group, who saw no future in computer printing,” he went on. “they said, ‘i.b.m. is doing that. why do we need to do that?’ and so forth. also, there were two or three competing projects, which i guess i have the luxury of calling ridiculous. one group had fifty people and another had twenty. i had two.” starkweather picked up a picture of one of his in-house competitors, something called an “optical carriage printer.” it was the size of one of those modular italian kitchen units that you see advertised in fancy design magazines. “it was an unbelievable device,” he said, with a rueful chuckle. “it had a ten-inch drum, which turned at five thousand r.p.m., like a super washing machine. it had characters printed on its surface. i think they only ever sold ten of them. the problem was that it was spinning so fast that the drum would blow out and the characters would fly off. and there was only this one lady in troy, new york, who knew how to put the characters on so that they would stay.“so we finally decided to have what i called a fly-off. there was a full page of text—where some of them were non-serif characters, helvetica, stuff like that—and then a page of graph paper with grid lines, and pages with pictures and some other complex stuff—and everybody had to print all six pages. well, once we decided on those six pages, i knew i’d won, because i knew there wasn’t anything i couldn’t print. are you kidding? if you can translate it into bits, i can print it. some of these other machines had to go through hoops just to print a curve. a week after the fly-off, they folded those other projects. i was the only game in town.” the project turned into the xerox 9700, the first high-speed, cut-paper laser printer in the world.in one sense, the starkweather story is of a piece with the steve jobs visit. it is an example of the imaginative poverty of xerox management. starkweather had to hide his laser behind a curtain. he had to fight for his transfer to. he had to endure the indignity of the fly-off, and even then xerox management remained skeptical. the founder of, jack goldman, had to bring in a team from rochester for a personal demonstration. after that, starkweather and goldman had an idea for getting the laser printer to market quickly: graft a laser onto a xerox copier called the 7000. the 7000 was an older model, and xerox had lots of 7000s sitting around that had just come off lease. goldman even had a customer ready: the lawrence livermore laboratory was prepared to buy a whole slate of the machines. xerox said no. then starkweather wanted to make what he called a photo-typesetter, which produced camera-ready copy right on your desk. xerox said no. “i wanted to work on higher-performance scanners,” starkweather continued. “in other words, what if we print something other than documents? for example, i made a high-resolution scanner and you could print on glass plates.” he rummaged in one of the boxes on the picnic table and came out with a sheet of glass, roughly six inches square, on which a photograph of a child’s face appeared. the same idea, he said, could have been used to make “masks” for the semiconductor industry—the densely patterned screens used to etch the designs on computer chips. “no one would ever follow through, because xerox said, ‘now you’re in intel’s market, what are you doing that for?’ they just could not seem to see that they were in the information business. this”—he lifted up the plate with the little girl’s face on it—“is a copy. it’s just not a copy of an office document.” but he got nowhere. “xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. unfortunately, creativity wasn’t on a metric.”a few days after that afternoon in his back yard, however, starkweather e-mailed an addendum to his discussion of his experiences at. “despite all the hassles and risks that happened in getting the laser printer going, in retrospect the journey was that much more exciting,” he wrote. “often difficulties are just opportunities in disguise.” perhaps he felt that he had painted too negative a picture of his time at xerox, or suffered a pang of guilt about what it must have been like to be one of those xerox executives on the other side of the table. the truth is that starkweather was a difficult employee. it went hand in hand with what made him such an extraordinary innovator. when his boss told him to quit working on lasers, he continued in secret. he was disruptive and stubborn and independent-minded—and he had a thousand ideas, and sorting out the good ideas from the bad wasn’t always easy. should xerox have put out a special order of laser printers for lawrence livermore, based on the old 7000 copier? in “fumbling the future: how xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer” (1988)—a book dedicated to the idea that xerox was run by the blind—douglas smith and robert alexander admit that the proposal was hopelessly impractical: “the scanty livermore proposal could not justify the investment required to start a laser printing business. . . . how and where would xerox manufacture the laser printers? who would sell and service them? who would buy them and why?” starkweather, and his compatriots at xerox, weren’t the source of disciplined strategic insights. they were wild geysers of creative energy.the psychologist dean simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. the difference between bach and his forgotten peers isn’t necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. the difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. a genius is a genius, simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. “quality,” simonton writes, is “a probabilistic function of quantity.”simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. “the more successes there are,” he says, “the more failures there are as well”—meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. this is why managing the creative process is so difficult. the making of the classic rolling stones album “exile on main street” was an ordeal, keith richards writes in his new memoir, because the band had too many ideas. it had to fight from under an avalanche of mediocrity: “head in the toilet blues,” “leather jackets,” “windmill,” “i was just a country boy,” “bent green needles,” “labour pains,” and “pommes de terre”—the last of which richards explains with the apologetic, “well, we were in france at the time.”i watched mick write the lyrics. . . . he wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. i’d never seen anything like it. he had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. it was amazing.richards goes on to marvel, “it’s unbelievable how prolific he was.” then he writes, “sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. the odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you’re crowding the airwaves, boy.” richards clearly saw himself as the creative steward of the rolling stones (only in a rock-and-roll band, by the way, can someone like keith richards perceive himself as the responsible one), and he came to understand that one of the hardest and most crucial parts of his job was to “turn the fucking tap off,” to rein in mick jagger’s incredible creative energy.the more starkweather talked, the more apparent it became that his entire career had been a version of this problem. someone was always trying to turn his tap off. but someone had to turn his tap off: the interests of the innovator aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporation. starkweather saw ideas on their own merits. xerox was a multinational corporation, with shareholders, a huge sales force, and a vast corporate customer base, and it needed to consider every new idea within the context of what it already had.xerox’s managers didn’t always make the right decisions when they said no to starkweather. but he got to—a place where, a continent away from the top managers, an engineer could sit and dream, and get every purchase order approved, and fire a laser across the foothill expressway if he was so inclined. yes, he had to pit his laser printer against lesser ideas in the contest. but he won the contest. and, the instant he did, xerox cancelled the competing projects and gave him the green light.. “they really liked it, because at the time they were building a personal computer, and they were beside themselves figuring out how they were going to get whatever was on the screen onto a sheet of paper. and when i showed them how i was going to put prints on a sheet of paper it was a marriage made in heaven.” the reason xerox invented the laser printer, in other words, is that it invented the personal computer. without the big idea, it would never have seen the value of the small idea. if you consider innovation to be efficient and ideas precious, that is a tragedy: you give the crown jewels away to steve jobs, and all you’re left with is a printer. but in the real, messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don’t really understand for the thing that you do is an inevitable tradeoff.“when you have a bunch of smart people with a broad enough charter, you will always get something good out of it,” nathan myhrvold, formerly a senior executive at microsoft, argues. “it’s one of the best investments you could possibly make—but only if you chose to value it in terms of successes. if you chose to evaluate it in terms of how many times you failed, or times you could have succeeded and didn’t, then you are bound to be unhappy. innovation is an unruly thing. there will be some ideas that don’t get caught in your cup. but that’s not what the game is about. the game is what you catch, not what you spill.”in the nineteen-nineties, myhrvold created a research laboratory at microsoft modelled in part on what xerox had done in palo alto in the nineteen-seventies, because he considereda triumph, not a failure. “xerox did research outside their business model, and when you do that you should not be surprised that you have a hard time dealing with it—any more than if some bright guy at pfizer wrote a word processor. good luck to pfizer getting into the word-processing business. meanwhile, the thing that they invented that was similar to their own business—a really big machine that spit paper out—they made a lot of money on it.” and so they did. gary starkweather’s laser printer made billions for xerox. it paid for every other single project at xeroxin 1985, starkweather got a call from the head of one of xerox’s competitors, trying to lure him away. it was someone whom he had met years ago. “the decision was painful,” he said. “i was a year from being a twenty-five-year veteran of the company. i mean, i’d done enough for xerox that unless i burned the building down they would never fire me. but that wasn’t the issue. it’s about having ideas that are constantly squashed. so i said, ‘enough of this,’ and i left.”he had a good many years at his new company, he said. it was an extraordinarily creative place. he was part of decision-making at the highest level. “every employee from technician to manager was hot for the new, exciting stuff,” he went on. “so, as far as buzz and daily environment, it was far and away the most fun i’ve ever had.” but it wasn’t perfect. “i remember i called in the head marketing guy and i said, ‘i want you to give me all the information you can come up with on when people buy one of our products—what software do they buy, what business are they in—so i can see the model of how people are using the machines.’ he looked at me and said, ‘i have no idea about that.’ ” where was the rigor? then starkweather had a scheme for hooking up a high-resolution display to one of his new company’s computers. “i got it running and brought it into management and said, ‘why don’t we show this at the tech expo in san francisco? you’ll be able to rule the world.’ they said, ‘i don’t know. we don’t have room for it.’ it was that sort of thing. it was like me saying i’ve discovered a gold mine and you saying we can’t afford a shovel.”he shrugged a little wearily. it was ever thus. the innovator says go. the company says stop—and maybe the only lesson of the legend of xeroxis that what happened there happens, in one way or another, everywhere. by the way, the company that couldn’t afford a shovel? its name was apple. * ♦* gary starkweather joined apple after steve jobs had left the company.malcolm gladwell has been a staff writer for the the new yorker since 1996.
 oil prices hit fresh five-year lows on monday on signs a global glut will keep growing.the latest losses come after a period where oil markets had shown signs of steadying. they all-but clinch the petroleum sector’s status as the worst-performer among commodities this year.both the u.s. and global benchmarks lost more than 2% after...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 stan higgins | published on january 17, 2015 at 19:12 gmtibm has unveiled its proof of concept for adept, a system developed in partnership with samsung that uses elements of bitcoin’s underlying design to build a distributed network of devices – a decentralized internet of things.the adept concept, or autonomous decentralized peer-to-peer telemetry, taps blockchains to provide the backbone of the system, utilizing a mix of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake to secure transactions.ibm and samsung chose three protocols – bittorrent (file sharing), ethereum (smart contracts) and telehash (peer-to-peer messaging) – to underpin the adept concept. adept was formally unveiled at ces 2015 in las vegas.according to the draft paper , blockchains deployed within the adept system would serve as a ledger of existence for billions of devices that would autonomously broadcast transactions between peers in a three-tier system of peer devices and architecture. by using an implementation of the bitcoin protocol, adept could serve as a bridge between many devices at low cost.“applying the blockchain concept to the world of [internet of things] offers fascinating possibilities. right from the time a product completes final assembly, it can be registered by the manufacturer into a universal blockchain representing its beginning of life. once sold, a dealer or end customer can register it to a regional blockchain (a community, city or state)."the draft paper outlines a number of use cases, including several based in domestic settings. when coindesk spoke with chief architect paul brody in october , he noted that ibm was looking at how, in theory, implementations of the bitcoin protocol could change the way people live, in both big and small ways.ibm and samsung envision networks of devices that are capable of autonomously maintaining themselves. in theory, the paper states, appliances in the home would be able to signal operational problems and retrieve software updates on their own. devices could also use adept to communicate with other nearby devices in order to facilitate power bartering and energy efficiency.“we demonstrate how, using adept, a humble washer can become a semi-autonomous device capable of managing its own consumables supply, performing self-service and maintenance, and even negotiating with other peer devices both in the home and outside to optimize its environment.”“all this is achieved without a central controller orchestrating or mediating between these devices,” the paper adds.according to the paper, a samsung w9000 washing machine reconfigured to work within the adept system uses smart contracts to issue commands to a detergent retailer in order to receive new supplies. these contracts give the device the ability to pay for the order itself and later receive word from the retailer that the detergent has been paid for and shipped.this information would be broadcast to the smartphone of the washer’s owner, a device that would also be connected to that home’s network.certain issues, including scalability and the nature of cryptocurrency development today, are cited as potential challenges for adept should the concept ever be applied on a grander scale.the adept team addresses the issue of network scalability within the context of a distributed internet of things, and according to the authors, there are no clear paths forward to scale the system as-is to incorporate billions of devices, but that work in this area is promising.“multiple efforts like sidechains, treechains, and mini-blockchains are ongoing to address this problem. while each approach has its merits and demerits we are yet to see consensus on a common approach across the board. a blockchain to cater to hundreds of billions of devices needs to be scalable.”the paper notes that challenges associated with ethereum’s existing design as it relates to adept’s proposed infrastructure could pose problems, saying that those concerns “are being addressed” as ethereum moves toward its planned launch sometime this year. the authors also cited ongoing developments around anonymizing technology for cryptocurrency as potential areas where adept could be impacted.the full adept draft paper can be found below:
 in the post that follows i’m trying to develop what i see to be strong analogues to another crucial period/turning point in the history of technology, but like all such comparisons, the differences are as illuminating as the similarities. i'm still not sure how far i should be stretching the metaphors, but it feels like we might be able to learn a lot about the future of bitcoin from the history of the internet. this is my first post about bitcoin and i’m really looking more for reactions and new ideas than trying to prove a point. feedback and links to things i should read would be greatly appreciated.i’m fundamentally an internet person -- my real business life started around the dawn of the internet and for most of my adult life, i’ve been involved in building layers and pieces of the internet, from helping start the first commercial internet service provider in japan to investing in twitter and helping bring it to japan. i’ve also served on the boards of the open source initiative, the internet corporation for names and numbers (icann), the mozilla foundation, public knowledge, electronic privacy information center (epic), and been the ceo of creative commons. given my experiences in the early days of the net, it’s possible that i’m biased and everything new looks like the internet.having said that, i believe that there are many parallels between the internet and bitcoin and there are many lessons from the internet that can help provide guidance in thinking about bitcoin and its future, but there are also some important differences.the similarity is that bitcoin is a transportation infrastructure that is decentralized, efficient and based on an open protocol. instead of transferring packets of data over a dynamic network in contrast to the circuits and leased lines that preceded the internet, bitcoin’s protocol, the blockchain, allows trust to be established between mutually distrusting parties in an efficient and decentralized way. although you could argue that the ledger is “centralized”, it’s created through mechanical decentralized consensus.the internet has a root -- in other words, just because you use the internet protocol doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily part of the internet. to be part of the internet, you have to agree to the names and numbers protocol and root servers that are administered by icann and its consensus process. you can use the internet protocol and make your own network, using your own rules for names and numbers, but then you’re just a network and not the internet.similarly, you can use the blockchain protocol to create alternative bitcoins or alt.coins. this allows you to innovate and use many of the technological benefits of bitcoin, but you are no longer technically interoperable with bitcoin and do not benefit from the network effect or the trust that bitcoin has.also like the beginning of the internet, there are competing ideas at each of the levels. aol created a dialup network and really helped to popularize email. it eventually dumped its dialup network, its core business, but survived as an internet service. many people still have aol email accounts.with crypto-currencies, there are coins that don’t connect to the “genesis block” of bitcoin -- alt.coins that use fundamentally the same technology. there are alt.coins that use slightly different protocols and some that are fundamentally different.on top of the coin layer, there are various services such as wallets, exchanges, service providers with varying levels of vertical integration -- some agnostic to whichever cryptocurrency ends up “winning” and some tightly linked. there are technologies and services being built on top of the infrastructure that use the network for fundamentally different things than transacting units of value, just as voice over ip used the same network in a very different way.in the early days of the internet, most online services were a combination of dialup and x.25 a competing packet switching protocol developed by comité consultatif international téléphonique et télégraphique, (ccitt), the predecessor to the international telecom union (itu), a standards body that hangs off of the united nations. many services like the source or compuserve used x.25 before they started offering their services over the internet.i believe the first killer app for the internet was email. on most of the early online services, you could only send email to other people on the same service. when internet email came to these services, suddenly you could send email to anyone. this was quite amazing and notably, email is still one of the most important applications on the internet.as the internet proliferated, the tcp/ip stack, free software that anyone could download for free and install on their computer to connect it to the internet, was further developed and deployed. this allowed applications that ran on your computer to use the internet to talk to other programs running on other computers. this created the machine-to-machine network. it was no longer just about typing text into a terminal window. the file transfer protocol (ftp) and later gopher, a text-based browsing and downloading service popular before the web was invented, allowed you to download music and images and create a world wide web of content. eventually, permissionless innovation on top of this open architecture gave birth to the world wide web, napster, amazon, ebay, google and skype.i remember twenty years ago, giving a talk to advertising agencies, media companies and banks explaining how important and disruptive the internet would be. back then, there were satellite photos of the earth and a webcam pointing at a coffee pot on the internet. most people didn’t have the imagination to see how the internet would fundamentally disrupt commerce and media, because amazon, ebay and google hadn’t been invented -- just email and usenet-news. no one in these big companies believed that they had to learn anything about the internet or that the internet would affect their business -- i mostly got blank stares or snores.similarly, i believe that bitcoin is the first “killer app” of the blockchain as email was the killer app for the beginning of the internet. we are in the process of inventing ebay, amazon and google. my hunch is that the blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as the internet was to media, commerce and advertising. it will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce friction. as we know, one person’s friction is another person’s revenue.one of the main things we worked on when i was on the board of icann was trying to keep the internet from forking. there were many organizations that didn’t agree with icann’s policies or didn’t like the us’s excessive influence over the internet. our job was to listen to everyone and create an inclusive and consensus-based process so that people felt that the benefits of the network effect outweighed the energy and cost of dealing with this process. in general we succeeded. it helped that almost all of the founders and key technical minds and technical standards organizations that designed and ran the internet worked together with icann. this interface between the policy makers and the technologists -- however painful -- was viewed as something that wasn’t great but worked better than any of the other alternatives.one question is whether there is an icann equivalent needed for bitcoin. is bitcoin email and the blockchain tcp/ip?one argument about why it might not be the same is that icann fundamentally had to deal with the centralization caused by the name space problem created by domain names. domain names are essential for the way we think the internet works and you need a standards body to deal with the conflicts. the solutions to bitcoin’s centralization problems will look nothing like a domain name system (dns), because although there is currently centralization in the form of mining pools and core development, the protocol is fundamentally designed to need decentralization to function at all. you could argue that the internet requires a degree of decentralization, but it has so far survived its relationship with icann.one other important function that icann provides is a way to discuss changes to the core technology. it also coordinates the policy conversation between the various stakeholders: the technology people, the users, business and governments. the registrars and registries were the main stakeholders since they ran the “business” that feeds icann and provides a lot of the infrastructure together with the isps.for bitcoin it’s the miners -- the people and companies that do the computation required to secure the network by producing the cryptographically secure blockchain at the core of bitcoin -- all in exchange for bitcoin rewards from the network itself. any technical changes that the developers want to make to bitcoin will not be adopted unless the miners adopt them, and the developers and the miners have different incentives. it’s possible that the miners have some similarities to the registrars and registries, but they are fundamentally different in that they are not customer-facing and don’t really care what you think.as with icann, the users do matter and are key for the network effect value of bitcoin, but without the miners the engine doesn’t run. the miners aren’t as easy to identify as the registrars and registries and it’s unclear how the dynamics of incentives for the miners will develop with the value of bitcoin fluctuating, the difficulty of mining increasing and the transaction fees being market driven. it’s possible that they will develop into a community with a user interface and a governance function, but they are mostly hidden and independent for a variety of reasons that are unlikely to change for now. having said that, one of the first publicly traded bitcoin companies is a miner.the core developers are different as well. the founders of the internet may have been slightly hippy-like, but they were mostly government-funded and fairly government-friendly. cutting a deal with the department of commerce seemed like a pretty good idea to them at the time.the core bitcoin developers are cypherpunks who do what they do because they don’t trust governments or the global banking system and are trying to build a distributed and autonomous system, one that is impervious to regulation and meddling by anyone at any time. at some level, bitcoin was designed to not care what regulators think. the miners have an economic interest in bitcoin having value, since that’s what they’re paid in, and they care about scale and the network effect, but the miners probably don’t care if it’s bitcoin or an alt.coin that ends up winning, as long as their investments in hardware and plant don’t disappear before they make a return on their investment.regulators clearly have an incentive to influence the rules of the network, but it’s unclear whether the core developers really need to care what the regulators think. having said that, without some sort of buy-in by regulators, it’s unlikely to scale or have the mainstream impact that the internet did.very much like the early days of the internet, when we saw the power of internet email but hadn’t yet invented the web, we are just imagining the potential uses of concepts such as crypto-equity and smart contracts … to name just a few.i believe it’s possible that over-regulation could cause bitcoin or the blockchain to never achieve its full potential and remain a feature of the side-economy, much in the same way that the tor anonymizing system is extremely valuable to people who really need privacy but not really used by “normal people”... yet.what helped make the internet successful was the lack of regulation and the generally inclusive and permissionless nature of innovation. this was driven in large part by free and open source software and the venture capital community. the question i have is whether the fact that we’re now talking about “money” and not “content,” and that we seem to be innovating at a much higher speed (venture capital investment in bitcoin is outpacing early internet investments), the dialog in popular media is growing, and governments are very interested in bitcoin makes this a completely different game. i think ideas like the five-year moratorium on bitcoin regulation proposed by us representative steve stockman are a good idea. we really have no idea what this whole thing is going to turn into, so a focus on dialog versus regulation is key.i also believe that layer unbundling and innovation at each layer, assuming that the other layers will sort themselves out, is a good idea. in other words, exchanges and wallets that are coin-agnostic or experiments with colored coins, side chains and other innovations that are “unbundled” as much as possible allow the learnings and the systems created to survive regardless of exactly how the architecture turns out.it feels a lot to me like when we were arguing over ethernet and token ring -- for the average user, it doesn’t really matter which we end up with as long as in the end it’s all interoperable. what’s different is that there is more at stake and it’s moving really fast, so the shape of failure and the cost of failure might be much more severe than when we were trying to figure out the internet and a lot more people are watching.
 the video cnn planned to air at the end of the world has leaked online thanks to the work of a former intern at the network, who posted the video on gawker media’s jalopnik blog on monday.the video had passed into cnn lore by the time mike ballaban, now an editor with jalopnik, worked as an intern at the network in 2009. as rumor had it, the billionaire founder of cnn , ted turner, a man as known for his eccentricities as for his wealth and media legacy, had called for the preparation of a video to air in the event of nuclear holocaust.the legend has circulated for decades, boosted by turner’s own words in june 1980, when he said, “we’re gonna go on air june 1, and we’re gonna stay on until the end of the world. when that time comes, we’ll cover it, play nearer my god to thee and sign off.”ballaban told the guardian he first saw the video while interning at cnn in 2009, after hearing about it from a professor who had ties with the network. the source who provided him the video also took screenshots of its home in cnn’s mira archive, under the all-caps heading of “turner doomsday video – hfr till end of the world confirmed.” (hfr means “hold for release”, though the circumstances of what authority should, could or would confirm the apocalypse to a cnn employee, and how – and what that employee should consider when weighing whether to publish the video as he or she and the remnants of humanity stared down the ruination of our species, apparently via cnn broadcast – are unfortunately all omitted.)the grainy video posted to jalopnik on monday, lasting little more than a minute, shows just what turner said it would: a military band stands in formation between the columns of the turner broadcasting mansion and the circular reflecting pool that lay on the lawn in the 1980s. one soldier raises a flag to the right, the musicians raise their instruments, and they begin the mournful hymn mentioned by turner – said by survivors to be the last song played by the band on the titanic . the low resolution obscures the faces of the musicians, who finish a brief version of the song and snap their instruments to attention. the video fades to black.ballaban said the video was well known at cnn six years ago and remains so today, although it took some effort to track down: “it’s one of those things you only look for if you’re a really bored intern or have a lot of time on your hands.”neither cnn nor a representative for turner, who left his management roles at the network’s parent company in 2006, replied to requests for comment, but details of the video seem to corroborate it was actually made for broadcast during an apocalyptic event such as a nuclear holocaust – a very real threat in june 1980.the video clearly takes place at cnn’s then headquarters in georgia, the turner mansion, identifiable by the distinctive, devil-horn shape of the facade above the door frame. the reflecting pool before which the band plays has been removed since the 1980s, but is clearly visible in photos and video of the mansion from the decade.the band fits too: the band’s regiment, us army forces command, is legible above an identifiable logo on the bass drum of a percussionist in the video; georgia’s nearby fort mcpherson was base for us army ground forces command until 2011 .there is also indirect confirmation of the video’s authenticity through the diligent work of fact-checkers at the new yorker, who in 1988 were presented with an article about turner and his ultimate broadcast (paywall alert). turner told the reporter (who wrote during the pre-byline era of the new yorker’s “talk of the town” section) that the rumors about the video were true, and then showed it in his georgia office, after a speech about how “if we don’t become extinct by exhausting the planet’s natural resources, then we’ll destroy ourselves through nuclear war”.then turner slipped a tape into a vcr, and explained that he knew “we would only sign off once”, so he asked a military band to play nearer my god to thee for a camera. when the tape began, turner fled the room in a fit of emotion, but what the new yorker reporter described watching is precisely the video posted by ballaban. turner popped his head back in the room after the clip was over and told the new yorker: “i keep this tape around because when the world ends it’ll be over before we can say what we wanted to say. before we can leave any final messages.”no matter how one interprets turner’s thinking, ballaban pointed out that his idea shares something with the morbid but common practice of newspapers to prepare obituaries long before their subject’s deaths. turner, with bizarre, melodramatic and oddly haunting flair, prepared an obituary for the world, ready to air.
 mobile technology won’t kill large lenders, but smaller ones may struggle to adaptfinancial dinosaurs haven’t gone extinct. they have just gotten bigger.two decades ago, bill gates described banks as “dinosaurs” that would be bypassed by innovative technology. yet since then banks have survived challenges from personal-finance software, early virtual banks and the internet. now, there again is talk about banking being disrupted. money is pouring into financial technology startups. the initial public offerings of...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 “when we think of amish people we think of a simple life, free of modern advancements.” so begins a viral article, called “why the amish don’t get sick,” which seeks to prove that americans would be healthier if they lived more like the midwestern anabaptists. the piece appears to have its roots in a site called la healthy living , but it has recently bounced its way across the naturopathic internet, ending up on the domains of quack doctors and, more recently, on a hippie news site called earth we are one , through which it landed in my facebook feed.though it masquerades as “what we can learn from them”-style journalism, the piece is basically just catnip for the anti-gmo and anti-vax crowds. and sadly, it appears to have already spread its nonsense far and wide.“most of us view [the amish] as foolish for not using the advantages of convenient technology,” it reads, “and even look down on them for not conforming to the norms of mainstream society.” (yeah, you know how people are always like: “ipads are so great; the amish are a bunch of idiots for not using them.”)“but if we look at the statistics,” it continues, “the amish are much healthier than the rest of america. they virtually have no cancer, no autism, and rarely get sick. what are they doing different from the rest of america?”the first tip, according to this article, is not getting vaccinated : “in spite of constant pressure from the government, the amish still refuse to vaccinate.”nope. most amish parents vaccinate, but even then, the relatively low overall vaccination rate in the community fueled a massive measles outbreak in ohio’s amish country earlier this year. the incident proved something that amish and “english” parents alike should know by now: vaccines don’t cause autism, but not getting a vaccine can cause outbreaks of nasty, 19th-century diseases.the rest of the items in the listicle aren’t as terrible. being physically active, not getting too stressed out, and eating a lot of vegetables are all “amish” habits the article says other americans would do well to adopt. however, its suggestion that amish food contains no gmos is bunk— some amish farms do use genetically modified crops for financial and efficiency reasons. besides, there's no evidence that genetically modified foods are detrimental to human health in any way.but it’s the very premise of the article that’s bizarre. if you’re going to hype a community as “never getting sick,” use a place that’s actually remarkably healthy, like minneapolis . not only do amish people get sick, they get some of the worst diseases in the world.almost all of the roughly 250,000 amish people in the u.s. can trace their roots back to a few hundred swiss farmers who immigrated to pennsylvania in the 18th century. the centuries of isolation and intermarriage has forged tight-knit communities, sure, but it has also caused widespread genetic problems.one example is maple syrup urine disease—so named for the smell of the sufferer’s urine and ear wax—which causes the body to be unable to metabolize protein. most people with msud experience vomiting, seizures, and brain damage starting in infancy, and they die early.only one out of every 180,000 babies in the general population is born with the disease, but it strikes one out of every 358 amish babies . treatment usually involves avoiding meat and dairy entirely—which is tough to manage in the “all-natural” amish lifestyle. liver transplants are another option, but few amish can afford them.and that’s just one of the many virtually unheard-of genetic diseases that plague the plain people.granted, one study found that the amish do have a lower incidence of seven types of cancer—mostly because they don’t drink, smoke, or have unprotected sex with lots of different partners. they also reduce their risk of skin cancer by wearing wide-brimmed hats and covering their bodies from ankle to wrist. but you don’t see “la healthy living” trumpeting the health perks of bonnets.it’s tempting to brush this kind of thing off as a fringe piece of “content” that no one will read, but the version of the story on earth we are one garnered nearly 68,000 pageviews, according to its own counter. that site also has more than 600,000 fans on facebook. anyone with an audience that big who uses an insular religious sect to prop up their dangerous pseudo-science should be meidung—shunned.
 financial theory has taken a lot of abuse recently, specifically some of the basic tenets of modern portfolio theory. some of it we at aqr aid and abet (just two examples: markets are good but not perfect , and risk balancing beats capitalization weighting ). but a fair chunk of the abuse comes from our industry’s collective tendency to judge ideas over relatively short periods, even if — or precisely because — short periods often feel like long periods. thus, it’s important to occasionally step back and note that when examined properly, the very basics hold up better than many think or sometimes casually assert.to explore this, i’m going to do some analysis very similar to something i saw gary brinson do many years ago (at least i think it was gary; of course, while i’ve stolen the basic idea, any errors of concept or execution are my own). while the whole concept is borrowed, a fair amount of this will be out of sample as i’m getting old and it was a while ago! to start off, if you wanted to create an efficient frontier of stocks, bonds and commodities (here, i just look at the u.s., though i think, from distant memory, that gary’s version included international and possibly small stocks, too) you’d probably expect:bonds (u.s. 10-year treasury bonds) to be lower volatility and lower expected return;stocks (s&p 500) and commodities (s&p gsci) to be higher volatility and higher expected return. having said this, commodity expected returns are more difficult to pin down. why? certainly they are harder because their weight within the market portfolio is quite arguable, but also because they seem to have low correlation with the market portfolio of wealth. so, unlike equities you probably expect lower returns compared with their volatility. in fact, whether or not you expect positive excess returns over cash for commodities is a controversial topic. we would (just our opinion) expect positive — but not as high as stocks (again, because their risk is more diversifiable) — even though commodities have been, and probably will remain, quite volatile. of course, we also have the benefit of knowing what the final figure at the end of this piece looks like!all of the analysis below is done using excess returns over cash, and represent annualized realized monthly arithmetic average returns and annualized monthly standard deviations.we begin with 1970-1974 and proceed in five-year increments (for all of the charts i keep the range of the x axes constant, as is my preference for comparing exhibits, but i can’t indulge this preference for the y axes because they just vary too much).well the first five-year period certainly doesn’t look right! stocks shouldn’t have a lower expected return than bonds (i’m foreshadowing the ultimate point here of course as these are not “expected” returns but realized returns). and negative to boot! and commodities can’t be that good. what gives? this theory stuff is not starting out well… maybe the next five years will restore some sanity?darn, different but not much better. stocks earned positive returns (though not enough to offset the early-decade losses). but now bonds are losing money: they sure aren't riskless. investing is hard.maybe the next five years will do it. i certainly hope so…finally, stocks and bonds demonstrate a pretty reasonable fit with our priors, albeit with an incredibly volatile period for bonds (almost as volatile as stocks and commodities). and it’s doubtful anyone would ever invest in commodities, perhaps not even as a hedge, with an expected loss of nearly 10% per annum and a lot of volatility to boot. finally, as a premium over cash, <4% on equities is certainly more reasonable than losing money, but ain’t so great. theory isn’t as disastrous here but certainly not looking strong.by the way, you might remember we had a fairly devastating recession during this period. it really crushed stocks and made bonds soar for the whole five years, didn’t it? well, no, it didn’t. it probably was responsible for crushing commodities if that helps get you through this long dark night of efficient frontiers, but stocks seemed to survive ok. it’s just a nice statement (one we’ll emphasize again a few times) that the headline events over even a five year period often are short-term and less impactful than you might think.the next five years have to make sense, they just have to…ok, now we’re talking. bond volatility, though still high by historic standards, is more reasonable than that crazy 1980-84 ride. all realized returns are positive over cash, and stocks > commodities > bonds. all is good in the world. except… nah, it would be churlish to object now. ok i’ll say it. these returns are pretty high. really high. do people really expect/require 12% over cash (over cash!) to own stocks? do they need 7% over cash to own bonds? theory doesn’t predict negative expected returns but it also doesn’t predict giant positive ones. i’m beginning to think this theory stuff is really overrated…also remember that this period includes the great crash of october 1987. see how such a crash can kill stock returns? they only made about 12% over cash this period. wait, that’s an awesome return. but there was a crash, i know there was… also, though stock volatility does look a bit high, it’s not close to crazy high. but a massive crash happened! something odd is going on…but i have high hopes for 1990-94. really. i do. promise.well those hopes were partially realized. 1990-94 is the best one yet. both bonds and stocks look pretty reasonable, though the gsci is a big disappointment. taking that kind of wild volatile ride only to lose money vs. cash can’t be rational can it?oh, and recall that a crushing period for bonds, the 1994 fed hike, is included in this period. but you really can’t see its effects can you?all in all, definitely this efficient frontier looks the most intuitive so far, even if far from perfect. maybe we’re on a roll. come on 1995-1999!wow! by the end of this period people were shouting dow 36,000! stocks for the long run! so, our hopes for a roll have been dashed. this doesn’t look right at all. remember, too high is as wrong (for theory, more fun for investors) as too low.equity returns are way higher than we’d rationally ever expect/demand, bonds far lower versus stocks (though perhaps reasonable on their own), and the gsci basically flat for half a decade; hardly a win for such a high-volatility asset class. this period is a bust. it doesn’t fit theory at all. maybe it is theory that’s a bust.so, after such a weird five years, we’re owed a “normal” looking five-year efficient frontier, right?nope. sigh. so very far from normal. horrifically far from normal. really, really not even close to normal. i think you’re getting my drift. it doesn’t look normal. theory stinks.it was a great time to own bonds and commodities, but a terrible time to own the asset we’d expect the most from, stocks.as a side note, this was the period of coming down from the great dot-com bubble. given that ex post knowledge, the poor stock returns are not so surprising. but perhaps you are surprised that stock market volatility was again quite restrained (around 16% per annum) when viewed over the full five years. it seems even knowing what happened (at least some of the things that happened) it’s hard to get this stuff right. my wife and i (mainly her) did have four children within an 18-month stretch of this five year period so some things were indeed pretty volatile (at least for me). but stocks? not so much.i’m feeling very good about 2005-09 though, aren’t you?this is ridiculous! after losing money for the prior five years, stocks have lost money again. this finance/efficient-frontier stuff is for the birds. i mean, besides stocks, commodities lost even worse and at huge volatility. who would call that rational? who’s running this place?note this was the period of the global financial crisis. so at the very least we’d certainly expect this to be a period of wild and crazy stock market volatility, no? well, again, no, not really when viewed over the whole five years. volatility of 16% or so is maybe a tad high but mostly pretty darn normal. it seems you can’t even count on the seminal financial event of our times anymore to produce what you expect, when you wait at least 5 years to judge.ok, we have one five year period left, 2010-14 (one month short actually as we’re ending in november). it’s all up to you 2010-14, you’ve always been my favorite!* 2014 includes 11 months, january-november.ok, this is just nuts. returns and volatility are greater for stocks than bonds, that’s nice, it fits our theories well. but a 15% or so annual premium for stocks over cash? no sir. not an efficient frontier i’d call reasonable. and commodities again a big and volatile loser, that makes no sense. who would own those things if that were their expected return? finally, if you get more than 6% over cash on your 10-year u.s. treasury holdings, you should be praising your higher power, as it’s certainly more than a rational investor expects/demands.nope, while kind of pleasant ex commodities, the above is not a normal-looking efficient frontier, and not one theory takes kindly to (or vice versa).we have one more card to play. thankfully it’s a really good card.* 2014 includes 11 months, january-november.yep, you’re looking at the same calculation methodology as before, but now we are using the full 45-year (ok, one month shy) period.my god it is beautiful.bonds at about a 3.5% premium to cash. that’s probably a higher premium than we’d expect long-term, but more reasonable than most of the other periods (as i’m typing this, bond yields are about 230 basis points over cash — while many people predict bonds will suffer price declines caused by rising rates going forward, that kind of yield premium makes a number like 3.5% look at least not so crazy).stocks at just over a 5% premium to cash look reasonable. it’s hard to get annoyed with that in either direction, as an investor or as a theorist.commodities have done well, but not as well as stocks. remember, even though they are more volatile they’re also more diversifying (again, in theory you get paid for bearing risk you have to bear, not volatility you can diversify away). so, over this 45-year period, theory is feeling pretty good about itself.here’s another way to view it, ordering each asset class increasing from left to right, done separately for ordering by average return and realized volatility over the period.
 this burst of new life comes as cartoons seemed to be in terminal decline. punch, once a fierce political satire magazine whose cartoons feature in almost every british history textbook, finally closed its doors in 2002. the edgier viz magazine, which sold a million copies an issue in the early 1990s, now sells 65,000. in the united states, of the sprawling ec comics stable, only mad magazine remains, its circulation down from 2.1m in 1974 to 180,000. meanwhile, the american newspaper industry, home of the cartoon strip, now makes less in advertising revenue than at any time since the 1950s.cartoons go way back before newspapers. they have their origins in the caricatures and illustrations of early modern europe. in renaissance germany and italy, woodcuts and mezzotint prints were used to add pictures to books. by the 18th century simple cartoons, or caricatures, circulated in london coffee shops, lampooning royalty, society and politicians. popular engravers such as william hogarth and james gillray came up with tricks we now take for granted: speech bubbles to show dialogue and sequential panels to show time passing.but it was the combination of the rotary printing press, mass literacy and capitalism which really created the space for comic art to flourish. in britain punch coined the term “cartoon” in 1843 to describe its satirical sketches, which soon spread to other newspapers. in the united states, the modern comic strip emerged as a by-product of the new york newspaper wars between joseph pulitzer and william randolph hearst in the late 19th century. in 1895 pulitzer’s sunday world published a cartoon of a bald child with jug ears and buck teeth dressed in a simple yellow shirt: the yellow kid. the cartoon gave the name to the new mass media that followed: “yellow journalism”.newspapers filled with sensationalist reporting sold millions. they even started wars. but in an era before television and film, it was the cartoons—filled with images of the city and stories of working-class living—which sold the newspapers. with most papers reporting much the same news, cartoons were an easy way for proprietors to differentiate their product. after the success of the yellow kid, both pulitzer and hearst introduced extensive comic supplements in their sunday papers. like the papers that printed them, comics rose and died quickly: the yellow kid lasted barely three years. but as the newspaper industry overall grew, so too did the funnies pages. by the mid-1920s one cartoonist, bud fisher, was paid $250,000 a year for “mutt and jeff”. by 1933, of 2,300 daily american papers, only two, the new york times and the boston transcript, published no cartoons.that was the golden age. during the second world war, paper rationing forced comic strips to shrink on both sides of the atlantic. afterwards, the rise of television news culled the number of dailies and all but wiped out evening papers. with less competition, newspapers relied less on cartoons to sell copies. comic books filled some of the gap, but unlike the newspapers, these were mostly for children. by the 1980s most newspaper cartoon strips were controlled by a small group of syndicates whose executives saw them primarily as devices to sell licensed merchandise. childish cartoons with weak, universal jokes thrived—think “garfield”—while more interesting artists struggled to find an outlet for their work. when authors retired, successful strips were handed down to new artists like real estate to avoid jeopardising merchandise revenues. “mutt and jeff”—tired by the 1950s—continued until 1982.the decline of newspapers and the rise of the internet have broken that system. newspapers no longer have the money to pay big bucks to cartoonists, and the web means anybody can get published. cartoonists who want to make their name no longer send sketches to syndicates or approach newspapers: they simply set up websites and spread the word on twitter and facebook. randall munroe, the creator of “xkcd”, left a job at nasa to write his stick men strip, full of science and technology jokes (see above and below). kate beaton, a canadian artist who draws “hark, a vagrant”, sketched her cartoons between shifts while working in a museum. matthew inman created his comic “the oatmeal” by accident while trying to promote a dating website he built to escape his job as a computer coder.the typical format for a web comic was established a decade or more ago, says zach weiner, the writer of “saturday morning breakfast cereal”, or “smbc” (below). it has not changed much since. most cartoonists update on a regular basis—daily, or every other day—and run in sequence. “i think that’s purely because that’s what the old newspapers used to do,” says mr weiner. but whereas many newspaper comics tried to appeal to as many people as possible, often with lame, fairly universal jokes, online cartoonists are free to be experimental, in both content and form.ryan north uses the same drawing every day for his “dinosaur comics”—the joke is in the dialogue, which he writes fresh every weekday, and the absurdity of dinosaurs discussing shakespeare and dating. “smbc” flicks between one-panel gags and extremely long, elaborate stories. fred gallagher, the writer of “megatokyo”, has created an entire soap-opera-like world, drawn in beautiful japanese manga-style, accessible only to those who follow the sage regularly. mr munroe’s “xkcd” is usually a simple strip comic, but recently featured one explorable comic, entitled “click and drag”, which, if printed at high resolution, would be 46 feet wide.perhaps thanks to the technical skills needed to succeed, web cartoonists tend to be young—few are over 30—well-educated and extremely geeky. “xkcd” is full of jokes about statistics, the scientific method, computer code and how terrible competitive sport is: hardly surprising given munroe’s previous work at nasa. “smbc” makes similar jokes, but it tends to mix cruder gags in too. “ctrl alt del”, “megatokyo” and “penny arcade” built up around the nascent video-games industry, and feature the stock characters of game culture: ninjas, snipers and busty women.but on the internet, anything can thrive, it seems. ms beaton writes surreal strips for “hark, a vagrant!” typically based on history and forgotten bits of popular culture. (one features isambard kingdom brunel being visited by steampunk imitators from the future. they do not understand him.) alison acton’s “bear nuts” is mostly about cute, extremely well-drawn furry animals hurting each other. dan walsh, an it manager from dublin, pays homage to a print cartoon: garfield minus garfield, his site, simply takes the cat out of jim davis’s strip, exposing the existential angst of its owner, jon arbuckle (and improving the cartoon in the process).many of these comics are expanding outwards into little media empires of their own. “xkcd”, probably the most innovative, now features a separate blog called “what if?”, on which mr munroe answers questions sent in by readers. one recent post asked “if every person on earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time, would it change color?” (the answer is no, unless you can borrow 6 billion one-megawatt lasers from the pentagon.) “smbc” and “ctrl alt del” have both experimented with sketch shows and animated comics. “penny arcade” has become a sprawling video-games industry phenomenon, hosting games conventions and fund-raising campaigns.one thing they have in common is how they make their money. the typical audience for one of the leading web comics is between 1m and 10m unique browser visits per month, comparable to a medium-sized newspaper website (the website of the daily mail, the best-read newspaper on the web, gets 100m per month). but unlike on newspaper websites, where advertising is the main source of revenue, the audience on web comics are not just readers—they are also customers. most artists sell t-shirts, books, mouse mats, posters and other paraphernalia. the most successful at monetising content is said to be mr inman: his site, “the oatmeal” made $500,000 in 2011 from its audience of around 7m unique visitors per month.amplified by social media—mr inman has some 700,000 facebook followers—this audience can be powerful. one extremely long and exceptionally geeky comic last summer on “the oatmeal”, extolling the virtues of the inventor nikola tesla and attacking his better-known rival, thomas edison, somehow snowballed into a campaign to save one of tesla’s labs on the outskirts of new york. by leveraging his immense traffic to attract donations and to sell t-shirts and other gear, mr inman raised $1m in nine days—enough, with matching funding from new york state, to buy the building.web cartoons have an important political role where speech is constrained. in china cartoons distributed across weibo, a collection of twitter-like social networks, have become a powerful way of criticising the communist regime. pi san, a cartoonist and animator from beijing, creates carefully coded cartoons as a way of subverting china’s strict web-censorship regime. his most popular character, kuang kuang, is a lazy schoolboy at a prison-like institution where dissent is routinely persecuted. the drawings, full of jagged lines and dark colours, are as edgy as the politics. one recent animation, poking fun at china’s censorship of references to ai weiwei, a controversial artist, was viewed by a million people within just a few hours of its being posted online.that works in the arab world too. a long and illustrious tradition of political cartooning has long existed, with arab cartoonists highlighting high inflation and unemployment, or attacking common enemies, such as israel and america. but many cartoonists have struggled with censorship—explicit and implicit—and attacks on governments used to be rare. that is now changing. the syrian cartoonist ali farzat, one of the best-known cartoonists in the arab world, founded syria’s first weekly satirical newspaper ad domari in 2001, but published only 104 issues before being shut down by the regime in 2003. last august he was beaten up by government supporters for his work, and he is now exiled in egypt. but his cartoons, together with those of younger arab artists, are now distributed by syrian activists across arab news websites and social networks.this new world, in which humour spreads instantly and globally, threatens webcomic artists at the same time as it liberates them. cartoons can spread around the web without crediting their creators; copyright thieves can sell unlicensed merchandise. cartoonists need to be entrepreneurs, as well as artists. online cartoons can be lucrative, but unlike working for a syndicate, they hardly provide stable work. “no one has retired from them yet,” points out ms beaton. and the competition is getting fiercer. now that everyone can be a cartoonist, almost everyone is. online communities such as 4chan, somethingawful and reddit thrive on jokes, often just pictures with a caption attached, uploaded by users. new cartoonists, however good, can struggle to get attention, yet alone make a living.but then, as bill watterson pointed out, money and stability, combined with insufficient competition, strangled cartooning. bored of fighting with his syndicate, and unwilling to let “calvin and hobbes” become stale, he gave up his strip in 1995 and retreated into the woods of ohio to paint landscapes. the world in which he thrived is disappearing. the revolution he wanted is now unfolding.correction: this article originally stated that the daily mail's website is visited by 48m unique users a month. the correct figure is 100m. sorry.
 create your own data transformation: [+]use a formula to modify and combine data series into a single line. for example, invert an exchange rate a by using formula 1/a, or calculate the spread between 2 interest rates a and b by using formula a - b.use the assigned data series variables above (e.g. a, b, ...) together with operators {+, -, *, /, ^}, braces {(,)}, and constants {e.g. 2, 1.5} to create your own formula {e.g. 1/a, a-b, (a+b)/2, (a/(a+b+c))*100}. the default formula 'a' displays only the first data series added to this line. you may also add data series to this line before entering a formula.
 after months underplaying the risks of deflation, it looks like the european central bank (ecb) is now finally resigned to it.chief economist peter praet admitted in an interview released this morning that inflation figures will spend a large part of 2015 in negative territory, and offered some of the biggest hints so far on what europe's qe programme is going to look like.spain's inflation figures, released yesterday, show the major effect that tumbling oil prices are likely to have. prices dropped 1.1% in the year to december, the fastest drop in five years, and far faster than analysts expected. eurozone inflation was last at 2% at the beginning of 2013, and has been steadily dropping ever since. it's been below 1% for all of 2014, and a dip into deflation is now all but guaranteed in the new year. here's that plunge:praet's comments are some of the most dovish come from the ecb, making it sound all but guaranteed that the central bank will start a quantitative easing programme in january. he's also given a hint towards the makeup of the likely qe programme, saying that government bonds are "the only type of bond in which there is a significant market volume".unlike germany's bundesbank chief jens weidmann, who has argued that the ecb should effectively ignore falling oil prices , praet says that with expectations for future inflation now "extremely fragile", the ecb must act to bring inflation upwards.
 u.s. stocks little changed on factory data; dollar gainsmario draghi, president of the european central bank, said he can’t exclude the risk of deflation in the euro area, hinting that the likelihood of large-scale quantitative easing is increasing. closemario draghi, president of the european central bank, said he can’t exclude the risk of... read moremario draghi, president of the european central bank, said he can’t exclude the risk of deflation in the euro area, hinting that the likelihood of large-scale quantitative easing is increasing.u.s. stocks were little changed after erasing declines in the final half hour of trading, as investors assessed data showing manufacturing cooled. treasuries rallied and the dollar strengthened amid speculation the federal reserve will raise rates this year.the standard & poor’s 500 index fell less than 0.1 percent at 4 p.m. in new york , erasing a drop of 0.6 percent. the russell 2000 index dropped 0.5 percent. the stoxx europe 600 index lost 0.4 percent while the euro weakened to a 4 1/2-year low and the dollar rose versus all of its 16 major peers. the yield on five-year german notes fell below zero for the first time and the rate on 10-year treasuries dropped five basis points to 2.12 percent.manufacturing in the u.s. cooled in december, settling into a more sustainable pace of growth as the year drew to a close. european central bank president mario draghi said he can’t exclude the risk of deflation in the euro area, hinting that the likelihood of large-scale quantitative easing is increasing, according to an interview with german newspaper handelsblatt. the fed releases next week the minutes from its last policy meeting at which it pledged patience in raising interest rates even as growth showed signs of accelerating.“investors are looking for validation that the economy is, in fact, as strong as advertised,” peter sorrentino , a cincinnati-based fund manager at huntington asset advisors inc., which oversees $1.8 billion, said in a phone interview. “the market may struggle to find its footing here in the first couple of days until we get some more data points out.”the s&p 500 , which closed at records 53 times last year, slipped in the last two days of 2014, trimming its third straight annual gain to 11 percent. trading in s&p 500 shares was 21 percent below the 30-day average at this time of day.shares rallied last year as accelerating growth fueled optimism in the u.s. economy and an accommodative federal reserve policy sent risk-seeking investors into equities.the institute for supply management ’s factory index dropped to a six-month low of 55.5 from 58.7 in november, a report from the tempe, arizona-based group showed today. the reading in october matched a three-year high.“the data failed to meet early expectations but is still trending in the right direction as we continue the trend of positive but not robust growth,” eric wiegand, a senior portfolio manager at u.s. bank wealth management in new york, which oversees $120 billion, said by phone. “we expect more volatility but as you look around the globe we’re still in expansionary territory and that’s not the case with our major trading partners.”consumer-discretionary producers in the s&p 500 lost 0.7 percent while phone and utilities added 0.5 percent.d.r. horton inc. and lennar corp. slumped at least 1.2 percent as an s&p index of homebuilders lost 1 percent. disappointing november construction spending suggests some economists may revise down fourth-quarter gross domestic product estimates, christophe barraud, market securities llp chief economist, said in a note to bloomberg first word.the bloomberg dollar spot index had its highest close since march 2009. the yen retreated 0.4 percent to 120.26 against the u.s. currency. the pound weakened to the lowest level in more than a year against the dollar after a report showed u.k. manufacturing unexpectedly slowed last month.investors have been buying u.s. assets as the fed pledged patience in raising interest rates and economic growth accelerated.the euro touched $1.2009, its lowest level since june 2010, after completing its worst annual loss since 2005. the swiss franc weakened to parity with the dollar for the first time in four years.“the risk that we don’t fulfill our mandate of price stability is higher than it was six months ago,” draghi told handelsblatt. “we are in technical preparations to alter the size, speed and composition of our measures at the beginning of 2015, should this become necessary, to react to a too-long period of low inflation. there’s unanimity in the ecb council on that.”spain’s 10-year yield fell 12 basis points, or 0.12 percentage point, to 1.49 percent, touching the lowest level since bloomberg began collecting the data in 1993.germany’s five-year yield dropped two basis points to minus 0.007 percent, meaning investors are willing to receive less back from the securities if they hold them to maturity than they paid to purchase them.the rate on 10-year bunds fell to a record-low 0.492 percent and the yield spread with similar-maturity spanish bonds earlier touched as little as 97 basis points.“the market’s verdict right now seems to be that draghi’s ecb will act swiftly,” said christoph rieger , head of fixed-rate strategy at commerzbank ag in frankfurt . “if that is the case, spreads can compress further and we stick with our strategic overweight of the peripheral countries. next to the large peripherals, portugal should be the best performer of 2015.”the stoxx 600 fell as much as 0.7 percent as a measure of euro-area manufacturing expanded less in december than initially estimated. the number of shares changing hands in stoxx 600-listed companies was 36 percent lower than the average of the past 30 days, data compiled by bloomberg showed.“while the fed is not going to rush into any action, rates will go up,” said thomas averill , a managing director in sydney at rochford capital, a currency and rates risk-management company. “the market is very long the dollar against the yen and the euro, and across the board.”oil capped the sixth weekly loss by dropping to the lowest since may 2009 amid growing supply from russia and iraq and signs of manufacturing weakness in europe and china.west texas intermediate for february delivery fell 1.1 percent, to $52.69 a barrel in new york. brent futures dropped 1.6 percent, to close at $56.42 a barrel in london. both had the lowest settlement since april 30, 2009.copper dropped to the lowest in more than four years in london. the metal for delivery in three months fell 0.7 percent to settle at $6,255 a metric ton ($2.84 a pound). nickel and aluminum retreated in london, while zinc, lead and tin gained.gold futures for february delivery gained 0.2 percent to settle at $1,186.20 an ounce in new york.the msci emerging markets index slipped 0.4 percent to erase a third weekly gain. the gauge dropped 4.6 percent in 2014, capping the first back-to-back annual decline in 12 years. brazil’s ibovespa slid 3.1 percent as commodity producers declined.the hang seng china enterprises index advanced 2.2 percent to its highest close since august 2011 today amid speculation the government will further ease monetary policy to support a slowing economy. hong kong markets were closed yesterday, while mainland exchanges remain shut until jan. 5.a chinese manufacturing gauge slipped to the lowest level in 18 months, adding pressure on policy makers to do more to support economic growth, according to data released yesterday by the statistics bureau and the china federation of logistics and purchasing in beijing.local markets in china, russia, japan, new zealand , the philippines , taiwan and thailand were closed today.to contact the reporters on this story: jeremy herron in new york at jherron8@bloomberg.net ; joseph ciolli in new york at jciolli@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: jeff sutherland at jsutherlan13@bloomberg.net jeremy herronpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 it’s been an interesting couple of days. on friday, i posted about women and minorities in startups and investing, and yesterday, i followed-up with a more targeted post focused on underrepresented minorities (urm) in startups and investing. i’m trying to listen and focus on small things i can do in my limited capacity that may have leverage. the main argument i’ve found most compelling relates to networks and information theory — that if any investment pipeline is a product of an individual’s or firm’s own network, and if the silicon valley and sf proper (where most venture capital resides) is — let’s face it — not racially diverse — then the pipelines may only be tapping certain wells.so, i started thinking about this last night. here’s my thought process: 1/ twitter is the single-greatest networking tool for folks in startups and investing. 2/ most investors either are on twitter (or should be, in my opinion). 3/ underrepresented minorities in general make up a significant portion of activity and culture on twitter (especially in america). 4/ twitter facilitates conversations with the least amount of friction, seen lately around conversations i unassumingly started on pro-rata rights , physical stock certificates , and this topic , too.and…there’s my idea to start, to kickstart more lightweight, organic discussion that’s outside the normal everyday networks and routines for investors. so, here’s what i did:first, i created a public list on twitter called “urm” which is a list of underrepresented minorities in startups, tech, and investing on twitter. so far, there are over 100 members i’ve put into the list and i’ll make it my small contribution to keep adding to this list until my fingers bleed. you can follow the list by clicking here — note lists strip out most conversation @ reply mention tweets, so it will be higher signal.second, if you’re an investor on twitter and reading this, please subscribe to the list and make a concerted effort to engage in conversation with people on the list. there’s no requirement to follow anyone and this should be more about getting to know other people over time and engaging in discussion versus investment pitches. right now, i see about 30 people have subscribed to the list , and when i check it next week, it would be nice to see 100s of investors subscribed, too.twitter seems like the perfect first step here. it’s lightweight, easy, conversational, and if you’re reading this, you’ve likely met many of the strongest people in your network using twitter, so what’s to say that it can’t continue? there’s no travel required, no email, no pitches…just a public dialogue…and likely an easy way to make new friends. in just 24 hours, i know i have.
 residential buildings stand in front of a skyscraper under construction in the futian district of shenzhen, china. bribery scandals have rocked the sector in the past and the prospect other developers may be targeted has hit bond and share prices almost unanimously. closeresidential buildings stand in front of a skyscraper under construction in the futian... read moreresidential buildings stand in front of a skyscraper under construction in the futian district of shenzhen, china. bribery scandals have rocked the sector in the past and the prospect other developers may be targeted has hit bond and share prices almost unanimously.as europe grapples with terrorism and switzerland scrapped a currency peg, the troubles of a chinese developer that’s never reached $3 billion in market value became something investors from new york to london couldn’t ignore.a missed $23 million interest payment by kaisa group holdings ltd. (1638) earlier this month puts it at risk of being the first chinese real estate company to default on its dollar-denominated bonds. that may signal deeper risks for china’s already fragile and corruption-prone property market, which according to world bank estimates accounts for about 16 percent of economic growth.chinese companies comprised 62 percent of all u.s. dollar bond sales in the asia-pacific region ex japan last year, issuing $244.4 billion of the $392.5 billion total, according to data compiled by bloomberg. blackrock inc., the world’s biggest asset manager, owned kaisa’s 8.875 percent securities due 2018 and the ones the subject of the missed coupon payment, the 10.25 percent 2020s, its latest filing on jan. 14 shows. funds managed by jpmorgan chase & co., fidelity investment and ing investment management also held some of kaisa’s debt at the end of october, according to filings.kaisa group holdings ltd.’s woes began late last year when the government in shenzhen, less than 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from hong kong, blocked approvals of its property sales and new projects in the city. closekaisa group holdings ltd.’s woes began late last year when the government in shenzhen,... read morekaisa group holdings ltd.’s woes began late last year when the government in shenzhen, less than 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from hong kong, blocked approvals of its property sales and new projects in the city.“the market has been too complacent,” said raymond chia, the singapore-based head of asia credit research at schroder investment management ltd., which had $447.7 billion under management as of sept. 30. investors would be “rational to adopt a cautious approach in view of the fact that anything can happen, anywhere, anytime. it would be irrational to continue thinking that after kaisa none of the companies will see a similar fate.”kaisa’s woes began late last year when the government in shenzhen, less than 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from hong kong, blocked approvals of its property sales and new projects in the city. it’s also being probed over alleged links to jiang zunyu, the former security chief of shenzhen who was taken into custody as part of a graft probe, two people familiar with the matter said last week, asking not to be named because the connection hasn’t been made public.kaisa missed an interest payment due jan. 8 on its $500 million of 2020 bonds. the notes were sold to investors at par, or 100 cents on the dollar, in january 2013. in december, when some of kaisa’s projects were blocked and key executives quit, the debentures lost 40.1 percent. they continued to fall in january, slumping to 29.901 cents on the dollar on jan. 7, a record low, however have since recovered to trade at about 35.2 cents.concern is mounting that increasing financial stress among builders could spill over into a broader credit crisis in china . new-home prices fell in 65 of the 70 cities monitored in december and were unchanged in four, the national bureau of statistics said in a statement yesterday. shenzhen recorded higher prices, the first city to see an increase in four months.borrowing costs for many developers in the world’s second-largest economy have surged since kaisa’s travails began. yields on chinese dollar-denominated speculative grade debt climbed to 12.38 percent on jan. 16, a bank of america merrill lynch index shows, the highest since june 2012. the junk debt has lost 5.7 percent in 2015, the worst start to a year on record.loan investors are also shunning chinese developers with the bank facilities of shimao property holdings ltd., country garden holdings co. and evergrande real estate group ltd. quoted at levels that indicate impending stress, according to offered prices compiled by bloomberg from two traders.some of kaisa’s chinese creditors, meanwhile, have asked courts to freeze the company’s assets. in a statement on jan. 9, the developer said that “several bank accounts of the group” had been frozen.a court in northeast china froze 640 million yuan ($103 million) of deposits, people familiar said today. dalian intermediate people’s court, in liaoning province, froze 540 million yuan of deposits on jan. 12 as part of lawsuit filed by industrial & commercial bank of china ltd. while the same court ordered 100 million yuan to be stopped on jan. 9 as part of law suit brought by china everbright bank co., the people said, asking not to be identified because the orders haven’t been made public.it’s a reminder of the risks overseas bondholders face when chinese companies run into trouble. china’s bankruptcy laws favor local creditors while offering fewer protections to foreign debt claims. kaisa has a 30-day grace period to make its missed payment.a bigger concern for global investors may be the hurt inflicted on the property market by president xi jinping’s effort to uproot government corruption. bribery scandals have rocked the sector in the past and the prospect other developers may be targeted has hit bond and share prices almost unanimously.“it’s definitely a concern among investors” that similar events could happen to other chinese developers, said alan jin, a hong kong-based analyst at mizuho securities co. emerging funding difficulties in offshore markets may have an impact on the industry’s recovery, he said.inspectors sent by the central government found property related corruption cases, including misbehavior by officials in land auctions and property development, in all but one of the 21 provinces they inspected since 2013, the official xinhua news agency reported oct. 13, citing the ruling party’s disciplinary body.jiang zunyu was named the target of a graft probe in october, according to xinhua. jiang was previously head of longgang district, the people who spoke on condition of anonymity said. according to company filings, some approval procedures for kaisa projects in longgang were suspended last month.the shenzhen city government’s media department referred questions on jan. 13 and a request for contact information for jiang or a legal representative to its foreign media office, which didn’t answer three phone calls.stock moves jan. 16 showed how jittery the markets have become. china overseas land & investment ltd. (688) fell as much as 6.9 percent after the shenzhen government blocked some sales for unspecified reasons. china overseas land later said in a company statement that all the blocked units had been sold and the move won’t affect its business or finances. the shenzhen government also issued a statement saying the restrictions were for “normal processing.” its shares closed down 2.8 percent.fantasia holdings group co. dropped as much as 3.7 percent while guangzhou r&f slid as much as 4.9 percent. the benchmark hang seng index closed down 1 percent.aside from kaisa, agile property holdings ltd. and hydoo international holding ltd. were also implicated in probes in 2014.agile property’s shares plunged 17 percent in hong kong oct. 13 after the company disclosed on oct. 10 its billionaire chairman was put under control of prosecutors in september before being released last month. the company didn’t detail the nature of the detention. in august, shenzhen-based hydoo removed its chairman after losing contact with him for two weeks only to learn he was assisting chinese authorities in an investigation.a shenzhen government website posted an announcement on jan. 15 that four apartments owned by fantasia in the city had been given “restricted” status. the website didn’t indicate when the status on the properties changed. that same day, fantasia issued an exchange filing saying it no longer owned the apartments and that its business operations were normal. dollar bonds of fantasia fell to record lows.“when sales are blocked at other developers, it fuels speculation of similar political risks,” said mari oshidari, a hong kong-based strategist at okasan securities group inc.kaisa didn’t respond to requests for comment about its situation or its connection to jiang zunyu. agile declined to comment and hydoo also didn’t respond to e-mailed requests for comment.housing’s influence on china’s economy is pervasive, driving sales of everything from cement and steel to electrical appliances, furniture and cars. it’s contribution at home, and to global expansion, make it “the most important sector in the universe,” jonathan anderson, the former chief economist for emerging markets at ubs group ag who now runs beijing-based emerging advisors group, wrote in a 2011 research note. property is the main risk for china’s economy, ma jun, the chief economist at the people’s bank of china, said in october.while the clock for kaisa’s missed dollar bond coupon payment ticks, the company has at least secured more time to repay a defaulted bank loan, reducing its immediate cash needs. it said in a jan. 12 statement that it received a waiver from hsbc holdings plc on a hk$400 million ($51.6 million) facility, which was tipped into default when its chairman, kwok ying shing, resigned dec. 31. chief financial officer cheung hung kwong and vice chairman tam lai ling also quit last month.“the most exposed are small developers, particularly in small cities with weaker balance sheets and less access to the banking system,” david loevinger , a former u.s. treasury department senior coordinator for china affairs and now a los angeles-based analyst at tcw group inc., said by phone on jan. 15. “my impression is that the government won’t be unhappy to see some consolidation.”to contact bloomberg news staff for this story: zhang dingmin in beijing at dzhang14@bloomberg.net ; david yong in singapore at dyong@bloomberg.net ; christopher langner in singapore at clangner@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: katrina nicholas at knicholas2@bloomberg.net ; brian bremner at bbremner@bloomberg.net ; andreea papuc at apapuc1@bloomberg.netpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 the bank of england gold vault: the pound is no longer linked to its holdings photo: caters news agencythe circumstances leading up to the bank of england’s abandonment of the gold    standard in 1931 have been detailed by letters between the bank and the    government from the period, which were released today.amid the great depression, during which many countries around the world    sufferered economic turmoil, investors in paris and new york lost confidence    in the pound.at the time, sterling was pegged to bullion. this meant that the pound was    worth a fixed amount compared to other currencies and gold itself. in order    to ensure that sterling retained its value, the bank of england was    obligated to exchange gold for pounds at the specified rate.however, as political turmoil engulfed the uk, the country’s first national    government – a coalition between labour and the conservatives – presided    over a budget crisis that triggered a run on the pound.minutes    from the bank’s court in 1931 , published on wednesday,    detailed how foreign exchange reserves were being drained to such an extent    that the gold standard had to be abandoned.up to that point, the gold standard had been preserved by loans from the    federal reserve and the french central bank, with the bank’s bullion    reserves used as collateral. but threadneedle street decided in september    that its reserves would run dry if new york and paris withdrew support.ernest harvey, the bank’s deputy governor at the time, wrote to ramsay    macdonald, the prime minister, and philip snowden, the chancellor, on    september 19, 1931, saying that reserves worth more than £100m were close to    running out.mr harvey wrote: “i am directed to state that the credits for $125,000,000 and    fcs 3,100,000,000 arranged by the bank of england in new york and paris    respectively, are exhausted, and that the credit for $200,000,000 arranged    in new york by his majesty’s government, together with credits for a total    of fcs 5 milliards [5bn] negotiated in paris, are practically exhausted also."“the heavy demands for exchange on new york and paris still continue. in    addition the bank are being subjected to a drain of gold for holland.“under these circumstances, the bank consider that, having regard to the above    commitments and to contingencies that may arise, it would be impossible for    them to meet the demands for gold with which they would be faced on    withdrawal of support from the new york and paris exchanges.“the bank therefore feel it their duty to represent that, in their opinion, it    is expedient in the national interest that they should be relieved of their    obligation to sell gold under the provisions of [the gold standard act    1925].”with a pound worth $4.87, the credits were worth around £100m.in response, the prime minister wrote back:the gold standard was thus swiftly abandoned, leading to a sharp devaluation    in sterling. this helped the uk recover from the crisis in 1931. the uk had    previously abolished the gold standard during the first world war, but    restored it under winston churchill in 1925.gold standards were popular around the western world in the 19th and early    20th centuries, but no country uses them today. instead, central banks issue “fiat currencies” – money that is not convertible on demand.this gave governments and central banks flexibility to promote growth or    devalue currencies to deal with debts, although the rise of quantitative    easing has seen some pine for the days when money had a fixed value.
 renewables are no longer a fad but a fact of life, supercharged by advances in power storageat first sight the story of renewable energy in the rich world looks like a waste of time and money. rather than investing in research, governments have spent hundreds of millions of pounds, euros and dollars on subsidising technology that does not yet pay its way. yet for all the blunders, renewables are on the march. in 2013 global renewable capacity in the power industry worldwide was 1,560 gigawatts (gw), a year-on-year increase of more than 8%. of that total, hydropower accounted for about 1,000gw, a 4% rise; other renewables went up by nearly 17% to more than 560gw. true, after eight years of continuous increase, the amount invested dropped steeply in 2012 amid uncertainty about future subsidies and investment credits. but thanks to increased efficiency, less money still bought more power.measuring progress is tricky: the cost of electricity from new solar systems can vary from $90 to $300 per megawatt hour (mwh). but it is clearly plummeting. in japan the cost of power produced by residential photovoltaic systems fell by 21% in 2013. as a study for the united nations environment programme notes, a record 39gw of solar photovoltaic capacity was constructed in 2013 at a lesser cost than the 2012 total of 31gw. in the european union (eu), renewables, despite a 44% fall in investment, made up the largest portion (72%) of new electric generating capacity for the sixth year running.the clearest sign of health in the renewables market is smoke-clogged china, which in 2013 invested over $56 billion, more than all of europe, as part of a hurried shift towards clean energy. china’s investment included 16gw of wind power and 13gw of solar. the renewable-power capacity china installed in that year was bigger than its new fossil-fuel and nuclear capacity put together.whether or not it represents good value for money in all circumstances at the moment, renewable energy has become a serious part of the energy mix. in 2013 denmark’s wind turbines provided a third of the country’s energy supply and spain’s a fifth. some worries are abating. though power from solar and wind is intermittent, nature often cancels out the fluctuations: sunny days tend not to be windy, and vice versa.both forms of generation have their fans, but solar seems to be pulling ahead of wind. wind technology is running up against the laws of physics: it is hard to see great new gains in siting, or in the design of bearings and blades. and wind turbines are widely considered unsightly and noisy. solar panels, by contrast, can be surprisingly attractive. instead of featuring serried ranks of black rectangles, the latest designs look like glittering autumn leaves captured in glass.the main reason for the growth in solar energy, though, is innovation, not aesthetics. it comes in two forms. the smaller (accounting for around a tenth of existing solar capacity) is thermal storage, in which sunlight is concentrated as heat, for example in molten salt. that can be used to produce steam for power turbines. after some slack years this form of renewable energy is enjoying a renaissance.investment in the second, more widespread form of solar energy, electricity produced by photovoltaic (pv) cells, fell back in 2013 after ten years when average annual growth was around 50%. yet in the same year total global capacity added in solar electricity exceeded that in wind for the first time. solar received 53% of the $214 billion invested worldwide in renewable power that year. it still provides only a sliver of the world’s energy, and even by 2020 it will make up just 2% of global electricity supply. but the pace of change is remarkable, with more solar capacity installed since 2010 than in the previous four decades.along with worries about pollution from other fuels, the biggest boost to solar—both in the rich and the emerging world—is its plummeting cost. in a recent report on solar electricity the iea noted that the cost of solar panels had come down by a factor of five in the past six years and the cost of full pv systems, which include other electronics and wiring, by three. the “levelised cost” (the total cost of installing a renewable-energy system divided by its expected energy output over its lifetime) of electricity from decentralised (small-scale) solar pv systems in some markets is “approaching or falling below the variable portion of retail electricity prices”, says the report. the iea expects the cost of solar panels to halve in the next 20 years. by 2050, it predicts, solar will provide 16% of the world’s electric power, well up from the 11% it forecast in 2010. at times of peak demand in places such as hawaii, where electricity would otherwise come from oil-fired power stations, solar electricity produced by unsubsidised large installations is already competitive. sanford c. bernstein, a research firm, reckons that in the right conditions solar, measured by thermal units produced, is already cheaper than both oil and asian lng, despite the recent dip in the oil price.such forecasts are largely based on existing technologies. new solar technology, known as “third generation”, stacks layers of photovoltaic material to capture a much broader section of the spectrum, including invisible parts such as infra-red. such cells could be printed from graphene (an ultra-light form of carbon) on a 3d printer. there will no longer be a need for solar panels on rooftops. instead, any man-made surface could be turned into a solar panel with films and paint. in a pilot project in the netherlands, solar electricity is being generated by a newly built road. dieter helm, the oxford-based energy expert cited earlier, believes that solar power will become so cheap that energy will no longer be seen as scarce.other forms of “distributed” generation which provide power for flexible local use and storage are also coming up fast. domestic fuel cells, for instance, are common in energy-hungry japan. such fuel cells can run off the gas grid. its pipes, notes david crane, the boss of nrg, an american power company, are simpler, cheaper and less vulnerable to rough weather than the poles and wires of the electric grid. households can turn their gas into electricity on the spot. that may end up cheaper and more reliable.some of that gas could come from waste products instead of fossil sources. america’s oldest brewery, yuengling in pennsylvania, has installed a combined-heat-and-power (chp) plant, fuelled by methane produced from waste, which provides 20% of the brewery’s energy needs. in ukraine, which is trying to become independent of russian natural-gas supplies, the european bank for reconstruction and development is financing a 2.25mw biogas plant at a sugar refinery near kiev. in britain the first self-powered sewage works came into operation in october 2014, at a saving of £1.3m ($2m) a year. and biogas now accounts for one-tenth of gas consumption in china, where 42m households turn their animal and human waste into methane. cost apart, the biggest problem with renewables has always been storing the electricity they produce. that gave a big advantage to incumbent power companies, which could afford large capital investments in generation and storage. for domestic consumers, the power produced from solar panels on the roof is of limited use if they cannot store it, because they still have to buy from the grid in the evening when they need it most. but if intermittent energy can be stored, its economics are dramatically improved: the cost of installing capacity remains the same but the cost per kilowatt hour shrinks.the easiest storage is someone else’s. in regimes with “net metering” rules, common in some green-minded places including 43 american states, the energy utility is obliged to buy renewable power from small-scale producers at the same price at which it sells its own electricity. that is a startlingly good deal for the producer, less so for the company. but it applies only to small amounts of power and is unlikely to last.meanwhile breakthroughs in storage are creating other options. businesses and households can store cheap, home-generated electricity as thermal energy. an american company sells a device called ice bear which makes ice at night with cheap electricity (and in cooler temperatures), then uses it to cool air in the daytime, saving energy and money.all these technologies are becoming cheaper and more practical, and in some countries are boosted by generous subsidies. germany rebates 30% (an average of €3,300, or $4,000) on the cost of a solar-plus-battery household system, and offers low-interest credit for the rest. california has legislation in place under which a third of its energy must come from renewable resources by 2020. the state has told its three large utilities to provide 1.3gw of storage capacity. around 85mw of this is likely to be used by small providers with solar panels.bloomberg new energy finance (bnef) has done the sums for a german household planning to install a 5kw solar system and a battery with 3kwh of storage capacity at a cost of around €18,000 ($22,000). the solar panels would cut the household’s power consumption by roughly 30%; adding the storage system could increase the saving to as much as 80%. at the current cost of the equipment, and assuming no rise in electricity prices, the return on the investment would be barely 2%. but on more realistic assumptions—a continuing rise in electricity prices of 2% a year and a big fall in the cost of solar capacity and storage—the rate of return could be a juicy 10% or more.the gigafactory, which will build batteries for the tesla electric-car company, aims to cut the cost of battery storage towards what many see as a crucial benchmark: $100 per kwh against $250 now. that will bring the price of an electric car close to parity with that of a conventional one, maybe even before the end of this decade, hints elon musk, the ceo. but better batteries will have other advantages too. one is that electric cars, when not being driven (which is 95% of the time, research suggests), can be used for storage. and batteries that are being displaced by more efficient versions can play a part in domestic storage.the storage business is booming. navigant, a consultancy, reckons that in 2014 alone projects amounting to 363mw were announced. bnef estimates that by 2020 some 11.3gw will be installed, 80% of it in america (chiefly california), germany, japan and south korea, and that investment in storage by then will be running at $5 billion a year.the biggest advantage of storage is that it dispenses with the most inefficient part of the power industry: the generating capacity that is held in reserve to meet peaks of demand. in the state of new york, for example, one-fifth of the generating capacity runs for less than 250 hours a year. by some counts, a megawatt of storage replaces roughly ten megawatts of such generating capacity—an irresistible saving.in rich countries new forms of storage and generation are eating away at the model that has sustained the electricity industry since the days of thomas edison. in parts of the developing world where there are no incumbents, they offer the best chance for whole populations to get any power at all.
 by alex tabarrok on december 4, 2011            at 7:01 am               in  economics , education , law  | permalinkusa today : lanya olmstead was born in florida to a mother who immigrated from taiwan and an american father of norwegian ancestry. ethnically, she considers herself half taiwanese and half norwegian. but when applying to harvard, olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.“i didn’t want to put ‘asian’ down,” olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against asians in the application process.”asian students have higher average sat scores than any other group, including whites. a study by princeton sociologist thomas espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum sat score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). espenshade found that asian-americans needed a 1550 sat to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.note that this is true even though there is a history of discrimination against asians in the u.s., asian children also do well on extra-curricular activities and many have poor, immigrant backgrounds.comparing schools which can and cannot legally discriminate suggests a lot of discrimination.  at yale the class of 2013 is 15.5 percent asian-american, at dartmouth 16.1 percent, at harvard 19.1 percent, and at princeton 17.6 percent. these figures are above the asian share of the population but compare:the  california institute of technology , a private school that chooses not to consider race, is about one-third asian. (thirteen percent of california residents have asian heritage.) the university of california-berkeley, which is forbidden by state law to consider race in admissions, is more than 40 percent asian — up from about 20 percent before the law was passed.interestingly, the obama administration has recently reversed bush era rules and interpretations in order to promote race-based admissions:obama guidelines: “institutions are not required to implement race-neutral approaches if, in their judgment, the approaches would be unworkable.”governor jerry brown would also like to repeal or limit  ca’s ban on race-based admissions.
 the money spigots for u.s. startups opened last year to their widest since the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000.venture capitalists pumped $48.3 billion into u.s. startups in 2014, according to data today from the national venture capital association and pricewaterhousecoopers, the most since investors piled $105 billion into closely held companies in 2000. the 2014 total was up 61 percent from $30 billion in 2013 and was more than double the $20.4 billion invested in 2009.the venture number caps what was a year of megadeal funding rounds and rising valuations for startups, especially in the technology industry. mobile car-booking company uber technologies inc. reeled in two financings that each exceeded $1 billion last year, ending with a valuation of $40 billion. venture fundings of more than $500 million hit a six-year high last year, according to researcher cb insights.“i think we’re in an environment where there are a lot of things to celebrate, but we’re getting to the point of excessive in the amount of capital being raised and valuations,” said joe horowitz, managing general partner at jafco ventures.the flood of money has renewed debate about whether silicon valley is in a bubble. venture capitalists including andreessen horowitz’s marc andreessen, benchmark’s bill gurley and breyer capital’s jim breyer have all cautioned in recent months that the good times may not last for startup fundraising“when the market turns, and it will turn, we will find out who has been swimming without trunks on,” andreessen said in a twitter post in september. bloomberg lp, the parent of bloomberg news, is an investor in andreessen horowitz.the nvca and pricewaterhousecoopers data doesn’t fully capture the amount of money being poured into u.s. startups because the survey only tracks investments from venture capitalists. other types of investors have also increasingly started putting money into startups, including hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and international companies. last month, for example, chinese web company baidu inc. (bidu) agreed to invest in san francisco-based uber.apart from uber, other u.s. startups that benefited from the easy-money environment last year were virtual-reality startup magic leap inc. and mobile messaging company snapchat inc., as well as media startup vice media, according to nvca and pricewaterhousecoopers data.many of the startups taking in money are receiving larger funding amounts. the number of investing deals last year rose to 4,356 last year, up 3.9 percent from 2013, illustrating how more money flooded into a relatively constant number of companies, according to the nvca and pricewaterhousecoopers report.“the inflow of capital and public market funds is very real and sizeable,” said steve harrick, general partner at institutional venture partners. “the investment climate is very good in terms of opportunities.”venture capitalists last year paid particular attention to software startups, which accounted for 41 percent of total investments. it was the largest share the category has held since at least 1995, according to the data.among the most active venture firms in 2014 were new enterprise associates, andreessen horowitz, kleiner perkins caufield & byers, google ventures and khosla ventures , cb insights said.even with the warnings from some venture capitalists, others said the rush of money is set to continue. charles kane, a senior lecturer at the massachusetts institute of technology’s sloan school of management, said venture investors still need to deploy the huge amounts of funding they’ve raised.“next year will be bigger than the past year,” kane said. “the venture capital firms that have gone out to raise money haven’t had trouble raising money.”to contact the reporter on this story: eric newcomer in san francisco at enewcomer@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: pui-wing tam at ptam13@bloomberg.net reed stevensonpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 by robert costa and ed o'keefe december 29, 2014 follow @costareports follow @edatpostrep. steve scalise (r-la.), the house majority whip , acknowledged monday that he spoke at a gathering hosted by white-supremacist leaders while serving as a state representative in 2002, thrusting a racial controversy into house republican ranks days before the party assumes control of both congressional chambers.scalise, 49, who ascended to the house gop’s third-ranking post this year, confirmed through an adviser that he once appeared at a convention of the european-american unity and rights organization, or euro. but the adviser said the congressman didn’t know at the time about the group’s affiliation with racists and neo-nazi activists.“for anyone to suggest that i was involved with a group like that is insulting and ludicrous,” scalise told the times-picayune on monday night. the organization, founded by former ku klux klan leader david duke, has been called a hate group by several civil rights organizations.the news could complicate republican efforts to project the sense of a fresh start for a resurgent, diversifying party as the new session of congress opens next week. in the time since voters handed control of congress to republicans, top gop leaders have been eagerly trumpeting their revamped image and management team on capitol hill.monday night, some democrats were already raising questions about whether scalise should remain in a leadership post.rep. steve scalise (r-la.) says he won a three-way race for majority whip because his coalition was united, and says his election is "a win for america."“it’s hard to believe, given david duke’s reputation in louisiana, that somebody in politics in louisiana wasn’t aware of duke’s associations with the group and what they stand for,” said rep. joaquin castro (tex.), a rising star in the democratic party who is considered among the most prominent hispanics in congress. “if that’s the case and he agreed to join them for their event, then i think it’s a real test for speaker boehner as to whether congressman scalise should remain in republican leadership,” castro said in a phone interview.“race still is, sadly, an ugly aspect of our politics,” he said by e-mail. “no politician should ever find himself/herself addressing a white supremacist organization except to tell them to go to hell.” associates of house speaker john a. boehner (r-ohio) are monitoring the situation, and minority leader nancy pelosi’s staff had no comment.scalise’s political circle worked furiously late monday to quell the storm, with his confidants e-mailing reporters and house members, assuring them that scalise did not know the implications of his actions in 2002 and describing him as a disorganized and ill-prepared young politician who didn’t pay close attention to invitations.when scalise was asked by the times-picayune how he came to appear at the conference, he cited his staff, saying he had only one person working for him at the time. “when someone called and asked me to speak, i would go,” he said. “if i knew today what they were about, i wouldn’t go.”in a phone interview late monday from his home in mandeville, la., duke recalled scalise as a “nice guy” and said he was invited to the conference by two of duke’s longtime associates: howie farrell, who had worked on duke’s gubernatorial campaign, and kenny knight.scalise “says he didn’t realize what the conference was. i don’t know if he did or did not,” duke said. he also said scalise should not be forced to resign, saying scalise was merely taking an opportunity to meet with “constituents.”“what politician would ever pass up an opportunity to talk to his constituents?” duke said. “it sounds like they are just playing politics.”duke said he spoke to the conference twice, once by phone and later by video hookup. but he did not hear scalise speak, he said, and does not know whether scalise heard him speak.in a statement, scalise’s spokeswoman, moira bagley smith, emphasized that the then-state lawmaker was unaware at the time of the group’s ideology and mission. “he has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question,” smith said. “the hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what mr. scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted catholic.”rep. steve king (r-iowa), a leading conservative in the house, said in an interview monday that he stood by scalise and believed that many conservatives in the house’s hard-right bloc would do the same.“jesus dined with tax collectors and sinners,” king said. “it’s not the healthy who need a doctor, it’s the sick. given that piece of scripture, and understanding that scalise probably wasn’t staffed thoroughly, i could understand how something like this happened. but i know his heart, i’ve painted houses with him post-katrina, and i know he is a good man.”scalise’s appearance at the event was first reported by blogger lamar white jr. , who manages a web site on louisiana politics.white’s post, which was published sunday, said scalise spoke at the best western landmark hotel in metairie, la., a suburb of new orleans, as a part of a two-day conference in may 2002.“duke, a former grand wizard of the ku klux klan, former louisiana state representative, and former republican candidate for louisiana governor, was attempting to rebrand his movement into something more palatable and less incendiary, and the ambiguous-sounding euro seemed to do the trick,” white wrote.ronald doggett, the head of the virginia chapter of euro, said duke participated in the conference via phone from russia, where the former kkk leader was living at the time.doggett, who attended the conference, said he did not remember hearing scalise speak but said it would not be unusual for euro to have contact with local officials.“if that happened, so what?” doggett said in a phone interview monday. “what is the big deal? there’s a different standard for whites than there are for other groups. how is this really news?”scalise’s aides said that because of the unavailability of scalise’s schedule from that year, they did not have details to share about his appearance or remarks. they said he was a frequent speaker at events at that hotel — a hot spot for new orleans-area conferences.scalise’s defense — that he and his staff were not fully cognizant of the group’s leanings and the nature of the meeting — contrasts with the local news media coverage generated by the duke-coordinated conclave that spring.the gambit weekly, an alternative publication in new orleans, wrote days before the conference that the hotel distanced itself from duke’s group. “a contract to book this event was made some time ago, and it is our practice to fulfill our contractual obligations,” a company spokesman told the publication. “our company does not share the views of this organization.”the iowa cubs, a minor league baseball team, also told the gambit weekly that they were concerned about housing their players, which included several african americans, at that hotel while traveling to louisiana.“i’m glad we’re staying away from it,” pat listach, then a cubs coach, said in an interview earlier that month. “i wouldn’t have been comfortable staying there.”the duke group drew additional headlines nationally in the weeks before the louisiana meeting. in mid-may 2002, usa today reported that the organization was active in south carolina and had “picketed” there to support the confederate flag flying on state capitol grounds.the news about scalise, coupled with the unrelated legal troubles of two other gop lawmakers, could disrupt republican plans to hit the ground running this january as the party takes full control of congress.rep. michael g. grimm (r-n.y.), who represents staten island, pleaded guilty last week to felony tax fraud and on monday privately signaled he was readying to resign, according to house republican staffers familiar with his calls to house gop leaders. and rep. blake farenthold (r-tex.) has been accused by a fired former staffer of creating a hostile work environment. the staffer has sued, alleging that the congressman “regularly drank to excess” and made sexually inappropriate comments to another co-worker.a former chairman of the republican study committee — the caucus of the most conservative gop members — scalise was elected majority whip in june, following the defeat of then-house majority leader eric cantor in a virginia republican primary. cantor’s loss and subsequent departure from congress opened up the whip post after then-majority whip kevin mccarthy (r-calif.) decided to seek cantor’s position as boehner’s deputy. scalise won the third-ranking job on the first ballot.“i’m excited about that opportunity to help be a part of this leadership team that’s stronger than ever and more focused on the problems this country is facing and working to get our country back on track,” he said.but scalise’s engagement with a white-supremacist group might create immediate disquiet for at least two members of the expanded republican majority.for the first time in several years, the house gop conference will include two black members — mia love, a former mayor of a small utah town, and will hurd, a former cia operative, who will represent a swing district in texas. they cast their candidacies as historic, while gop leaders embraced them as examples of the party’s broadening appeal.manuel roig-franzia contributed to this report.robert costa is a national political reporter at the washington post.ed o’keefe is a congressional reporter with the washington post and covered the 2008 and 2012 presidential and congressional elections.
rt @tokyowoods: currency market in turmoil after swiss-franc move. some forex brokers face significant losses.
 brokerage fxcm gets rescue package; deutsche bank and citigroup suffer big hitsbanks, brokers and individual investors were left with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses a day after an unexpected surge in the swiss franc sent shock waves through markets.fxcm inc., a major u.s. retail foreign-exchange broker, emerged as the biggest victim so far and had to be rescued by an emergency $300 million lifeline from investment firm leucadia national corp.shares of fxcm, one of the largest retail...to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 partner @a16z . product guy & founder.the “connected home” aka the “smart home” as a theme is clearly the winner at ces this year with hundreds of companies showcasing both hardware and software solutions on the show floor. it’s captured the attention of those attending ces and those who are watching from afar like me. but, as i’ve poured through what’s been announced so far, i don’t believe 2015 will be the year that the smart home will finally be realized. to further fred wilson’s point in his “ what’s going to happen " in 2015 post, iot as a general category, which includes wearables, personal mesh, etc., will have fits and starts as the major platform players (google, apple, samsung, etc.) jockey for positioning, trying to convince developers to build solutions on their own stack, creating a veritable mess of non-interoperable computing standards and the need to open a dozen apps to operate a dozen iot devices.however, the one area that was supposed to take a back seat this year was mobile. as some have claimed, “mobile innovation is dead”, “hardware commoditization has commenced”, and “mobile operating systems and phone hardware are basically good enough.” while some elements of those statements may be correct, sharp analysts such as “the bens” ( ben thompson , ben bajarin , and my own colleague at a16z ben evans ) know that we’re nowhere near done. innovation doesn’t just come from addition, but as clay christensen has taught us over and over, disruption by subtraction can be even more powerful.that’s why i believe that the most interesting thing that’s come out of ces this year (yes, there’s 2 more days, but hear me out) is microsoft’s nokia 215 . most have wondered whether microsoft can really and truly “make it in mobile” given their legacy as a 40-year old company (their 40th birthday is on april 4, 2015). in combining two major investments in the last decade in nokia and facebook (where msft still owns ~1%), the nokia 215 at $29 — without a single subsidy! — brings facebook, facebook messenger, a browser, and a feature-phone capabilities to a single device, helping get the next two billion people online with “semi-smartphones”. it’s dual-sim, which is increasingly popular in emerging markets as it lets users typically do 1 of 2 things: a) make/receive calls for both personal and work numbers, or b) have 1 primary number and use the 2nd sim for their data plan, which are replaced fairly often based on the best data promotions they can find. finally, a 29-day standby time on a single battery charge is amazing.folks in the us have to remember that nokia still has significant brand power in europe and asia, so i think this was an incredibly smart move by microsoft. we’ll see if the software actually holds up — it’s a dated operating system originally based on mediatek called series 30+. but, if you’re one of those two billion people coming online, you’ll not only have some options at the $30 price point like this phone, but also further up the stack with $100-150 devices like the newly announced micromax yu , pre-installed with the cyanogen operating system based on the android open source project (aosp), which is a fully-functional operating system, making the yu one of the cheapest true smartphones out there. (disclosure: my firm andreessen horowitz is an investor in cyanogen).i would love for this year to be the year of the “smart home”, but the rise of semi-smartphones will be what i remember most from ces and will likely be the bigger story for the rest of 2015.
 by matt o'brien december 26, 2014 follow @obsoletedogmavladimir putin wants to have his dollars, spend them too, and invade ukraine.that's impossible, of course, but he's trying to make it a little less so with some financial legerdemain that covers up what's really going on. putin, you see, is forcing russia's companies to spend their dollars instead—but russia's government will be on the hook if those firms get into trouble as russia's economy implodes. so putin, in other words, is playing a financial shell game to try to buy enough time for oil prices to rebound and bail him out.russia's problem, as i've said before , is that it doesn't so much have an economy as an oil exporting business that subsidizes everything else. and that business is in bad shape now that oil prices have halved the past few months. cheaper oil means russian corporations have fewer dollars to turn into rubles, which is just another way of saying that there's less demand for rubles—so its price is falling.free falling, actually. the ruble, which started the year at 33 per dollar, gradually dropped to 60 before suddenly dropping to 80 on dec. 16. it was a run on the currency. people flocked to their banks to turn their rubles into dollars and, failing that, stampeded to stores to buy whatever foreign goods they could—luxury cars, apple products and ikea furniture—before their money lost any more value. even jacking up interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent, basically paying people to keep their money in rubles, wasn't enough to persuade them to do so.and then the panic was over. well, at least for now. the ruble stabilized, then it rallied, and now it's settled at around 54 per dollar. what changed? simple: russia's government started turning its dollars into rubles, and it started strong-arming russia's companies into doing so as well. specifically, the government spent $15.7 billion of what was its $414 billion war chest in the past week alone. that's a pretty high burn rate. and it's even worse than that because russia is counting on that money to bail out not only its currency, but also its government and companies.the math is pretty brutal. russia's government, you see, will go from surplus to deficit now that its oil revenues have dried up. and it can't borrow the money it needs, because western sanctions over its incursion into ukraine have cut it, along with everyone else in russia, off from international credit markets. so it will have to start dipping into its rainy day fund to cover its bills.it's already using that money, though, to bail out its banks. here's how the dominos line up. russia's companies, as paul krugman explained, borrowed a lot of dollars the past few years when it looked like the ruble would keep going up and up. so those dollar debts—which can't be rolled over, again, because of the sanctions—are harder to pay off now that the ruble has collapsed. that's bad news not just for the russian companies that might default, but for the russian banks that lent them money.so far, the government has seen its $530 million bailout of trust bank, a mid-tier lender known for its bruce willis ads , balloon to $1.9 billion  in a matter of days—with plenty more to come for other banks. indeed, the government announced that two other lenders will probably need $5.9 billion the next few months, and from there, who knows how much more. it's no wonder that russia's banks mistrust each other so much that they won't lend to each other  on anything but punitive terms for even short amounts of time. and that despite the fact that the government told them that they could pretend they hadn't taken losses by not marking their books to market.russia, in other words, is stuck in an economic catch-22. it can't afford to spend too many dollars bailing out its currency when it needs to use that money to bail out its companies. but those companies, which have a lot of dollar debts, will need even bigger bailouts—as will the banks that lent them money—if russia doesn't bail out its currency. so either way, it's going to have to spend its dollars, but it can't really afford to do that, either. that's because $400 billion of reserves is more like $200 billion. think about it this way. if you spend half your money bolstering your currency and your financial system, and that's still not enough, why should the other half be either? markets will smell the blood in the water and attack until the ruble completely collapses and companies go broke.so putin needs to find more dollars, and he needs to find them now. where, you ask? well, the answer is as obvious as it is unlikely: russia's companies. now, the government has said it will never use capital controls—forbidding people and corporations from turning their rubles into foreign currency—even as it's started to introduce them. it's already  ordered the big exporters to sell some of their dollars for rubles, and then keep their dollar reserves at that level from now on.but think about it. there's a problem here: the government is basically taking dollars from companies that have a lot of dollar debts. so how will they pay back what they owe now? well, if you guessed that in true circular fashion the government would lend companies back the dollars they need, you'd be right. the central bank, you see, will lend dollars and euros for up to a year to banks that have lent dollars and euros to corporations. or, if you ignore the middleman, russia's central bank is lending dollars directly to russia's companies.the point of all this is to hide how many dollars russia is actually spending to prop up the ruble. and in that, at least, it's succeeding. it's not easy to keep track of how much money russia is committing when it's spending its reserves, forcing companies to spend theirs, and then loaning those companies the dollars they now need. because if companies default on these dollars loans, it will turn out that the government was spending these dollars all along. that shouldn't happen, but it still could if the combination of low oil prices and a deep credit crunch make its economy shrink somewhere between 5 and 10 percent next year, like people think it could. in that case, the central bank would probably print however many rubles these companies need, which it basically already did for the big oil producer rosneft , and then watch the ruble fall further as markets catch on to the sleight of hand.putin could end at least some of this pain if he gave up his imperial ambitions in ukraine and the sanctions were lifted. if he doesn't, though, and oil prices stay around $60 a barrel, then russia is going to be hit by the double whammy of rising unemployment and rising inflation. to give you an idea how serious it's getting, putin is already talking about putting price controls on vodka  now that all prices are  starting to climb .putin's going to find out if letting them drink vodka works any better than letting them eat cake.matt o'brien is a reporter for wonkblog covering economic affairs. he was previously a senior associate editor at the atlantic.
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 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.the centers for disease control released a monster report in may on the state of americans' health. the 511-page report makes one thing abundantly clear: teens are behaving better right now than pretty much any other time since the federal government began collecting data.the teen birth rate has plummeted in recent decades.  separate data shows this has coincided with dramatic drops in the teen abortion rates. nobody is totally sure why this is happening, but they do have a lot of theories about why its happening, which range from the show 16 and pregnant setting a good example to  getting lead out of the environment.the decline in teen births has also happened at a time when teenagers have gotten better at using contraceptives. over 30 percent of teenagers between 15 and 19 report using contraceptives, which is up from 24 percent in 1982 (it is a slight drop, however, from 2002).high school seniors are drinking less, smoking less, and barely using cocainethe cdc unfortunately doesn't measure how many teenagers specifically are meeting  federal exercise guidelines (which recommend at least an hour of exercise three days per week). but they do look at 18 to 24-year-olds, who have the highest rate of hitting the federal guidelines among any group of adults measured — and have been doing better in recent years.
rt @hilzfuld: been fortunate to interview some wow people over the years including @guykawasaki, @stevewoz, and @pmarca 
 by hilzfuld · june 17, 2011one of the best parts of my job has been interviewing tech & marketing superstars. don’t forget to bookmark this page as i will be updating it frequently with new interviews that i conduct. just this week, i have two extremely exciting interviews i will hopefully be adding to this list.the following is a list of industry shakers that i have had the opportunity to interview thanks to twitter:- guy kawasaki : the founder of alltop and the man who made apple, cool. in this interview, guy gives some sound advice to beginning entrepreneurs, and talks aboutthe future of the web.- walt mossberg : walt is widely regarded as the father of all tech journalists. here is the man that steve jobs walks up to right as he gets off the wwdc keynotestage with his newly announced product in hand. walt was the first person to ever see and review the original iphone.- robert scoble : if you have gone anywhere near the internet, you have most likely heard of the scobleizer. the man makes and breaks companies.some celebrities have action figures and others have verbs named after them. a company that meets scoble and succeeds thanks to his pr is a company that was scobleized.yep, this has to be the most surreal interview i have done. alyssa milano, or sam from who’s the boss, is now a super geek tweeting to her almost two million followers about tech, baseball, and saving the world (yes, she has done amazing work.). she was kind enough to take off the time to answer my questions, and since then, has also tweeted some of my posts, which caused my entire server to collapse thanks to her tremendous online influence.- gary vaynerchuk : gary is a man that can be summed up in one word: passion. the guy  need a new shirt after he gets off stage and it does not matterwhat topic he was speaking about, wine, social media, or starting a business. you watch gary speak, you cannot possibly stay unaffected. his charisma is addictive and that explains his tremendous success.- sean percival : i had not heard of sean because he is the vp marketing of myspace, i had heard of him because he is all over the web. between creating viral photosthatare spread around through sites like techcrunch to his popular twitter account, sean is a pretty interesting guy with some awesome insights in this interview.- richard barley : as the community manager of tweetdeck, richard does a better job than anyone out there. the man seems not to sleep and offers support totweetdeck users around the clock. between the awesome product, the professional team, and the massive user base, it is no wonder twitter just bought this company for $40m.mike, the founder of the wildly popular ipad magazine app, flipboard, is one of the nicest and smartest people i have ever spoken to. everyone who meets mike is immediately impressed, and mike is a sought after commodity in the tech world. he sits on the twitter board and consults with many different companies.in today’s mobile industry, if there is one developer that rules the market, it is rovio, thanks to their games including angry birds, and others. rovio, by all standards has done some phenomenal marketing work, and peter is the “mighty eagle” in charge of the company’s marketing strategy. peter is also a really nice guy who does not let his success get to his head. he is responsive, professional, and a true role model.as the chief editor of mashable, ben has to be the most professional writer/author i have ever known. the guy is a machine and pops out blog posts faster than i can say mashable. he is also a really nice guy and tries to help when he can.as the cmo of getjar, the largest independent app store, patrick has his work cut out for him going head to head with giants like apple and google, he is doing a phenomenal job defining the app landscape and had some extremely interesting insights about the future of this space.chris was blogging before the term “blog” was even coined. the man is a legend on the web and was a true pioneer in the web video space. his sense of humor is something you do not generally see in people as influential as chris and that is chris for you, a down to earth guy who truly gets it. this was also the only inteview that was answered in a video.as one of the main authors on the leading tech site, techcrunch, mg is a brilliant writer and a tech expert. his posts are always insightful, highly technical and somehow humorous all at the same time. getting mg to do this interview took a few months, but he gave me some awesome insights in the world of tech and blogging.one of the most professional and highly regarded online journalists online, om has been recognized by many for excellence in tech reporting. he is also a really down to earth guy, which is something that caught me by surprise, as he is truly a legend on and off the web.david pogue is the technology journalist for the ny times, need i say more? as someone put it to me this week “david pogue is the man when it comes to tech. if he endorses your company with just one positive word, you are made. and the opposite is true as well, pogue is a powerful man as far as tech entrepreneurs are concerned. from my communication with david, you would never know how important the guy is, i don’t think he knows how important he is.this was somewhat of a more difficult interview to conduct as jon is breaking tech stories almost daily. named one of the top 100 most influential people in tech, boy genius has been quoted across the web and recognized for his expertise on matters of technology. like many others on the list, based on my correspondence with jon, you would really never know who he is and what he has achieved, but as far as i am concerned, he has reached the highest possible level that a tech journalist and blogger can achieve.- tim stevens : the new editor in chief of engadget, i was fortunate enough to connect with tim on twitter. the man is completely down to earth despite being widely regarded as one of the biggest experts in the mobile and gadgets space.- dennis crowley : co founder and ceo of foursquare. dennis has pretty much accomplished the impossible and reeducated consumers to launch foursquare and check in to places when almost all foursquare users said at one point “i would never do that, why would i?”: tech journalist and hotel dweller, paul manages to inject humor in everything he does. this interview is no different.- vic gundotra : senior vp engineering of google, vic is one of the nicest people in tech. vic regularly replies to users on google+ and was kind enough to spend time talking to me.- jeri ryan : i originally connected with jeri on twitter and google+ and quickly learned that she does not realize just how awesome she is. read the interview, you’ll understand.mike elgan : mike is one of the most prolific tech journalists out there. or in other words, the man is a tech content machine. follow him closely and you will see. meanwhile, enjoy this interview.amir shevat : amir is in charge of developer relations at google, israel and having known amir for a few years, i can safely say he earned that title of the nicest guy in tech.robin wauters:  robin is one of my all time favorite bloggers. previously of techcrunch, robin now writes for thenextweb and is always first and last on the scene.-  jay yarow : jay is one of the funnier bloggers/journalists around. he writes about the tech world for business insider and always has unique insights on trends and the industry in general. - steve wozniak : steve is the legendary co-founder of apple inc who started the company alongside his best friend steve jobs. need i say more?- mathew ingram : mathew is a senior gigaom writer and hands down, one of the best sources on twitter for tech. if you follow mathew on twitter, you get a mixture of tech analysis and general updates on current events.- damian burns : damian leads strategic partnerships at google and is one of the nicest people i know. his interview answers were nothing short of awesome. due to his senior position at google, it was not a trivial thing for him to do this interview but i asked so he made the effort. very much appreciated!- marc andreessen : mega investor and entrepreneur, marc is best known for pretty much inventing the web browser. marc is also widely regarded as the father of the technology venture capital world. this was my first twitter interview and my first guest post on venturebeat!- martin bryant : editor-in-chief of one of my favorite tech blog, the next web, i have sent martin many stories over the years and always found him to be a super professional who gets things done.- tomer sharon : a senior ux researcher at google, nyc, tomer opened my eyes to the fascinating world of ux. very enlightening interview!- saul singer : the man who coined the phrase “startup nation” and one of the greatest and most forward thinking individuals in the israeli and global tech scene!- hunter walk:  my first interview of 2015! hunter walk, one of my top follows on twitter talks to me about mobile, entrepreneurship and investing! that’s all folks. stay tuned for some upcoming interviews that will blow you away. also, if there is anyone that you would like to see me interview, please let me know in the comments, and i will try my best to reach out to them.
 (bloomberg) -- lu ting, head of greater china economics at bank of america corp. in hong kong, talks about china's economy and real estate market.       he speaks with rishaad salamat on bloomberg television's "on the move". (source: bloomberg)china is accelerating 300 infrastructure projects valued at 7 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) this year as policy makers seek to shore up growth that’s in danger of slipping below 7 percent.premier li keqiang ’s government approved the projects as part of a broader 400-venture, 10 trillion yuan plan to run from late 2014 through 2016, said people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified as the decision wasn’t public. the national development and reform commission, which will oversee the projects, didn’t respond to a faxed request for comment.the move illustrates concern among officials that china’s planned shift to a domestic-consumption driven economy has yet to produce enough growth momentum. the yuan rose, halting a two-day decline, and australia ’s dollar -- a proxy for china due to its shipments of iron ore and other commodities used in construction -- climbed after the news.“it’s part of china’s efforts to stabilize growth, and the news will help to boost market confidence,” said julia wang, a hong kong-based economist with hsbc holdings plc. “infrastructure investment will continue to be a major driver for china’s economic growth.”the shanghai composite index (shcomp) pared a loss of as much as 1.4 percent to close little changed. the msci asia pacific index lost 1.7 percent.traffic moves under elevated roads at night in shanghai, china. the economic observer newspaper reported dec. 26 on its website that an official from the ndrc’s zhejiang provincial bureau said the government had approved more than 420 infrastructure projects needing investment of more than 10 trillion yuan. closetraffic moves under elevated roads at night in shanghai, china. the economic observer... read moretraffic moves under elevated roads at night in shanghai, china. the economic observer newspaper reported dec. 26 on its website that an official from the ndrc’s zhejiang provincial bureau said the government had approved more than 420 infrastructure projects needing investment of more than 10 trillion yuan.the approvals contrast with past moves to boost growth via infrastructure in which the government gave the green-light to projects individually. they are part of efforts to respond to weak output, according to the people.the projects will be funded by the central and local governments, state-owned firms, loans and the private sector, said the people. the investment will be in seven industries including oil and gas pipelines, health, clean energy, transportation and mining, according to the people. they said the ndrc is also studying projects in other industries in case the government needs to provide more support for growth.the ndrc’s spokesman, li pumin, said last month china would encourage investment in those areas.the economic observer newspaper reported dec. 26 on its website that an official from the ndrc’s zhejiang provincial bureau said the government had approved more than 420 infrastructure projects needing investment of more than 10 trillion yuan, without specifying a timeframe.rail investments may exceed 1.1 trillion yuan this year as investments in the previous four years lagged behind the five-year plan for 2011-2015, han siyi, an analyst at shenyin & wanguo securities, said at a conference in shanghai today.china has sought ways to stimulate growth without resorting to full-blown stimulus as it seeks to keep a lid on total debt that is now more than 200 percent of gross domestic product. the central bank added liquidity into the banking system last year and announced an interest-rate cut on nov. 21.“it’s not 2008 again,” zhao xijun, a finance professor with renmin university of china in beijing, said in reference to a 4 trillion yuan stimulus china unleashed at that time. “when china launched the big stimulus package in 2008 to deal with the global financial crisis, china wanted nothing but faster growth; now china is focusing more on quality, efficiency and sustainability.”china’s total fixed-asset investment in the first 11 months of the year was 45.1 trillion yuan . infrastructure spending totaled 9.8 trillion yuan in transportation; environment and water management; and the supply of heat, gas and water, according to national bureau of statistics data compiled by bloomberg.deutsche bank ag analysts yesterday cut their expansion projections for this quarter to 6.8 percent, reinforcing their call for the central bank to step up monetary stimulus.“we expect growth to surprise to the downside in q1 and policies to surprise on the loose side in 2015,” deutsche bank economists led by hong kong-based zhang zhiwei wrote. china will be hit by a “double whammy” of slowing property investment and a sharp decline in land sales by local governments, the analysts wrote.to contact bloomberg news staff for this story: steven yang in beijing at kyang74@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: malcolm scott at mscott23@bloomberg.net ; jessica zhou at jzhou75@bloomberg.net nicholas wadhamspress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 » follow the world desk on:samia el alaoui talibi, who with her husband ministers to muslims at a prison in northern france, talks to an inmate. activists blame france's social policies for the disproportionate number of muslims in its prison system. (by molly moore -- the washington post)sequedin, france -- samia el alaoui talibi walks her beat in a cream-colored head scarf and an ink-black robe with sunset-orange piping, an outfit she picked up at a yard sale.after passing a bulletproof window, el alaoui talibi trudges through half a dozen heavy, locked doors to reach the muslim faithful to whom she ministers in the women's cellblock of the lille-sequedin detention center in far northern france.it took her years to earn this access, said el alaoui talibi, one of only four muslim holy women allowed to work in french prisons. "everyone has the same prejudices and negative image of muslims and islam," said moroccan-born el alaoui talibi, 47, the mother of seven children. "when some guards see you, they see an arab; they see you the same as if you were a prisoner."this prison is majority muslim -- as is virtually every house of incarceration in france. about 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are muslim, according to muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country's population.on a continent where immigrants and the children of immigrants are disproportionately represented in almost every prison system, the french figures are the most marked, according to researchers, criminologists and muslim leaders."the high percentage of muslims in prisons is a direct consequence of the failure of the integration of minorities in france," said moussa khedimellah, a sociologist who has spent several years conducting research on muslims in the french penal system.in britain , 11 percent of prisoners are muslim in contrast to about 3 percent of all inhabitants, according to the justice ministry. research by the open society institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent muslim. in belgium, muslims from morocco and turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.sociologists and muslim leaders say the french prison system reflects the deep social and ethnic divides roiling france and its european neighbors as immigrants and a new generation of their children alter the demographic and cultural landscape of the continent.french prison officials blame the high numbers on the poverty of people who have moved here from north african and other islamic countries in recent decades. "many immigrants arrive in france in difficult financial situations, which make delinquency more frequent," said jeanne sautière, director of integration and religious groups for the french prison system. "the most important thing is to say there is no correlation between islam and delinquency."but muslim leaders, sociologists and human rights activists argue that more than in most other european countries, government social policies in france have served to isolate muslims in impoverished suburbs that have high unemployment, inferior schools and substandard housing. this has helped create a generation of french-born children with little hope of social advancement and even less respect for french authority."the question of discrimination and justice is one of the key political questions of our society, and still, it is not given much importance," said sebastian roche, who has studied judicial discrimination as research director for the french national center for scientific research. "we can't blame a state if its companies discriminate; however, we can blame the state if its justice system and its police discriminate."as a matter of policy, the french government does not collect data on race, religion or ethnicity on its citizens in any capacity, making it difficult to obtain precise figures on the makeup of prison populations. but demographers, sociologists and muslim leaders have compiled generally accepted estimates showing muslim inmate populations nationwide averaging between 60 and 70 percent.
 jb straubel is charged with more than electrifying the californian carmaker. he wants to take batteries to a new dimensionput your foot down in a tesla model s and the experience is rather different to other cars. the usual exhaust roar is replaced by a hushed whooshing sound as the car accelerates rapidly—and relentlessly—thanks to the high torque of an electric motor making gear changes unnecessary because there is no gearbox. and inside, instead of multiple dials and switches, a large touchscreen dominates the centre console. established carmakers have tended to make modest electric vehicles, usually small ones to eke out the range available from their pricey batteries. but it was tesla, a silicon valley startup, which realised that many early adopters of new technologies are likely to be well heeled and would prefer a large high-performance saloon that is both luxurious and extremely high-tech.why did tesla act differently? for a start, it does not think of itself as a carmaker. “i see us more as an energy-innovation company,” says jeffrey “jb” straubel, the firm’s chief technology officer, and one of the co-founders of tesla, along with elon musk, the chief executive. “if we can reduce energy-storage prices, it’s the most important thing we can do to make electric vehicles more prevalent,” says mr straubel. “add in renewable power and i have a direct line of sight towards an entire economy that doesn’t need fossil fuels and doesn’t need to pay more to do it.”mr straubel’s captivation with energy storage is understandable. he is cagey about the exact cost of the lithium-ion (li-ion) battery pack powering the model s, but it is believed to represent around a quarter of the $70,000 starting price of the basic version. a smaller car, the model 3, is due in 2017. although the new car will have some self-driving features like the model s, it is aimed more at the mass-market. but to hit the model 3’s expected price of around $35,000, mr straubel now needs to reduce the cost of his battery packs by at least a third.the best way to do that and to meet expected demand, mr straubel believes, is for tesla to make its own batteries. and to make them big time. this is why he and mr musk are gambling on building a $5 billion “gigafactory” in nevada in a joint venture with panasonic, a japanese battery supplier. by 2020 the gigafactory is set to produce as many li-ion batteries as the entire world used this year.the determination to act boldly and independently has worked for mr straubel in the past. when researching a charging system for the model s he rejected existing industry standards because they delivered too little power. and instead of waiting for an agreement with other carmakers for a universal recharging plug, he designed his own proprietary connector. the company’s superchargers, which provide free recharging in public locations to tesla owners, can top up a battery to about 80% of capacity in 40 minutes. these now comprise the largest fast-charging network in the world.mr straubel also takes a different view on the batteries themselves. whereas most manufacturers of electric vehicles have opted for large-format batteries, both the model s and its predecessor, the tesla roadster, are powered by around 7,000 individual li-ion cells. the roadster’s were originally the standard li-ion cells widely used in industry and found in devices such as laptop computers. for the model s, however, the cells have been significantly redesigned. mounted inside a battery pack, the cells are interconnected and interwoven with liquid cooling systems to prevent fires in the event of an accident (damage resulting in short circuits and faulty charging can cause li-ion batteries to burst into flame).teslas were always going to be unique. mr straubel, who is 38, made his first full-sized electric vehicle 14 years ago (a golf cart which he resurrected at the age of 14 doesn’t count). this was a 1984 porsche 944 fitted with twin electric motors and 380kg of old-fashioned lead-acid batteries: a weighty proposition, but one that went on to become the fastest electric car in the world at a drag-racing event in california.“i love immersive experiences where you’re engaged with the thing that you’re engineering. if you are driving, riding or flying it, it’s even more exciting and fun,” says mr straubel, who holds a private pilot’s licence. after graduating with a master’s degree in energy engineering from stanford university, he worked with harold rosen (the designer of the first geosynchronous satellite) on a novel hybrid-drive system for cars. this used a turbine to generate electricity and a fast-moving flywheel to store and release kinetic energy when needed. although the innovative combination worked, it was a leap too far for conservative carmakers, which declined to invest in it. nevertheless, the pair licensed the technology to a company that makes flywheels for commercial vehicles. mr straubel and mr rosen went on to build a hydrogen-powered electric engine for aircraft, which was subsequently licensed to boeing.it was then that mr straubel met mr musk, a freshly minted multimillionaire from the sale of his paypal digital-payments company to ebay. “one lunch was the beginning of what eventually became tesla,” says mr straubel. “we spent most of the meal talking about electric aeroplanes. but as we were wrapping up, i said i was working on a fun crazy project with cars, trying to build a lithium-ion battery pack that could last 1,000 miles.”that dream is still some way off. the model 3 is likely to have a range of 322km (200 miles) compared with the 440km claimed for a top-of-the-line model s. but with tesla intending to sell ten times as many model 3s, the need for a reliable battery supplier is paramount. hence the gigafactory. tesla will have to innovate in battery chemistry and manufacturing techniques even as it ramps up production. although the new cells are likely to remain small, their exact specifications are still undecided.mr straubel insists that this strategy is less risky than it might seem. he notes that model s cells today are produced on equipment very similar to that used for the roadster cells almost ten years ago, even though the energy from the cells has increased by half and their chemistry has changed substantially. the roadster cells used cobalt oxide as a cathode whereas the model s uses a nickel-cobalt-aluminium oxide. the difference, says mr straubel, is a much improved energy density, a longer lifetime and a higher operating temperature (which means less cooling is required). besides the chemistry, tesla is also developing other new features for the batteries.the idea is that, benefiting from economies of scale, the gigafactory’s cells will be significantly cheaper than those from more established manufacturers. “over the next ten years, it’s going to change to the point where we’re focused on production to meet the world’s energy-storage needs rather than waiting for a cost reduction from a radical change in battery technology,” says mr straubel.not everyone agrees. a report by lux research, a firm of technology analysts, has predicted that the gigafactory will bring about only a modest cut in battery costs and suffer more than 50% overcapacity. “most other companies do not believe that battery volume will grow as fast as it’s going to,” mr straubel counters. “they don’t understand the tight linkage between cost and volume. we’re at this crossing-point where a small reduction in cost is going to result in a ridiculously big increase in volume, because the auto industry is so big.”not all the cells made by the gigafactory are destined for vehicles. some will end up in the company’s superchargers, allowing tesla to cope with sudden bursts of demand should multiple vehicles need to recharge at once. others will be used at tesla’s assembly plants to store energy when it is cheap, typically at night, and release it when the price rises.the use of batteries to store renewable power (see article ) may provide tesla with its biggest opportunity in the years ahead. the potential is huge, says mr straubel. “the economics in many cases have already crossed a threshold where battery packs can effectively store renewables on a very big scale.” the main problem with renewable-power sources, such as wind or solar, is that the wind does not always blow or the sun shine when demand for electricity is high. this requires utility companies to maintain additional power stations, usually running on fossil fuels, to meet the shortfall. batteries, however, could store the power from renewables when it is generated and release it when needed.around 1,000 households in california already have a tesla battery pack installed alongside photovoltaic panels leased from solar city, another company owned by mr musk. the battery packs allow householders to run appliances if the power goes out or switch when electricity prices are high. but they are also designed to maximise the return from “net metering” rules that allow residential customers to sell excess energy to utilities.tesla’s residential batteries have been plagued by interconnection problems with utilities and are not being adopted as swiftly as mr straubel had hoped. “utilities tend to be very conservative by nature,” he says. nevertheless, mr straubel thinks that favourable economics will persuade utilities of the benefits.as batteries improve in terms of safety and the amount of energy they can store, this will allow new electrically powered products to be produced, reckons mr straubel, returning to another of his interests: “in the foreseeable future, electric aeroplanes become an interesting and pretty compelling proposition.” a variety of small electric aircraft have been built in america, china and europe. airbus recently set up a subsidiary in france to build a two-seater pilot-training aircraft called the e-fan. it is powered by electric motors driving a pair of ducted fans on either side of the rear fuselage. the european aerospace giant is also looking at the potential of building an electric helicopter and a 90-seat electrically powered passenger plane for short journeys.a number of developments are under way which have the potential to boost the amount of energy a battery can store. for instance, a team at stanford university is investigating enclosing the lithium-based anodes used by li-ion batteries in a thin film of carbon “nanospheres”. this would allow more lithium to be used safely in the anode (it is lithium’s high chemical reactivity that puts the batteries at risk of catching fire). the coating, researchers think, would allow a li-ion battery to hold about five times as much energy as those used today, weight-for-weight.such innovations are still at the laboratory stage and remain some way from commercial reality. in time, perhaps, even lithium may be replaced by more exotic new materials in batteries. “no one wishes we could come up with a technology that makes today’s chemistry obsolete more than me,” says mr straubel. “we could sell more cars at a lower price. but we’re not waiting.”
 start-ups have warned on the possible effect on britain’s nascent technology sector of cameron’s plans. photograph: barry huang/reutersdavid cameron is “living in cloud cuckoo land” when he suggests a new tory government would ban messaging apps that use encryption, security experts have told the guardian.the prime minister has pledged anti-terror laws to give the security services the ability to read encrypted communications in extreme circumstances. but experts say such access would mean changing the way internet-based messaging services such as apple’s imessage or facebook’s whatsapp work.independent computer security expert graham cluley said: “it’s crazy. cameron is living in cloud cuckoo land if he thinks that this is a sensible idea, and no it wouldn’t be possible to implement properly.”other security experts echo cluley, describing the approach as “idiocy” and saying cameron’s plans are “ill-thought out and scary”. the uk’s data watchdog has also spoken out against “knee-jerk reactions”, saying moves could undermine consumer security.meanwhile a start-up has warned on the possible effect on britain’s nascent technology sector of cameron’s plans. eris industries, which uses open-source cryptography, has said it is already making plans to leave the uk if the conservative party is re-elected with this policy in its programme.on monday, cameron made a speech in which he decried the ability of ordinary people to have conversations on which the security services were unable to eavesdrop.“in extremis, it has been possible to read someone’s letter, to listen to someone’s call, to mobile communications,” cameron said. “the question remains: are we going to allow a means of communications where it simply is not possible to do that? my answer to that question is: no, we must not.”cluley said either tech companies would have to work with uk government and build backdoors into their software to allow the authorities to intercept messages, or the apps themselves will have to be banned.“if there are backdoors in the apps, or if weak encryption is used, then you are only opening up opportunities for hackers to break in and steal information too. that’s not going to go down well with businesses or consumers,” cluley said.ross anderson, professor of security engineering at the university of cambridge, said: “this is just what the agencies pushed in the late 1990s, after al gore persuaded tony blair to go back on his pre-election promise not to ban encryption.“industry fought back, along with civil society, and the outcome was the rip act, which gives a chief constable the power to demand decryption.”peter sommer, professor of cybersecurity and digital evidence at de montfort and the open universities, said: “the national crime agency and the people there understand that relationships with people and the companies like google are important, as they will help you, but passing laws and badmouthing in public is simply not going to work,”“but at the top there’s been the kind of idiocy exemplified by what happened in the basement of the guardian, where there were obviously lots of copies of the snowden material but they insisted on the destruction of a computer that might have been used for storing them.”“yes you can pass laws in westminster until you’re blue in the face but you can’t enforce them,” said sommer.the uk’s data watchdog, the information commissioner christopher graham and data privacy campaigners were equally worried by cameron’s comments and the implications it could have on data security and privacy.“we must avoid knee jerk reactions,” said graham. “in particular, i am concerned about any compromising of effective encryption for consumers of online services.”“citizens, businesses, and nation states need to protect themselves. internet companies are understandably offering their customers online services that are better encrypted following recent security incidents,” said graham.“cameron’s plans appear dangerous, ill-thought out and scary,” said jim killock, director of the open rights group. “having the power to undermine encryption will have consequences for everyone’s personal security. it could affect not only our personal communications but also the security of sensitive information such as bank records, making us all more vulnerable to criminal attacks.”“the only practicable way forward is a new international treaty on access to communications data and content, which must involve safeguards that will be acceptable to all,” said anderson.preston byrne, the chief operating officer of eris industries, warns that his company will be forced to leave the uk if cameron’s comments on the technology become policy, and move to “more liberal climes such as germany, the u.s., the people’s republic of china, zimbabwe, or iraq.”byrne, who is also a fellow at the london-based free-market think tank asi, told the guardian that “secure open-source cryptography is at the core of our business… so we were able to make the decision more or less immediately.”eris industries uses technology loosely based on the bitcoin cryptocurrency to build a decentralised network, with potential applications in communications, social networking and community governance. but, byrne warns , “none of these benefits can be realised without secure cryptography, including end-to-end encryption.“david cameron has said this measure is designed to ‘modernise’ the law. he fails to understand the full extent of how out of date the law is. the only way you can shut down cryptographic distributed networks today is to either arrest the vast majority of (or in the case of a blockchain database, all) persons running a node and ensure that every single data store containing a copy of that application database is destroyed; or shut down the internet.”“i think if you’re saying that encryption is the problem, at a time when consumers and businesses see encryption as a very necessary part of trust online, that’s a very indicative point of view.”
 princeton – since the european sovereign-debt crisis erupted in 2009, everyone has wondered what would happen if a country left the eurozone. at first, the debate focused on crisis countries – greece, or maybe portugal, spain, or italy. then there was a rather hypothetical discussion of what would happen if strong surplus countries – say, finland or germany – left.through it all, a consensus emerged that an exit by one country could – like the collapse of lehman brothers in 2008 – trigger a wider meltdown. now, in switzerland, we have a demonstration of just some of the risks that might emerge were a surplus country to leave the eurozone.in september 2011, switzerland pegged its currency to the euro to set a ceiling to the swiss franc’s rapid appreciation in the wake of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008. the country thus became a temporary adjunct member of the european monetary union. but, on january 15, the swiss national bank (snb) suddenly and surprisingly abandoned the peg.obviously, exiting a real currency union is far more complex and legally fraught than ending a temporary exchange-rate arrangement; the effects of such a move would be greatly magnified. nonetheless, the swiss move reveals at least some of the uncertainties that a full-fledged exit could create.the snb was not forced to act by a speculative run. no financial crisis forced its hand, and, in theory, the snb’s directorate could have held the exchange rate and bought foreign assets indefinitely. but domestic criticism of the snb’s large buildup of exchange-rate reserves (euro assets) was mounting.in particular, swiss conservatives disliked the risk to which the snb was exposed. fearing that eurozone government bonds were unsafe, they agitated to require the snb to acquire gold reserves instead, even forcing a referendum on the matter . though the initiative to require a fixed share of gold reserves failed, the prospect of large-scale quantitative easing by the european central bank, together with the euro’s recent slide against the dollar, intensified the political pressure to abandon the peg.whereas economists have modeled financial attacks well, there has been little study of just when political pressure becomes unbearable and a central bank gives in. the snb, for example, had proclaimed loyalty to the peg just days before ending it. as a result, markets will now hesitate to believe central banks’ statements about future policy, and forward guidance (a major post-crisis instrument) will be much more difficult.there is historical precedent for the victory of political pressure, and for the recent swiss action. in the late 1960s, the bundesbank had to buy dollar assets in order to stop the deutsche mark from rising, and to preserve the integrity of its fixed exchange rate. the discussion in germany focused on the risks to the bundesbank’s balance sheet, as well as on the inflationary pressures that came from the currency peg. some german conservatives at the time would have liked to buy gold, but the bundesbank had promised the fed that it would not put the dollar under downward pressure by selling its reserves for gold.in 1969, germany unilaterally revalued the deutsche mark. but that was not enough to stop inflows of foreign currency, and the bundesbank was obliged to continue to intervene. it continued to reduce its interest rate, but the inflows persisted. in may 1971, the german government – against the wishes of the bundesbank – abandoned the dollar peg altogether and floated the currency.politics had prevailed over central-bank commitments. within three months, the fallout destroyed the entire international monetary system, and us president richard nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. the credibility of the entire system of central bank commitments had collapsed, and international monetary policy became extremely unstable. the deutsche mark appreciated, and life became very hard for german exporters.today, the global ramifications of a major central bank’s actions are much more pronounced than in 1971. when the bundesbank acted unilaterally, german banks were not very international. but now finance is global, implying large balance-sheet exposures to currency swings.big swiss banks fund themselves in swiss francs, because so many people everywhere want the security of franc assets. they then acquire assets worldwide, in other currencies. when the exchange rate changes abruptly, the banks face large losses – a large-scale version of naive hungarian homeowners’ strategy of borrowing in swiss francs to finance their mortgages.though the snb had given many warnings that the euro peg was not permanent, and though it had imposed a higher capital ratio on banks, the uncoupling from the euro came as a huge shock. swiss bank shares fell faster than the general swiss index.the risks created by the snb’s decision – as transmitted through the financial system – have a fat tail. the negative effects for the swiss economy – through the decreased competiveness of its export industries (including tourism and medicine) – may already be showing that abandoning the euro peg was not a good idea.but the consequences will not be limited to switzerland. after years of wondering whether the exit of a small, fiscally weak country like greece could undermine the euro, policymakers will have to deal with an even bigger shock stemming from the exit of a small, fiscally strong country that is not even a member of the european union.
 you probably already know that your smartphone is more powerful than the computers used to land astronauts on the moon. but did you know that the processor used in the original sony playstation is currently guiding a space probe the size of a grand piano towards pluto? yep, the same  mips r3000 cpu that once ran final fantasy vii and metal gear solid was repurposed by nasa in 2006 to fire thrusters, monitor sensors, and transmit data from the  new horizons space probe. you may have thought defeating ruby weapon was an achievement but try orchestrating a gravity-assisted flyby past jupiter on a four-hour time delay.nasa’s engineers don’t need power; they need reliabilitythis isn’t unusual behavior for nasa though, as the space agency always prefers the tried-and-tested to the cutting-edge. the next-generation orion spacecraft, for example — the one that will hopefully take humans to mars one day — is controlled by an ibm processor  made back in 2002 . the cpu in new horizons may have been tweaked a little to better survive the radiation bombardment of space, but other than that it's the same old chip: nasa’s engineers don’t need power; they need reliability.this is why there’s nothing better than a reputation staked on years of commercial use. is your old playstation still working? good. because new horizon has been in space for nine years already. the probe was launched back in january 2006 but is now on its  final approach to pluto , moving at a speed of approximately 36,373 mph with a projected arrival date of july 14th. once there it will explore the dwarf planet and its moons before moving on to travel through the kuiper belt — the massive asteroid belt that fringes our solar system. this chip is going to parts of space where man-made objects have never been before, meanwhile your playstation is stuck in a closet somewhere beneath a stack of pokémon trading cards.
 new york (reuters) - china and the united states headed the list of 2014 top-performing equity markets among larger economies while crude oil prices closed in the red to cap a massive yearly slump.the u.s. dollar on wednesday added slightly to gains that have made it the year's star major currency.on wall street, stocks fell on wednesday but the s&p 500 closed 2014 near its record high. the index hit records in more than 50 sessions throughout the year."markets put in a solid year in spite of significant headwinds that could have easily derailed a multi-year bull market," said peter kenny, chief market strategist at clearpool group in new york. "the most the bears got out of this year was a 10 percent correction on an intraday basis, and the markets stubbornly moved higher, and for good foundational reasons."the s&p 500 ended its third straight year of double-digit percentage gains. the benchmark added 11.4 percent this year. the dow jones industrial average gained 7.5 percent, and the nasdaq composite gained 13.4 percent for the year.on a total return basis, the s&p 500 gained 13.7 percent this year.on the day, the dow fell 160 points, or 0.89 percent, to 17,823.07, the s&p 500 lost 21.45 points, or 1.03 percent, to 2,058.9 and the nasdaq composite dropped 41.39 points, or 0.87 percent, to 4,736.05.in latin america, argentina's benchmark stock index .merv added 59 percent in 2014 and brazil's bovespa .bvsp shed nearly 3 percent. colombia's igbc .igbc fell 11 percent and mexico's ipc .mxx was little changed, up less than 1 percent.the stand-out equity performer among top economies this year was china, where the csi300 index .csi300 ended 2014 with gains of near 52 percent. the index added more than 25 percent in december alone, its best month since april 2007, in part as foreigners won wider access to chinese stocks."china stocks have done really well this year and the dollar move has also been very interesting," said alvin tan, an fx strategist at societe generale in london. "it barely moved against the other major currencies in the first (half) of the year and all the big gains came in the second."the dollar ended 2014 up 12.8 percent against a basket of major currencies .dxy, its best performance since 1997. an expected start to a federal reserve tightening cycle may strengthen the dollar's appeal in the new year.the euro, undermined by bets that the european central bank will have to start buying government bonds to avert deflation, was down 0.5 percent at $1.2098 eur= , having touched a 2-1/2-year low of $1.2095.the russian rouble rub= was down 5 percent on the day as a more than 76 percent plunge for the year marked its worst performance since russia defaulted in 1998. [emrg/frx]the young bitcoin currency btc=btsp is closing the year only slightly better than the rouble, falling 57 percent at about $318. it peaked at $995 last january.u.s. government debt that matures in 20 years and beyond booked a 27 percent return, according to barclays. that would be its biggest annual gain since 2011, when it generated a 33 percent return. .bcusatsy20pon its last session of the year, the benchmark 10-year u.s. treasury note us10yt=rr was up 6/32, the yield at 2.1703 percent.crude oil prices lcoc1clc1, already down by half from this year's peak, slumped again on wednesday. brent fell as much as 3.7 percent to trade below $56 a barrel and u.s. crude was down 3 percent at its session low. weak chinese manufacturing data and demand concerns weighed on prices.brent was last down 0.6 percent at $57.55 a barrel and wti fell 0.6 percent to $53.80 a barrel. for the year brent is down 48 percent and wti is down 46 percent. [o/r]copper cmcu3, of which china is the biggest consumer, looked set to post its biggest annual decline in three years at 14.4 percent, while traditional safe-haven gold xau= was to close the year just shy of 2 percent lower. silver xag= fell 19.4 percent in 2014 after a more than 35 percent drop in 2013.[gol/](additional reporting by global financial markets teams; editing by dan grebler, leslie adler and meredith mazzilli)
 in this series of posts, influencers and members predict the ideas and trends that will shape 2015. read all the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #bigideas2015 in the body of your post).capitalism is the greatest economic model in history. that said, sometimes it breaks, as we’ve seen. but one of its strengths is that it also can shift and change; and we may be on the verge of one such change, a change that will lead to a more prosperous capitalism.that change is the coming demographic shift. boomers are retiring. stepping into their places are two key groups: millennials and women. the energy around the advancement of these two groups is almost palpable. the millennials are aging into the workforce, an unstoppable force.as for women, after years of stalled professional progress, the momentum seems to be in their favor. the national conversation on the benefits of gender diversity – sparked by “lean in,” by anne-marie slaughter, by speculation over hillary clinton’s presidential run – is powerful. as a result, women are recognizing the power they have as a group, joining networks such as ellevate and women 2.0 , in which they share information and knowledge, mentor each other, and help each other advance. women are starting businesses at a greater rate than men, as technology reduces the cost; this may pick up steam as platforms like indiegogo promise to make capital raising more inclusive. and company managements are renewing their efforts around diversity, as they recognize that their tired affinity groups won’t be the only answer.the implications of this shift in the workforce are significant: these groups think differently, act differently and value different things than those who have come before them. as they bring their values into the workplace, our economy begins to shift to a form better termed “inclusive capitalism.”what does inclusive capitalism look like?well, if the research is right, a lot of great things happen:the economy grows. further advancing women in the workforce is not a zero sum game: more economic participation begets more economic demand begets more economic participation. by some accounts, fully engaging women in the us economy expands it by 7 percent to 9 percent, and by more in some parts of the world.the retirement savings funding gap is reduced. more women working, more retirement savings, more social security savings, lower funding gap. in addition, there is some evidence that more women in senior management roles leads to lower gender pay disparities; it is estimated that equal pay for equal work could close the social security gender gap by a third .less volatile financial markets. women are more risk-aware than men, with the correlations between testosterone and risk-taking well-documented. so imagine trading floors of the big banks with more women. it’s hard to believe that such diversity would have led to a more severe financial crisis, right??innovation increases. we mythologize lone geniuses. but innovation is also fueled by diverse perspectives: are teams that all have the same background likely to be more innovative, or those that bring in people who think differently, examining issues in different ways? much like cities are more innovative than small towns, so teams that have different, and clashing, ideas are more innovative.companies perform better. in addition to greater innovation, more diverse teams have been associated with higher returns on capital, lower risk, greater long-term focus, and greater client focus. the power of diversity is so great that diverse teams outperform “smarter” teams. (see my piece on: the secret to putting together an insanely successful team. ”)employees will push companies toward greater “meaning and purpose.” when we asked the members of ellevate network their priorities for accepting a job, the number one answer was “meaning and purpose.” and catchafire’s research indicates that 79 percent of millennials seek to work at companies that are socially responsible. no, neither group wants to trade compensation for this, but are instead pushing companies to stretch to do both.investors push companies to define their impact on the world around them. as women and millennials increase their wealth, their investments will grow. and so their drive for doing well and doing good will extend past their workplace to their investments (see my post: “ the big idea 2014: investing will completely change ”). and, in fact, values-based investing – in which investors look for both a fair return and a reflection of their values in their investments – is well out-stripping growth in the overall investing industry.think about the potential positive impact: according to the center for talent innovation , 77 percent of women want to invest in companies with diverse leadership teams. as their capital flows to those companies, there can be a self-reinforcing mechanism: more capital to companies with greater diversity, which drives better business results, which gives investors more money to invest, which drives more capital to companies with greater diversity. and this can be replicated for any number of social values.families benefit. yes, i know some folks will have the view that, in this environment, children will suffer without a full-time parent at home. as we approach full economic engagement – and as the desire of women and millennials for greater work-life integration is felt – smart companies will respond. today, most larger companies report that they have flexible work programs; yet 60 percent of working women with minor children say they wish they had work flexibility. hhhhmmm.smart companies will move to true “ flexibility without shame ,” in which taking time for outside demands is not viewed as a form of weakness. instead, i would guess that worker productivity goes up, as the stress of this-sometimes-unwinnable juggling act (for women and men) is reduced.entire industries are re-shaped. pediatricians who work early morning and evening hours. vets who work weekends and make housecalls. a wall street that is less about the next complex financial instrument and more about values-based investing. a cable guy who shows up on time. law firms that no longer bill by the hour. i’m not sure how industries will respond to these changes, but the businesses will morph to meet the needs of this emerging workforce.this shift in capitalism certainly won’t happen overnight, and there are still things to be frustrated about (women making 78 cents to a man’s dollar, venture capital dollars still overwhelmingly directed to males). and these deserve our time and attention to fix them.but it’s the trend that matters most here. as these groups fully engage in the economy, we will move to a more inclusive capitalism, which will be a more prosperous capitalism.sallie krawcheck is the chair of ellevate network and ellevate asset management. ellevate network (formerly 85 broads) is a professional woman’s network, operating across industries and around the world. both businesses are committed to the full economic and financial engagement of women.
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 recently some fed policymakers have noted that if  “…the unemployment rate continued to decline quickly this could raise wages and price inflation more quickly than anticipated”. historical data suggest that when the unemployment rate falls below the 6% threshold, wage growth accelerates. up to now unemployment has been falling rapidly and is currently at 5.6%, while wage growth, on any measure, has been weak. we think that we are at the turning point where labour market tightening will trigger broad, but modest wage gains in 2015. we expect a tighter labour market will prompt the fed to hike rates in mid 2015 even if wage gains by then will only have had a small impact on consumer price inflation. this is consistent with the gradual pace of rate hikes which we have forecasted after the rate lift-off in 2015 and the faster pace of rate hikes in 2016.until recently, there has been a relative weakness of wage growth compared to the strength of labour market indicators. for fed chair janet yellen, the sluggishness in wage growth is partly explained by pent-up wage deflation. this suggests that many firms were unable or unwilling to lower compensation during the recession and the earlier part of the recovery and are therefore not yet inclined to raise wages significantly. at the same time, yellen has mentioned that transitory pressures could emerge well before maximum sustainable unemployment has been reached, given the structural impediments to reemployment that are still lingering as a result of the great recession. we think that given the long period of wage sluggishness, a modest acceleration of wage growth will likely increase consumer spending and gradually raise inflation pressures even if in the short term this relationship will not be too strong. this macro focus addresses whether the behaviour of nominal wage inflation is unusual relative to the current measures of labour market slack and to what extent nominal wage inflation will impact price inflation, since price inflation is key to the fed’s dual mandate.in the us, there is a clear relationship between wage inflation and unemployment. however, the relationship is nonlinear, which means that at lower levels of unemployment, wages tend to accelerate more rapidly. concretely, historical data suggest that when the unemployment rate falls below the 6% threshold, wage growth accelerates. the question is where the turning point now is in this relationship. the graph below shows that we don’t have a precise understanding of the point at which this will take place, but there has already been some progress in moving to the steepest part of the curve. unemployment has been falling rapidly in the past months and is currently at 5.8%. in fact, we are seeing a pick-up in some measures of wage growth.there are a number of indicators that measure wage growth. the differences among the indicators are derived from the category of industries that are covered and whether these measures only include wages or other measures of compensation as well. we focus on some of the most commonly used indicators. average hourly earnings, which is a measure of gross pay divided by total hours paid, is a partial indicator given its coverage as it is calculated before taxes and other deductions. a more comprehensive measure of wages is the employment cost index. this index measures total compensation wages and salaries as well as benefits. benefits include paid leave and other supplementary pay. many analysts, including the fed, consider that the employment cost index is the most reliable measure of labour costs. finally, unit labour costs are calculated based on the difference between compensation costs divided by output per hour (productivity). this measure also takes productivity growth into account, which is also critical when evaluating the impact of wages on inflation. that is to say an increase in wages which is matched by an increase in productivity should not impact inflation.when comparing these wage measures, all three measures show that wages have been subdued in the past years, remaining far below the long-term average. but most are starting to recover. the employment cost index (eci), which is more appropriate for forecasting future wage inflation, has shown the fastest increase in the past few months. still, growth rates remain modest. for some, even the modest acceleration is already evidence of diminishing labour market slack.moreover, surveys of small businesses suggest that they plan to increase compensation in the coming months. but we think there are certain restraints to rapid wage growth, including low inflation expectations as a result of lower energy prices. we expect the growth momentum of wage gains to be around 3% at the end of 2015, but that growth will remain modest in the first half of the year. this is the lower bound of the 3-4% rate that fed chair yellen has identified as normal.chair yellen has included wage growth in her labour market dashboard and follows closely the cyclical but also secular trends that are affecting the evolution of wages in recent years.  recently, some fed policymakers have noted that the uptick in the eci could be a tentative sign of an upturn in wage growth. in any case, the labour market improvement has gone beyond fed policymakers expectations. since october, the unemployment rate (now at 5.6%) has been falling faster than the central tendency projections of the fomc, forecast at 5.8% in the fourth quarter of 2014. our forecasts indicate that unemployment will continue to decline this year from 5.8% to around 5% at year-end. the fed expects unemployment to reach around 5.2% at the end of this year, approaching the normal long-term unemployment rate.the impact of wage gains on consumer prices will depend on whether wage gains exceed productivity growth and on the path of import prices. in the past years, compensation has been outpacing productivity, which has had a modest impact on unit labour costs. since we are not expecting major shifts in productivity, the acceleration in wage growth will push up unit labour cost and hence core inflation. however, the decline in oil prices and the stronger dollar continue to push down import prices. so we think that an increase in consumer spending will still have a minor impact on inflation.the latest fomc minutes were quite revealing in this respect. even if wages show a moderate growth and headline inflation does not move close to the fed 2% target, fed policymakers have noted that this should not be an impediment to normalising interest rates. we expect a tighter labour market will prompt the fed to hike rates in mid 2015 even if wage gains will by then only have had a small impact on price inflation. indeed the committee mentioned that “they might begin normalisation at a time when core inflation was at current levels”.
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 ross andersen is deputy editor at aeon magazine. he has written extensively about science and philosophy for several publications, including the atlantic and the economist.‘fuck earth!’ elon musk said to me, laughing. ‘who cares about earth?’ we were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at spacex headquarters in los angeles. it was a sunny afternoon, a thursday, one of three designated weekdays musk spends at spacex. musk was laughing because he was joking: he cares a great deal about earth. when he is not here at spacex, he is running an electric car company. but this is his manner. on television musk can seem solemn, but in person he tells jokes. he giggles. he says things that surprise you.when i arrived, musk was at his computer, powering through a stream of single-line email replies. i took a seat and glanced around at his workspace. there was a black leather couch and a large desk, empty but for a few wine bottles and awards. the windows looked out to a sunbaked parking lot. the vibe was ordinary, utilitarian, even boring. after a few minutes passed, i began to worry that musk had forgotten about me, but then suddenly, and somewhat theatrically, he wheeled around, scooted his chair over, and extended his hand. ‘i’m elon,’ he said.it was a nice gesture, but in the year 2014 elon musk doesn’t need much of an introduction. not since steve jobs has an american technologist captured the cultural imagination like musk. there are tumblrs and subreddits devoted to him. he is the inspiration for robert downey jr’s iron man. his life story has already become a legend. there is the alienated childhood in south africa, the video game he invented at 12, his migration to the us in the mid-1990s. then the quick rise, beginning when musk sold his software company zip2 for $300 million at the age of 28, and continuing three years later, when he dealt paypal to ebay for $1.5 billion. and finally, the double down, when musk decided idle hedonism wasn’t for him, and instead sank his fortune into a pair of unusually ambitious startups. with tesla he would replace the world’s cars with electric vehicles, and with spacex he would colonise mars. automobile manufacturing and aerospace are mature industries, dominated by corporate behemoths with plush lobbying budgets and factories in all the right congressional districts. no matter. musk would transform both, simultaneously, and he would do it within the space of a single generation.musk announced these plans shortly after the bursting of the first internet bubble, when many tech millionaires were regarded as mere lottery winners. people snickered. they called him a dilettante. but in 2010, he took tesla public and became a billionaire many times over. spacex is still privately held, but it too is now worth billions, and musk owns two-thirds of it outright. spacex makes its rockets from scratch at its los angeles factory, and it sells rides on them cheap, which is why its launch manifest is booked out for years. the company specialises in small satellite launches, and cargo runs to the space station, but it is now moving into the more mythic business of human spaceflight. in september, nasa selected spacex, along with boeing, to become the first private company to launch astronauts to the international space station (iss). musk is on an epic run. but he keeps pushing his luck. in every interview, there is an outlandish new claim, a seeming impossibility, to which he attaches a tangible date. he is always giving you new reasons to doubt him.i had come to spacex to talk to musk about his vision for the future of space exploration, and i opened our conversation by asking him an old question: why do we spend so much money in space, when earth is rife with misery, human and otherwise? it might seem like an unfair question. musk is a private businessman, not a publicly funded space agency. but he is also a special case. his biggest customer is nasa and, more importantly, musk is someone who says he wants to influence the future of humanity. he will tell you so at the slightest prompting, without so much as flinching at the grandiosity of it, or the track record of people who have used this language in the past. musk enjoys making money, of course, and he seems to relish the billionaire lifestyle, but he is more than just a capitalist. whatever else might be said about him, musk has staked his fortune on businesses that address fundamental human concerns. and so i wondered, why space?musk did not give me the usual reasons. he did not claim that we need space to inspire people. he did not sell space as an r & d lab, a font for spin-off technologies like astronaut food and wilderness blankets. he did not say that space is the ultimate testing ground for the human intellect. instead, he said that going to mars is as urgent and crucial as lifting billions out of poverty, or eradicating deadly disease.‘i think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary,’ he told me, ‘in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct. it would be like, “good news, the problems of poverty and disease have been solved, but the bad news is there aren’t any humans left.”’musk has been pushing this line – mars colonisation as extinction insurance – for more than a decade now, but not without pushback. ‘it’s funny,’ he told me. ‘not everyone loves humanity. either explicitly or implicitly, some people seem to think that humans are a blight on the earth’s surface. they say things like, “nature is so wonderful; things are always better in the countryside where there are no people around.” they imply that humanity and civilisation are less good than their absence. but i’m not in that school,’ he said. ‘i think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.’people have been likening light to consciousness since the days of plato and his cave because, like light, consciousness illuminates. it makes the world manifest. it is, in the formulation of the great carl sagan, the universe knowing itself. but the metaphor is not perfect. unlike light, whose photons permeate the entire cosmos, human-grade consciousness appears to be rare in our universe. it appears to be something akin to a single candle flame, flickering weakly in a vast and drafty void.musk told me he often thinks about the mysterious absence of intelligent life in the observable universe. humans have yet to undertake an exhaustive, or even vigorous, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, of course. but we have gone a great deal further than a casual glance skyward. for more than 50 years, we have trained radio telescopes on nearby stars, hoping to detect an electromagnetic signal, a beacon beamed across the abyss. we have searched for sentry probes in our solar system, and we have examined local stars for evidence of alien engineering. soon, we will begin looking for synthetic pollutants in the atmospheres of distant planets, and asteroid belts with missing metals, which might suggest mining activity.the failure of these searches is mysterious, because human intelligence should not be special. ever since the age of copernicus, we have been told that we occupy a uniform universe, a weblike structure stretching for tens of billions of light years, its every strand studded with starry discs, rich with planets and moons made from the same material as us. if nature obeys identical laws everywhere, then surely these vast reaches contain many cauldrons where energy is stirred into water and rock, until the three mix magically into life. and surely some of these places nurture those first fragile cells, until they evolve into intelligent creatures that band together to form civilisations, with the foresight and staying power to build starships.‘at our current rate of technological growth, humanity is on a path to be godlike in its capabilities,’ musk told me. ‘you could bicycle to alpha centauri in a few hundred thousand years, and that’s nothing on an evolutionary scale. if an advanced civilisation existed at any place in this galaxy, at any point in the past 13.8 billion years, why isn’t it everywhere? even if it moved slowly, it would only need something like .01 per cent of the universe’s lifespan to be everywhere. so why isn’t it?’‘if you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and i mean strange in a bad way’life’s early emergence on earth, only half a billion years after the planet coalesced and cooled, suggests that microbes will arise wherever earthlike conditions obtain. but even if every rocky planet were slick with unicellular slime, it wouldn’t follow that intelligent life is ubiquitous. evolution is endlessly inventive, but it seems to feel its way toward certain features, like wings and eyes, which evolved independently on several branches of life’s tree. so far, technological intelligence has sprouted only from one twig. it’s possible that we are merely the first in a great wave of species that will take up tool-making and language. but it’s also possible that intelligence just isn’t one of natural selection’s preferred modules. we might think of ourselves as nature’s pinnacle, the inevitable endpoint of evolution, but beings like us could be too rare to ever encounter one another. or we could be the ultimate cosmic outliers, lone minds in a universe that stretches to infinity.musk has a more sinister theory. ‘the absence of any noticeable life may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. ‘like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars in the background, but you can’t ever get there. if it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mould in a petri dish.’ musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘if you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and i mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘and it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’it is true that no civilisation can last long in this universe if it stays confined to a single planet. the science of stellar evolution is complex, but we know that our mighty star, the ball of fusing hydrogen that anchors earth and powers all of its life, will one day grow so large that its outer atmosphere will singe and sterilise our planet, and maybe even engulf it. this event is usually pegged for 5-10 billion years from now, and it tends to mark armageddon in secular eschatologies. but our biosphere has little chance of surviving until then.five hundred million years from now, the sun won’t be much larger than it is today but it will be swollen enough to start scorching the food chain. by then, earth’s continents will have fused into a single landmass, a new pangaea. as the sun dilates, it will pour more and more radiation into the atmosphere, widening the daily swing between hot and cold. the supercontinent’s outer shell will suffer expansions and contractions of increasing violence. its rocks will become brittle, and its silicates will begin to erode at unprecedented rates, taking carbon dioxide with them, down to the seafloor and into the deep crust. eventually, the atmosphere will become so carbon-poor that trees will be unable to perform photosynthesis. the planet will be shorn of its forests, but a few plants will make a valiant last stand, until the brightening sun kills them off, too, along with every animal that depends on them, which is to say every animal on earth.in a billion years, the oceans will have boiled away altogether, leaving empty trenches that are deeper than everest is tall. earth will become a new venus, a hothouse planet where even the hardiest microbes cannot survive. and this is the optimistic scenario, for it assumes our biosphere will die of old age, and not something more sudden and stroke-like. after all, a billion years is a long time, long enough to make probabilistic space for all kinds of catastrophes, including those that have no precedent in human memory.of all the natural disasters that appear in our histories, the most severe are the floods, tales of global deluge inspired by the glacial melt at the end of the last ice age. there are a few stray glimmers of cosmic disasters, as in plato’s timaeus, when he tells the story of phaeton, the son of the sun god, who could not drive his father’s fiery chariot across the sky, and so crashed it into the earth, burning the planet’s surface to a crisp. plato writes:that story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shift of the bodies in the heavens which move round the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.a remarkable piece of ancient wisdom, but on the whole, human culture is too fresh an invention to have preserved the scarier stuff we find in the geological record. we have no tales of mile-wide asteroid strikes, or super volcanoes, or the deep freezes that occasionally turn our blue planet white. the biosphere has bounced back from each of these shocks, but not before sacrificing terrifying percentages of its species. and even its most remarkable feats of resilience are cold comfort, for the future might subject earth to entirely novel experiences.some in the space exploration community, including no less a figure than freeman dyson, say that human spaceflight is folly in the short terma billion years will give us four more orbits of the milky way galaxy, any one of which could bring us into collision with another star, or a supernova shockwave, or the incinerating beam of a gamma ray burst. we could swing into the path of a rogue planet, one of the billions that roam our galaxy darkly, like cosmic wrecking balls. planet earth could be edging up to the end of an unusually fortunate run.if human beings are to survive these catastrophes, both the black swans and the certainties, we will need to do what life has always done: move in the service of survival. we will need to develop new capabilities, as our aquatic forebears once evolved air-gulping lungs, and bony fins for crude locomotion, struggling their way onto land. we will need to harness the spirit that moved our own species to trek into new continents, so that our recent ancestors could trickle out to islands and archipelagos, before crossing whole oceans, on their way to the very ends of this earth. we will need to set out for new planets and eventually, new stars. but need we make haste?some in the space exploration community, including no less a figure than the physicist freeman dyson, say that human spaceflight is folly in the short term. we humans are still in our technological infancy, after all, only a million years removed from the first control of fire. we have progressed quickly, from those first campfire sparks to the explosions we bottle in tall cylinders, to power our way out of earth’s gravity well. but not everyone who sits atop our rockets returns safely. to seed a colony on another planet, we need astronaut safety to scale up. perhaps we should park human missions for now, and explore space through the instruments of our cosmic drones, like the voyager probe that recently slipped from the solar system, to send us its impressions of interstellar space. we can resume human spaceflight later this century, or next, after we have reaped the full fruits of our current technological age. for all we know, revolutions in energy, artificial intelligence and materials science could be imminent. any one of them would make human spaceflight a much easier affair.‘there is an argument you often hear in space circles,’ i said to musk, ‘where people say the focus on human space travel in the near-term is entirely misplaced – ’‘but to the extent you’re advocating for one,’ i said, ‘there is an argument that says until we ramp up technologically, we’re better off sending probes because, as you know, the presence of a single human being on a spacecraft makes the engineering exponentially more difficult.’‘well, we are sending probes,’ musk told me. ‘and they are very expensive probes, by the way. they aren’t exactly bargain-basement. the last rc car we sent to mars cost more than $3 billion. that’s a hell of a droid. for that kind of money, we should be able to send a lot of people to mars.’there is a story musk likes to tell, part of the founding myth of spacex, about how he stayed up late one night searching nasa’s website for information about a crewed mission to mars. this was back in 2001, when the space shuttles were still flying, their launches providing a steady drumbeat of spectacle, just enough to convince the casual observer that human spaceflight wasn’t in serious decline. today, it is impossible to sustain that delusion.the idea that humans would one day venture into the sky is as old as mythology, but it wasn’t until the scientific revolution, when the telescope made the sky legible, that it began to seem like a realistic objective. in 1610, the astronomer johannes kepler wrote, in a letter to galileo:let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. in the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies.after the hot air balloon and airplane were invented, a few visionaries moved on to planning for space colonisation itself. but it wasn’t until the space race, the extraordinary period of progress that began with sputnik in 1957 and ended with the first moon landing in 1969, that the idea of cosmic manifest destiny moved from the fringe to the mainstream. in the ensuing decades, it would inspire whole literatures and subcultures, becoming, in the process, one of the dominant secular narratives of the human future. but reality has not kept up.it has been three years since nasa, the world’s best-funded space agency, fired a human being into orbit. americans who wish to fly to the iss must now ride on russian rockets, launched from kazakhstan, at the pleasure of vladimir putin. even the successful trips are, in their own way, evidence of decline, because the space station sits a thousand times closer to earth than the moon. watching nasa astronauts visit it is about as thrilling as watching columbus sail to ibiza. but that’s as good as it’s going to get for a while. the agency’s next generation rocket isn’t due until 2018, and its first iteration will barely best the saturn v, the pyrotechnic beast that powered the apollo missions. american presidents occasionally make bold, kennedy-like pronouncements about sending humans to mars. but as musk discovered more than a decade ago, there are no real missions planned, and even optimists say it will be 2030 at the earliest. it wasn’t supposed to be like this. only a few decades ago, it seemed as though we were entering a new epoch of exploration, one that would shame the seafarers of the high renaissance. we would begin by mastering lower earth orbit, so that visits to space were safe and routine. then we’d go to the moon and build a permanent base there, a way station that would let us leap to the planets, each in quick succession, as though they were lily pads on a pond, and not massive moving worlds spaced by hundreds of millions of miles. we’d start with mars and then shoot through the asteroid belt to jupiter and its ocean-harbouring moons. we’d drink in saturn’s sublimity, its slanted rings and golden hue, and then head for the outer giants, and the icy rubble at the solar system’s edge. the sun would look small out there, and the stars beckoning. we would spread through the milky way’s safe zone, the doughnut of gas and fire, billions of stars strong, that surrounds our galaxy’s violent core, and then we’d press out into intergalactic space. we’d use wormholes or warp drives, or some other vaguely sketched physics, to pretend away the millions of light years that separate us from andromeda and the glittering web beyond it, whose glimpsable regions alone contain hundreds of billions of galaxies.when musk realized there were no missions to mars on the books, he figured americans had lost interest in space exploration. two years later, the public response to the columbia shuttle disaster convinced him otherwise. ‘it was in every newspaper, every magazine, every news station, even those that had nothing to do with space,’ he told me. ‘and yeah, seven people died and that was awful, but seven people die all the time, and nobody pays any attention to it. it’s obvious that space is deeply ingrained in the american psyche.’ musk now sees the space race as a transient cold war phenomenon, a technological pissing match fuelled by unsustainable public spending. ‘the soviets were crowing after sputnik, about how they had better technology than we did, and so therefore communism is better,’ he told me. ‘and so we set a really tough target and said we would beat them there, and money was no object. but once the ideological battle was won, the impetus went away, and money very quickly became an object.’nasa’s share of the us federal budget peaked at 4.4 per cent in 1966, but a decade later it was less than 1 per cent, where it has remained ever since. the funding cut forced nasa to shutter the saturn v production lines, along with the final three moon landings, and a mission to mars slated for the late 1980s. that’s why the agency’s website looked so barren when musk visited it in 2001.aghast at this backsliding, and still thinking it a failure of will, musk began planning a mars mission of his own. he wanted to send a greenhouse to mars, filled with plants that would become, in the course of their long journeying, the most distant travellers of all multicellular life. images of lush, leafy organisms living on the red planet would move people, he figured, just as images of the earth rising, sunlike, on the lunar plain had moved previous generations. with a little luck, the sentiment would translate into political will for a larger nasa budget.when musk went to price the mission with us launch companies, he was told transport would cost $60-80 million. reeling, he tried to buy a refurbished russian intercontinental ballistic missile to do the job, but his dealer kept raising the price on him. finally, he’d had enough. instead of hunting around for a cheaper supplier, musk founded his own rocket company. his friends thought he was crazy, and tried to intervene, but he would not be talked down. musk identifies strongly as an engineer. that’s why he usually takes a title like chief technical officer at the companies he runs, in addition to chief executive officer. he had been reading stacks of books about rockets. he wanted to try building his own.great migrations are often a matter of timing, of waiting for a strait to freeze, a sea to part, or a planet to draw nearsix years later, it all looked like folly. it was 2008, a year musk describes as the worst of his life. tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. lehman had just imploded, making capital hard to come by. musk was freshly divorced and borrowing cash from friends to pay living expenses. and spacex was a flameout, in the most literal sense. musk had spent $100 million on the company and its new rocket, the falcon 1. but its first three launches had all detonated before reaching orbit. the fourth was due to lift off in early fall of that year, and if it too blew apart in the atmosphere, spacex would likely have numbered among the casualties. aerospace journalists were drafting its obituary already. musk needed a break, badly. and he got it, in the form of a fully intact falcon 1, riding a clean column of flame out of the atmosphere and into the history books, as the first privately funded, liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit.spacex nabbed a $1.6 billion contract with nasa in the aftermath of that launch, and musk used the money to expand rapidly. in the years since, he has reeled off 15 straight launches without a major failure, including the first private cargo flights to the iss. last year, he signed a 20-year lease on launch pad 39a, the hallowed stretch of cape canaveral concrete that absorbed the fire of apollo’s rockets. earlier this year, he bought a tract of land near brownsville, texas, where he plans to build a dedicated spaceport for spacex. ‘it took us ages to get all the approvals,’ he told me. ‘there were a million federal agencies that needed to sign off, and the final call went to the national historic landmark association, because the last battle of the civil war was fought a few miles away from our site, and visitors might be able to see the tip of our rocket from there. we were like, “really? have you seen what it’s like around there? nobody visits that place.”’musk isn’t shy about touting the speed of his progress. indeed, he has an ali-like appetite for needling the competition. a bloomberg tv interviewer once asked him about one of tesla’s competitors and he laughed in response. ‘why do you laugh?’ she said. ‘have you seen their car?’ he replied, incredulously. this same streak of showmanship surfaced when musk and i discussed the aerospace industry. ‘there have been a number of space startups,’ he told me. ‘but they have all failed, or their success was irrelevant.’but spacex does have competitors, both industry giants and scrappy startups alike. the company has just spent three years in a dogfight to become the first commercial space outfit to launch us astronauts to the space station. the awarding of this contract became more urgent in march, after the us sanctioned russia for rolling tanks into crimea. a week later, russia’s deputy prime minister dmitry rogozin quipped: ‘after analysing the sanctions against our space industry, i suggest the us deliver its astronauts to the iss with a trampoline.’spacex was an early favourite to win the contract, but it was never a lock. critics have hammered the company for delaying launches, and in august it suffered a poorly timed mishap, when one of its test rockets blew up shortly after lift-off. in the end, nasa split the contract between boeing and spacex, giving each six launches. musk said that he would move into human missions, win or lose, but his progress would have been slowed considerably. the contract is only for short hops to lower earth orbit, but it will give musk the chance to demonstrate that he can do human spaceflight better than anyone else. and it will give him the money and reputation he needs to work up to a more extraordinary feat of engineering, one that has not been attempted in more than four decades: the safe transport of human beings to a new world.great migrations are often a matter of timing, of waiting for a strait to freeze, a sea to part, or a planet to draw near. the distance between earth and mars fluctuates widely as the two worlds whirl around in their orbits. at its furthest, mars is a thousand times further than the moon. but every 26 months they align, when the faster moving earth swings into position between mars and the sun. when this alignment occurs where their orbits are tightest, mars can come within 36 million miles, only 150 times further than the moon. the next such window is only four years away, too soon to send a crewed ship. but in the mid-2030s, mars will once again burn bright and orange in our sky, and by then musk might be ready to send his first flurry of missions, to seed a citylike colony that he expects to be up and running by 2040.‘spacex is only 12 years old now,’ he told me. ‘between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. if we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.’musk told me this first group of settlers will need to pay their own way. ‘there needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go,’ he said. ‘and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. my rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. but it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. it’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early american colonies.’even at that price, a one-way trip to mars could be a tough sell. it would be fascinating to experience a deep space mission, to see the earth receding behind you, to feel that you were afloat between worlds, to walk a strange desert under an alien sky. but one of the stars in that sky would be earth, and one night, you might look up at it, through a telescope. at first, it might look like a blurry sapphire sphere, but as your eyes adjusted, you might be able to make out its oceans and continents. you might begin to long for its mountains and rivers, its flowers and trees, the astonishing array of life forms that roam its rainforests and seas. you might see a network of light sparkling on its dark side, and realise that its nodes were cities, where millions of lives are coming into collision. you might think of your family and friends, and the billions of other people you left behind, any one of which you could one day come to love.the austerity of life on mars might nurture these longings into regret, or even psychosis. from afar, the martian desert evokes sweltering landscapes like the sahara or the american west, but its climate is colder than the interior of antarctica. mars used to be wrapped in a thick blanket of atmosphere, but something in the depths of time blew it away, and the patchy remains are too thin to hold in heat or pressure. if you were to stroll onto its surface without a spacesuit, your eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds. even in a suit you’d be vulnerable to cosmic radiation, and dust storms that occasionally coat the entire martian globe, in clouds of skin-burning particulates, small enough to penetrate the tightest of seams. never again would you feel the sun and wind on your skin, unmediated. indeed, you would probably be living underground at first, in a windowless cave, only this time there would be no wild horses to sketch on the ceiling.‘even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on mars’it is possible that mars could one day be terraformed into an earthly paradise, but not anytime soon. even on our planet, whose natural systems we have studied for centuries, the weather is too complex to predict, and geoengineering is a frontier technology. we know we could tweak the earth’s thermostat, by sending a silvery mist of aerosols into the stratosphere, to reflect away sunlight. but no one knows how to manufacture an entire atmosphere. on mars, the best we can expect is a crude habitat, erected by robots. and even if they could build us a four seasons, near a glacier or easily mined ore, videoconferencing with earth won’t be among the amenities. messaging between the two planets will always be too delayed for any real-time give and take.cabin fever might set in quickly on mars, and it might be contagious. quarters would be tight. governments would be fragile. reinforcements would be seven months away. colonies might descend into civil war, anarchy or even cannibalism, given the potential for scarcity. us colonies from roanoke to jamestown suffered similar social breakdowns, in environments that were edenic by comparison. some individuals might be able to endure these conditions for decades, or longer, but musk told me he would need a million people to form a sustainable, genetically diverse civilisation.‘even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on mars,’ he said. ‘you would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than earth. there would be no trees growing. there would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. no oil.’i asked musk how quickly a mars colony could grow to a million people. ‘excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people,’ he said. ‘but you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. in fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. it would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. and we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship.’musk told me all this could happen within a century. he is rumoured to have a design in mind for this giant spaceship, a concept vehicle he calls the mars colonial transporter. but designing the ship is the easy part. the real challenge will be driving costs down far enough to launch whole fleets of them. musk has an answer for that, too. he says he is working on a reusable rocket, one that can descend smoothly back to earth after launch, and be ready to lift off again in an hour.‘rockets are the only form of transportation on earth where the vehicle is built anew for each journey,’ he says. ‘what if you had to build a new plane for every flight?’ musk’s progress on reusable rockets has been slow, but one of his prototypes has already flown a thousand metres into the air, before touching down softly again. he told me full reusability would reduce mission costs by two orders of magnitude, to tens of dollars per pound of weight. that’s the price that would convert earth’s launch pads into machine guns, capable of firing streams of spacecraft at deep space destinations such as mars. that’s the price that would launch his 100,000 ships.all it takes is a glance over your shoulder, to the alien world of 1914, to remind yourself how much can happen in a century. but a million people on mars sounds like a techno-futurist fantasy, one that would make ray kurzweil blush. and yet, the very existence of spacex is fantasy. after talking with musk, i took a stroll through his cathedral-like rocket factory. i wandered the rows of chromed-out rocket engines, all agleam under blue neon. i saw white tubes as huge as stretched-out grain silos, with technicians crawling all over them, their ant-farm to-and-fro orchestrated from above, by managers in glass cube offices. mix in the cleanroom jumpsuits and the edm soundtrack, and the place felt something like santa’s workshop as re-imagined by james cameron. and to think: 12 years ago, this whole thrumming hive, this assembly line for spaceships, did not even exist, except as a hazy notion, a few electrified synapses in musk’s overactive imagination.who am i to say what spacex will accomplish in a century’s time? for all i know musk will be hailed as a visionary by then, a man of action without parallel in the annals of spaceflight. but there are darker scenarios, too. musk could push the envelope, and see his first mission to mars end in tragedy. travel to mars could prove elusive, like cold fusion. it might be one of those feats of technology that is always 25 years away. musk could come to be seen as a cultural artifact, a personification of our post-apollo hangover. an icarus.i asked musk if he’d made peace with the possibility that his project could still be in its infancy, when death or infirmity forces him to pass the baton. ‘that’s what i expect will be the case,’ he said. ‘make peace with it, of course. i’ve thought about that quite a lot. i’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that spacex continues its mission without me,’ he said. i nodded toward a cluster of frames on his wall, portraits of his five sons. ‘will you give it to them?’ he told me he had planned to give it to an institution, or several, but now he thinks that a family influence might be stabilising. ‘i just don’t want it to be controlled by some private equity firm that would milk it for near-term revenue,’ he said. ‘that would be terrible.’‘we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. that’s the next step’this fear, that the sacred mission of spacex could be compromised, resurfaced when i asked musk if he would one day go to mars himself.  ‘i’d like to go, but if there is a high risk of death, i wouldn’t want to put the company in jeopardy,’ he told me. ‘i only want to go when i could be confident that my death wouldn’t result in the primary mission of the company falling away.’ it’s possible to read musk as a noah figure, a man obsessed with building a great vessel, one that will safeguard humankind against global catastrophe. but he seems to see himself as a moses, someone who makes it possible to pass through the wilderness – the ‘empty wastes,’ as kepler put it to galileo – but never sets foot in the promised land.before i left spacex, i wanted to know how far musk thought human exploration would go. when a man tells you that a million people will live on mars within a century, you want to know his limits, if only for credibility’s sake. ‘do you think we will go to the stars?’ i asked him.‘wow,’ he said. ‘it’s pretty hard to get to another star system. alpha centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. you have to accelerate. you have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at alpha centauri and not go zipping past.’ to accentuate this last point, musk made a high-pitched zooming noise, like kids make when playing with toy spaceships.
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rt @peterwsinger: icym
how 3d printing could effect war and foreign policy http://t.co/jna79xc1y9
 with key patents running out this year, new printers that use metal, wood and fabric are set to become much more widely available – putting the engineering world on the cusp of major historical changea visitor looks at a 3d printer printing an object, during 'inside 3d printing' conference and exhibition in new york, april 22, 2013. emmanuel dunand/afpparis, france – 3d printing will revolutionize war and foreign policy, say experts, not only by making possible incredible new designs but by turning the defense industry – and possibly the entire global economy – on its head.for many, 3d printing still looks like a gimmick, used for printing useless plastic figurines and not much else.but with key patents running out this year, new printers that use metal, wood and fabric are set to become much more widely available – putting the engineering world on the cusp of major historical change.the billion-dollar defense industry is at the bleeding edge of this innovation, with the us military already investing heavily in efforts to print uniforms, synthetic skin to treat battle wounds, and even food, said alex chausovsky, an analyst at ihs technology.scientists at the massachusetts institute of technology have already invented "4d printing" – creating materials that change when they come into contact with elements such as water.one day, that could mean things like printed uniforms that change color depending on their environment.in the real world, the baby steps are already being taken.late last year, british defense firm bae systems put the first printed metal part in a tornado jet fighter.the company recently put out an animated video showing where they think such humble beginnings could one day lead.it imagined a plane printing another plane inside itself and then launching it from its undercarriage."it's long term, but it's certainly our end goal to manufacture an aerial vehicle in its entirety using 3d printing technology," matt stevens, who heads bae's 3d printing division, told agence france-presse.but the real revolution of 3d printing is less about the things you can make and more about where you make them.being able to take printers to a warzone promises a radical shake-up of combat and the defense industry, says peter w singer, an expert in future warfare at the new america foundation."defense contractors want to sell you an item but also want to own the supply chain for 50 years," he says."but now you'll have soldiers in an austere outpost in somewhere like afghanistan who can pull down the software for a spare part, tweak the design and print it out."this could lead militaries to cut out private defense companies altogether. and by combining 3d printing with assembly line robotics, those that remain will be enormously streamlined.that sort of disruption carries huge political implications in places like the united states where defense firms are purposefully spread around the country and support millions of jobs."the pentagon and defense industry have an incredibly tough time with innovation, but you don't want to wait to lose a major battle before you do it," says singer.3d printing could even change foreign policy, for instance by undermining sanctions."the us has sanctioned everything from fighter jet spare parts to oil equipment. 3d printing could turn sanctions – which have been a crucial part of foreign policy for a generation or more – into an antiquated notion," says singer.then there are the scarier prospects that come with reducing the barriers to arms manufacturing."think of master bombmakers in the middle east making new designs that look like everyday products or a lone wolf operator printing a plastic gun he can get past security at the white house," says chausovsky.but all of that may pale in comparison to the security risks that 3d printing could trigger by revolutionizing economies.if anyone can print retail goods, economies that rely on cheap factory labour to make things like clothes and toys may find themselves in deep trouble – with all the security consequences that go with that."if you want to know where the big threat of 3d printing is, think about how reliant china is on its low-cost merchandising sector," says chausovsky.3d printing – invented in the 1980s – is much older than many realize.the recent upsurge in interest is tied to the fact that patents on the original technology are expiring – opening the way for competition that will drive up quality and push down prices.but the next big ones, that expired in the first half of 2014, are related to "selective laser syntering" that prints metals such as aluminum, copper and steel, and with much greater definition.and rather than working with solid lumps of metal, engineers can create complex new shapes that use much less material without losing any strength."you can't drill a curved hole," says chausovsky. "with 3d printing, you're creating products that would never be possible with traditional methods.the full implications are still hard to imagine."it's the first time in a very long time that there's been such a radical shake up in industrial engineering," says stevens at bae. "we're not just improving things – we're re-writing the rule book." – rappler.com
rt @nfergus: fascinating and revealing that the things the bostonian revolutionaries buried were coins and newspapers:
 the unveiling, before a bank of television cameras and a collection of dignitaries including departing governor deval patrick, came just a month after hatchfield, lying on a muddy wooden plank at the state house, spent six hours carefully chipping the time capsule from the underside of the cornerstone.the contents were not a surprise. they had been carefully cataloged after a group of workers building an addition to the state house stumbled upon them in 1855. but the detail — the partially obscured names of the newspapers, the “quar.dol” notation on one of the coins, the wording of the silver plate’s inscription — inspired delight as hatchfield dug deeper and deeper into the box.pam hatchfield, a conservator at the museum of fine arts, held a silver plaque that was inside the time capsule.“this is what we as conservators live for,” she said.there was considerable ceremony surrounding the unveiling, which took place in the museum’s art of the americas wing, in front of thomas sully’s grand painting, “the passage of the delaware,” depicting george washington on horseback in 1776.but there was far more pageantry surrounding the original placement of the time capsule.on july 4, 1795, 15 white horses — one for each state of the union — pulled the cornerstone for the new state house through the streets of boston to the building site.adams arrived with an escort of fusiliers. and amid a 15-gun salute, the governor, revere, and scollay placed the original contents of the capsule, sandwiched between two sheets of lead. adams dedicated the building to core principles that should “there be fixed, unimpaired, in full vigor, till time shall be no more.”after the workers came across the time capsule in 1855, its contents were cleaned and cataloged. officials added newspapers and coins from their own era, placed everything in a brass box, and put it in a carved depression in a new stone in the original spot.the new capsule would remain there for 159 years, from the administration of know-nothing governor henry gardner, through the tenure of republican governor calvin coolidge, and deep into the second term of democrat patrick.but in may, water marks discovered in a section of the state house basement once used for loading coal prompted a water infiltration investigation. and officials identified the cornerstone as an area of concern.at about 4:30 in the afternoon on a cold december day, after her arduous efforts to free the capsule, mfa conservator hatchfield sat up to applause, holding a small box turned green with time.the capsule, a little smaller than a cigar box, was taken to the museum by state police escort. and three days later, conservationists x-rayed it in the museum’s high-tech research laboratory.the images appeared to show the objects described in an 1855 account of the reburial. there were a few mysteries, though. there appeared to be an extra coin in the box. what was it? and while the x-rays suggested the items were in good condition, it was difficult to know.would there be signs of corrosion on the coins, which were washed in nitric acid before they were reburied in 1855? and would the newspapers be in good condition?the unveiling found the newspapers — what looked like an old copy of the boston bee, perhaps two copies of the old traveller, and a couple of unknowns — in relatively good shape. some of the coins appeared corroded. the mystery of the extra coin had not been solved as of tuesday evening.secretary of state william galvin, who is also chairman of the massachusetts historical commission, second from left, pointed to an object as governor deval patrick, center, looked on.all of the attention, if exciting, was a bit jarring for the conservationists overseeing the project. “we very rarely work under the klieg lights,” said hatchfield, in an interview tuesday afternoon, describing a profession that prizes careful, almost “glacial” restorative work.there was considerable anxiety, in the run-up to the unveiling, that hatchfield would have to halt the opening mid-lift and send everyone home disappointed. what if the newspapers were stuck to the top of the box? the sticking was minimal.now that the capsule has been opened, a number of questions face state officials and mfa preservationists. how much to restore coins whose condition, however poor, is an important piece of history? should the newspapers be unfolded or left as they are? should the state add some 21st-century items to the time capsule or not?secretary of state william galvin said that’s up for debate, though he suggested he did not want to “taint” the historical feel of the capsule with new materials.galvin said the mfa will probably display the items from the time capsule later this year. then, he said, he would like to stash it in the cornerstone of the state house once again.
 i've been teaching a class on intermediate macroeconomics this quarter. increasingly, over the past twenty years or more, intermediate macro classes at ucla (and in many other top schools), have focused almost exclusively on economic growth. that reflected a bias in the profession, initiated by fynn kydland and ed prescott , who persuaded macroeconomists to use the ramsey growth model as a paradigm for business cycle theory. according to this real business cycle view of the world, we should think about consumption, investment and employment 'as if' they were the optimal choices of a single representative agent with super human perception of the probabilities of future events. although there were benefits to thinking more rigorously about inter-temporal choice, the rbc program as a whole led several generations of the brightest minds in the profession to stop thinking about the problem of economic fluctuations and to focus instead on economic growth. kydland and prescott assumed that labor is a commodity like any other and that any worker can quickly find a job at the market wage. in my view, the introduction of the shared belief that the labor market clears in every period, was a huge misstep for the science of macroeconomics that will take a long time to correct.in my intermediate macroeconomics class, i am teaching business cycle theory from the perspective of keynesian macroeconomics but i am grounding old keynesian concepts in the theory of labor market search, based on my recent books ( 2010a , 2010b ) and articles ( 2011 , 2012 , 2013a , 2013b ).  i am going to use this blog to explain some insights that undergraduates can easily absorb that are adapted from my understanding of keynes'  general theory . today's post is about measuring employment.  in later posts, i will take up the challenge of constructing a theory to explain unemployment.ever since robert lucas introduced the idea of continuous labor market clearing, the idea that it may be useful to talk of something called 'involuntary unemployment' has been scoffed at by the academic chattering classes. it's time to fight back. the concept of 'involuntary unemployment' does not describe a loose notion that characterizes the sloppy work of heterodox economists from the dark side. it is a useful category that describes a group of workers who have difficulty finding jobs at existing market prices. 
rt @maxcroser: larry summers on energy independence and why the oil price will remain low
follow him here: @lhsummers

 transcript: the main reason why oil prices are falling is that we had a stretch of time where we had rising supply from north america matched by falling supply from other places because of developments in libya and developments in iraq, developments in iran. and the run of bad supply developments has largely stopped and the positive supply developments in the united states have continued. and the expectation that that will continue in the future is leading to a significant decline in the price of oil. my guess and guesses about oil prices are highly problematic is that they’re going to stay down, since it seems to me there’s probably more room for positive supply surprises from here than there is for negative supply surprises. no one really knows the price sensitivity of tight oil, shale type oil in the united states. my best guess would be that at prices above $60 the broad trend towards increasing u.s. supplies will continue.and so i think we are making progress towards energy independence though i think energy independence is a somewhat complex goal and may mean less than presidents of the united states have often implied that it means. japan and europe remain dependent on middle east oil and it is hard to believe that we could ever allow a situation to materialize where there was a vast difference in price between the price of oil in japan and europe and the price in the united states. and so if one asks the fundamental question is the world price of oil vulnerable to what happens in the middle east the answer to that question is probably somewhat less than it was but it is still very vulnerable to what happens in the middle east. and in that sense even if the united states stops being a net importer of oil it will still be very vulnerable and can’t really be said to be energy independent.
 squirrel causes power outage in brookside, waldo areas of kc updated 6:46 pm cst jan 15, 2015at least 8,200 kansas city power and light customers were without power in the waldo and brookside neighborhoods of kansas city, mo., for a short time thursday afternoon.the area affected is bordered by ward parkway to the west, wornall to the east, meyer boulevard to the north and interstate 435 to the south.a kcp&l spokesperson said the outage was caused by a squirrel at a substation.power has since been restored.the views expressed are not those of this site, this station or its affiliated companies. by posting your comments you agree to accept our terms of use.president barack obama made a feisty pitch for economic populism in his penultimate state of the union tuesday night, touting the improving economy on his watch and making the case that government has a role in ensuring equal opportunity for all.your profile has been deleted.no email address was supplied by .                                 to complete your registration on this site, please supply an address.please confirm or modify the email address to which you will have subscription offers sent.
 talking with frithjof bergmann, prof. emeritus from u. of michigan, ann arbor about his book new work, new culture (2004, english release coming soon).frithjof is a world-renowned ex-hegel/nietzsche scholar who has worked since the early 80s on projects to realize the goal of “new work,” which is an alternative to the current, dysfunctional job system. new work enables people to do work (which is not the same as a “job”) that they really, really want. human nature is not such that we are born free and need restraining by a social contract; rather, we need institutions to help us develop a self, to figure out what we really want and become free by doing things that we deeply identify with. new work enterprises promotes technology like fabricators and cutting-edge farming to support community self-sufficiency in places like detroit that the job system has left behind. read more about new work at newworknewculture.com .be sure to listen to mark’s overview of the topic . listen to a follow-up q&a between mark and frithjof. watch more interviews on the new work youtube channel mark manages . get more info, video, and a hefty hunk of the text .end song: “we who have escaped,” a brand new recording by the new lineup of mark’s band new people . get the mp3, along with all three of their albums, a not school discussion of this bergmann book, and much more by becoming a pel citizen , or just support our efforts through a donation .
rt @robert_graboyes: closing of the frontier/ are us laws, regulations, institutions, politics bringing medical innovation to a close?
 an edited version of this op-ed ran in usa today on november 7, 2013in the 1930s, the united states gave birth to the most innovative health care system in human history. in every decade since, american doctors continued to introduce medical miracles of greater and greater significance to the rest of the world. now it is 2013, and every young health care professional ought to ask, “are our laws, regulations, institutions, and politics bringing this age of innovation to a close?”my parents always had an endearing and ingenuous habit—innocently inflating the importance and accomplishments of their friends. a friend who was moderately well-to-do would rise in their description to the level of aristotle onassis. a second vice president at some company would be just a notch or two below the ceo. i donned perhaps the biggest smile when my father told me that our small-town family doctor essentially invented the idea of stem-cell therapy. imagine my smile decades later when i discovered that dad was pretty much correct. the case of milton ende, m.d. , is iconic—a reminder of the importance of physician autonomy and a warning against the rigid, centrally driven homogenization of medical practice. a well-known and colorful figure in petersburg, va., dr. ende grew up with my mother. in an era of sedate menswear, he sported brightly colored jackets and enormous, 150-decibel bowties. we knew him to be an astoundingly fine diagnostician. when an aunt with chronic health problems was critically ill, he quickly asked a question no one over the years thought to ask, “has anyone ever tested her for multiple sclerosis?” they hadn’t, and his keen eye spotted that key diagnosis in an instant. in the early 1960s, dr. ende wondered why infants rarely contracted cancers. he and his brother norman, also an m.d., thought that perhaps something in the infants’ blood inhibited cancer growth—and they wanted to see whether transplanting blood from infants to cancer sufferers might have therapeutic benefits. ethically, they couldn’t extract blood from infants for this purpose, but they realized that they could use infant blood cells from the umbilical cords (and later placentas) of newborns. cord blood, we now know, is rich in stem cells.the brothers transplanted cord blood into cancer sufferers whose cases were deemed hopeless. their experiments cured none of the patients, but some exhibited temporary and at times substantial and prolonged improvement—enough to give the doctors hope that they were onto something.funders and major medical journals routinely rejected the endes’ work, so in 1972, they first reported their findings in a regional publication, “ the virginia medical monthly .” in medicine, credentialism is real and, sometimes, a real problem. in the early 2000s, some finally recognized the importance of the endes’ work, describing them as the earliest of all pioneers in stem-cell therapy. and all of this occurred in a small, quiet town whose primary contribution to medical science had been civil war field hospitals a century earlier. while the endes never received their full measure of recognition, the medical frontier in those days was wide open, and other pioneers gave rise to a vast array of stem-cell research and therapies.could the endes’ experiment occur today? physicians have told me “almost certainly not.” one, a cardiologist, reminisced about grass-roots-level innovation in his field 40 years ago. in that time, a burst of new surgical procedures emerged via improvisation and experimentation—almost on the fly. today, physicians have to run their innovations through an expensive, slow-motion gauntlet of attorneys, accountants, and bureaucrats. of course, we must balance our desire for experimentation against the need for patient protection. but young medical professionals ought to ask whether our quest for safety and deference for credentialed insiders is unnecessarily snuffing out potential sources of life-saving treatments. in our era, big science and big government are deeply intertwined, with the capacity to discourage heterodox research and treatment. such intellectual ossification can occur through outright prohibition or reimbursement policies. (if medicare doesn’t pay for treatment x, no one is going to do treatment x.) with too much central control, medicine slows to an uninspiring, unaffordable stasis.we see such control in various ways. malpractice law sends physicians quivering into lockstep practice patterns. excessive red tape ends small practices, forcing doctors into large groups. comparative effectiveness research shifts from useful gauge to mechanistic autopilot—homogenizing medicine toward “best practices.” medicare’s reimbursement formula gives primacy to conventional wisdom and barricades the path of innovation. the affordable care act worsens matters by tightening washington’s bureaucratic grip through such unaccountable institutions as the independent payment advisory board. the aca’s focus on accountable care organizations will further consolidate physician groups and hospitals into larger combinations.the most important question in american medicine ought to be, “ why is there no steve jobs of health care? ” why is there no visionary who brings us undreamt-of quality care and sends prices plunging? are we snuffing out health care innovation altogether? both ends of the political spectrum have failed to answer these questions, if indeed they have even bothered to ask them.
 in a blog post last month i looked at how a raspberry pi can be used to emulate a formidable ibm mainframe , and in this post i describe how a pair can be used to emulate vax computers which can then be configured to form a vmscluster.the microvax 3900 hardware being emulated this time is a little more modern and somewhat smaller than the ibm 4381 processor, but the vax architecture and openvms operating system are no less impressive. on introduction in 1989 an entry level microvax 3900 would have set you back over $120,000 and, as with ibm's vm operating system, you'd be mistaken if you thought that openvms was dead and buried as it runs many mission critical workloads today.emulation of the vax hardware has been made possible by a pretty amazing piece of software called simh . in order to be able to run openvms on this a licence is required, but fortunately these are available free of charge via the openvms hobbyist programme.the simh software is configured to emulate a microvax 3900 with 64mb of memory, 1.5gb disk and a cd-rom drive. an iso file containing an image of the openvms installation media is attached to the virtual cd-rom drive and the emulator is booted. the steps to install the software are reasonably simple and the image below shows part of the installation process.for extra authenticity the above image shows a real dec vt420 serial terminal wired up to the uart of raspberry pi #1 via a 3.3v-rs232 level converter. but for the sake of clarity the screenshots that follow have been captured via a linux laptop connected to rasberry pi #2 via a a usb-serial adapter, a.k.a. “ftdi cable”.in the above screenshot we can see openvms starting up and the many operator communications or “opcom” messages that are displayed. once system startup has completed we can then log in and use the “show system” command to get the equivalent of a “ps -aef” on linux. note that openvms commands are not case sensitive and can be abbreviated.with one system up and running we now need at least one more in order to form a cluster. here we have a second raspberry pi attached via a network crossover cable and each board has been configured with a static ip address. although in actual fact we won't be using tcp/ip at all, but it's useful to have this configured to test the ethernet connection and to copy files across if required.once we've tested basic network connectivity the second simh instance can be configured pretty much the same, albeit the emulated ethernet card must be configured with a different mac address. obviously, when installing openvms the system is given a different node name, and when installing the networking software a different decnet address is used. to summarise, we have:
 "we love the troops, but we'd rather not think about them." what happens when a nation's view of its military is both reverent and disengaged.several times this past fall, i've mentioned that i was concentrating on a big project for the magazine and thus was deferring most other commitments, from our ongoing (and soon-to-be-revamped) american futures saga to the daily fray of news about politics, china, aviation, etc.the article i was working on has now come out in the new january-february 2015 issue of the magazine ( subscribe! ) and has gone online this evening. in the days to come i'll say more about the themes i emphasize in this article, and the ones i decided to leave out. also about some of the ramifications for policy and politics, plus the reactions i've begun receiving from people who have read the print magazine.my purpose right now is simpler. it is to point you to:1. the article itself, which you can find here, "the tragedy of the american military."2. the article above includes some powerful interactive graphics, plus a video the atlantic's online team has created to accompany the online version of the article, which you will see as you read through it. the graphics are meant to underscore one of the "chickenhawk nation" themes, which is the stark contrast between the relative handful of americans directly involved in the country's ongoing wars and the huge majority of politicians who are dealt into what dwight eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" through supply contracts to their home districts. the video illustrates the difference between civilian technology, which grows ever cheaper and more reliable, and military technology, which does the reverse.3. the brief background on and text of "the gary hart memo" that i mention in the article. when i first began reporting on the post-vietnam war "military reform" movement, in a 1980 atlantic article called "the musclebound superpower" and then in my 1981 book national defense , gary hart was a rising young democratic senator from colorado who was assembling a network of historians, technologists, combat leaders, weapons designers, and others to think about how the united states could take a more flexible, realistic, and sustainable approach to defending itself. his main republican counterparts were the then-young and rising representatives newt gingrich of georgia and dick cheney of wyoming.we know about the subsequent paths of gingrich and cheney. what many people don't realize about hart's career since then is how seriously he has maintained his interest in the tactics and strategy of national defense. because of this background, in 2011 president obama privately asked hart to formulate advice on what obama could do, if he won a second term, to make a difference in long-standing military problems. this memo, published here for the first time , was the result.4. a collection of arguments pro and con about two controversial military aircraft, the a-10 "warthog" attack plane and the f-35 "lightning ii" fighter. my article takes a hard line in arguing that the a-10 illustrates some of the best practices in weapons-design, and the f-35 the reverse. thus i argue that the current policy of phasing out the a-10 while pouring money into the f-35 is a costly and illustrative mistake.the civilian and military officials in the pentagon who have been pushing for the f-35 and against the a-10 obviously disagree. the links on this page will allow you to explore the claims and responses and see which you find most convincing. and since the main argument of my article is that the hollow practice of "honoring our heroes" at halftime ceremonies and through priority boarding at airports has become a cheap substitute for serious engagement with the real problems of our defense establishment, whatever you conclude about specific weapons or policies, wading into the issues is important in itself.the memo from gary hart's small group was meant to be terse and suggestive rather than encyclopedic. knowing how fiercely competed-for a president's time and attention are, hart insisted that the memo be kept under 2,500 words in length.my article, as you might notice, is not quite that short. even so, with about 10,000 words to work with, there are a lot of themes and discussions we decided to save for another time, in the interest of concentrating this one on its central chickenhawk theme. for instance, the "air-sea battle" concept, which could loom large in future tensions between the united states and china, is important. so, obviously, are the future of the nuclear deterrent, and the implications of cheaper, widely dispersed drones, and the ways in which the military trains and promotes its officers. but we decided to deal with those later.this article, plus its accompanying material, is meant to raise questions rather than resolve them all, begin a discussion rather than conclude it.
rt @fmbutt: "as of 2013, nearly $1 trillion of fdi  was parked in u.s. manufacturing, by far the #1 mfg investment destination"

 though a monument to the ravages of soviet central planning, the barren magnitogorsk steel works complex still inspires america’s industrial policy proponents.  “failure to plan is a plan for failure,” said comrade rep. dan lipinski (d-il), as he described the “pro-manufacturing” legislation he helped slip into the mammoth cromnibus bill, which became law this month.the revitalize american manufacturing and innovation act directs the secretary of commerce to establish a “network for manufacturing innovation” to:improve the competitiveness of u.s. manufacturing and increase production of goods manufactured predominately within the united states;stimulate u.s. leadership in advanced manufacturing research, innovation, and technology;accelerate the development of an advanced manufacturing workforce; andof course, the verbs “revitalize,” “improve,” “stimulate,” “accelerate,” “create,” and “preserve” are euphemisms for protect, subsidize, regulate, and intervene.this is a big victory for a sector of our economy that over the years has provided so many high quality jobs in my district, in our region, and across the nation, but has taken many hits over the past couple of decades, especially during the recent recession. while manufacturing is by-and-large a private, market endeavor, few can disagree that government policy impacts manufacturing in countless ways.yes, government policy has affected manufacturing in countless–usually adverse–ways. excessive regulations enabled by irresponsible agency cost-benefit analyses, a burdensome tax system, endemic exposure to frivolous lawsuits, exorbitant health care costs, inefficient union work rules, tariffs on industrial inputs, absurd restrictions on immigration, subsidization of chosen firms, and other forms of corporate favoritism are all drags on manufacturing (and other economic sectors, too). u.s. manufacturing would benefit from less washington, not more.the revitalize act is a solution in search of a problem – and a bad solution at that. american manufacturing does not need revitalizing. despite washington’s many meddling interventions, and despite the persistence of the myth of u.s. industrial decline, u.s. manufacturing is thriving –and always has been. year after year, with the exceptions of during cyclical recession, new records are set with respect to most relevant industry health metrics.  the most recent official data reveal all-time highs for manufacturing sector output, value-added, revenues, exports, profits, and foreign direct investment–all in real terms and all achieved, largely, in the absence of top-down planning.moreover, for a country whose consumers spend twice as much on services than on goods, and where 90 percent of the workforce is employed outside the manufacturing sector, official obsession over the future of manufacturing is more than a bit overplayed. many with this obsession dwell on the past, evoking the good old days of 1979, when the sector employed almost 20 million workers, or 1953, when manufacturing accounted for a record 28 percent of u.s. gdp.  but today’s manufacturing worker produces an average of $170,000 of value-added per year, as compared to $28,000 in 1979–a more than quadrupling of output in real terms. and, although manufacturing’s share of the economy has declined to about 12 percent today, the absolute value of u.s. manufacturing output, in real terms, has increased more than six-fold since 1953.  the facts that the sector supports far fewer jobs today and accounts for a smaller share of the u.s. economy say absolutely nothing about the state of the manufacturing.what matters is whether there is continued growth in value-added, revenues, foreign direct investment, research and development expenditures, capital expenditures, and productivity. by each of those measures, u.s. manufacturing is robust.  when it comes to the question of the condition of u.s. manufacturing, which is likely to be a more credible barometer: legislators who benefit from the perception of fixing “manufactured” problems or investors revealing their preferences through their own actions? as of 2013, nearly $1 trillion of foreign direct investment was parked in u.s. manufacturing, by far the number-one manufacturing investment destination in the world. that’s a rather strong endorsement of the state of u.s. manufacturing .how on earth would u.s. manufacturers–the world’s most advantaged with their unparalleled access to idea incubators, research universities, r&d laboratories, and broad and deep capital markets to commercialize the ideas that make it through a rigorous vetting process–benefit from the commerce department’s participation in mapping out the future?  sure, some firms in some manufacturing industries–those that succeed in convincing the government that they are worthy of public support (i.e., those that commit more resources to political, rather than economic, activities)–may benefit.  but others, which rely upon and adapt to the verdicts of consumers in a market environment, will be disadvantaged.industrial policy is anathema to the market.  it short-circuits a selective, evolutionary process that has undergirded the world’s most successful innovation machine and reduces chances of worthy ideas, firms, and industries leading the next commercial wave. did the last generation’s policymakers anticipate the arrival of steve jobs, bill gates, or mark zuckerberg and the revolutionary products and services they delivered? did washington bureaucrats foresee the advent of specific life-extending medicines and devices, like swallowable, pill-sized cameras? had those proposing industrial policy in response to a rising japan in the 1980s and early 1990s prevailed, much of the technology and medical advances taken for granted today would have never come to fruition. american manufacturing and the broader u.s. economy have been successful by shunning, more than embracing, industrial policy.with its pre-eminence in innovation and entrepreneurship still intact, the united states is situated at the top of the global value chain. staying there will require americans to remain skeptical of top-down industrial policy. it could propel the united states above kazakhstan as the world’s greatest producer of potassium , but at unthinkable costs.
 something’s changed about the broader public’s interest in art and it is not just the celebrities showing up at art fairs. in many ways, art is at the beginning of a long journey into public awareness—and popularity—similar to the path taken by gourmet and artisanal food:it would be hard to separate the growth of interest in art from the increasingly visual culture created by the internet and mobile technology. in the age of instagram, communicating through images has become a necessary part of contemporary life. no longer a luxury, finding meaning through images is becoming a maslovian need.you can think of this in terms of food. the u.s. is in the midst of yet another phase of transforming tastes in food. not 30 years ago, processed foods were ascendant in american culture. today, companies who ruled that era are facing a growing preference for fast-casual restaurants that serve food prepared with fresh, whole ingredients. mcdonald’s and twinkies are down; chipotle and whole foods are up. the canary in the prep kitchen, the signal that preceded this massive shift, was a change in high-end restaurant culture.in the 1980s and 1990s, a generation of college-educated chefs followed alice waters’s lead and built restaurants that were more inviting and inventive showcases of food than the stuffy old restaurants in a few global cities. over the course of 30 years, diners became accustomed to learning the about the purveyors and sourcing of their meal’s ingredients. leveraged by the growth of a television food network and reality shows about cooking and chefs, and aided and abetted by a growth of high-quality coffee outlets and an explosion of craft brewers and cult winemakers, the language and culture surrounding food in contemporary life is nothing less than a sea change from the last century.art has the same opportunity. it won’t follow the same path. but there is no reason to think that our society’s enduring fascination with homes and decoration as a form of self-expression will not evolve into the kind of collecting—of diverse cultural objects from a broad variety of sources—that adds order, depth, and meaning to ordinary people’s lives.
 saudi arabia can last eight years on low oil prices, says former adviserexcess gas being burned off at shaybah in saudi arabia. photograph: george steinmetz/corbisa former adviser to saudi arabia has said the country can withstand eight years or more of low oil prices as tensions over the price slump simmered between the world’s biggest oil exporter and iran.mohammad al-sabban told the bbc that saudi arabia was concerned about the falling oil price but its cash reserves and planned budget cuts meant it could cope with a long period of depressed prices.“saudi arabia can sustain these low oil prices for at least eight years. first, we have huge financial reserves of about 3tn saudi riyals (£527bn). second, saudi arabia is embarking now on rationalising its expenditure, trying to take all the fat out of the budget,” sabban told the bbc’s world business report . “i think [saudi arabia] is worried but we [have to] wait for the full medicine that we have prescribed for ourself to take its course.”without cuts in spending on infrastructure, sports stadiums and new cities, saudi arabia can withstand low oil prices for at least four years, said sabban, a former adviser to the saudi minister for petroleum. he also suggested that lower oil prices could have long-term benefits for saudi arabia.saudi arabia has refused to cut production despite a more than 50% fall in the price of oil since last summer.“to shorten the cycle, you need to allow prices to go as low as possible to see those marginal producers move out of the market on the one hand, and also if there is any increase in demand that will be welcomed.”his comments were a further signal that saudi arabia was prepared to use its financial strength to ride out depressed oil prices now piling pressure on other producers, including iran , which also faces western sanctions over its nuclear programme.a meeting between saudi arabia’s foreign minister and his iranian counterpart was postponed partly because of disagreement over the falling oil price, bloomberg reported . saudi arabia and other producers in the persian gulf “are expected to make efforts to stop the fall in oil prices and not let the decline have a lasting impact on oil-producing nations’ economies”, said hossein amir-abdollahian, iran’s deputy foreign minister for arab and african affairs.tensions have been building between iran and other arab oil states over what iran has said is an international plot to weaken tehran by forcing down the price of oil. saudi arabia and kuwait opposed iran’s unsuccessful effort to persuade opec to cut output at its last meeting in november.the price of crude oil has more than halved since june 2014 because demand has weakened, particularly from china, while the us shale boom has increased global production. brent crude slipped back below $50 a barrel on monday, falling 1.8% to $49.29, as traders expected gloomy economic growth figures from china on tuesday and a bond-buying programme by the european central bank on thursday aimed at stimulating the eurozone economy.
 up until a little over a month ago, kathleen mandt had never spent any significant amount of time on reddit. mandt, an earth and planetary scientist at the southwest research institute, had heard of the social news site, but only because her teenage son “mostly lives on reddit.” she received a crash course, however, when a press release summarizing a recent paper she’d published was submitted to r/science , a thriving community on reddit with over six million subscribers. “a coworker told me about it,” she recalled in a phone interview. “so my son sat me down, signed me up for reddit, and i started answering questions about the paper itself.” it was while she was answering those questions that a redditor suggested in the thread that mandt sign up for an official ama. “so then i had my son sit down and sign me up for an ama.”short for “ask me anything,” amas are a bedrock of the reddit community, so much so that a subreddit devoted to them is one of the most popular on the site. the concept is somewhat self explanatory: a person with some kind of interesting experience offers himself up to the reddit community, promising to answer any question that is asked of him. as i write this, a thread titled, “ iama survivor of stalin’s dictatorship. my father was executed by the secret police and my family became ‘enemies of the people’. we fled the soviet union at the end of wwii. ask me anything ” has over a thousand comments, more questions than any one person could answer in a single sitting. in true reddit fashion, the questions with the most upvotes float to the top, so the popular questions are usually the ones the participants answer.the iama subreddit became so popular that it eventually caught the eye of publicists and became a pitstop for any celebrity on a press tour looking to promote a new project. suddenly you had superstars like george clooney and louis ck stopping by to answer questions. an ama with president barack obama, conducted just before the 2012 elections, drew so much attention that the site temporarily crashed under all the traffic.something happened once celebrities began to flock to iama, however: it became more difficult for non celebrities to get much attention, even when those non celebrities had something particularly unique to share. nathan allen, a mod for r/science and r/askscience (mods are volunteers who police subreddits and have administrative powers), noticed this discouraging trend whenever he’d see scientists try to conduct amas. “if you go through and arrange an ama for a member of the national academies of sciences,” he said in a phone interview, “and you do a lot of work to prep him for the ama, and then george clooney posts an ama on the same day, the [scientist’s ama] gets buried, and these people don’t get any visibility even though it’s really important and the general public needs to have access to it.”so allen, a phd chemist who works for the dow chemical company in pennsylvania, began to think about ways he could leverage r/science’s massive reach to connect scientists to the general public. r/science is a default subreddit, meaning it’s visible to people visiting reddit.com even if they aren’t logged in. according to internal metrics allen has access to, r/science gets between 30,000 and 100,000 unique visitors a day; it’s arguably the largest community-run science forum on the internet. so what if r/science were to form an ama series of its own, focused solely on working scientists who are producing interesting, groundbreaking research?starting in january, r/science officially launched its science ama series, and very quickly you had scientists not widely known to those outside their fields answering questions on the front page of a site that is visited by 114 million people a month. virtually overnight, reddit had created the world’s largest two-way dialogue between scientists and the general public. “of course you can talk about the large audience when scientists go on tv,” said allen.  “but is that really an interaction?” usually, those scientists who you’ll regularly see on cable news or the daily show are among a small group of pop culture celebrities, like neil degrasse tyson or bill nye the science guy. “you have the pop culture scientists like neil degrasse tyson, who’s doing a good job of communicating science, but he’s not publishing a lot of scientific papers,” allen argued. “his role is more science communication, but he’s not so much a practicing scientist who goes out and has ongoing research projects and is doing the nuts and bolts of science.”for the mods, the two-way conversation was as equally important as the sheer reach of the amas. “really the only way people get to find out about new research is if they have journal access or if they read the shortform news story that can be skewed by whatever journalist is covering it,” said chris dawson, another r/science mod. “if you had questions about the study then there wasn’t a good way to get them answered, and now you can.”there has been a longstanding criticism against science journalism, particularly its penchant for histrionically magnifying the scope of the results in such a way that misleads the public into thinking a much more monumental discovery has been made. “the general public won’t catch ‘may,’ ‘could,’ or ‘potentially,’” noted allen. “they just skim over that, and then that’s why they think there are cancer cures every week, because they see reports of early phase academic studies on something that fights cancer in a petri dish. and though this could be the mechanisms in which  a cancer treatment could be provided 30 years from now, the general public reads this as, ‘oh there’s a cure for cancer.’” while the science amas aren’t a panacea for misinformation, by giving the public access to the scientists themselves, allen hopes to eliminate at least some of the impact of sensationalized journalism.since launching, science amas have been conducted up to five times a week, though never more than one a day. the brunt of the labor of organizing each one falls on allen’s shoulders; he not only conducts most of the outreach to solicit participation, but also walks them through the entire process of conducting an ama, from creating an account to crafting the headline so it’ll have a wide appeal to reddit’s userbase. “the problem we encounter is that it turns out big name scientists aren’t big redditors,” he said. “their grad students may be, but they are not. typically, big name scientists are in their late 40s, 50s, 60s — they’re a different generation and don’t really have a natural inclination to post in social media.” much of his outreach involves a simple cold call or email to the scientist; armed with r/science’s web traffic statistics, it’s not difficult to convince a top tier researcher of the ama’s value. gradually, however, the pr departments within universities have begun to notice the series and, wanting to generate publicity for their own faculty, started reaching out to allen to schedule amas.that’s what happened with peggy mason, a professor of neurobiology at the university of chicago who studies empathy in rats. kevin jiang, a communications specialist at the university, approached her several months ago to pitch her on conducting an ama. “it was just as i was about to start teaching a mooc” — short for massive open online course — “we were thinking let’s try to publicize this whole thing. and so we pitched it, and reddit was really easy to work with.we went back and forth and they said what the blurb should say and how short it should be. they also told me to make sure to set aside a lot of time that day. it was a complete trip. it was so much fun.”within minutes after mason’s ama was posted, dozens of questions began to flood the thread. most of the redditors asked questions pertaining to what was mentioned in the short blurb describing her work and few referenced her published research in scholarly journals — a sign that this was mostly a layman audience who merely sought to slake their random curiosities rather than engage in rigorous scientific discussion. mason was asked questions ranging from whether rats mourned the death of other rats to if sociopathy exists in other mammals besides humans. “for me it was an exciting and fun conversation about something i love, even if it wasn’t questions on the one particular subject that i had published on most recently,” kathleen mandt said of her ama .but with a large audience comes great responsibility. we’ve seen the devastating impact of what happens when bad science creeps into the national conversation. recent measles outbreaks, for instance, have been wholly attributed to the pseudoscientific claims propagated by the anti-vaccination crowd. nathan allen was forced to consider his criteria for vetting ama candidates when he was approached by paul héroux, a physicist at mcgill university. “we knew going in that it was going to be controversial,” allen told me. “he holds that electromagnetic radiation from electronic equipment has health effects and can affect the metabolism of cells. this isn’t a generally accepted view, in fact . but the guy is still a legitimate professor at mcgill university. it’s a very good school. it’s called the harvard of canada, and he’s a tenured professor there.”but were those accomplishments enough to warrant allen giving héroux access to such a massive viewership? “i don’t want to be in the business of deciding what’s a fringe idea and what’s mainstream,” he said. “that’s against the basic philosophy of reddit. so i made the decision that, ok, this guy has a fringe idea, and we have a bunch of verified scientists [who frequent r/science]. this guy speaks for himself. he can get up to the mic and answer questions. if he can defend his answers, then we’ll let the community decide whether or not he’s fringe.”héroux posted his ama about a month ago, and what followed in the subsequent hours was about as close as you can come to a bloodbath in a wonky, jargon-laden scientific discussion on the internet. reading it now, the first thing that strikes you is that héroux avoided answering many of the questions that were upvoted to the top of the thread, a heterodox faux pas in a community that’s rooted firmly in the wisdom of crowds. a cadre of biochemists flocked to the ama and, after reviewing the scientist’s research, began to dissect his findings to such a technical and abstruse degree that a layman like me couldn’t even begin to discern the validity of their arguments. “having read some of your paper, i have to say that your conclusions seem like a serious stretch from the evidence,” wrote one redditor. “i find it a bit odd that you think it appropriate to bring your results to a public forum like reddit at this stage. no offense, but your actions strike me as having political intent.”whenever héroux did respond, it was often in a vague, evasive manner that avoided addressing the specifics of his challengers’ questions. several of his answers yielded negative upvotes, a sign that the reddit community had turned against him. “i think the important lesson here is that the general public gets to see that scientists have different opinions,” said allen. “they get to see how scientists are critical of other scientists. they get to see what peer review looks like in a real sense — what sort of minutia is going on. they get to see the actual mechanism of science going on. the comments that were in that thread would not be out of line in any comments you’d get in an anonymous peer-reviewed journal.”reading through the dozens of science amas that have been conducted on reddit, it seems evident that r/science is fulfilling a need that may have been previously unforeseen by the scientific community of researchers who spend years toiling in obscurity, testing and retesting their hypotheses so that one day their hard work may see the light of day in the form of a journal article. in a world where scholarly journals are often frustratingly difficult to access by the general public, there remains a demand in the market for a way to remove the friction between scientists and non scientists. with the rise of moocs and other discussion tools like reddit, science communication is transcending its heretofore gatekeepers. “my personal belief, in the end, is that scientists really work for the people,” said mason. “we’re allowed to follow our intellectual curiosity insomuch as we share it with other human beings.” with six months of amas and thousands of questions uploaded, reddit’s science ama series seems to have brought us significantly closer to that goal.enjoy my writing? want me to create awesome content for your company?  go here  to learn more about what i can offer you.or you can subscribe to my newsletter:
 on the surface, malcolm gladwell’s latest article for the new yorker, “ creation myth: xerox parc, apple, and the truth about innovation “, is a story about the mouse and how inventions travel – and evolve – across time and place. but examined more deeply, the article is really about the factors that determine whether you end up with an invention or an innovation .simply put: “invention” is the manifestation of an idea or creation of something new. it doesn’t become an “innovation” until it’s applied successfully in practice – i.e., it reaches the market and impacts people’s lives.the story of parc – and for that matter, any other innovative company – is indeed a mix of hopeful inventions, world-changing innovations, and missed opportunities, as gladwell observes. we agree with many of the key points illustrated by the anecdotes and quotes in his article.but there’s more – in contrast to his thesis that there’s a clean split between invention and innovation, and that companies are structurally limited in their innovation opportunities – we believe that there is now a framework that allows companies to innovate beyond their comfort zones and existing infrastructures. it’s called open innovation.but first, we want to highlight some of the key points that really resonated in gladwell’s article, along with our observations based on parc’s experience from being in the business of innovation today:1. adding limits or constraints can actually create more – and better – innovations. as gladwell observes, apple wanted to build a popular vs. a personal computer. so steve jobs pushed his designer by adding constraints to the mouse such as low price and high reliability. we’ve found that you don’t have to “turn the &*^%$;# tap” of creativity off – but you can focus the tap by imposing constraints (in our case, these often come from our clients reflecting their product or service strategy). these constraints motivate creative ideas that reduce complexity, improve user experience, and help reach the target price – whether it’s a $15, $300, $3000, or $16000 prototype.2. success requires failure. there are all sorts of pithy sayings about this out there – and not surprisingly, they’re true! since the number of successful ideas that emerge is a function of the volume of failed ones, you need both a learning-based culture and a portfolio of innovation investments to help manage return vs. risk.3. operational management often values the cost of a “shovel” over the possibility of a “gold mine”. that’s because it’s easy to quantify a known cost (i.e., a shovel), but hard to agree on the value of a risky future possibility (i.e., a gold mine). but sometimes you have to trust the intuition of your experts and then continually test your assumptions along the way. [one strategy we use at parc is a  real options approach, which meters investments over time based on assessing probabilities of success as we learn new information. this approach is much better than  net present value for evaluating the cost – and potential return – from an r&d project.]4. inventive creativity can’t be measured by spreadsheets. yet if one wants to move the outputs of such creativity from invention to innovation, projects do need to be managed for different types of technical, market, and execution risks over time.5. thinking inside the box for years (e.g., lasers) is crucial to thinking outside the box when opportunity arises (e.g., laser printing). especially when that opportunity arises from combining deep expertise from multiple disciplines (e.g., lasers + printing) to address a novel problem (e.g., the need for remote printing without requiring physical contact). only then does chance favor the prepared expert mind.speaking of the “expert mind”… there’s a nuance that’s often forgotten in popular retellings of the story of the mouse.as gladwell describes, doug engelbart ‘s pioneering work on the mouse at sri inspired the researchers at xerox parc, who connected it to their pc with the goal of making computing personal (vs. mainframe) and accessible (vs. command-line interface). the really interesting revelation, however, is why the xerox parc researchers chose the mouse.because in reality, they had multiple pointing devices to choose from.here’s what happened: xerox parc scientist stuart card examined how easily a person could hit a given target (in this case, moving a cursor to manipulate the gui) by applying a then little-known model of human movement called fitts’ law . what he found: the mouse as pointing device was almost as effective as if using one’s hand. this finding not only led to the adoption of the mouse, but helped develop the field of human-computer interaction .good ideas usually go through a series of refinements as they encounter people with different perspectives and objectives, but there’s something valuable – and magical – about the expert mind that can connect and see possibilities across disciplines.now, on to finishing where gladwell left off.if steve jobs came to parc today , there would be a much better understanding of his goals, our goals, and what we would want to accomplish – together – through open innovation.because that’s what’s different: open innovation provides a framework for these conversations and interactions. through the pioneering work of henry chesbrough and others, there is now widespread awareness and practice of open innovation as a means for companies to leverage inventions and innovations from external parties. this can range from simply licensing ip (from or to others) and relying on outside organizations to help you see what’s possible, to co-developing and leveraging someone else’s investment to be tailored to your needs.simply put, open innovation institutionalizes and provides an alternative model for the uncharted do-we-or-don’t-we-let-him-in? model of a few decades ago. and why not? drawing on one another’s strengths is a great way to not only reduce risk, but realize new opportunities, faster.instead of each party viewing “the problem from a different perspective” and carving off “a different piece of the puzzle” (as gladwell notes), within an open innovation framework, each party can combine their perspectives and share the results of realizing the whole puzzle. that’s what we do today.you can read malcolm gladwell’s may 16 article for the new yorker, “creation myth”, here . besides gladwell’s take, many articles have been written about xerox parc and/or the steve jobs visit story; you can check out some of these here (institute for the future), here (oxford journals’ industrial and corporate change), and here (michael hiltzik, l.a. times – he also wrote the seminal book on the topic, dealers of lightning , which is cited by all of these articles).we’d love to hear your reactions – or lessons learned about invention vs. innovation – in the comments below. we look forward to engaging with you!
 a lot of the papers in the list are open access, which means you can get them as pdfs or html files. unfortunately though, the top journals tend to be behind corporate-controlled paywalls and require university subscriptions or money to get in. that said, if a paper is closed access, search for it online and you'll often find earlier pdf versions of it floating about, because the authors often publish draft versions or working papers in open access formats before getting them accepted into closed journals.i'm not one of those people who is oblivious to the fact that research exists outside the english language, and i know that it's quite possible that some of the most cutting edge bitcoin research could be going on in a chinese university or in a greek think-tank. unfortunately i don't speak those languages, so be aware that these are only english language papers.bitcoin literature is very new. the first paper - satoshi nakamoto's paper - came out only in 2008. i could find almost no academic research from 2009 and 2010, and only a trickle in 2011. it's only in 2012 that we start to find a decent amount emerging in the record. it's really in 2013 though, that the big research starts to come. 2014 has by far the most research, and it's in this year that peer-reviewed academic journal articles start to come out.bear in mind that peer-review processes for big journals can take years, so it's little surprise that there are so few cryptocurrency articles out in the really big-hitter journals. my prediction for 2015 though, is that there will be a big flood of research, and a significant batch of peer-reviewed journal articles. good research takes a while to do, especially in the social sciences.quality to some extent is in the eye of the beholder, but i'll be honest - there is a fair amount of crap research out there. for example, i've found 'academic' analyses of bitcoin from people that work in big universities, that still hold onto archaic beliefs about money emerging from barter. there are also a lot of pdf documents floating about with academic-sounding titles, written by people with academic sounding affiliations, but you never really know how good they are, or if they're written by some enthusiastic second-year students who don't really know what they're talking about.peer-reviewed journals obviously demand a certain degree of quality, but being published in a big journal doesn't necessarily mean an article is groundbreaking. it just means you managed to pitch it right, and get past a panel of peers who might have the same biases as you. for example, it's widely suspected that the peer-review process in the big economics journals systematically excludes economic theories that don't follow neo-classical interpretations of markets. to be accepted into the hallowed halls of such journals, one must cow down and play the game, and couch everything in the apolitical language of mathematical equations and spurious models. needless to say, some of the most interesting economics research is not found in the big prestige economics journals.so, it's best to treat this list as an initial starting point to launch into papers, and to make your own decisions about how interesting they are.firstly, there is a huge amount of technical stuff about the cryptography, computer science, security and systems design. computer science researchers have clearly enjoyed the chance to get involved in this cutting-edge area. the only problem with this though, is that the quantity of this research drowns out a lot of the equally important social sciences research, and tends to present bitcoin as a technological issue, rather than a profoundly human phenomenonsecondly, there is a sub-strand of the tech-related research that focuses on how to change bitcoin, or create a variant of it, or point out some failing it has. see, for example, this piece on a bitcoin-based emissions trading modelthirdly, there is a pretty big strand of research on the regulatory status, tax status, and legal status of bitcoin. this is clearly driven by the need to reach some clarity on these questions so that people know how to practically proceed in the short-term. there is also a nascent strand of accounting research - check out, for example, this new piecefourthly, there is a growing field of economic analyses of bitcoin, mostly coming from pretty mainstream economics, or from austrian-style libertarian economics. like most economics, the attempt is to create models, or to analyse incentive structures, and they will tend to call people 'agents', rather than, well, 'people'. see, for example, this piece coming out in the prestigious journal of economic perspectivesthen, finally, there is an emergent trickle of social sciences research on actual humans, including the sociology, anthropology, politics and even ethics of the system. this research remains hugely underrepresented though, which is ironic, because it's by far the most important area of researchareas that need more attention: humansthere are a number of areas, in my opinion, that need deeper research and analysis. bitcoin as money: there are surprisingly few real discussions about the monetary theory embedded in the bitcoin code, or how it might function as money. the papers on 'the economics of bitcoin' don't address it deeply enough (but then again, economics has always been pretty shite at money analysis). i'd love to see more deep analyses of the nature of decentralised electronic money, and the social dynamics of such moneydespite the huge amounts of focus on the technology of bitcoin, there is still very little critical reflection on the technological politics of bitcoin, or critical studies of decentralised algorithm-based systems. my piece on the politics of the bitcoin blockchain  sketches out areas that need more focusethnographic studies of bitcoin: there are a few surveys of bitcoin users, and some interesting attempts to use social media to analyse users, but there are few true ethnographic studies the geographical dynamics of bitcoin: bitcoin is often spoken of as a global currency, but in reality most of the writing about it comes from americans and europeans, and many of them sitting in cities. i'd love to see true studies on, for example, whether someone in rural zimbabwe would actually use cryptocurrency (given that most of my family is from rural zimbabwe this is not just a throwaway question)i haven't had a chance to read all of these, but here are some really interesting looking articles that are probably not going to get as much attention as they should. "bitcoin meets google trends and wikipedia: quantifying the relationship between phenomena of the internet era" ( here )"the digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the bitcoin economy" ( here )"alderney: gambling, bitcoin and the art of unorthodoxy" ( here ): from the island studies journal, ha ha"bitcoin and the legitimacy crisis of money" ( here ), coming out in the cambridge journal of economics, from beat weber. beat is critical of bitcoin, and it's worth checking out his other piece in the journal of peer production here"do the rich get richer? an empirical analysis of the bitcoin transaction network" ( here )"internet architecture and the layers principle: a conceptual framework for regulating bitcoin"( here ), from a google employee"the politics of cryptography: bitcoin and the ordering machines" ( here ): this is from quinn du pont, who is doing intriguing work on cryptography political philosophy"the paradoxes of distributed trust: peer-to-peer architecture and user confidence in bitcoin"( here )"synthetic commodity money" ( here ) - this one is in the journal of financial stability, but free versions are floating around on the internet"the economics of bitcoin and similar private digital currencies" ( here ) - this one is in the journal of financial stability, but free versions are floating around on the internet"are bitcoin users less sociable? an analysis of users’ language and social connections on twitter" ( here ): a very intriguing paper, which suggests that 'bitcoin followers are less likely to mention family, friends, religion, sex, and emotion related words in their tweets and have significantly less social connection to other users on the site'"do libertarians dream of electric coins? the material embeddedness of bitcoin" ( here ): great title, and out in a pretty innovative scandinavian journali'll let you decide what number 25 is: perhaps a paper that you'd like to write?thanks for reading this. if you see any mistakes in the list, or have any suggestions and additions you'd like me to make, please do comment, either here or on the google doc. i get sent an email every time that happens so i'll definitely see them. i'll update this list periodically as new pieces come out. finally, please do share this with people who might find it useful - i spent a fair amount of effort creating this, so i want it to be as useful as possible.lastly: much energy went into this, so feel free to buy me a beerthis took me at least four days to build and double-check, and it was pretty damn exhausting. if it's useful to you, and helps you in your own research or enlightenment, please do consider supporting me. here are three things you could do:
 is regulation choking small business formation?startups have been on the decline for 30 years, and i have written frequently on some of the possible reasons . one big open question: to what extent is government regulation playing a role in that decline? a blog post by  scott shane , professor of entrepreneurial studies at case western reserve university, offers a few data points that suggest rules and red tape could be hindering business formation. he notes, for instance, small business owners are complaining more about regulation than they have in the past — twice as much as in the 1980s, for instance. and this:over the past three-and-a-half decades, federal regulation has been rising, while new business creation has been falling, as the chart above indicates. researchers at the ewing marion kauffman foundation , the hudson institute , the hoover institution and the heritage foundation believe the pattern is more than a coincidence. the per capita rate of new employer business creation and number of rules pages in the federal register — a common measure of the scope of federal regulation — correlate -0.67 over the 1977 to 2012 period. similarly, the per capita rate of business creation and the number of pages in the code of federal regulation — another frequently used estimate of government rulemaking — correlate -0.78 over the same period. (a correlation of 1.00 means that two numbers move in perfect concert.)correlation may not prove correlation, but it can provide a helpful lead on where to look for the problem. and, really, the possible fixes seem like intrinsically good ideas anyway. shane:one idea is to limit regulation on new companies. john dearie, executive vice president of the financial services forum has suggested that congress limit rules on businesses less than six years old to only “essential product safety, environmental, and worker protection regulations.” a young-company-regulatory-exemption would allow entrepreneurs to get their businesses up and running before facing the onslaught of federal rules, which would encourage more people to start companies. another idea is to cull from the rulebooks regulations that are out of date and unnecessary. the creation of a federal commission to review regulations and to suggest to congress those that could be eliminated and the inclusion of sunset dates on all federal regulations are two ways to trim the regulatory underbrush.
 venezuela reduces lines by trimming shoppers, not shortageslines continued to form outside private grocery stores in caracas, including this central madeirense outlet in eastern caracas. closelines continued to form outside private grocery stores in caracas, including this... read morelines continued to form outside private grocery stores in caracas, including this central madeirense outlet in eastern caracas.venezuelan authorities have found a way to reduce the long lines generated by shortages at state-run supermarkets: turn away most of those trying to queue up.to shorten the lines, police today began to enforce a directive from president nicolas maduro’s administration that limits consumers to two shopping days per week at government-owned food stores, said alejandro milano, a coordinator of venezuela ’s food mission.thousands lined up outside shops last week as an acute scarcity of foreign currency deepened shortages of everything from sugar to shampoo. the crisis led interior minister carmen melendez to deploy state security forces to ensure order.“an id card to buy food?” said jose gomez, a 32-year-old electrician, after being turned away at bicentenario food market in central caracas. “i guess i’ll have to go hungry until friday.”police turned away many shoppers under a new system that limited access to stores based on the last digit on a shopper’s national id card. venezuela’s immigration service, saime, also checked foreign shoppers’ papers to confirm legal residency.“the smuggling and long lines are over,” said milano, 37, who was overseeing security at the state-run bicentenario store in central caracas. “this is a much fairer system.”state police inspect national id cards of shoppers wishing to enter the government-run bicentenario supermarket in central caracas. closestate police inspect national id cards of shoppers wishing to enter the government-run... read morestate police inspect national id cards of shoppers wishing to enter the government-run bicentenario supermarket in central caracas.food security regulator carlos osorio said the government distributed staples like milk, rice and pasta to more than 4,000 people at a state-run food market in central caracas over the weekend.“if there was no food in venezuela, there would not be these lines we see here,” he said on state television. “we wouldn’t have so many people gathered at these installations. it’s the best demonstration we can have.”while maduro has recognized that many basic products are in short supply, he says the scarcities are the product of an economic war waged by opponents seeking to topple the socialist government.long lines continued to form today outside private grocery stores, where access was not restricted.ricard perez, 42, an accounting assistant, waited with hundreds outside a central madeirense outlet in eastern caracas on the promise that coffee had arrived.“it’s exasperating, but it’s the only way to get food in venezuela,” perez said.two-time opposition presidential candidate henrique capriles criticized the government today in a statement on the persistent shortages and long queues.“it’s time that people wake up so that their rights are respected,” capriles said. “this is the moment to express the indignation that we feel and the government doesn’t have a right to stop it.”to contact the reporter on this story: andrew rosati in caracas at arosati3@bloomberg.netto contact the editors responsible for this story: andre soliani at asoliani@bloomberg.net robert jamesonpress spacebar to pause and continue. press esc to stop.
 marc andreessen recently  looked at the arguments for and against secular stagnation. he cited my washington post article when examining the case against secular stagnation. one of the points i make in it is that the proponents of secular stagnation incorrectly invoke the long decline of real interest rates as prima facie evidence for their view. where they go wrong is that they look at real interest rates without accounting for the long decline in the risk premium. once the risk premium is stripped out of their real interest measure there is no downward trend in real interest rates. rather, you get a stationary risk-neutral real interest rate measure that averages close to 2%. this can be seen in the figures below, drawn from my follow-up article with ramesh ponnuru:interestingly, this risk-neutral measure closely tracks the business cycle and suggests it was the severity of the great recession and not secular stagnation that explains the low interest rates over the past six years:given this business cycle-driven relationship, the recent spate of good economic news points to rising interest rates in 2015. in fact, the daily measure of the risk-neutral nominal 1-year and 10-year interest rates from adrian, crump, and moench (2013)  show just that. see the figure below and note that 2014 has seen a trend change in the path of neutral interest rates. if this continues--and the improved economic news suggests it will--then the fed will have to raising its interest rate in 2015.i bring all of this up as a way to motivate a prediction for 2015: secular stagnation will fade from the national conversation for the u.s. economy. instead, the conversation will focus even more on how to handle the advent of an increasingly digitized, automated economy where productivity growth is rapid and neutral interest rates are rising. secular stagnation, in other words, is about to experience the same fate it had when it was first pushed in the 1930s. here is what ramesh ponnuru and i wrote about that experience:"the business cycle was par excellence the problem of the nineteenth century. but the main problem of our times, and particularly in the united states, is the problem of full employment. . . . not until the problem of the full employment of our productive resources from the long-run, secular standpoint was upon us, were we compelled to give serious consideration to those factors and forces in our economy which tend to make business recoveries weak and anaemic and which tend to prolong and deepen the course of depressions. this is the essence of secular stagnation— sick recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment.” thus wrote alvin hansen, a professor of economics at harvard, in 1938. slow population growth and the deceleration of technological progress, he argued, was leading to slow capital formation and weak economic growth. a program of public expenditures, though it had its dangers, was probably required to avoid this fate. hansen’s article was of course spectacularly wrong as a guide to the next few decades. instead of suffering through stagnation we entered an extended, broad-based, and massive economic boom. in hindsight we can see that his analysis, while thoughtful and intelligent, was unduly influenced by the depression he was living through, and can see as well that the depression was the result of specific policy mistakes rather than inexorable trends. recent research by alexander j. field shows that the 1930s were actually a time of exceptionally high productivity growth. hansen’s worry, some of his specific arguments, and his phrase “secular stagnation” are all making a comeback in our own day. lawrence summers, like hansen an economics professor at harvard, has sounded an alarm about the ability of industrial countries to achieve adequate economic growth. a new e-book, secular stagnation, includes chapters by summers and other leading economists discussing the question. the fact that hansen was wrong does not prove that contemporary stagnationists are. in this case, though, history is repeating itself rather exactly. we do not pretend to know what the future path of economic growth in the united states will be. but the case for stagnation is weak—and, as in the 1930s, it is getting undue credence because of a long slump caused by policy mistakes.
 jared bernstein, a former chief economist to vice president biden, is a senior fellow at the center on budget and policy priorities and author of “crunch: why do i feel so squeezed?” among other books.federal reserve chairman janet yellen. (susan walsh/associated press)no question, the u.s. job market is tightening up. last year was the best year for job growth since 1999, and the unemployment rate ended the year at 5.6 percent, a rate that’s just about what many economists will tell you is the lowest it can go without triggering destabilizing growth spirals in prices and wages.and yet, there’s also no question that nothing like such spirals are showing themselves either in the actual data, as shown below, or in forward-looking expectations .as noted, economists associate this concept of “full employment” with a job market that’s tight enough to generate wage and price pressures. but the concept also includes a strong bargaining power component. when there’s too much slack in the job market, as has been the case for most of the past 30 years , workers lack the clout they need to claim a greater share of the growth they’re helping to produce.the problem is, economists are unable to accurately pin down the unemployment rate commensurate with full employment (let’s call it the feur). the federal reserve guesses it’s between 5.2 and 5.5 percent, meaning we’re already butting up against its upper bound.that observation is awfully hard to square with the first figure below. it plots the unemployment rate, along with the yearly growth of the fed’s favorite inflation gauge and the average wage. i’ve also drawn a line for the fed’s feur: 5.35 percent being the mid-point of the range. as is quite clear, although the unemployment rate has fallen to a level just above the fed’s feur, we see no pressure on wage or price growth.so what’s going on here? the next figure provides what i’d argue is an important answer to that question. the blue line is just nominal wage growth, same as in figure 1. it has been stuck at about 2 percent since 2010. the red line comes from a simple model that predicts wage growth based on unemployment alone (see data note below).i ran the model through 2012 and then predicted wage growth going forward based on the actual decline of unemployment since then. as you see, as unemployment gets close to the fed’s full employment rate, the model predicts wage acceleration.but that prediction is wrong. following work by economists adam posen and david blanchflower, i added another variable to the model: the labor force participation rate. the idea for its inclusion is simple: the job market is less tight than you’d think from just looking at the unemployment rate, because a lot of people gave up the search when job creation was negative or weak.as the pace of job growth has picked up, the labor force has stabilized, and that’s a good sign. but the participation rate is still low and some economists, including me, believe there are significant numbers of people who are not officially in the labor force — they’re neither working nor looking for work — but would come back if decent jobs were available.if that’s true, then two other things should be true: 1) part of the decline in the labor force is just slack that’s not measured by the unemployment rate, and 2) putting the labor force rate in my model should improve its out-of-sample prediction of the wage data.and that’s just what you see in the green line in the figure. adding the labor force participation rate to the same model, stopping the estimation in 2012 and predicting wage growth going forward, this version shows no acceleration and cuts right through the actual wage trend.as fed chairman janet yellen has observed, “some ‘retirements’ are not voluntary, and some of these workers may rejoin the labor force in a stronger economy . . . a significant amount of the decline in participation during the recovery is due to slack.”so, you want to know why wages aren’t rising yet? it’s because there’s still too much slack in the job market. yes, there are more jobs, but there are still either too many workers chasing them or waiting in the wings to do so that employers don’t have to bid wages up to get the workforce they need.what to do about that will be the subject of my next post later this week. for now, i’ll say this: the fed needs to either update its feur to match reality or clarify why these variables are not behaving the way they should be if their feur is correct.data note: the model regresses yearly percent changes of nominal average hourly wage growth on unemployment with one lag and four lags of the dependent variable. the second model adds the labor force participation rate, also with one monthly lag. the estimation goes through dec. 2012 and then forecasts using actual values for unemployment and lfpr.
 to listen to an audio podcast, mouse over the title and click play. open itunes to download and subscribe to itunes u collections.these casual, candid interviews feature nine of princeton university’s young alumni who are highly successful entrepreneurs. each of these entrepreneurs offers a unique perspective on the world of startups. these interviews were conducted in the fall of 2014 over google hangouts for egr-201, an overview course on entrepreneurship sponsored by the keller center. the original intended audience for these interviews was princeton undergraduates. however, collectively these interviews serve as a kind of master class for anyone interested entrepreneurship.
 since reliable data first became available shortly before world war ii, the percentage of all employed people working for the federal government hit an all-time low in december.an article at business insider picked up on the big picture trend, noting that the number of total government employees in the workforce was lower than it had been in a half-century. they had a version of this graph, showing that the declining number of government jobs in recent years has meant that a smaller and smaller percentage of the expanding workforce is comprised of government employees.the last time the figure was this low was in the eisenhower administration.but that data breaks down into sub-groups: government employees at the federal, state, and local level. when you compare that to the overall national employee pool, you can see different sorts of movement. local has dropped off quickly, state and federal less so. (the spikes on the federal line coincide with the census.)if you break out the data on federal employees (which goes back further than the other two), you see the point mentioned at the top of this post. less than two percent -- 1.94 percent, to be precise -- of the total united states workforce is employed by the federal government. (the peak in the 1940s was world war ii.)this isn't all a function of recent political opposition to big government; the trend began in the 1950s. but it does run counter to a common perception of an ever-expanding bureaucratic state.philip bump writes about politics for the fix. he is based in new york city.
rt @sub8u: fascinating. weavers in bangalore turn silk into diabetes strips. at one-third the cost!
 using a simple wooden handloom, weavers create silk strips that diabetics can use as glucose sensors. this loom is at achira labs in bangalore, india. courtesy of tripurari choudhary hide captionusing a simple wooden handloom, weavers create silk strips that diabetics can use as glucose sensors. this loom is at achira labs in bangalore, india.it's a new way to do silk screening, that's for sure.bangalore-based achira labs has figured out a way to hand weave diabetes test strips from silk. that sounds pretty luxurious compared to the standard materials of plastic or paper. but silk turns out to have several advantages in a country like india, where weavers who can work a handloom are abundant and the material is readily available and inexpensive.many people with diabetes depend on these little strips to monitor their blood sugar levels. they prick a fingertip, dab a blood drop onto a test strip and then feed the strip into a glucose reader. the idea to use silk for medical sensors isn't new for achira labs, which has made silk strips that change color when they detect a deadly type of diarrhea in diapers .the new silk strips for diabetics, which will roll out this year, give the same information as other types of glucose strips but are easier to manufacture. plastic and paper strips are typically sprayed with enzymes that break down blood sugar into electricity. then a machine has to embed electrodes in the material, so the electrical signals can be transmitted into the glucose meter. achira's silk sensors only require the spray. the coated threads can conduct the electrochemical signals.sobha (center) is one of the weavers who turn silk into test strips. to her right is tripurari choudhary, a design engineer at achira labs. to her left is mithila azad, a company director. courtesy of manjunath tahsildar hide captionsobha (center) is one of the weavers who turn silk into test strips. to her right is tripurari choudhary, a design engineer at achira labs. to her left is mithila azad, a company director.those silk sensors would meet the fda's stringent standards for detecting blood sugar, says mit chemical engineer patrick doyle, who serves as an unpaid adviser for achira.and the cost is lower. right now, a box of 100 paper or plastic strips costs about 1,600 indian rupees or $25. a box of silk strips will cost one-third to one-quarter of that, says mithila azad, director of achira's fabric diagnostics division, which has developed the fabric sensors over the last 18 months.the price point is especially critical in india, which has the second highest number of diabetes cases in the world – 66.8 million – behind china. a low-income indian family supporting a diabetic relative may spend up to 25 percent of its income on care, according to the world health organization , while a similar family in the u.s. might spend around 10 percent.the strips also create new ways for women weavers to earn money. the weavers who work for achira are pumping out 100,000 strips every six hours using a traditional handloom.more weavers should soon be joining them. last summer, achira began scouting for a way to weave and distribute the strips in low-income communities. the company teamed with the working women's forum, which helps marginalized women with handicraft skills, like silk weaving, start small businesses.this spring, thanks to a $100,000 grant from grand challenges canada , the team will recruit women to open five weaving hubs in rural and suburban towns across tamil nadu, a southeastern state where one in 10 people have diabetes. the weavers will run each hub, manufacturing and distributing the silk strips in their communities."any weaver can make it. that's the beauty. it can give a boost to the small-scale weaving industry," says electrical engineer siva vanjari of the indian institute of technology, who isn't involved with the project.but don't look for silk test strips in u.s. pharmacies. the high price of importing silk means that in the united states, the fabric will likely be reserved for scarves and stockings.
 the u.s. economy enters 2015 with the strongest momentum in at least a decade and as the fittest of all the industrialized nations. the question is whether that muscle can help yank the rest of the world out of its doldrums.“our expectation is for a fairly robust u.s. economy, and that’s where the good news starts and ends,” said adolfo laurenti, chief international economist for investment and advisory firm mesirow financial....to read the full story, subscribe or log in
 they may do well on happiness surveys, but they have plenty of problems. (istock)michael booth, a british journalist, is the author of “the almost nearly perfect people: behind the myth of the scandinavian utopia.”‘what’s there not to love?” actor will ferrell enthuses in the second episode of nbc’s expat-comedy “ welcome to sweden .” “picking blueberries, outhouses, a year off if you have a baby — even if you don’t have a baby, just a year off. your family around constantly. lagom — not too much, not too little. i mean, they’re doing it right over here.”ferrell is in character, but his fervor is all too familiar. the united states is in the midst of an episode of chronic scandimania, brought on in part by the habitually high placing of sweden and its similarly prosperous, egalitarian, collectivist neighbors — denmark, norway, iceland and finland — in global rankings of everything from happiness to lack of corruption, gender equality and consumption of organic root vegetables.it is true, the old viking tribes excel in many of these areas, but i fear, lately, we non-scandis have become rather blinded by the northern lights.consider the glowing reports on finnish schools (the best in the world, says smithsonian magazine, though the latest rankings show they are slipping), norwegian prisons (“superior” claims the atlantic — it helps that norway barely has any criminals) and swedish road safety (new york mayor bill de blasio wants to borrow the model, though i suspect that speeding fines that rise with income wouldn’t be popular in manhattan). and there’s the adulation of nordic cuisine. (is there a u.s. publication that hasn’t gone foraging with rené redzepi ? car and driver, maybe.)the washington post is not immune to scandinavia’s charms, recently marveling at how danish branches of mcdonald’s manage to pay their employees 2.5 times u.s. mcdonald’s workers’ wages (clue: when about 75 percent of earnings disappear as income and consumption taxes, higher wages are more necessity than choice).the new york times also seems to have a crush on the nordics. “ joy is always in season ,” it gushed in a piece on denmark (the latest gallup polls indicate that’s less true than it once was), and last month the times assured us that “ a big safety net and strong job market can coexist. just ask scandinavia .” (*cough* unemployment is 5.6 percent in the united states, vs. 8.1 percent in sweden , 8.9 percent in finland and 6.4 percent in denmark.)i live in denmark, and although it appears to have been surpassed as the happiest country in the world by panama, costa rica or fiji (depending on which list you believe), it is still a pretty great country, especially in which to raise kids. but scandinavia is not the utopia that american liberals or the 11 million americans of nordic descent often make it out to be, just as it is not the quasi-commie, statist gulag that those on the right would often have us believe.and global and domestic events are conspiring to make life a little more uncertain for these former high achievers. i am not just talking first-world problems, although those are definitely a scandi specialty — at a recent dinner party, i heard one woman complain that her son’s preferred university did not offer the surfing degree he wanted. rather, the scandinavian model’s structural fissures are coming under increasing stress.plummeting oil prices have made the norwegians jumpy, for instance. the oil boom that began in the early 1970s transformed them from the butt of country-bumpkin jokes to the beverly hillbillies of the north. but now revenue is declining, and their economy is stuttering for the first time in decades.meanwhile, the norwegians seem to have lost their parsimonious, workaholic, lutheran mojo. norwegians treat friday as a “free day” and take more sick leave than anyone else in europe, if not the world — a law enshrines their right to claim sick days even while on holiday. and they don’t want to work in fish-processing factories anymore. they’ve delegated that to cheap foreign laborers, while, at the same time, the popularity of the right-wing, anti-immigration progress party indicates declining tolerance for those very outsiders.sweden, too, has its problems. it is struggling with increasing racial tension — as evidenced by the firebombing of a mosque in eskilstuna on christmas day.it has also seen the rise of a hitherto gagged right wing. the sweden democrats party, which has its roots in the neo-nazi movement, won 13 percent of the vote in september’s general election. some credit its rise to sweden’s “open door” immigration policy; others point to the poor integration of those immigrants and their resulting overrepresentation in crime and unemployment figures.either way, the party’s electoral success prompted hasty political horse trading among other parties intent on keeping extremists as far from the levers of power as possible, which in turn prompted allegations that sweden’s political establishment was subverting the democratic process. this has distracted from the slowing economy, increasing state and household debt levels, and one of the highest youth unemployment rates in europe.denmark took a bigger hit than its neighbors following the 2008 global economic crisis, which increased pressure on its massive welfare state, funded by the highest taxes in the world. household debt is the highest in europe (any connection there, i wonder?). and there is a nagging suspicion that the universal, free education and health care we receive are not as good as they should be. danish schools perform poorly in international rankings, and the country has the world’s highest cancer rates .like the norwegians, the danes appear to have taken their foot off the gas. they too enjoyed an oil boom, albeit a rather more modest one that peaked in the 1980s, and along with the norwegians they work among the fewest hours a year of any europeans.in iceland, a combination of ultra-nordic social cohesion — bluntly, nepotism — combined with milton friedman-style rampant monetarism led to the near-bankruptcy of the entire country. this wasn’t just a question of bonkers bankers, but a kind of collective giddy spree that saw ordinary households taking out sophisticated yet reckless loans in yen or mortgages in swiss francs. the icelanders are recovering after a fashion, but their pride has taken a mighty blow, they still owe an awful lot of money, and few outsiders are prepared to lend to these semi-feral mavericks.finally, finland is dealing with the double whammy of a loss of trade with russia — after the european union imposed ukraine-related sanctions — and the decline of its golden goose, nokia. prime minister alexander stubb recently blamed apple for the country’s economic woes: the ipad killed off finland’s paper industry, he moaned, while the iphone destroyed nokia.the finns also have a colorful portfolio of demons and taboos with which to wrestle, ranging from binge drinking ( alcohol is the no. 1 cause of death for working-age people) to one of the highest homicide rates in western europe. there was a particularly nasty double ax murder in oulu on wednesday.all that said, the nordic countries do remain true lands of opportunity. there is far greater social mobility here — freedom for people, regardless of background, to fulfill their potential and rise up the income scale — than there is in the states. scandinavia also has relatively low crime, great public transportation and low-cost day care.but here are just two scandi-paradoxes that might make you hesitate before signing on a nice penthouse in turku: these countries that do so well in life-satisfaction surveys also record the highest consumption of antidepressants in the world, and despite their reputation for gender equality, they have the highest rates of violence against women in europe.i suspect that few americans would truly embrace a scandinavian-style society. the tax rates alone would likely be a sufficient deterrent. though i’m a freelance journalist, i essentially work until thursday lunchtime for the state. and it’s not as if the money that is left in my pocket goes all that far: these are fearfully expensive countries in which to live.the scandinavians’ collective modesty, distrust of boasting and self-censoring of ambitions would also be hard for americans to comprehend, i suspect. a danish acquaintance who lives in washington was recently back in copenhagen having coffee with friends. she remarked, proudly, that her son was doing especially well in math. “there was a silence, and then someone changed the conversation,” she told me. “if i had said he was great at role-playing or drawing it would have been fine, but it was totally wrong to boast about academic achievement.”even if you are willing to accept such downsides, there is no exportable model for turning a country scandinavian. these lands have evolved into the flawed, fascinating paragons of civilization that they are today over many centuries, through a combination of unique historical events, religion, geography and climate — to which some might add dna. there is no secret to replicate their success.put it another way: i’m not saying the nordic miracle is over, but it was never a miracle. and it’s over.
 is uber democratic or republican?for senator marco rubio, uber’s not just an easy tool for fast rides. it’s an app of political persuasion. in his new book, “american dreams: restoring economic opportunity for everyone,” in a chapter called “making america safe for uber,” the florida republican trumpets uber’s effect on pliable young minds. he details how uber influenced the views of the students he taught in a florida politics class at miami’s florida international university, once they found out it wasn't just for their friends in washington:the students in my class were genuinely intrigued by this innovative service and wondered why they didn’t have it in miami. i explained to them that it was because of regulations created by government. politicians, i said, had passed rules to stifle competition that might threaten their constituents and supporters in the existing taxi and sedan service industry. in miami, for example, there was a government-created cap on the number of sedan medallions allowed in the city. that regulation effectively shut out any competition to the existing car service companies—competition like uber.as my progressive young students listened to me explain why government was preventing them from using their cell phones to get home from the bars on saturday night, i could see their minds change. they went from fervently believing that big government is necessary to protect the little guy to realizing that big government is often used to stick it to the little guy. before i knew it, i was talking to a bunch of 20- and 21-year-old anti-regulatory activists.this isn’t the first time that rubio has championed the company, nor is it the first time republicans have eagerly claimed it as their own. last year, the republican national committee launched a  petition  “in support of innovative companies like uber.” in patriotic text, it touted, “our country was built on the entrepreneurial spirit. our cities deserve innovative and effective solutions without government getting in the way,” and denounced the roadblocks, red tape, and “strangling regulations” set up by “taxi unions and liberal government.”uber’s ceo, travis kalanick, sure does have a whiff of ayn rand off-the-range about him, even a little tea party bomb-thrower. (he  said  last may, “we’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is uber, and the opponent is an asshole named taxi.”) but as with many a fringe political phenomenon, the politics of uber partake of both parties' visions. last august, the company hired david plouffe, formerly president obama’s former campaign manager. according to the daily beast , “uber has hired political muscle all over the country: in d.c., it has the franklin square group (apple, google). in new york, it has bradley tusk (michael bloomberg’s former campaign manager). in chicago, it has michael kasper (the lawyer who got rahm emanuel on the ballot).” hardly sounds like a red calling card. but last july , americans for tax reform president grover norquist, noting that democrats currently govern “most big u.s. cities,” wrote that uber “can help the gop gain control of the cities.”the truth is that support for, and opposition to, uber, isn’t for now fully decipherable along party lines. conservative governors like republican jan brewer of arizona have moved against the company, and conservative cities like orlando, houston, and san antonio have favored regulations that discourage usage of uber. the fact is, uber reigns in liberal towns like new york and san francisco, where it was made. the company  announced  tuesday that it would share ridership data with the city of boston—a partnership without precedent, in quite a left-leaning town.rubio may want to claim the app as useful republican propaganda machinery. but it’s an app, not a party line: for young people, convenience is king. silicon valley’s wars over regulation aren’t quite black or white, red or blue, at least not yet. and how far behind the phrase “sharing economy” could republicans get?
 stop me if this sounds familiar: a popular theory posits that, about every 20 years, pop culture warps, folding in on itself, and nostalgia for two decades prior suddenly becomes hip, as evidenced by, say, a recent spike in the ranks of pearl jam cover bands.willing as i am to sign up for a study that straps thousands of millennials into electrodes, this isn't yet a scientifically validated theory. but here's a personal anecdote: i have an affection for  this project from technologist andy baio that borders on the defensive. a couple months ago, baio dumped  a collection of videos about the pre-1996 web onto the internet. the videos, culled from vhs tapes, are an exercise in answering a simple question: how did people view the internet when it was just hitting homes?the answer is: embarrassingly. here is a 1995 video called "the internet show" that is essentially a single cringe expanded into one hour of instructional programming:but get past the gentleman in the mustache defining "geek speak" — i know, but you can get past it — and there's something almost comforting about this video. it's a comfort in cluelessness: here is not only a reminder of how far we've come, but how far we've got to go. in the great year of king rand paul 2035, we will look back at the simpler times, at facebook, and amazon, and at the drones that had not yet gained sentience. when the world feels overwhelming, there's a pleasing nihilism in revisiting the past, but also in realizing we don't know the half of what's coming.
 get vox in your inbox!by signing up, you agree to our terms.update: on january 12, a federal judge struck down south dakota's  same-sex marriage ban, but the decision was put on hold as it works through the appeals process.since 2013, when the supreme court struck down the federal ban on same-sex marriage, lower courts have  followed with their own decisions effectively ending same-sex marriage bans in several states.as the decisions pile up, it can get a little difficult  to track  which same-sex marriage bans are legally valid and which have been  overturned. this  simple list tracks where each state stands.• florida: a federal judge on august 21 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. the supreme court refused to stay the decision, allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry in the state starting on january 6 . a state judge allowed marriages to begin one day earlier — on january 5 — in miami-dade county.• south carolina: the fourth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on july 28  struck down virginia's same-sex marriage ban. since the fourth circuit court      presides  over south carolina, the decision should take effect there now      that the  supreme court on october 6 rejected an appeal on the circuit court's ruling. a federal judge on november 12 affirmed the fourth circuit court's ruling, allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry on november 20 after the supreme court and fourth circuit court of appeals denied stays on the decision.• montana: the ninth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on october 7 struck down idaho and nevada's same-sex marriage bans. since the ninth circuit  court presides    over montana, the decision  should take effect there. a federal judge on november 19 lifted the state's same-sex marriage ban, allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry immediately.• kansas: the 10th circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on june 25 struck down utah's same-sex marriage ban. since the 10th circuit court presides      over kansas, the decision takes effect there now that the  supreme     court on october 6 rejected an appeal on the circuit court's ruling. a federal court on november 4 reinforced the circuit court's ruling, and the supreme court on november 12 allowed same-sex marriages to move forward.• missouri: a federal judge on november 7 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. but the state's ban remains in place  until the case works through the legal appeals process, although a  state judge on november 6 allowed same-sex marriages to begin in st. louis county .• wyoming: the 10th circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on june 25 struck down utah's same-sex marriage ban. since the 10th circuit court presides      over wyoming, the decision took effect there after the      supreme court on october 6 rejected an appeal on the circuit court's ruling. a federal judge on october 17 reinforced the circuit court's ruling. state officials, after announcing they won't appeal the decision, allowed same-sex couples to wed starting on october 21.• alaska:  the ninth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on october 7 struck down idaho and nevada's same-sex marriage bans. since the ninth circuit    court presides    over alaska, the decision took effect there.   with a federal court's decision on october 12, same-sex marriages were briefly allowed to begin. the ninth circuit court of appeals on october 15 placed the weddings on hold until october 17 to give an appeal time to go in front of the us supreme court, but the supreme court on october 17  denied the appeal, allowing same-sex couples to marry.• arizona: the ninth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on october 7 struck down idaho and nevada's same-sex marriage bans. since the ninth circuit  court presides    over arizona, the decision took effect there. a federal judge on october 17 reinforced the ninth circuit court's decision, allowing same-sex couples to wed immediately in the state.• idaho: the ninth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on october 7 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban, but the us supreme court initially put the ruling on hold. the supreme  court on october 10 lifted its stay, and the ninth circuit court on october 13 said same-sex couples can marry in idaho starting on october 15.• north carolina: the fourth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on july 28  struck down virginia's same-sex marriage ban. since the fourth circuit court    presides  over north carolina, the decision took effect there after the  supreme court on october 6 rejected an appeal on the circuit court's ruling. with a federal court's decision on october 10, same-sex marriages were allowed to begin.• nevada: the ninth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on october 7 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. after state officials announced they won't appeal the case further, courts cleared same-sex marriages to begin in nevada.• west virginia: the fourth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on july 28  struck down virginia's same-sex marriage ban. since the fourth circuit court    presides  over west virginia, the decision took effect there after the  supreme court on october 6 rejected an appeal on the circuit court's ruling. on october 9, west virginia attorney general patrick morrisey and governor earl ray tomblin announced they will not fight a challenge to the state's same-sex marriage ban, allowing same-sex couples to marry no later than october 14.• colorado: the colorado supreme court on october 7 cleared the way for same-sex marriages in the state, after the 10th circuit court of appeals on june 25 struck down utah's  same-sex marriage ban — in a ruling that spans the entire 10th circuit,  including colorado — and the supreme court on october 6 rejected an appeal on the 10th circuit ruling.• indiana: the seventh circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision , on september 4  struck down the state's same-sex  marriage ban. when the supreme court rejected an appeal, same-sex marriage became effectively legal.• oklahoma: the 10th circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on july 18  struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. when the supreme court rejected an appeal, same-sex marriage became effectively legal.• utah: the 10th circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on june 25 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. when the supreme court rejected an appeal, same-sex marriage became effectively legal.• virginia: the fourth circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision, on july 28  struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. when the supreme court rejected an appeal, same-sex marriage became effectively legal.• wisconsin: the seventh circuit court of appeals, following a lower court's decision , on september 4 struck down the state's same-sex  marriage ban. when the supreme court rejected an appeal, same-sex marriage became effectively legal.states where courts overturned bans, but rulings are under appeal• south dakota: a federal judge on january 12 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. but the decision was put on hold as the case works through legal appeals processes.• mississippi: a federal judge on november 25 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. but the decision was put on hold as the case works through legal appeals processes.• arkansas: an arkansas judge on may 10 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. a federal judge on november 25 also struck down the state's marriage ban. but the state's ban remains in place   until the cases work through legal appeals processes.• louisiana: a federal judge on september 3 upheld the state's same-sex marriage ban — the first time a federal court  ruled against same-sex marriage rights since the supreme court's  decision. but a state judge on september 22 struck down louisiana's ban.• texas: a federal judge on february 26 struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. but the state's ban remains in place   until the case works through the legal appeals process.• kentucky: the sixth circuit court of appeals on november 6 upheld the state's same-sex marriage ban. the decision is being appealed to the supreme court.• ohio: the sixth circuit court of appeals on november 6 upheld the state's same-sex marriage ban. the decision is being appealed to the supreme court.• michigan: the sixth circuit court of appeals on november 6 upheld the state's same-sex marriage ban. the decision is being appealed to the supreme court.• tennessee: the sixth circuit court of appeals on november 6 upheld the state's same-sex marriage ban. the decision is being appealed to the supreme court.
 balloons bearing the bitcoin logo float above the floor at the inside bitcoins conference and trade show, on monday, april 7, 2014 in new york. the balloons are part of a promotional effort by london-based cloud hashing, a bitcoin mining company.the price of bitcoin has taken bit of a dive over the last couple of days, shedding over 20 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. the sell-off, like other sell-offs and rallies before it, draws a lot of attention and questions about what it means for the future of the technology. here’s why i don’t focus on price much.bitcoin is best thought of as a 5- to 10-year project, and we’re at the very early stages. an (admittedly imperfect) analogy is the early web.jerry brito is executive director of coin center, a non-profit research and advocacy organization based in washington, d.c. focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as bitcoin.like the early web, bitcoin is an open platform that no one owns, and on top of which anyone can build without having to get anyone else’s permission. and just like the early web, success requires investors, entrepreneurs, and developers to build out the infrastructure and applications that will make it useful to average users.the world wide web was conceived by tim berners-lee; he published a paper proposing it in march of 1989. the following year he worked to implement the idea in code, making the first website in december of 1990. the first popular web browser didn’t come until 1993 when marc andreessen and the team at the national center for supercomputing applications released mosaic. the following year andreessen started netscape and released the netscape navigator browser in 1994.those of us old enough to remember using navigator to browse the web over a winsock connection on a 56k baud modem can attest that it was not the amazing experience we take for granted today. in fact, if you couldn’t see that the technology would evolve, you would have concluded that it was practically useless. for one thing, there was no easy way to find things on the web. well, we didn’t get google until 1998.google is now the most visited website on the planet. second to it is facebook, and for many people the web is virtually synonymous with social networking. yet facebook was not founded until 2004–a full 14 years after the web was first conceived.so here’s the parallel: bitcoin was conceived by satoshi nakamoto and proposed in a paper published in 2008. he worked on implementing the idea into code, mining the first block of the blockchain in january of 2009. so, if we take the web as a parallel, we’re at the stage in bitcoin were we would hope to see a mosaic level development, not a facebook.in other words, it’s early days. the googles and facebooks of bitcoin–the killer apps that will make the technology indispensable for ordinary users–may not come for another 5 years.unlike the early web, though, bitcoin has a price ticker people look at daily, and so they wring their hands. every dip and spike in the price gets a lot of attention and spells either doom or “irrational exuberance.” but as marc andreessen has pointed out , “the price of domain names didn’t determine the usefulness of the internet.”with a longer time horizon in mind, you can put the short-term drops and rallies in price of bitcoin in perspective. so don’t worry so much.
 banks in the u.s. once gave away toasters and irons to lure depositors. banks in china are upping the ante. with customers pulling out money and putting it into higher-yielding investments, they are offering mercedes, iphones, and daily deliveries of vegetables to sidestep interest rate caps and get people to stash some yuan in savings accounts.“chinese banks are hemorrhaging their deposits,” says rainy yuan, an analyst at brokerage masterlink securities in shanghai. china’s banks lost 950 billion yuan ($154 billion) of deposits in the three months through september, the first quarterly drop since 1999. in the first 11 months of the year, new deposits were 23 percent lower than in the same period last year, people’s bank of china data show. offering incentives to attract money is not the solution, yuan says: “there is no fix for this. all the efforts they made to win savers back will only push up the costs, so it’s a losing battle to fight.”decline in new deposits in the first 11 months of 2014 vs. the same period last yearsavers seeking higher returns have been pouring money into online money-market funds offered by the e-commerce companies alibaba group ( baba ) and baidu ( bidu ). one fund, yu’e bao, started last year by alibaba affiliate alipay, drew 535 billion yuan in its first 15 months of existence from 149 million customers, more than the populations of france and the u.k. combined. users simply tapped a few buttons on their mobile phones to secure an annual rate of return that climbed as high as 6.8 percent before falling to about 4 percent recently.savers can also earn more on their money by moving to high-yield products, the fastest-growing part of the so-called shadow banking system. households put 12.9 trillion yuan into high-yield trust products as of sept. 30. trust companies pool investor capital to put money in real estate and construction projects, or make corporate loans, and promise returns of more than 10 percent. trust companies have seen assets under management rise more than tenfold since the start of 2009.the shanghai composite index’s 45 percent surge over the past six months has led people to shift money from banks to stocks. in the first week of december, chinese investors opened almost 600,000 stock trading accounts, a 62 percent increase over the previous week, according to china securities depository & clearing.to stimulate the economy, china’s central bank on nov. 21 announced a cut in benchmark interest rates for the first time in more than two years. that was offset by the central bank’s decision to raise the maximum interest rate banks can pay customers to 20 percent over the benchmark from 10 percent above it. ping an bank ( 000001:ch ), china citic bank ( 601998:ch ), and bank of ningbo ( 002142:ch ) immediately alerted customers through text messages that they would offer the highest rate allowed.the china banking regulatory commission in september banned what it called “illicit” deposit-gathering practices, including gifts and rebates on deposits, without clarifying whether product giveaways in lieu of interest payments qualify as gifts. banks that flout the curbs could face punishment, the regulator said. the warning hasn’t deterred banks. the iphone promotion, at a beijing branch of ping an bank in october, offered a 128-gigabyte iphone 6 plus in lieu of interest payments for depositing 38,000 yuan for five years. for parking 903,000 yuan for the same period, savers could pick one of four mercedes-benz models. a mercedes a180, which costs 252,000 yuan, would give investors the equivalent of an annualized return of almost 7 percent, compared with the benchmark rate of 4 percent on five-year deposits.in northern shanxi province, industrial bank offered a gold pendant for a one-year deposit of 10,000 yuan. also in shanxi, citic bank promised a daily supply of eggs and vegetables for three weeks to elderly customers who deposited 10,000 yuan, shanxi daily reported in november. in ningbo, ping an bank is giving cash instead of gifts. savers can get 258,000 yuan of interest payments immediately when depositing 1 million yuan, or receive an interest-and-principal payment of 1.3 million yuan in five years. a spokesman for ping an bank declined to comment.central bank governor zhou xiaochuan pledged in march to deregulate interest rates fully in one or two years. that will increase pressure on bank earnings as the companies compete for savers’ money by offering higher rates, according to liao qiang, a director at standard & poor’s in beijing. “the battle for deposits will only get worse as china moves ahead with interest rate liberalization, which will drive up banks’ funding costs and hurt profit,” he says.
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 the secular stagnation discussion has a bad title and sounds wonkish but is extremely important — it is about nothing short of understanding what the economy is and should be about. if you want a lot of detail you can read through marc andreessen 's epic secular stagnation tweet storm and all the great source material that he links to.at the heart of the secular stagnation discussion is the idea that somehow the economy is growing more slowly than it should. see for instance the following quote from a larry summers speech :[…] through this recovery, we have made no progress in restoring gdp to its potential.the rest of the speech goes on exploring the reasons for why this might be so with a particular focus on interest rates.there is, however, another line of inquiry that is much more important and that is to question the very premise here by asking whether gdp makes sense as a measure for the economy going forward.let me give an analogy from the business world. suppose you are newspaper and the kpi you are using to manage your business is your circulation. that works really well for a great many years. then all of a sudden you are in board meetings that show a lack of circulation growth and possibly even a decline. you keep arguing about the reasons for why your management has “made no progress in restoring circulation to its potential.” the debate rages on all the while you completely ignore that your newspaper also has a website on which traffic has been growing steadily.that is what is happening with the economy at large. we are de-materializing it and moving from a world of easily measured and priced atoms to a world of bits which are creating massive consumer surplus. so for instance: we stop printing and selling the encyclopedia brittanica because everyone is using wikipedia instead — that shows up as a decrease in gdp even though many more people now have access and get the benefit of knowledge. if we take dozens of different devices that were all sold separately (film camera, video camera, maps, books, photo albums, pencils, tape recorders, etc) and combine them into a single device (the smartphone) that uses primarily software to accomplish these functions that too can easily result in a decrease in gdp. in a talk i am about to give at dld in munich i will give even more examples of this but you get the idea.by the way, gdp was always a suspect kpi for the economy because of the challenge of negative externalities: if we make products that harm people (eg selling cigarettes that cause lung cancer) and then sell other products to correct the harm (eg lung cancer treatment drugs) both of these increase measured gdp. again, there are tons of other examples like that.to be clear, there are lots of intelligent discussions to be had about phenomena such as reductions in risk premia , the role of china and nafta , the influence of household deleveraging , etc. and their impact on the economy. but until we are willing to ditch gdp as the correct kpi for the economy we will be like the newspaper management team trying desperate measures to fix their circulation problem.you can see me talk about all of this in a presentation recorded last may at dld new york . in the coming days i will write more about this topic including the impact of  technology driving down prices .  chris dixon tweeted a great chart  and you should check out my posts on education and healthcare . imagine for a moment a computer than can correctly diagnose patients within seconds and then think about the implications for gdp.i understand that this is a partial equilibrium argument and will expand on how it can be true for the economy as a whole. as part of that i will also suggest that our obsession with full employment — which is also part of the secular stagnation discussion — is also problematic as a kpi. stay tuned.addendum 2: one other important criticism of gdp as a kpi is that it is silent on distribution. we have seen major changes in that (a) away f rom labor toward capital and (b) within labor from normal distributions towards power laws (eg ceo comp relative to employees).
 can long-term global growth be saved?january 2015 | byjames manyika, jonathan woetzel, richard dobbs, jaana remes, eric labaye, andrew jordanover the past 50 years, global economic growth was exceptionally rapid. the world economy expanded sixfold. average per capita income almost tripled. hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. yet unless we can dramatically improve productivity, the next half century will look very different. the rapid expansion of the past five decades will be seen as an aberration of history, and the world economy will slide back toward its relatively sluggish long-term growth rate (exhibit 1).global growth: can productivity save the day in an aging world?mgi’s richard dobbs, james manyika, and jaana remes explain why global economic growth is destined to slow unless governments and business find ways to increase productivity.the problem is that slower population growth and longer life expectancy are limiting growth in the working-age population. for the past half century, the twin engines of rapid population growth (expanding the number of workers) and a brisk increase in labor productivity powered the expansion of gross domestic product. employment and productivity grew at compound annual rates of 1.7 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively, between 1964 and 2014, pushing the output of an average employee 2.4 times higher. yet this demographic tailwind is weakening and even becoming a headwind in many countries.the net result is that employment will grow by just 0.3 percent annually during the next 50 years, forecasts a new report from the mckinsey global institute (mgi)—global growth: can productivity save the day in an aging world? even if productivity growth matches its rapid rate during the past half century, the rate of increase in global gdp growth will therefore still fall by 40 percent, to about 2.1 percent a year (exhibit 2). our new normal would then be economic growth slower than it was during the past five years of recovery from the great recession and during the energy-crisis decade of 1974 to 1984. per capita income and living standards, in both the developed and the emerging worlds, will rise more slowly.global employment growth has been slowing for more than two decades. by around 2050, our research finds, the global number of employees is likely to peak. in fact, employee headcounts are already declining in germany, italy, japan, and russia; in china and south korea, they are likely to begin falling as early as 2024. while there is significant scope for policies that boost labor-market participation among women, young people, and those over the age of 65, that will be far from easy. employment growth could double, to 0.6 percent, in the countries we studied: the g19 (the g20 without the european union as a composite member) plus nigeria—economies that account for 63 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of global gdp. but that will happen only if each gender and age group, throughout these countries, closes the employment gap with the high-performing economies. in any case, even a doubling of employment growth won’t fully counter the erosion of the labor pool.so productivity growth must drive the expansion of gdp in the longer term. indeed, it would have to reach 3.3 percent a year—80 percent faster than its average rate during the past half century—to compensate fully for slower employment growth. is this possible? actually, our case studies of five sectors (agriculture, automotive, food processing, healthcare, and retailing) found scope to boost annual productivity growth as high as 4 percent, more than enough to counter demographic trends.the world isn’t running out of technological potential for growth. but achieving the increase in productivity required to revitalize the global economy will force business owners, managers, and workers to innovate by adopting new approaches that improve the way they operate.our study found that about three-quarters of the potential productivity growth comes from the broader adoption of existing best practices, or catch-up improvements. the remaining one-quarter—counting only what we can foresee—comes from technological, operational, or business innovations that go beyond today’s best practices and push the frontier of the world’s gdp potential. efforts to improve the traditionally weak productivity performance of the large and growing government and healthcare sectors around the world will be particularly important.business must play a critical role: aggressively upgrading capital and technology, taking risks by investing in r&d and unproven technologies or processes, and mitigating the labor pool’s erosion by providing a more flexible work environment for women and older workers, as well as training and mentorship for young people. in an environment of potentially weaker global economic growth, and definitely evolving growth dynamics, executives need to anticipate where the market opportunities will be and the competitors they will meet in those markets. above all, companies need to be competitive in a world where productivity will increasingly be the arbiter of success or failure.the past half century has been a time of extraordinary economic expansion. yet without significantly boosting the one engine the world economy still has—productivity growth—this period may prove to be a historic anomaly. our report has identified ten enablers that could lift global gdp growth closer to its potential by increasing transparency and competition, creating incentives for innovation, mobilizing labor, and further integrating the world economy. but all this will be hard. only sweeping change by the private and public sectors—and a smarter approach to growth—will overcome the forces that now threaten global economic prosperity.for more on the issue of how economic growth is determined, see  is gdp the best measure of growth?james manyika, jonathan woetzel, and richard dobbs are directors of the mckinsey global institute, where jaana remes is a partner and eric labaye is chairman; andrew jordan is a consultant in mckinsey’s new york office.
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rt @marchochstein: by a citi exec. mt @houmanshadab 
 in 2014, fintech became a buzz word. there was a tremendous amount of attention, venture investing activity and interest in new possibilities for financial services – from next-generation offerings to more customer-friendly experiences. bitcoin continued to capture the imagination of many, lending club went public, apple pay was introduced and that’s all just part of the picture – it was quite a year.from a big picture perspective, some key themes surfaced that we expect will continue to gain momentum: democratization, disintermediation of traditional models and customer experience.democratization: top-of-market capabilities, previously only available to institutional and high net worth clients, are being made more easily accessible to a broader group of customers. this expands the financial literacy, opportunity and options to more people. betterment is a perfect example – this online investment advisor is providing a greater continuum of sophisticated wealth management options to a broad audience. (citi ventures participated in the series c funding round for betterment.)disintermediation of traditional business models: new platforms and technologies have changed the way certain financial products and services are being delivered. one example is the growth of loan marketplaces, which provide borrowers with new financing options and investors with new asset classes. for example, sofi and its equivalents are meeting student lending needs with alternative underwriting approaches.customer experience: there is a clear march toward providing customers with intuitive, mobile-first, personalized financial offerings. the expectation that banking is as user-friendly as shopping or browsing your facebook page is increasingly the norm. from simple to apple pay, the emphasis is on providing a new customer experience and interface. it’s clear that established financial services institutions are operating in a very dynamic market with a diverse array of new entrants and emerging technologies that are upending traditional growth areas and opening new and unexpected doors. at citi ventures, we see tremendous opportunity to embrace new possibilities and envision a safer, more efficient and friendlier system for next-generation banking.in 2015, we expect the exciting ride in fintech to continue. here are the five big trends you won’t be able to ignore in the coming year:1. merging of lifestyle and payments. we're seeing more lifestyle platforms experimenting with a "buy" button. next year, we’re anticipating significant movement towards payments embedded into the user experience. social networks are one of the largest sources of referral traffic for purchases – facebook, instagram, pinterest and twitter are all experimenting with “buy” buttons, and we expect that purchasing options from a single platform will become increasingly commonplace. apple, of course, has already made a big play in this market.2. growth in automated investment advisory. automated investment advisors and investing services – those that use sophisticated algorithms to inform allocation recommendations – will become more popular among an increasingly broad set of consumers. these platforms – betterment, wealthfront and others – bring the very best in modern portfolio theory to consumers at significantly lower cost than traditional advisory. we can thank millennials for this shift. many of them prefer new digital solutions to meet their financial service needs.3. expansion of marketplaces into new verticals and services. marketplaces will continue to grow and expand into new verticals and services; we’ve already seen expansion into other lending verticals such as solar and real estate. marketplaces have enabled new standards for trust and transparency, efficiency and connectivity between buyers and suppliers. it’s clear that these newer, vertical marketplaces in the sharing economy (like transportation – uber, and hospitality – airbnb) appeal to millennials who are more likely to transact with and be influenced by peers, friends and like-minded communities rather than institutions.4. advances in wearables. we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about wearables, but this could be the year they actually become big, given the anticipated release of products from consumer tech tastemakers. once google brings a watch to market, integration with programs like google wallet will be an obvious next step. the possibility for design to advance into new wearable offerings is exciting.5. blockchain technology. it’s here, it’s interesting and we think the underlying technology has tremendous potential. despite all the attention, it is still very early days – but we think it’s critical to understand the potential impact of this technology.what are some of the trends that you see in the coming year? what opportunities and challenges lie ahead for fintech?
 economics is much more than just numbers and graphs. in fact, we can use economics to explain much of what we encounter in our daily lives. for instance, why iseconomics is much more than just numbers and graphs. in fact, we can use economics to explain much of what we encounter in our daily lives. for instance, why is customer service at your local restaurant usually better than that of the cable company? to find the answer we can take a closer look at the incentives at play. for another example, we look to eighteenth century great britain. what did bad incentives have to do with the death rate of prisoners shipped from england to australia? let’s find out together in this first video of mru’s course on principles of economics: microeconomics. 
 eight black leaders share with wayne sutton the advice that helped propel their success in technology.wayne sutton: why black leaders matter in technology eight black leaders share with wayne sutton the advice that helped propel their success in technology. check out this story on usatoday.com: http://usat.ly/1zwqenia link has been sent to your friend's email address.a link has been posted to your facebook feed.wayne sutton, special for usa today 3:57 p.m. est december 31, 2014san francisco — it's hard to believe that on the eve of 2015, instead of ringing in the new year, minority communities are marching across the country to send the message that black lives matter.as a black man working hard to make a difference, it is sad that we have to start there: at life. because life is just the beginning. what about quality of life? creation of wealth? contributing to an innovative society?i ask myself: how do we change how america views african-american men? and how do we create more opportunity for african-american men?the key: the technology industry, and bringing up a  new generation of black technology leaders.over the past decade, the african-american community has been mobilized by technology.we spend the most time on social media services. we are avid smartphone consumers and we are the no. 1 demographic on services such as twitter and instagram.you can see the power and influence of african americans in the response to the police deaths of michael brown and eric garner. they have used these services to organize protests and create national awareness campaigns. to put it in perspective, the march on washington in 1963 was attended by 250,000 people. with social media today, you can reach millions of people per tweet, google+ post or facebook status with hashtags such as #handsupdontshoot and #blacklivesmatter.yet few african-americans benefit from jobs and wealth inside these social media hubs — let alone having a place in the leadership, on the board of directors or are founders of a start-up that goes on to become a household name.there is a notable exception. omar wasow might not be a household name, nor is he credited with starting the revolution in social networking. but he founded blackplanet in 1999 long before myspace, facebook and twitter, and he scaled the platform to millions of users before selling it for $38 million to radio one in 2008.there's a saying in african-american culture: "often we forget those who have paved the way for many." as part of the diversity "oorah" cry to create monetary role models, we keep saying we're looking for a "black mark zuckerberg." we should be looking for the next wasow.mentoring is a simple yet effective way to do that. shared experiences can help an individual save time, avoid making the same mistakes and open wide the doors of opportunity.so i asked black male leaders in technology: "what advice did your mentor provide to help you become successful today?" this is what they told me.one of my mentors was our first lawyer at justin.tv.  his name is carlos ellerbe. what he told me is that it takes seven to 10 years to make a start-up into a billion-dollar company.  he was right.  it made me understand how important it is to start with a good team because we are going to be working together a building for a long time.take the time to build valuable, meaningful relationships versus attempting to connect with any and everyone in a seemingly glamorous position. integrity beats titles any day!it's not just about having a seat at the table; it's about having a voice. it's also not just about you "making it;" it's about you leaving the door open for the next generation.i never really had a mentor and that was, ironically, the best advice i guess i (never) got.it was like being a young boy growing up with my father not around.  the parent may overlook his or her importance to the child, but the child never forgets. so the lesson i learned was the responsibility to do the opposite for someone else. so now i go out of my way to mentor and advise others. it's more important to me than my own success.this is a very simple piece of advice that has been incredibly helpful. writing life goals, drafting legislative outlines, writing organizational plans, writing ideas, drawing wireframes, and writing code all start with putting pen to paper; or fingers to keys.effectively and frequently taking the ideas swirling around in my head and translating them into prose and points has been integral to any success i have had.two things i've found that work are 1) focus on solving a problem and test it quickly by either getting people to use it repeatedly or pay immediately; and 2) don't give up too soon. there's truth to pivoting but sometimes it can take a couple years until you really start hitting on the pain point, don't die on your way.invest in yourself. this is a very simple concept, but incredibly important. i was taught to spend a significant amount of my time dedicated to self-development (whether it be a new language, exercise, computer programming classes, etc). the moment you stop investing in yourself is the moment you have written off future dividends in life.my mentors told me that the best way to "get lucky" is to maximize opportunities for luck. more specifically: to meet and know every talented person available to me, because great people are the source of opportunity.as a community we consume everything and own nothing. it is time design the future versus buying what someone else creates.advice i received was not from a personal mentor but from jim rohn. i saw an old youtube video from the 70's where he repeated advice from his own mentor:"it is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go."learning how to change the way i perceived a challenge or even a victory has helped me tremendously. it's key not to put too much focus on things you can't control.wayne sutton is a serial entrepreneur and general partner at buildup.vc. he has more than 14 years of experience in technology, design and business development.read or share this story: http://usat.ly/1zwqeni
 marc andreessen’s thoughtful “tweetstorm” on secular stagnation raises a number of important questions.  we are in agreement that the essence of the secular stagnation issue is not whether technology has stopped advancing; but rather whether there is a mismatch between desired saving and investment opportunities that results in low equilibrium real interest rates, precipitates financial instability, and may inhibit economic growth. here i respond to his specific questions and criticisms regarding the secular stagnation hypothesis:have there ever been periods of sustained growth with stability from levels of output reasonably close to potential? is there any normal to which we can hope to return?for the roughly 30 years after world war ii, the american economy generated consistent growth in living standards with business cycles of relatively low amplitude.  from the early 1980s until the late 1990s, the economy again preformed quite well, leading many economists to speak of “the great moderation.”  so, we have plenty of experience with satisfactory economic performance to set as an aspiration.is the apparent decline in real interest rates something fundamental or just the removal of a risk premium that was present after the high inflation 1970s?no one can be sure, but note that:(i)                 there is a similar downward trend in real short rates, where inflation uncertainty is not a large issue.(ii)               markets – in the form of 30-year indexed bonds – are now predicting that real rates well below 2 percent will prevail for more than a generation.(iii)             however we understand real interest rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s, inflation was clearly under control by the early 1990s, and indexed bond yields have steadily trended down since then – not just in the united states, but in the world at large.(iv)             i think it is quite plausible and consistent with marc’s picture that equilibrium real rates were roughly constant at around 2 percent until the mid-1990s and have trended downward since that time.is growth in the labor force and in productivity really slowing?with respect to the labor force, the facts are pretty clear.  the growth of the adult population will be much slower over the next 25 years than over the last 25 years.  female labor force participation, after trending upward for a long time, is now trending downward.  and rates of work among teenagers and among men with limited skills were trending down before the recession, and they are now trending down more rapidly.  of course the millennials are, as marc points out, a bigger generation than the boomers. but this does not deny the argument that the growth rate of the labor force is declining.there is plenty of room for debate about measurements of productivity.  it is very likely that official statistics take insufficient account of quality improvements and new products.   whether this phenomenon is increasing with the passage of time is hard to ascertain. television, for example, was a massive change in lifestyles during the 1950s. but the evolution of productivity growth is not essential to the argument about whether equilibrium real interest rates have declined.  this decline could have occurred for many other reasons – including increased foreign saving, lower priced capital goods, slower labor force growth, increased demand for safe assets, more burdens on financial intermediation, and lower rates of inflation.what to make of it all?marc writes “while i am a bull on technological progress, it also seems that much that progress is deflationary in nature, so even rapid tech may not show up in gdp or productivity stats even as it =higher real standards of living”from an economist’s point of view, this paragraph is very hard to understand.  real gdp and productivity statistics are calculated after adjusting for price changes – so they are unaffected by inflation or deflation.  it is also not clear how one would distinguish deflationary and inflationary progress.  the price level reflects the value of goods in terms of money, so it is hard to analyze without thinking about monetary and financial conditions.there is a major puzzle regarding how technological changes, which seem to be associated with so much efficiency and certainly with job displacement, do not show up more visibly in productivity statistics.  but i at least cannot understand in what sense this phenomenon can be attributed to technological progress’ deflationary character.marc and i agree that we are headed into a period of soft real interest rates, where there will be more money available than great deals.  this may, as he suggests, not be all bad; as it will make it easier for risky ideas to get funded.the danger which i think is very real is that the zero lower bound on nominal rates will prevent the attainment of full employment as desired investment falls short of desired saving.  a related danger is that the very low interest rates will encourage risk-taking and asset price inflation in ways that will ultimately give rise to financial instability.the important point to recognize is that – as the experience of the us economy in the 1930s demonstrates – even with rapid innovation it is possible for economic performance to be very poor when finances are not successfully managed.  recent good news about the state of the us economy should not blind us to this reality.
 can long-term global growth be saved?january 2015 | byjames manyika, jonathan woetzel, richard dobbs, jaana remes, eric labaye, andrew jordanover the past 50 years, global economic growth was exceptionally rapid. the world economy expanded sixfold. average per capita income almost tripled. hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. yet unless we can dramatically improve productivity, the next half century will look very different. the rapid expansion of the past five decades will be seen as an aberration of history, and the world economy will slide back toward its relatively sluggish long-term growth rate (exhibit 1).global growth: can productivity save the day in an aging world?mgi’s richard dobbs, james manyika, and jaana remes explain why global economic growth is destined to slow unless governments and business find ways to increase productivity.the problem is that slower population growth and longer life expectancy are limiting growth in the working-age population. for the past half century, the twin engines of rapid population growth (expanding the number of workers) and a brisk increase in labor productivity powered the expansion of gross domestic product. employment and productivity grew at compound annual rates of 1.7 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively, between 1964 and 2014, pushing the output of an average employee 2.4 times higher. yet this demographic tailwind is weakening and even becoming a headwind in many countries.the net result is that employment will grow by just 0.3 percent annually during the next 50 years, forecasts a new report from the mckinsey global institute (mgi)—global growth: can productivity save the day in an aging world? even if productivity growth matches its rapid rate during the past half century, the rate of increase in global gdp growth will therefore still fall by 40 percent, to about 2.1 percent a year (exhibit 2). our new normal would then be economic growth slower than it was during the past five years of recovery from the great recession and during the energy-crisis decade of 1974 to 1984. per capita income and living standards, in both the developed and the emerging worlds, will rise more slowly.global employment growth has been slowing for more than two decades. by around 2050, our research finds, the global number of employees is likely to peak. in fact, employee headcounts are already declining in germany, italy, japan, and russia; in china and south korea, they are likely to begin falling as early as 2024. while there is significant scope for policies that boost labor-market participation among women, young people, and those over the age of 65, that will be far from easy. employment growth could double, to 0.6 percent, in the countries we studied: the g19 (the g20 without the european union as a composite member) plus nigeria—economies that account for 63 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of global gdp. but that will happen only if each gender and age group, throughout these countries, closes the employment gap with the high-performing economies. in any case, even a doubling of employment growth won’t fully counter the erosion of the labor pool.so productivity growth must drive the expansion of gdp in the longer term. indeed, it would have to reach 3.3 percent a year—80 percent faster than its average rate during the past half century—to compensate fully for slower employment growth. is this possible? actually, our case studies of five sectors (agriculture, automotive, food processing, healthcare, and retailing) found scope to boost annual productivity growth as high as 4 percent, more than enough to counter demographic trends.the world isn’t running out of technological potential for growth. but achieving the increase in productivity required to revitalize the global economy will force business owners, managers, and workers to innovate by adopting new approaches that improve the way they operate.our study found that about three-quarters of the potential productivity growth comes from the broader adoption of existing best practices, or catch-up improvements. the remaining one-quarter—counting only what we can foresee—comes from technological, operational, or business innovations that go beyond today’s best practices and push the frontier of the world’s gdp potential. efforts to improve the traditionally weak productivity performance of the large and growing government and healthcare sectors around the world will be particularly important.business must play a critical role: aggressively upgrading capital and technology, taking risks by investing in r&d and unproven technologies or processes, and mitigating the labor pool’s erosion by providing a more flexible work environment for women and older workers, as well as training and mentorship for young people. in an environment of potentially weaker global economic growth, and definitely evolving growth dynamics, executives need to anticipate where the market opportunities will be and the competitors they will meet in those markets. above all, companies need to be competitive in a world where productivity will increasingly be the arbiter of success or failure.the past half century has been a time of extraordinary economic expansion. yet without significantly boosting the one engine the world economy still has—productivity growth—this period may prove to be a historic anomaly. our report has identified ten enablers that could lift global gdp growth closer to its potential by increasing transparency and competition, creating incentives for innovation, mobilizing labor, and further integrating the world economy. but all this will be hard. only sweeping change by the private and public sectors—and a smarter approach to growth—will overcome the forces that now threaten global economic prosperity.for more on the issue of how economic growth is determined, see  is gdp the best measure of growth?james manyika, jonathan woetzel, and richard dobbs are directors of the mckinsey global institute, where jaana remes is a partner and eric labaye is chairman; andrew jordan is a consultant in mckinsey’s new york office.
rt @calisthene: @amcafee @pmarca nobody should mention millennium bug &amp; not mention gary north

 for my special 72-hours action report for art bell's listeners, click here .we've got a problem.  it may be the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced.  i think it is.  at 12 midnight on january 1,  2000 (a saturday morning), most of the world's mainframe computers  will either shut down or begin spewing out bad data.  most of the  world's desktop computers will also start spewing out bad data.   tens of millions -- possibly hundreds of millions -- of pre-programmed  computer chips will begin to shut down the systems they automatically  control.  this will create a nightmare for every area of life, in every  region of the industrialized world.it's called the year 2000 problem.  it's also called the millennium bug, y2k, and (misspelled), the millenium time bomb.  millennium or millenium: it doesn't matter how we spell it; this bomb isn't going away.think of what happens if the following areas go down and stay down for months or even years: banks, railroads, public utilities, telephone lines, military communications, and financial markets.  what about social security and medicare?  if social security and medicare go down, it will affect millions of people.  yet both programs are at risk.is this possible?  it's far more than merely possible.  one man who thinks that disruptions are likely is ed yourdon, one of america's senior mainframe computer programmers, author of two dozen books on programming. he and his daughter have written a book, time bomb 2000. you can read the preface by clicking the link i've provided under the category, "domino effect." see the document, yourdon on the domino effect .  i have also posted extracts from a key article he wrote in the summer of 1997.  see the categories "domino effect" and "programmers' views."  look for the key word, "yourdon." you may not believe my scenario.  you had better take yourdon's scenario very seriously.  in the category "programmers' views," he warns programmers that it may soon be time to quit their big city jobs and head for safer places.  see the posting: yourdon: should programmers quit and leave town in 1999? if they do, there will be no solution for y2k.  will they quit?  i'm betting my life on it.  the exodus of programmers will begin no later than 1999.months before january 1, 2000, the world's stock markets will have crashed.  who is going to leave his money in his bank if he thinks his bank's computer is not reliable?   a worldwide run on the banks will create havoc in the investment  markets.  people who have placed their retirement hopes in stocks  and mutual funds will see their dreams vanish.  how reliable  will stocks and mutual funds be if the banking system has closed  down?  how will you even get paid?  how will your employer get paid?  how will governments get paid?by the way, no government tax collection agency above the county level  is year 2000-compliant today.  people will know in 2000 that the government cannot trace them.  will they continue to pay, especially if the huge government welfare programs for the elderly have shut down?but if governments don't get paid, what happens to government debt markets?   how high will interest rates go in 1999 if investors think that governments  will default in 2000?  what will high rates do to the world's economy?everything is tied together by computers.  if the computers go down or  can no longer be trusted, everything falls apart.  and it matters not a  whit to the computers whether we accept this fact or not.  they do what  they've been programmed to do.  they've been programmed to recognize  2000 as 1900.  (uncorrected pc architecture dos and windows-based desktop computers will revert back either to 1980 or 1984. they can be corrected briefly, but as soon as a pc is turned off, the correction dies.  it will reboot to 1980 or 1984.  meanwhile, pc programs must be redesigned.)our first response when we hear this news is denial.  most people  will stay in denial, including the business managers whose companies are  totally vulnerable to a computer failure.  this is why the problem will  not be fixed.  everyone in authority will deny that time has run out to get this fixed, right up until december 31, 1999.  they are paid to  deny this.  i'm saying that it's over.  right now.  it cannot be fixed. whatever it does, the millennium bug will bite us.  how hard?  there  the debate begins.read the list of vulnerable systems that was posted by the institution of electrical engineers.  it's under "noncompliant chips": if these systems are at risk, everything is at risk .  anyone who says that y2k is not a big problem needs to understand just how many systems are at risk.  print out this list and hand it to the skeptic.  let him see for himself.i don't expect you to believe me . . . yet.  that is why i have  created this site.  on this site you will find links to other web sites that have posted documents related to the year 2000 problem.   included are such things as military sites, government hearings, news  releases, and much more.  i also include comments with each document, so  that you can understand why i think it's important.despite its 3,500+ entries, the goal of this site is not to bury you in information.  rather, it  is to give you a sense of the magnitude of the problem.  the domino  effect of a computer-driven breakdown in supply delivery systems,  including the means of payment (banks), will be huge.  this site will  help you to evaluate your own personal vulnerability.i have many critics who believe that my scenario is too apocalyptic.   you must decide for yourself.  this web site is designed to provide you with relevant evidence to help you make an informed opinion, and then  a principled series of decisions.if you have practical questions -- where to go, what to buy, etc. -- ask them on one or more of the discussion forums. that is why i have created them.when you hear good news about some organization that is y2k-compliant, recall ronald reagan's statement with respect to disarmament treaties: "trust, but verify."  get a signed letter on letterhead stationery that the organization is 100% compliant.  until you receive this form of written assurance, which the outfit's lawyers have cleared, assume the worst. don't take seriously any promise that the outfit will be compliant rsn: real soon now.note: if my critics want to create their own web sites filled with "it's not going to be all that bad" evidence, they may do so.  i am unaware of any such site on the web today.i am also unaware of any y2k programmer who says, "even if programmers  don't get this fixed, there will not be big problems."  the debate is over  two questions: (1) "can the programmers get this fixed in time?" and (2)  "how big will our problems be if they don't?"  my answers: "no" and  "catastrophic."  you'll have to decide for yourself, either now or later.u.s. goverment leaders and other experts have now confirmed the threat of the millennium bug. to see what they have said publicly, click here .one last warning: the governments' strategy, all over the world, is: (1) talk this problem to death, (2) form committees, and (3) send out pr sheets that they will make it -- without evidence.  but this problem cannot be talked to death or solved by committees.  it cannot be avoided.  there is an absolutely fixed deadline.  bureaucrats are not used to absolutely fixed deadlines.  neither are computer programmers.i'm not a programmer.  my ph.d. is in history.  i take the historian's  view: things are interconnected in ways we can barely understand.  if  you want to know what i think lies ahead, get copies of the three books that i mention in my free e-mail report, "blind man's bluff in the year 2000.""blind man's bluff in the year 2000" is ideal for introducing the  problem to wives, in-laws, and other skeptics.  you can receive a copy in a  few minutes.
 mumbai – as 2015 begins, the global economy remains weak. the united states may be seeing signs of a strengthening recovery, but the eurozone risks following japan into recession, and emerging markets worry that their export-led growth strategies have left them vulnerable to stagnation abroad. with few signs that this year will bring any improvement, policymakers would be wise to understand the factors underlying the global economy’s anemic performance – and the implications of continued feebleness.in the words of christine lagarde , the international monetary fund’s managing director, we are experiencing the “new mediocre.” the implication is that growth is unacceptably low relative to potential and that more can be done to lift it, especially given that some major economies are flirting with deflation.conventional policy advice urges innovative monetary interventions bearing an ever expanding array of acronyms, even as governments are admonished to spend on “obvious” needs such as infrastructure. the need for structural reforms is acknowledged, but they are typically deemed painful, and possibly growth-reducing in the short run. so the focus remains on monetary and fiscal stimulus – and as much of it as possible, given the deadening effects of debt overhang.and yet, the efficacy of such policy advice remains to be seen. it is worth noting that the japanese checked each of these boxes over the last two decades: they held interest rates low, introduced quantitative easing, and launched massive debt-financed spending on infrastructure. few would argue that japan has recovered fully from its malaise.an emerging narrative might better explain why stimulus efforts have been unsuccessful: as former us treasury secretary larry summers has argued, the world economy may be going through a sustained period of “secular stagnation.”the causes of the stagnation very much depend on which economist one asks. summers emphasizes the inadequacy of aggregate demand, exacerbated by the inability of central banks to reduce nominal interest rates below zero. the reasons for weak aggregate demand include aging populations that consume less and the growing concentration of wealth among the very rich, whose marginal propensity to consume is small.the economists tyler cowen and robert gordon, on the other hand, argue that the problem is on the supply side. in their view, the years following world war ii were an aberration, with industrial countries’ growth helped by post-war reconstruction, rising education levels, higher workforce participation rates (owing to the entry of women), restored global trade, increasing investment, and the diffusion of technologies such as electricity, telephones, and automobiles.whatever the causes, growth started to slow in the 1970s, and adverse consequences like high unemployment rates among immigrants and the young were compounded by the growing realization that governments would struggle to deliver on their promises of social security. these promises, notes the sociologist wolfgang streeck , had been made in the 1960s, when economies were surging and visions of a “great society” seemed affordable. promises have since been augmented with pension hikes and old-age health-care commitments for public-sector workers.to meet their obligations, governments needed growth. so, from the 1970s on, they began to spend to stimulate the economy. because of the supply-side problems, however, the spending translated into spiraling inflation. price stability needed to be restored, but the spending had to be maintained. the ultimate solution was to finance spending not with the inflation tax, but with debt: first public debt, and then, as governments cut their deficits, private-sector debt. in 2008, these elevated debt levels – in banks, businesses, households, and governments – sparked the financial crisis.today, debt is making it difficult for developed countries to resume pre-2008 growth rates, let alone restore the levels of gdp that would have been attained if the subsequent great recession had not happened. meanwhile, industrial countries’ overall debt/gdp ratios are continuing to grow.in emerging markets, slow growth in the advanced economies has shut down a traditional development path: export-led growth. as a result, emerging markets have had to rely once again on domestic demand. this is always a difficult task, given the temptation to over-stimulate.the abundance of liquidity sloshing around the world – the result of developed countries’ ultra-accommodative monetary policies – has made the task more difficult still, as the smallest sign of growth in an emerging economy can attract foreign capital. if not properly managed, these flows can precipitate a credit and asset-price boom and drive up exchange rates. when developed-country monetary policies are eventually tightened, some of the capital is likely to depart. emerging markets will have to ensure that they are not vulnerable.to be sure, the world’s economic outlook could still take a turn for the better. the us may become the world’s engine of growth. declining oil prices could provide a major boost, especially to oil-importing developed economies. technological advances could still come to the rescue.but, overall, there is a palpable sense of gloom in the developed world, a feeling that growth is unlikely to take off in the foreseeable future. if secular stagnation persists, these countries will have to undertake painful structural reforms, figure out how to restructure their promises (debts, social-security commitments, and pledges to keep taxes low), and distribute the resulting burden.after the city of detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013, it had to make tough choices between servicing its pensioners or its debt, keeping its museums open or its police force intact. as 2015 begins, similar difficult decisions may become increasingly common.
 how to go from a nobody to a somebody january 12, 2015the new york times magazine ran a scathing article about marissa mayer two weeks ago, adding fuel to the meme that she’s failing at leading yahoo out of their lost decade — and that she has to get fired.it’s complete bullshit and, frankly, embarrassing for the gray lady to have published.tl;dr: marissa has accomplished a ton, and she should be judged after seven years & $10b in acquisitions–not 30 months and $2b. this piece was designed to sell books and get page views — it doesn’t match the reality of how hard these turnarounds are.six not-so-quick points regarding yahoo under marissa follow.yahoo was a complete disaster when mm joined: a half-dozen or so folks have tried to shepherd the company during the last decade and at no point has anyone succeeded at making the place in any way competitive at acquiring startups or talent.in our business, the most talented people have an array of absurd options. if you’ve done anything with moderate success, or if you have elite technical ability (top 20%), you are looking at everything from becoming a venture capitalist (short hours, high pay, no stress) to creating your own startup funded by the insane amount of cash sloshing around the streets of the bay area (higher stress but complete control of your destiny).heck, i know people in the top 25% of the tech market who have joined google, gotten paid six figures and literally do 20 hours of work per week. google prints money and i’m told that they are more than happy to pay you to not compete with them. the way they think, i’m told, is that if there is a chance that you’ll do something productive in the actual 1,000 hours you work there per year it’s worth them not maximizing their value on your time. they are probably right, too: a .001% improvement on tens of billions of dollars in advertising revenue is huge!today people actually want to sell their companies and go work for yahoo. this is 100% due to what marissa has done. she made the place liveable again. it’s not in the top 20 places anyone would choose to work in the valley — but you would no longer get laughed at for saying you were going to work at yahoo.on the measure of ’desirability to talent,’ marissa’s tenure is a huge success.the piece was given the insane title “what happened when marissa mayer tried to be steve jobs,” and goes to painstaking lengths to paint marissa as being delusional in thinking she is steve jobs.i’m not bffs with marissa, but we hung out a half-dozen times when she was coming up at google. she’s a geek who got lucky enough to join one of the super-unicorn rocket ships that leave silicon valley every five years or so.she does not think she is steve jobs — the article just fabricates that to make her look silly. that’s what the link-baiting press does today: they literally make shit up to get you to click the headline.in this case, the author isn’t an nyt employee. he’s an up-and-coming writer from the masters of linkbait: business insider. yes, the same business insider that brought you the headline & slide show of “why people hate jews!”the story comes to the conclusion — and makes it the headline — because marissa pointed out to her board and team that steve jobs didn’t make the ipod until he was well into his second tenure at apple.oh yeah, marissa read a steve jobs quote at an all-hands meeting.news flash: every f-ing ceo in the valley quotes jobs at every meeting. steve jobs is our collective jesus — he’s worth quoting!in an effort to get yahoo’s revenue issues fixed, she bet on a former googler named henrique de castro. in order to get him, yahoo had to give him a $60m package to make up for the lost google stock options he would leave behind.it’s a sick amount of money, to be sure, but over four years that’s $15m per year. it’s maybe 4x what he should get — but we live in competitive times and marissa took a big risk.it looked even worse because, i think (someone please confirm if they can — it’s not public/clear), the value of that stock almost doubled during his short tenure. he walked away with over $100m for 15 months of work.sickening to be sure, but marissa has to make bets like this when running a company at this scale.if she had three or four examples like this it would be a proof point. with only one example, it’s just “gotcha!!! journalism.”mayer has no idea what she is doing when it comes to content — but she’s learning. she made a bunch of bad bets on bad talent like former nyt journalist david pogue. pogue is considered a laughing stock in the gadget industry. he’s the type of reporter that has no following and has never had to generate page views for himself.so, he got a huge pay day (probably $1m a year), trading on his nyt gig. good for him, bad for marissa.marissa made a similar mistake hiring katie couric, who although delightful on tv, has exactly zero pull online.so, she learned a valuable lesson that i learned a decade ago: being famous in one medium rarely translates into a second (see michael jordan/baseball, william shatner/singing, etc).the truth is, yahoo’s best business move is to go all in with content — and specifically video content. so, marissa is doing exactly that and she’s learning that she — like 99% of silicon valley — has zero talent in picking content.now she can simply hire someone who is an expert in the content business — and she will.the ceo shouldn’t be picking the programming. that’s why tv networks & movie studios buy their content from producers, production companies, etc.marissa has either learned this or will come to that conclusion when she reads this sentence: the better you know technology the worse you probably know good art. get help.here’s a shocker: a powerful tech lead, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, has a couple personality quirks and might not have the highest eq.the piece points out the “gotcha!” meme where marissa eliminated work-from-home jobs (couple of hundred), while at the same time building a nursery next to her office.yeah, that’s bad timing and a little clueless — but certainly not intentional. the fact is, at that time yahoo had a ton of folks who needed to go and the remote folks were a good starting point for a company that needed to cut thousands of jobs.you know the number one complaint from most savvy shareholders of yahoo stock? marissa hasn’t cut enough people! damned if you do, damned if you don’t.if you’re a new mom trying to balance a baby and firing a bunch of other parents who work from home? bbq sauce. you’re roasted.now, there is a personality trait that many have documented in the past: marissa making folks wait for her. jason shellen, a seasoned tech executive mentioned this when he was on this week in startups.a number of my friends mentioned this to me back in the day. making adults wait outside your office is just insulting. running behind 30 minutes or an hour? acceptable. rescheduling? acceptable.this is quirk, and a bad one, but i have to think that marissa has self-corrected and thought “gee, do i want people considering coming to work for me to think i’ll debase them by making them wait outside my office like students waiting for a headmaster at a private school? no.”in a related personality section they talk about marissa being massively late for a meeting with ad executives. that’s just unforgivable if you’re trying to turn around a company. again, i’m sure marissa is learning that no matter how rich, powerful, or successful you are you have to keep up social graces.martin sorrell, the most important man in all of advertising, actually took mayer to task on stage about not returning his emails during that same event. he told mayer that sheryl sandberg from facebook always responds to him.seems obvious to me, but sheryl’s a serious extrovert, and i would guess marissa’s an introvert. could be that simple.[ sidenote: you know what, i’ve emailed marissa and sheryl about a half-dozen times in the past five years each (normally to invite them to a keynote/fireside chat at the launch festival, sometimes about a startup i’ve invested in).looking back on it, sheryl has personally gotten back to me each time and marissa has literally not returned an email from me in years. not that i’m anyone important, and certainly i’m all of 1.3% as important as sir martin sorrell (a literal knight). however, marissa did respond to my emails when she was coming up. whatever.  ]she probably needs to work on some style issues. i mean, you should never underestimate anyone. which means you should be gracious to everyone.but look, the article’s biggest thread is about her personality traits — which is why it’s the biggest section here. the truth is marissa is probably half as quirky as the average person in her position of power.which leads one to a small set of conclusions: 1. she’s a woman, so they treat her even more harshly, 2. she’s craved the press for a decade, doing a ton of fashion magazine pieces, so she is bankable for page views.it’s probably a little of both. live by the press, die by the press.marissa has two simple jobs: 1. stabilize yahoo’s core businesses (i.e. get yahoo mail, yahoo finance, yahoo sports, yahoo search, etc. to grow within 50% +/- its competitors), and 2. keep buying companies in the hopes of finding a youtube or instagram.google’s $1.6b purchase of youtube is the greatest in the history of acquisitions in any industry. youtube would be worth $75b if it were a public, standalone company right now — and growing.facebook’s $1b purchase of instagram was one of the 10 best acquisitions of all time. instagram would be worth at least $25b if it were a public, standalone company right now — and growing.if marissa can keep yahoo steady, the board and shareholders should give her $2b a year to acquire companies for the next 10 years.if you can make three or four big bets a year, over 10 years, i think you can find your youtube.it is worth noting, that with the exception of search and gmail, google’s other biggest hits were acquired: android (2005, $50m), applied semantics (2003, $102m; became adwords) and youtube.heck, we just found out that google bought — didn’t really build — their self driving car: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-carmarissa should be given the ability to do something similar if the goal is to truly bring yahoo back to prominence. chances of yahoo buying a transformative product? 50%+!chances of building a transformative product? i’d say well under 10%. perhaps 1%.ok, my 600-word piece is now 2,000 so i will stop.conclusion: the piece is a hit job and marissa is doing an amazing job. if you’re a shareholder who thinks there is a better option than supporting the person who has saved the sinking ship in under three years, then you are a complete moron.to those morons calling for her ouster here’s a simple test: how did the last couple of ceos with the job do? oh yeah, they ran it into the ground!if i was on the board (would never happen), i’d advocate for seven years and $20b in acquisitions.don’t believe what you read, even in the new york times.ps – the launch festival, which marissa passed on for year four of four, is taking place on march 2-4th. we have 10,000 folks coming … make us the largest startup conference in the world. http://festival.launch.co/pps – the launch ticker will save you an hour per day of reading the news, and the launch ticker pro will introduce you to three under-the-radar startups per week. my private research team is second to none in the startup space, so signup here: https://www.launchticker.com/plans
 i'm a fellow at the adam smith institute in london, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. an odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe i am. i have written for the times, daily telegraph, express, independent, city am, wall street journal, philadelphia inquirer and online for the asi, iea, social affairs unit, spectator, the guardian, the register and techcentralstation. i've also ghosted pieces for several uk politicians in many of the uk papers, including the daily sport.the author is a forbes contributor. the opinions expressed are those of the writer.
 event carried out in secret due to threat of taliban strikes in afghan capital, which has been hit by repeated bombings.nato has held a ceremony in kabul formally ending its war in afghanistan, officials said, after 13 years of conflict and gradual troop withdrawals that have left the country in the grip of worsening conflicts with armed groups.the event was carried out on sunday in secret due to the threat of taliban strikes in the afghan capital, which has been hit by repeated suicide bombings and gun attacks over recent years.on january 1, the us-led international security assistance force (isaf) combat mission will be replaced by a nato "training and support" mission."resolute support will serve as the bedrock of an enduring partnership" between nato and afghanistan, us army general john f campbell  told an audience of afghan and international military officers and officials, as well as diplomats and journalists.he paid tribute to the international and afghan troops who have died fighting in the conflict saying: "the road before us remains challenging but we will triumph".the closing of nato's combat mission comes at the end of the country's deadliest year during the war, which saw at least 4,600 afghan soldiers and police killed and many other civilian deaths.about 12,500 foreign troops staying in afghanistan will not be involved in direct fighting, but will assist the afghan army and police in the battle against the taliban, who ruled from 1996 until 2001.when numbers peaked in 2011, about 130,000 troops from 50 nations were part of the nato military alliance."now, thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in american history is coming to a responsible conclusion," he said in a statement.obama thanked the troops and intelligence workers who served in afghanistan, crediting them with "devastating the core al-qaeda leadership, delivering justice to osama bin laden, disrupting terrorist plots and saving countless american lives"."we are safer, and our nation is more secure, because of their service."but, obama warned, "afghanistan remains a dangerous place, and the afghan people and their security forces continue to make tremendous sacrifices in defence of their country."sunday's ceremony completes the gradual handover of responsibility to the 350,000-strong afghan forces, who have been in charge of nationwide security since the middle of last year.al jazeera's jennifer glasse, reporting from kabul, said that afghans were very concerned with the complete pullout, citing a security vacuum and political instability as the main threats as heavy fighting rages across the country."the government has also failed to name a cabinet, so it is not just the lack of security that is a concern, but also political instability".there was a lot of mingling before the ceremony among afghan officials, military officers, ambassadors, and diplomats from more than a dozen countries. it was a gathering befitting nato’s largest and longest ever coalition.in the blue and white gymnasium on isaf’s main headquarters, a small brass military band played in the corner as us general joseph campbell rolled up the green flag emblazoned with isaf for the international security assistance force, he has commanded since august.he unfurled a green flag with rs on it – the new colours as the military call them, of the nato resolute support force that takes over on january 1.the changeover marks the end of the 13-year long nato combat mission. but about 5,500 us forces will remain in afghanistan outside the nato mission, carrying out counterterrorism operations.in total, that puts about 17,000 international troops in afghanistan in 2015.the head of the afghan army, general sher mohammad karimi says his forces will miss isaf, and all the resources nato offered. "isaf had everything," he told me. "we are limited. we do not have enough equipment to get rid of the ieds [improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs] or equipment to give us early warning, but still we are doing better."but afghan forces continue to take punishing losses with more than 4,600 killed this year, and thousands more wounded.the speeches acknowledged the sacrifices made. afghanistan's national security adviser mohammad hanif atmar said, "we will never forget your sons and daughters who have died on our soil. they are now our sons and daughters. afghan and coalition personnel have spilled their blood to ensure a brighter future for our country and to bring peace to the world."no one here thinks peace will be easy. after 13 years and more than a trillion dollars spent in military and humanitarian support, afghanistan is still in a perilous position.it's heavily dependent on foreign aid, and the taliban and other groups that oppose the government continue to battle afghan forces on a number of fronts.the mood at the transition ceremony was one of deep camaraderie between allies who have come a long way, but recognise there is still a long way to go. not necessarily a mission accomplished – more a mission continued.