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Bill Fulkerson

Inequality and Ordinary Living Standards in Rich Countries | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...andards-in-rich-countries.html

inequality standards capitalism

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 03 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 03 Aug 18
     
    "This has fundamental implications for how one thinks about current challenges. Globalisation and technological change are often portrayed as exogenous forces sweeping across the rich countries, inexorably driving up inequality and forcing workers to accept wage stagnation (and often less security) if they are to hold on to their jobs. Instead, the variation in country experiences shows how much institutions and policy responses matter to how these forces - themselves subject to human agency rather than God-given - play out in the job market and affect household disposable incomes. Wage-setting institutions clearly have a critical influence. The Belgian combination of wages indexed to inflation, collective agreements covering most workers, and a high minimum wage underpinned significant wage growth across the distribution. In Australia, the extension of collectively negotiated employment terms and conditions over much of the work force, together with a very high minimum wage, play a key role. By contrast, the remarkably poor earnings performance of the UK over the last decade is in a context where wage bargaining has become individualised."
Bill Fulkerson

Luddites have been getting a bad rap for 200 years. But, turns out, they were right - Q... - 0 views

qz.com/...-but-turns-out-they-were-right

Luddite

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 01 May 17
     
    "The truth is that the Luddites were the skilled, middle-class workers of their time. After centuries on more-or-less good terms with merchants who sold their goods, their lives were upended by machines replacing them with low-skilled, low-wage laborers in dismal factories. To ease the transition, the Luddites sought to negotiate conditions similar to those underlying capitalist democracies today: taxes to fund workers' pensions, a minimum wage, and adherence to minimum labor standards."
Bill Fulkerson

Newly modeled: Minimum energy requirements for microbial communities to live - 0 views

phys.org/...gy-requirements-microbial.html

energy microbiome communities

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 06 May 20
     
    A microbial community is a complex, dynamic system composed of hundreds of species and their interactions, they are found in oceans, soil, animal guts and plant roots. Each system feeds the Earth's ecosystem and their own growth, as they each have their own metabolism that underpin biogeochemical cycles. The same community-level metabolic rates are exploited in biotechnology for water treatment and bioenergy production from organic waste, thus the ability to capture microbial growth rates and metabolic activities within the communities is key for modeling of planetary ecosystem dynamics, animal and plant health and biotechnological waste valorzation.
Bill Fulkerson

Optimization is as hard as approximation - Machine Learning Research Blog - 0 views

francisbach.com/on-is-as-hard-as-approximation

machine learning optimization ML

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 18 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 18 Dec 20
     
    Optimization is a key tool in machine learning, where the goal is to achieve the best possible objective function value in a minimum amount of time. Obtaining any form of global guarantees can usually be done with convex objective functions, or with special cases such as risk minimization with one-hidden over-parameterized layer neural networks (see the June post). In this post, I will consider low-dimensional problems (imagine 10 or 20), with no constraint on running time (thus get ready for some running-times that are exponential in dimension!).
Bill Fulkerson

A prediction model of outcome of SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia based on laboratory findings - 0 views

flip.it/w2kz.3

COVID-19 prediction pneumonia model

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 21 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 21 Aug 20
     
    The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in thousands of deaths in the world. Information about prediction model of prognosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection is scarce. We used machine learning for processing laboratory findings of 110 patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia (including 51 non-survivors and 59 discharged patients). The maximum relevance minimum redundancy (mRMR) algorithm and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator logistic regression model were used for selection of laboratory features. Seven laboratory features selected in the model were: prothrombin activity, urea, white blood cell, interleukin-2 receptor, indirect bilirubin, myoglobin, and fibrinogen degradation products. The signature constructed using the seven features had 98% [93%, 100%] sensitivity and 91% [84%, 99%] specificity in predicting outcome of SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia. Thus it is feasible to establish an accurate prediction model of outcome of SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia based on laboratory findings.
Bill Fulkerson

Reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 | Science - 0 views

science.sciencemag.org/...1422

transmission Covid-19

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 31 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 31 Aug 20
     
    Aerosol transmission of viruses must be acknowledged as a key factor leading to the spread of infectious respiratory diseases. Evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 is silently spreading in aerosols exhaled by highly contagious infected individuals with no symptoms. Owing to their smaller size, aerosols may lead to higher severity of COVID-19 because virus-containing aerosols penetrate more deeply into the lungs (10). It is essential that control measures be introduced to reduce aerosol transmission. A multidisciplinary approach is needed to address a wide range of factors that lead to the production and airborne transmission of respiratory viruses, including the minimum virus titer required to cause COVID-19; viral load emitted as a function of droplet size before, during, and after infection; viability of the virus indoors and outdoors; mechanisms of transmission; airborne concentrations; and spatial patterns. More studies of the filtering efficiency of different types of masks are also needed. COVID-19 has inspired research that is already leading to a better understanding of the importance of airborne transmission of respiratory disease.
Steve Bosserman

Chris Hedges: In the Time of Trump, All We Have Is Each Other - Chris Hedges - Truthdig - 0 views

www.truthdig.com/...we_have_is_each_other_20161225

localization distributed processes politics

shared by Steve Bosserman on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • We must begin again. Any hope for a restoration of civil society will come from small, local groups and community organizations. They will begin with the mundane tasks of holding back the expansion of charter schools, enforcing environmental regulations, building farmers markets, fighting for the minimum wage, giving sanctuary to undocumented workers, protesting hate crimes and electing people to local offices who will seek to mitigate the excesses of the state. “We have to reconstitute a civil society,” Schrecker said. “Intermediary institutions like the academy and the media have been hollowed out. Certainly, journalism is on life support. We have to resuscitate organizations and institutions that have atrophied.” “There is an attack on the American mind,” she said. “A lot of what we’re seeing with Trump is the product of 40 years of dumbing down.”
  • We must not become preoccupied with the short-term effects of resistance. Failure is inevitable for many of us. Tyrants have silenced voices of conscience in the past. They will do so again. We will endure by holding fast to our integrity, by building community and by spawning new institutions in the midst of the wreckage. We will sustain each other. Perhaps enough of us will endure to begin again.
Steve Bosserman

Why Didn't America Become Part of the Modern World? - 0 views

eand.co/-the-modern-world-dac6d65e9015

failed state modernity usa poverty

shared by Steve Bosserman on 09 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.
  • So in America, poverty wasn’t seen as a social bad or ill — it was seen as a necessary way to discipline, punish, and control those with a lack of virtue, a deficit of strength, to, by hitting them with its stick, to inculcate the virtues of hard work, temperance, industriousness, and above all, self-reliance. The problem, of course, was that the great lesson of history was that none of this was true — poverty didn’t lead to virtue. It only led to ruin.
  • So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.
Bill Fulkerson

The Federal Job Guarantee Is Not Just "Better" Than a Universal Basic Income. It's the ... - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...sal-basic-income-sinister.html

ubi

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 28 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • UBI adds money to the economy without increasing production or output. This is how you cause inflation: The creation of money without consideration of the real resources available to you.
  • FJG adds money to the economy by increasing productivity and output. This is how you avoid, or greatly reduce the severity of, inflation. It forces private industry and the military to up their game, in order to be competitive with the FJG: better than bare-minimum living wage, benefits, and working conditions.
  • If the FJG creates “busywork” pointless jobs, it is not a problem of the FJG itself, but rather a reflection of poor implementation of the FJG at the local level. There are basically an infinite number of genuinely useful things to be done at the local level, throughout the country.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The fear of automation is nonsense. We should embrace automation. Robots can cook our cheeseburgers, wash our cars, and accept and dispense cash better and faster than humans. But robots cannot take care of our children or seniors, they cannot entertain us, create works of art, write our books, or be our primary care physicians or psychologists. Leave the more physically taxing and repetitive drudgery work to the robots. Leave the infinite number of more satisfying and productive jobs for us humans.
Steve Bosserman

Could a Basic Income Plan End Poverty in Washington, D.C.? - 0 views

undark.org/...yd-blog-universal-basic-income

universal basic income

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 May 18 - No Cached
  • The 86-page report, from the District’s Office of the Budget Director, applies evidence-based methodology and economic forecasting to compare two approaches to alleviating poverty: a negative local income tax (similar to the federal earned-income tax credit for poor families) versus a straightforward cash grant, known as guaranteed or universal basic income (UBI for short).
  • “There are certainly a lot of advantages to a UBI program,” one of the researchers, Susanna Groves, a senior budget analyst for the city, said on a recent episode of “The Basic Income Podcast.” “It doesn’t have a social stigma attached to it. It provides a benefit for everyone and could really help. But what we found is that a negative income tax was a more feasible approach for the District to provide a minimum income benefit.”
Steve Bosserman

Escape to another world | 1843 - 0 views

www.1843magazine.com/...escape-to-another-world

time management economics trade-off work-life balance

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.
  • People work for many reasons – to occupy their time, to find purpose in life and to contribute to society, among other things – but the need to earn money typically comes top of the list. Money puts food on the table, clothes in the wardrobe and a roof overhead. Yet these days, satisfying those needs in the most basic way does not take an especially large income, particularly for those with the option of depending on family members for assistance. The reason to work harder and earn more than the minimum needed to survive is, in part, the desire to have something more than the bare necessities – nice meals, rather than the cheapest calories available, a car, holidays abroad, a home full of books and art. Much of the work we do is intended to earn the money to afford a few luxuries to add to our comfort and enrich our lives.Yet we face a trade-off. The harder we work, the less time we have to enjoy the luxuries our labour affords us. The more lavish the luxuries we seek, the more we must earn to acquire them, and the longer and harder we find ourselves working.
  • Stand back, however, and the implications are far more substantial than this. One can just about spot the vision of a distant, near-workless future in the habits of young gamers. If good things in life can be had for very little money, then working hard to have more than very little money looks less attractive. The history of the industrial era has been one in which technology has reduced the proportion of income devoted to necessities like food while providing vast new possibilities for consumption. As this happened, the hours worked by the typical person declined.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while neglecting other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective. But what does seem clear is that the choices we make in life are shaped by the options available to us. A society that dislikes the idea of young men gaming their days away should perhaps invest in more dynamic difficulty adjustment in real life. And a society which regards such adjustments as fundamentally unfair should be more tolerant of those who choose to spend their time in an alternate reality, enjoying the distractions and the succour it provides to those who feel that the outside world is more rigged than the game.
Steve Bosserman

It's time to regulate the gig economy | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...s-time-to-regulate-gig-economy

gig economy sharing economy favors exchange platforms labor unions

shared by Steve Bosserman on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Although it would seem straightforward that the laws protecting workers should also apply to workers in what is described as the ‘gig economy’ or ‘platform-based work’, there is much debate – and confusion – on this issue. This lack of clarity stems in part from the novelty of platform-based work. There has also been an effort to conceal the nature of platform-based work through buzzwords such as ‘favours’, ‘rides’, and ‘tasks’ as well as the practice common to many platforms of classifying their workers as independent contractors. Platform-based work includes ‘crowdwork’ and ‘work-on-demand via apps’. In crowdwork, workers complete small jobs or tasks through online platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, and Clickworker.  In ‘work-on-demand via apps,’ workers perform duties such as providing transport, cleaning, home repairs, or running errands, but the workers learn about these jobs through mobile apps, from companies such as Uber, Taskrabbit, and Handy. The jobs are performed locally.
  • Platforms mediate extensively the transactions they have with their workers, and also between the customers and the workers.  Platforms often fix the price of the service as well as define the terms and conditions of the service, or they allow the clients to define the terms (but not the worker). The platform may define the schedule or the details of the work, including instructing workers to wear uniforms, to use specific tools, or to treat customers in a particular way. Many platforms have performance review systems that allow customers to rate the workers and they use these ratings to limit the ability of lower-rated workers to access jobs, including by excluding workers from their system. The amount of direction and discipline that clients and platforms impose on workers, in many instances amounts to the degree of control that is normally reserved to employers and is normally accompanied by labour protections such as the minimum wage, limits on working time, and contributions to social security. This recent ILO study provides more detailed analysis on these features of platform-based work.
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