Week 28

Rupert Murdoch

When will Donald Trump stop embarrassing himself and his friends?

Hilarious

For the record,  Rupert Murdoch is this guy

The paper he is holding is one of his, and the title reads "Abu's Been Sleeping in My Bed".

John Markoff

There's this wonderful counter situation to the popular belief that there will be no jobs. The last time someone wrote about this was in 1995 when a book titled The End of Work predicted this. The decade after that, the US economy grew faster than the population for the next decade. It's not clear to me at all that things are going to work out the way they felt.

Errr

Wonderful counter-situation? Here is the funny thing about that: the author Markoff refers to, Jeremy Rifkin, is not only patting himself in the back these days, he is doing victory laps because of what he wrote in that book was so extremely accurate. "Economy growing faster" is no proof there isn't unemployment, new tech has displaced workers.

I'd expect better quality from Edge. This is complete junk.

Hillary Clinton

Enough renewables to power "every home in America".

Nice

We must wean off fossil fuels. This energy source encourages centralized / concentrated power structures, endangers the environment, and causes chaos in the Middle East.

But why can't there be debt relief for Greece now?

Timing seemed to be the issue

Nearly every article I'd read on this subject would state somewhere in the text that "everyone knows there will be certain amount of debt relief at some point in the future" (let's not forget, there was already a debt relief shortly after the crisis started). The issue was when. IMO further relief, bring the debt down to, say 100 billion euros would be hard to sell at EU capitals, especially in Bundestag, so this issue was deferred. It seems relief would be easier to sell once Greece reformed and started to grow again. Then Syriza came in, EU wondered if Tsipras was serious about reforms, then he goes and hires back the gov employees who were let go before his administration [1], then ...  your credibility as a reformer takes a hit at that point. It hardens "the other side" on other issues, bcz they don't see their counterpart at the same wavelength.

Question

So was Varoufakis wrong?

The deal on him..

.. is that his psychology was probably unsuited for his job. His profile shows he is what we call a Mellow Meadow -- these people have a subconcious feeling of having been wronged, they live in a persistent state of a victim, and their growth path is in getting out of this victimized feeling, and also, look at things conceptually. An MM in the negative is a very confused person, always giving up, their mind wondering from topic to topic, they have a hard time focusing, there could even be substance abuse problems. Surely V is not entirely at this negative extreme, this is a grown man, according to his background he became an academic (a perfect job for an MM, it would help to focus the mind), I am sure he grappled with hard things in life, did not give up, etc.

But we are talking about mega scale issues here and not many people are built to cope with this shit. The scrutiny, stress, responsibility will pull a person's character apart in unseemly ways, and will expose the tiniest crack in a man's demeanor. Even positives can start working against you, i.e. an MM should not be giving up, conceptualizing, but if this is done at the extreme, MM is always fighting, for no reason, conceptualizing, but in the wrong direction.

Question

But people gave mandate to do ______

They didn't give mandate for shit

Time for Change model shows people vote based on 3 variables, always judging the incumbent, not the new guy. This is very smart of them actually -- they always vote on something they have the most information on. So no growth, no popularity, it's more likely the incumbent is kicked to the curb. "Times are tough, get me whoever is next" -- that is the general feeling.

The public does not vote on issues per se. In US Republicans usually lower taxes, Democrats usually raise them - when one or the other is elected, it is not a mandate to lower or raise taxes. It simply means popularity, gdp growth, two terms variables were in the negative for the incumbent party.

Let's restate the obvious here: the system is representative. People do not meddle in governance, everyone has their job, and it works as long as the rulers don't screw the pooch. If they don't, there aren't too many surprises, everyone is happy. That also means rulers cannot overburden people with unnecessary choices... Like "you choose if I put a hat on, or not".. Or "should I say to country X, or ?" If rulers frequently overburden their populace, that will work against their popularity. They lose the office. If this happens all the time, well then, we'll start thinking other ways to skin this cat - won't we? 

[Researcher] Mogahed said it’s “kind of an obvious point” that [ISIS] uses Islamic texts to justify its brutality. “But I want to answer a slightly different question, which is: If Islam did not exist … would a group like ISIS, with all the other realities as they are, exist today and do the same things?”“My answer to that hypothetical question is a resounding yes.” Discussing global terrorism at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mogahed, who formerly led research on Muslims with the polling organization Gallup, said that extremist groups all over the world commit the same kinds of violence using what she called “the local social currency” to justify it. “That is sometimes Christianity. That is sometimes Judaism. That is sometimes Buddhism. And it is sometimes secular ideologies. So a world without Islam would still have a group like ISIS—they would just be called something else that may be less catchy.”

Exactly

Gallup

The percentage of U.S. employees engaged in their jobs averaged 31.5% in May. This reading is on par with 31.7% recorded in January, March and April, but is the lowest monthly average for 2015.

So ~70% are not engaged at work

The Economix Blog

The libertarian economist David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, and Professor Zwolinski, the philosopher, have both expressed sympathy for Paine’s idea that everyone today suffers from past injustices in terms of property rights. A universal income might be an appropriate reparations payment, they say.

Phew

This is some heavy stuff.. Here is the argument in Friedman's words:

[T]he existing state of the world is in part a result of past rights violations. Land claims [..] in the real world run back to an initial seizure by force. Similarly, claims to other forms of wealth must be justified, in libertarian moral theory, by a chain of voluntary transactions back to a first creator. In at least some cases that chain is interrupted by involuntary transactions. Consider a house built by slave labor. Is the legitimate owner the person with the present title to it or the heir of the slaves forced to build it, or is it perhaps partly the legitimate property of one and partly of the other? What about property in other forms inherited through a chain that leads back to a slave holding or slave trading ancestor who owed, but never paid, compensation to his victims? Oh BTW who is this coming from? David F**king Friedman. Who is the son of Milton F**king Friedman. Can anyone be more free-market oriented than these two guys?

Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society

In 1995, I published a book [..] in which I made the argument that “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilization ever closer to a near-workerless world.” The Economist ran a cover story on the end of work in which the editors suggested that we would have to see if my forecast will turn out to be prescient. In the interim years, the projections I had made back in 1995 of IT-generated automation leading to technology displacement in virtually every sector of the economy became a troubling reality, leaving millions of people unemployed and underemployed across every country in the world. If anything, my original forecast proved to be a bit too conservative.

In 2013, in the United States, 21.9 million adults are unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged and are no longer counted in the official statistics. Worldwide, 25 percent of the adult workforce was either unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged and no longer looking for work in 2011. The International Labor Organization reports that more than 202 million people will be without work in 2013. While there are many reasons for the unemployment, economists are just now waking up to the fact that technology displacement is a primary culprit. The Economist, among others, revisited the issue of the end of work 16 years after I published the book, asking, “What happens . . . when machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour.” [..]

It wasn’t that I was clairvoyant. The signs were everywhere, but in the growth years, most economists were so attached to conventional economic theory—that supply creates demand and that new technologies, while disruptive, reduce costs, stimulate consumption, spur more production, increase innovation, and open up opportunities for new kinds of jobs—that my message fell largely on deaf ears. Now, economists are taking notice. In the period of the Great Recession, economists discovered that while millions of jobs were irreversibly lost, productivity was reaching new peaks and output was accelerating around the world, but with fewer workers at their stations. [..]

Between 2008 and 2012, while the Great Recession was bleeding workers, industry was piling on new software and innovations to boost productivity and keep profitable with smaller payrolls. The effect of these efforts is striking. Mark J. Perry, a University of Michigan economics professor and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., ran the numbers. By the end of 2012, according to Perry, the U.S. economy had made a complete recovery from the 2007–2009 recession, with a gross domestic output of 13.6 trillion dollars (in 2005 dollars). That was 2.2 percent higher, or 290 billion dollars more real output, than in 2007, just before the recession, when the GDP was at 13.32 trillion dollars. Perry observes that, while real output was 2.2 percent above the recession level in 2007, industry churned out the increase in goods and services with only 142.4 million workers in 2012—or 3.84 million fewer workers than in 2007. Perry’s conclusion: “The Great Recession stimulated huge productivity and efficiency gains as companies shed marginal workers and learned how to do ‘more with less (fewer workers).

Although Perry and others are just now discovering the disquieting relationship between increased productivity and fewer workers—again, economists always believed in the past that increased productivity drives growth in jobs—evidence of the disconnect was building for more than 50 years [..].

We are just beginning to hear the rumble of what’s likely to become a global policy debate on automation and the future of jobs. In part, that discussion is starting to happen because of the jobless recovery that followed the Great Recession. The disconnect between a rising GDP and diminishing jobs is becoming so pronounced that it’s difficult to continue to ignore it, although I’m still somewhat amazed at how few economists, even at this stage, are willing to step forward and finally acknowledge that the underlying assumption of classical economic theory—that productivity creates more jobs than it replaces—is no longer credible [..]

I'd like to tap Sarah Palin for a cabinet position

Yeeeaah

I bet you'd like to tap that.

I mean, her. For a position. Graaarh #doublefacepalm

Question

What does the slang u used ___ mean?

Apologies

There is a certain amount of slang in this blog, we have a very diverse international readership here, but some of the stuff might be unintelligeble.. Aber was meint er mit "Hizzie for the Nizzie?". Sorry. A lot of this cannot be helped. Because it is literally how I think. Cultural refs, soundbites flying around. Like, I am watching a show where two friends are listening to fusion jazz (naturally  it sounds like crap, seriously, it sounds like a form of long-winded restricted farting) one of them says "what is this?", "it's fusion", then the first guy says  "this is no fusion, it's confusion!". "And that makes me remember the Bernie Mac joke "this food ain't no Cajun! It's Caucasian!". It's an endless cycle. #facepalm

Why do military spending cuts for Greece never seem to come to focus? Does that have something to do with Germany selling all that weaponary to Greeks?

Funny you say that

Cannot speak to the pre-crisis events, but now the reason Tippy Tippy Tsipras cannot make those cuts is because he went into coalition with Nazis - the Greek ones, because these clowns were "anti-austerity", and Tippy Tippy Tsipras wanted to "strengthen his hand" for the upcoming negotiations. The only minor nuisance about the situation was that, well these clowns are Nazis who like their military toys, that's how we end up with the current bizarre situation where a leftist government cannot even cut unnecessary defense spending.

#thegipper #reagan #gorbachev

Saw this at a bookstore in Berlin today. A piece of history etched in stone

#switzerland

Saw this at a cafe today, photo shows a Tsipras pouting.

Bernie Sanders on Obamacare.. what he says amounts to an attack on Hillary from the left. He calls Obamacare "a Romney style plan" labeling it un-Democrat in the process -- he is good, Bamacare was in fact based on Mitt's model, but Mitt said repeatedly the same ideas are not suitable at national level. Anyway - but he is correct in stating Obamacare is overengineered pile of crap [paraphrasing] and the public would be better served with a single-payer system, like the one Canada.

nonetflix #nearpluto

Congrats to all involved. A great milestone.

Food Waste: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

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beijing #smog

newhorizons

On the left: our best image of Pluto in May. On the right: our current best picture of Pluto.