Group items tagged

The U.K. could change its economic model if it isn’t granted access to trade in the European Union after it leaves the bloc, U.K. Treasury Chief Philip Hammond indicated in an interview with a German newspaper on Sunday.

It wasn’t clear what specific action Mr. Hammond was suggesting the U.K. might take and no one was immediately available at the Treasury for further comment.

Mrs. May has said the U.K. will seek to regain control over immigration from the EU and remove the country from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, fueling expectations that she intends to negotiate a clean break from the EU that would be incompatible with continued tariff-free access to European markets.

have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don't invalidate, my thesis. The first -- The Rise of the Cloud -- was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.

we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.

Today, however, Europe is talking about “the French question”: can the Socialist government of President François Hollande pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?

At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years.

France’s friends, Germany in particular, fear that Mr. Hollande may simply lack the political courage to confront his allies and make the necessary decisions.

Every German resident must belong to a sickness fund, and in turn the funds must insure all comers. They’re also mandated to cover a standard set of benefits, which includes most procedures and medications. Workers pay half the cost of their sickness fund insurance, and employers pay the rest. The German government foots the bill for the unemployed and for children. There are also limits on out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s rare for a German to go into debt because of medical bills.

this is very similar to the health-insurance regime that Americans are now living under, now that the Affordable Care Act is four years old and a few days past its first enrollment deadline.

There are, of course, a few key differences. Co-pays in the German system are minuscule, about 10 euros per visit. Even those for hospital stays are laughably small by American standards: Sam payed 40 euro for a three-day stay for a minor operation a few years ago

When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.

we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem

the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.

Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.

Paleontologists in Uruguay published findings in November suggesting that humans hunted giant sloths there about 30,000 years ago. All the way in southern Chile, Tom D. Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, has shown that humans lived at a coastal site called Monte Verde as early as 14,800 years ago.

Dr. Guidon, the Brazilian archaeologist who pioneered the excavations, asserted more than two decades ago that her team had found evidence in the form of charcoal from hearth fires that humans had lived here about 48,000 years ago.

differences on Iran policy correspond to answers to this one question: Whether the world of 2015 is fundamentally similar to, or different from, the world of 1938.

the idea of recurring historic episodes has a powerful effect on decision-making in the here and now. Disagreements over policy often come down to the search for the right historic pattern to apply.

the idea that Europe on the eve of the Holocaust is the most useful guide to the world in 2015 runs through arguments about Iran policy. And if that is the correct model to apply, the right "picture in our heads" as Walter Lippmann put it in Public Opinion, then these conclusions naturally follow:

what is wrong with us?

entire

We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

one theme does emerge unscathed throughout his work: a search for macroeconomic stability. According to Mr Skidelsky at Warwick University, much of Keynes’s work was motivated by a desire to return to the stability and growth of the pre-1914 period

All these works share one underlying feature—the idea that the internal stability of an economy (of prices and unemployment) should be prioritised above abstract principles that were directed at maintaining external stability (of exchange rates or the free movement of capital, for instance) at all costs.

He did not consider himself tied down to any particular economic creed. For instance, he pointed out that the most effective and appropriate economic theory for a particular period changes, because the structure of the world economy mutates and evolves over time far more quickly than, say, the natural world and its systems:

For Aldi, the panic and rush is an integral part of the shopping experience for two reasons. The first is the happy realisation once you have left the store, and your heartbeat has settled, that you have spent less time shopping than you would have in a typical supermarket. The second, and most important, is what Aldi managers describe, straight-faced, as “the thrill at the till”: your trolley full of goods has cost less than you thought it would. The rushed, no-frills experience isn’t something you merely endure for the sake of saving money; the awareness of your savings makes that experience a pleasure in itself.

Aldi is still relatively low-tech: without a loyalty programme, it knows little about individual customer preferences and you can’t buy its groceries online. What it has done is disrupt a mindset: the settled wisdom about how we think of ourselves as shoppers, and the basis by which we identify with a particular supermarket. Aldi’s victory was to show that there was no shame – and in fact there was satisfaction – in shopping at a discount supermarket

“Aldi’s customer profile is now classless,” said Hyman. “The supermarket is as strong with affluent people as it is with people on low incomes.”

Facebook was a bad actor by complicity in the entire 2016 election Russian interference campaign. As I’ve noted in other posts, it’s an engine built to maximize engagement for ad sales and data collection which operates with no need to price its negative externalities. To pull that out of jargon into more concrete terms, it’s like a factory that is highly profitable in large part because it can dump its toxic waste into the local river. Facebook is designed to do stuff like this.

what’s driving this. It’s built into Facebook’s business model and of a piece with its corporate culture. The business model of Facebook is universal usage. It doesn’t target one demographic or regional or political audience. The whole point of Facebook is that everybody be on it. Much of its network value is bound up in that universality. Everyone’s on Facebook. Everyone has an account.

This business model has critical political implications. Much like a television network, it can’t be perceived as taking sides in America’s increasingly polarized politics. That could cut it off from a big chunk of its potential audience. This fact has shaped the behavior of all of the tech giants over the last decade

Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.

Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?

“There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”

The oceans are warming faster than climate reports have suggested, according to a new synthesis of temperature observations published this week.

“The numbers are coming in 40 to 50 percent [warmer] than the last IPCC report,”

Oceans cover 70 percent of the globe and absorb 93 percent of the planet’s extra heat from climate change.

Deaths are not rising as fast as they are in other states. Dramatic declines in street traffic show that people are staying home. Hospitals have so far not been overwhelmed.

While each infected person was spreading the virus to an average of 2.7 other people earlier in March, that number appears to have dropped, with one projection suggesting that it was now down to 1.4.

The researchers who are preparing the latest projections, led by the Institute for Disease Modeling, a private research group in Bellevue, Wash., have been watching a variety of data points since the onset of the outbreak. They include tens of thousands of coronavirus test results, deaths, and mobility information — including traffic patterns and the movements of anonymous Facebook users — to estimate the rate at which coronavirus patients are spreading the disease to others.

It’s now clear that so many people have died, and so many more are desperately ill, simply because our politicians refused to listen to and act on advice. Scientists like us said lock down earlier; we said test, trace, isolate. But they decided they knew better.

it is the role of policymakers to act on the best available evidence. In the context of a rapidly growing threat, that means listening to experts with experience of responding to previous epidemics.

When I say that politicians “refused to listen”, I am referring to the advice and recommendations coming from the World Health Organization, from China and from Italy. The WHO advice, based on decades of experience and widely accepted by public health leaders and scientists around the world was clear – use every possible tool to suppress transmission. That meant testing and isolating cases, tracing and quarantining contacts, and ramping up hygiene efforts

About four out of five people known to have had the virus had only mild symptoms, and even among those older than 90 in Italy, 78 percent survived.

Two-thirds of those who died in Italy had pre-existing medical conditions and were also elderly

“I’m not pessimistic. I think this can work.” She thinks it will take eight weeks of social distancing to have a chance to slow the virus, and success will depend on people changing behaviors and on hospitals not being overrun. “If warm weather helps, if we can get these drugs, if we can get companies to produce more ventilators, we have a window to tamp this down,”

Now, Ohio may be realizing the benefits of early intervention in the pandemic by its government and medical community. With about 5,100 covid-19 cases, it has fewer than a third the number of people with the novel coronavirus than in three comparably sized states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois. And Ohio has just a small fraction of the deaths reported in those states.

The Cleveland Clinic, which eventually beefed up plans to expand from 3,200 beds to 8,000 should the worst occur, held just 150 covid-19 patients (along with 2,000 others) this week and is preparing to scale back some facilities. It is moving to lend medical personnel to cities such as Detroit and New York hit hard by the virus.

In the Cincinnati region, models now show that peak occupancy of hospital beds by covid-19 patients may be just 10 percent of the predicted worst-case scenario.

ames Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, which examines how the Third Reich found sustenance for its race-based initiatives in American law.

how the United States, a country grounded in such liberal principles as individual rights and the rule of law, could have produced legal ideas and practices “that seemed intriguing and attractive to Nazis.” In exploring this apparent incongruity, his short book raises important questions about law, about political decisions that affect the scope of civic membership, and about the malleability of Enlightenment values.

Pushing back against scholarship that downplays the impact in Nazi Germany of the U.S. model of legal racism, Whitman marshals an array of evidence to support the likelihood “that the Nuremberg Laws themselves reflect direct American influence.”

Our democratic system requires strong-enough economic growth to raise living standards and support activist government. These expectations, present in most advanced democracies, are no longer realistic, because the global economy has changed in ways that reduce growth.

For the United States, Europe and other developed nations, this means that “anything over 1.5 percent [annually] should be seen as healthy,” he says. This would be a big drop for the United States. Since World War II, the American economy has usually grown each year by 3 percent or better.

To be fair, there’s no technical consensus on these issues. Consider another recent report by innovation experts Michael Mandel and Bret Swanson. Contrary to Sharma, they predict a productivity boom that would boost annual U.S. economic growth closer to 3 percent a year — a target of the Trump administration — from the 2 percent of recent years.

For decades throughout the 20th century, it notes, the industrial economy — combined with large federal expenditures, particularly in the South — drove a “great economic convergence,” in which poorer states steadily caught up with better-off ones.

more recently, the development of the knowledge economy, whose benefits are largely concentrated in cosmopolitan hubs, has reversed this trend

Meanwhile, in many red states — mostly in the South — the model of weak unions and low wages, which made them competitive for business inside the national market, is faltering in the face of globalized production.