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Javier E

The Disturbing New Facts About American Capitalism - WSJ - 0 views

  • “Let your winners run” is one of the oldest adages in investing. One of the newest ideas is that the winners may be running away with everything.
  • Modern capitalism is built on the idea that as companies get big, they become fat and happy, opening themselves up to lean and hungry competitors that can underprice and overtake them. That cycle of creative destruction may be changing in ways that help explain the seemingly unstoppable rise of the stock market.
  • U.S. companies are moving toward a winner-take-all system in which giants get stronger, not weaker, as they expand.
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  • That’s the latest among several recent studies by economists working independently, all arriving at similar findings: A few “superstar firms” have grown to dominate their industries, crowding out competitors and controlling markets to a degree not seen in many decades.
  • The U.S. had more than 7,000 public companies 20 years ago, the professors say; nowadays, it’s fewer than 4,000.
  • Consider real-estate services. In 1997, according to Profs. Grullon, Larkin and Michaely, that sector had 42 publicly traded companies; the four largest generated 49% of the group’s total revenue. By 2014, only 20 public firms were left, and the top four— CBRE Group, Jones Lang LaSalle, Realogy Holdings and Wyndham Worldwide—commanded 78% of the group’s combined revenue.
  • Or look at supermarkets. In 1997, there were 36 publicly traded companies in that industry, with the top four accounting for more than half of total sales. By 2014, only 11 were left. The top four—Kroger, Supervalu, Whole Foods Market and Roundy’s (since acquired by Kroger)—held 89% of the pie.
  • Let’s look beyond such obvious winner-take-all examples as Apple or Alphabet, the parent of Google.
  • The winners are also grabbing most of the profits
  • At the end of 1996, the 25 companies in the S&P 500 with the highest net profit margins—income as a percentage of revenue—earned a median of just under 21 cents on every dollar of sales. Last year, the top 25 such companies earned a median of 39 cents on the dollar.
  • Two decades ago, the median net margin among all S&P 500 members was 6.7%. By the end of 2016, that had increased to 9.7%.
  • So while companies as a whole became more profitable over the past 20 years, the winners have become vastly more profitable, nearly doubling the gains they got on each dollar of sales.
  • Why might it be easier now for winners to take all? Prof. Michaely suggests two theories. Declining enforcement of antitrust rules has led to bigger mergers, less competition and higher profits.
  • The other is technology. “If you want to compete with Google or Amazon,” he says, “you’ll have to invest not just billions, but tens of billions of dollars.”
  • Still, history offers a warning. Many times in the past, winners have taken all but seldom for long.
Javier E

Marginal Revolution: Winner take-all economics - 0 views

  • The top 1 percent, for instance, has gone from capturing about 8 percent of the national income to 18 percent. But there's no obvious skills differential between workers in the top 1 percent and the workers directly beneath them
  • In a winner-take all economy, however, small differences in skills can mean large differences in returns and we have moved towards a winner take-all economy because technology has increased the size of the market that can be served by a single person or firm.
  • Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy.  And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling's words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere - this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.
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  • Time is limited and people want to read the same books that their friends are reading so book publishing has a winner-take all component.  Thus, greater leverage brings greater inequality.  The average writer's income hasn't gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires.  The top pulls away from the median.   
  • The same forces that have generated greater inequality in writing - the leveraging of intellect, the declining importance of physical labor in the production of value, cultural and economic globalization - are at work throughout the economy.  Thus, if you really want to understand inequality today you must first understand Harry Potter.
fischerry

Why are Nobel Prize winners getting older? - BBC News - 0 views

  • The 2016 Nobel laureates for physics, medicine and chemistry: all men, at least 65 years old and mostly over 72.
  •  
    This article talks about how the nobel prize winners are getting older, and what this means, and why this is. 
katyshannon

Who are the winners and losers of the COP21's climate deal? - CBS News - 0 views

  • "The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
  • But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?
  • On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)
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  • To achieve this goal, countries that signed on to the agreement promised that they would focus on cultivating clean, renewable energy sources and shift from the use of fossil fuels. They will also be required to report on their progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions every five years.
  • The deal also commits countries to deliver $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries by 2020, with a promise to increase financing in the future.
  • In a preamble, the deal doubles down on a pledge made six years ago, that richer, industrialized countries will contribute at least $100 billion of aid a year to poorer nations to help them battle the effects of climate change by 2020. It also promises that countries will consider increases to that amount in the future.
  • So there may be many vested parties with a stake in the climate change deal -- but there are also a few key winners and losers. We take a look at them here:
  • According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's (IDMC) 2015 Global Estimates report, "an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards" since 2008. These threatened populations are largely found in developing countries, which tend to be more vulnerable to rises in sea level, droughts, and floods.
  • The climate accord in Paris, however, have many in the developing world cheering.
  • According to President Obama, the targets are bold, but they also empower "businesses, scientists, engineers, workers, and the private sector -- investors -- to work together."
  • Mohamed Adow, senior climate change adviser from the disaster relief agency Christian Aid, told CBS News that this is one of the most important aspects of the COP21 accord: the promise provides poorer nations with the "assurance that the international community will not leave developing countries to deal with climate impact."
  • Some nations were not entirely satisfied with the final language -- there is still, after all, no legally binding provision that holds industrialized countries to this pledge for "adaptation" funds -- but nonetheless, Adow said, it gives significant hope to those countries hit especially hard with the threat of displaced citizens.
  • In fact, the aid money already seems to be flowing in light of the Paris negotiations: early this week, the U.S. promised to double its own aid to affected countries to $861 million as part of last-ditch efforts to push the climate deal through.
  • The effects of climate change in poor and developing nations also pose an increasing terror threat to the United States -- a connection that President Obama has made in the past, when he called global warming "an economic and security imperative" just weeks after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.
  • As Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders explained it on CBS' "Face the Nation" in November: "If we are going to see an increase in drought, in flood, and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that people all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources... When people migrate into cities and they don't have jobs, there's going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment, and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al Qaeda and ISIS are using right now."
  • Military reports have also viewed climate change as a "catalyst for conflict," and the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review last year dubbed its effects as "threat multipliers" that ultimately lead to "conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."
  • But the climate change deal seeks to mitigate these possible conflict catalysts so that "countries that don't have the resources to address these problems head on, now will," Jon Powers, who served the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer and Special Advisor on Energy to the U.S. Army in the Obama Administration, told CBS News.
  • One important target put forth by the deal was to ensure that parties would "undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century."
  • Here, the deal aims to strangle heavy carbon-emitting industries -- the "anthropogenic emissions" -- and cut down on total fossil fuels burned worldwide. Importantly, it's also a nod to investment in and development of new technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air.
  • U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told CNBC in an interview, "We recognize fossil fuels will continue to be a part of the portfolio for quite a long time," but that the popularity of other power sources are on the rise.
  • "Wind energy has gone up by several fold just in the last five to six years," Moniz said, "and now (wind) provides about 4.5 percent of our electricity. You add that with solar, we're talking 5 percent."
  • Kathleen McLaughlin, the chief sustainability officer for Walmart, said in a statement that the company would "support the U.N.'s call for the U.S. corporate sector to commit to science-based targets to reduce emissions."
  • Ahead of the Paris summit, China -- the world's biggest coal consumer -- said it would aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly two-thirds of its 2005 levels. In the past, international monitoring of those numbers would have been difficult to do, but the COP21 deal changes that.
  • The agreement holds nations accountable for reporting their progress on their climate goals in a global "stocktake" every five years starting in 2023. It also means countries will be monitoring, verifying and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions in a single accounting system.
  • According to one report released last month by the carbon investment think tank Carbon Tracker, fossil fuel companies could risk over $2 trillion dollars of current and future projects being left valueless as the market for fossil fuels narrows with recent global climate change action.
aidenborst

Ranked choice voting: Why the process could take weeks to deliver New York City primary results - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Democrats running for New York City mayor will square off in a crucial debate Wednesday night, but they won't just be trying to convince voters that they're the best candidate for the job -- being someone's second, third, fourth or even fifth favorite could be almost as good.
  • Unlike past elections, Big Apple voters will pick their party nominees for mayor on June 22 using ranked-choice voting, and it could take weeks to determine the winners.
  • This will be the first time voters will be able to rank their top five choices in order of preference for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and city council instead of selecting just one candidate for each spot.
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  • As of Tuesday, 152,817 absentee ballots had been sent out by elections officials. Citywide, more than 12,000 had already been returned.
  • To calculate the winner, the first-choice votes of each ballot are counted. If no one receives a majority of the vote (which is unlikely in such a large field), the candidate with the least support is eliminated from contention, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to whomever the voter marked as their second choice. That process continues until a winner is determined.
  • The stakes are high. Thirteen candidates are running for the Democratic nomination for mayor, with the winner heavily favored in November's general election. (Two Republicans are vying for their party's nomination.)
  • Almost three-quarters of New York City voters picked ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections in a 2019 referendum.
  • While the system is new to New York, it's been used in other places for years, according to FairVote, an organization that advocates for election reforms. New York City is the largest jurisdiction in the country to adopt ranked-choice voting, but it's been used for congressional and presidential elections in Maine since 2018. Alaska will begin using it next year.
  • "In order to do this process in the best way, we need to balance the public's right to know who won the election and the individual voter's right to cast absentee and affidavit ballots that will be counted and counted in an anonymous manner," Frederic Umane, the election board's president, said at a meeting last week.
  • Under the old system, if no primary candidate won 40% of the vote, the top two advanced to a runoff.November's general election will not use ranked-choice voting.
  • In April, the city launched a $15 million voter education plan, including advertising and community outreach.
  • In a statement announcing the initiative, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to a "full court press to ensure every New Yorker has the information they need to make their voice heard."
  • "Studies have shown that a disproportionate number of Black Democrats, particularly older voters, vote for only one candidate, so a Black candidate that finishes ahead with first place votes can ultimately lose if White voters fully avail themselves of the RCV option," Hazel wrote. "In essence, those votes by White voters would count more than the older Black single candidate voters since the Black voters' second choices would not come into play."
  • Despite those concerns, Dukes wrote that she was committed to helping educate voters about the process to "ensure voters know what to expect when they go to the polls this June."
  • "We're hoping that it will be a positive experience in the end," Quigg said. "That people can see 'maybe my first choice candidate didn't win, but hey look my second or third choice candidate won and so that effort that I put into figuring that out made a difference.'"
  • "I think a lot of a lot of voters have sort of 2020 fatigue, if you will and are frankly, still a little traumatized from that election cycle. So, you know, a lot of people just haven't really been tuning in yet," she said. "I think a lot of New Yorkers want to participate, but they just need to know about it and they need to know that it's actually not that complicated."
malonema1

Jeremy Corbyn Lost U.K. Election, but Is Still Its Biggest Winner - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Jeremy Corbyn Lost U.K. Election, but Is Still Its Biggest Winner
  • It was a scathing put-down. “He can lead a protest, I’m leading the country,” Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said about the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.Over the past seven weeks, Mr. Corbyn led the protest of his life. As Mrs. May faltered, stumbling her way toward an election she herself had called, the veteran left winger and serial campaigner turned his party into a movement.
  • Mr. Corbyn did lose the election. But he won more than anyone else. He deprived the prime minister who had treated him with such dismissiveness of both her Parliamentary majority and her authority. Far from obliterating Labour, he re-energized it, shifting its politics far to the left.
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  • A five-time winner of the parliamentary beard of the year, Mr. Corbyn is Britain’s Bernie Sanders, another grizzled firebrand who inspired a generation of young voters to become politicized and, at least this week, turn out to vote. Mr. Corbyn’s fans call themselves Corbynistas.
  • In 2015, after more than three decades as a lawmaker, he had to be persuaded to stand for the party leadership, agreeing only reluctantly and in order to enable the left to present a candidate. No one, not even Mr. Corbyn himself, expected him to win. If ever there were an accidental leader, he is it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Labour “bet the farm” on increasing the turnout among young voters by promising to abolish student tuition, at a cost of 11 billion pounds, Mr. Fielding said. “It gave a very tangible retail offer to young voters — the first time young
  • voters have been given this.”
  • Mr. Corbyn grew up in a political household (his parents met during the Spanish Civil War) and was himself galvanized into activism by the Vietnam War and environmental issues, particularly his opposition to nuclear power — and Britain’s nuclear deterrent policy.
  • With his core vote for now still far to the left of Middle England, Mr. Corbyn seems unlikely ever to run Britain. But that may not trouble a man who, almost uniquely among prominent politicians, shows few signs of wanting power, at least in any personal sense.
  • “I want to be in government so that we can conquer the housing crisis in Britain,” he said. “I want to be in government so that people get a real chance in life.”
Javier E

A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? | WIRED - 0 views

  • Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse. That wasn’t entirely bad, he argued. He hoped the few surviving humans would band together in small, tribal-style clusters. They wouldn’t be just off the grid. There would be no grid. Which was dandy, as far as Sale was concerned.
  • “History is full of civilizations that have collapsed, followed by people who have had other ways of living,” Sale said. “My optimism is based on the certainty that civilization will collapse.”
  • Sale was a bit taken aback—he’d never put a date on it. Finally, he blurted out 2020. It seemed like a good round number.
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  • Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right.Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
  • “I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” he said.
  • Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn’t been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year.
  • When Sale and Kelly made the bet, they had assumed that by 2020 the winner would be obvious. Maybe all it would take was a look around: Is civilization still here, or not? It clearly is still kicking around. But the pandemic, its economic consequences, and the worsening climate crisis have made things interesting. What would Patrick say?
  • That’s what Patrick had to determine. In early December he began writing up his decision. Despite his wariness toward tech, he had no intention of jumping on the current techlash bandwagon. Instead, the bet was constructed on three clear conditions, and Patrick would consider each one separately, as if judging a boxing match round by round.
  • Round by round, the outcome would seem to make it a draw. But when making the final call, Patrick stuck to the language of the original bet. In that fateful Greenwich Village encounter, Sale called for a convergence of three disasters. “Kirk must hit the trifecta to win, meaning that all three horses of his apocalypse must come through,” Patrick wrote. “Only one of his predictions was a winner; one came in neck and neck; and one was way back in the pack.”
  • So on December 31, Patrick declared Kelly the winner in an email to the bettors. “But it’s a squeaker and not much cause for celebration,” he concluded.
martinelligi

Trump, Biden camps duel over possibility of a winner being declared on Election Night | Fox News - 0 views

  • President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaigns sparred Monday over the possibility of a winner being declared on Election Night, with Trump’s campaign accusing Democrats of wanting to “delegitimize” votes and Biden’s campaign saying there’s “no scenario” the race will be called for Trump on Tuesday evening.
  • “Biden’s political operatives have already been distributing talking points and research to delegitimize Election Day results by coaching surrogates to refer to the President’s Election Day success as a ‘Red Mirage,’” Clark said. “The operatives are advising surrogates and media to create a smoke screen by casting blame all around—imaging postal delays or falsely claiming that mail-in ballots that have simply not been returned should be considered legitimate votes that need to be counted.”
  • The Trump campaign added that they are “on guard for Democrat’s to attempt to subvert state declines for receiving and counting ballots and we will fight to make sure they adhere to the law.”
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  • But the Biden campaign on Monday fired back, saying that “under no scenario” could Trump be declared a victor on Election Night, citing historic early voter turnout, and the way in which states count votes.
  • Republicans, for their part, warn there is a potential for widespread fraud and confusion in November’s election due to the unprecedented scale of mail-in ballots in states across the nation.
woodlu

How to predict winners at the winter Olympics | The Economist - 0 views

  • The strongest countries have arrived with ambitious medal targets and will be keeping track of their chances of matching those tallies throughout the games. Until recently working out who was likely to win an Olympic event was a guessing game based on hunches and limited data.
  • Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.
  • The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.
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  • A handful of financial institutions produced them when Rio de Janeiro hosted in 2016, using a mixture of macroeconomic indicators and performances at previous Olympics to forecast total medal hauls for each country.
  • Gracenote’s distinguishing feature is the ability to produce quantitative analysis for each event.
  • The company has created a performance index that tracks around 500 events across the various sports in the summer and winter Olympic programmes.
  • Gracenote still uses the old system to produce its public medal table, which also deals in absolute forecasts, rather than fractional ones. If a French athlete, say, is the most likely to win an event, France gets awarded one gold medal in the table, even though the true probability of the athlete winning gold is less than 100% and his chances of claiming silver and bronze are greater than 0%.
  • the Elo rating system, which was developed for chess by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian physicist. The formula exchanges ranking points from the loser to the winner, with greater rewards for beating stronger opponents. The difference in ratings points between two rivals can be easily used to calculate the probability that one will beat the other.
  • Yet only two events on the winter Olympics programme, curling and ice hockey, involve head-to-head contests.
  • Gracenote devised an Elo-style mechanism with modifications. Rather than simply measuring whether an athlete wins or loses a competition, the system predicts the share of opponents that he beats. If he finishes higher than expected, based on his previous rating and the strength of the field for the competition in question, his rating improves.
  • Those that compete in teams have their scores blended with their compatriots. And for those that participate in a number of events, such as Ms Dahlmeier, results in related disciplines affect multiple ratings. A strong performance in the biathlon sprint, a group race, would boost her ranking in the pursuit, a staggered race, for example.
  • The best way to answer that question is to take every previous contest in the sport and analyse how past results correlate with future success.
  • The bans have benefited Norway most, as the country will likely gain of the five of the 12 foregone medals—enough to nudge it ahead of Germany into first place in terms of total medals won.
  • Mr Gleave notes that the favourite only wins about 30% of the time, a lower share than in any other winter sport. Ms Dahlmeier’s rating has dwindled a little, but not by enough to suggest that last year’s record breaker has become this year’s flop.
  • Gracenote’s research into age curves for each sport shows that the best biathletes can maintain their peak performance into their early 30s (see chart). Expect to see more event-by-event forecasting at future Olympics, too.
Javier E

All the Trump Indictments Everywhere All at Once - 0 views

  • Here’s Furman:There’s what economists think people should think about inflation—and what people actually think about inflation are different. . . .Inflation has big winners and losers. So surprise inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors. And there are probably tens of millions of people in our economy who have benefited from inflation. Maybe it’s a business that was able to raise prices more. Maybe a worker who was able to get a bigger raise. Maybe it’s someone whose mortgage is now worth 10 percent less.But there are not tens of millions of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation. In fact, I’m not sure there are tens of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation.And so it has these winners and losers. The losers are very aware of their losses. The winners are completely oblivious to their gains.So then as a policymaker, do you want to sort of make people happy? Or do you want to sort of do what you think is in their economic and financial interests? And that to me is not obvious.
  • Oh it’s obvious to me. The People are the problem.But they’re a persistent problem and until the AIs replace us, The People aren’t going away. So given this constraint, I’m not sure that an optimal solution is ever going to be politically possible in American democracy. The country is too fractured. Our political institutions too compromised.
  • so if you work from the assumption that we’re going to shoot wide of the mark in one direction or the other, I’d still rather be on the Trump-Biden side of having done too much, and dealing with our attendant problems than the Bush-Obama side of having done too little.
Javier E

The real winner of the 'Hamilton' scrap - The Washington Post - 1 views

  • My own Twitter feed has been full of triumphant liberals celebrating the theater’s revived ability to effect political change and unmask Trump as a tetchy crybully; and triumphant conservatives celebrating how smug, moralizing and clueless this whole incident revealed liberals to be.
  • Both sides had so much fun patting themselves on the back that they sometimes failed to notice how much attention they drew away from the Trump University fraud settlement, the legalized bribery happening as foreign diplomats book stays at Trump-owned hotels, and rabidly bad administration picks.
  • no matter how unfailingly polite and pointed the production crafted its statement to be, when those words came on the heels of audience jeers, they still unwittingly played directly into Trump’s hands.
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  • This, I fear, will be the central challenge of mounting an effective opposition to Trump in the years ahead. Like Silvio Berlusconi, Trump has an uncanny instinct for setting off a “Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents,” as economist Luigi Zingales recently put it, which only strengthens him.
  • Calling out injustice always feels like the righteous thing to do. The uncomfortable question for Trump’s opponents in the years ahead now must be: How do we call out injustice, without unintentionally reinforcing it?
Javier E

Trade and Tribulation - The New York Times - 0 views

  • if protectionism really is becoming an important political force, how should reasonable people — economists and others — respond?
  • To make sense of the debate over trade, there are three things you need to know.
  • The first is that we have gotten to where we are — a largely free-trade world — through a generations-long process of international diplomacy, going all the way back to F.D.R. This process combines a series of quid pro quos — I’ll open my markets if you open yours — with rules to prevent backsliding.
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  • what the models of international trade used by real experts say is that, in general, agreements that lead to more trade neither create nor destroy jobs; that they usually make countries more efficient and richer, but that the numbers aren’t huge; and that they can easily produce losers as well as winners
  • In principle the overall gains mean that the winners could compensate the losers, so that everyone gains. In practice, especially given the scorched-earth obstructionism of the G.O.P., that’s not going to happen.
  • Why, then, did we ever pursue these agreements? A large part of the answer is foreign policy: Global trade agreements from the 1940s to the 1980s were used to bind democratic nations together during the Cold War, Nafta was used to reward and encourage Mexican reformers, and so on.
  • And anyone ragging on about those past deals, like Mr. Trump or Mr. Sanders, should be asked what, exactly, he proposes doing now. Are they saying that we should rip up America’s international agreements? Have they thought about what that would do to our credibility and standing in the world?
  • The most a progressive can responsibly call for, I’d argue, is a standstill on further deals, or at least a presumption that proposed deals are guilty unless proved innocent.
  • The larger point in this election season is, however, that politicians should be honest and realistic about trade, rather than taking cheap shots. Striking poses is easy; figuring out what we can and should do is a lot harder. But you know, that’s a would-be president’s job
Javier E

Essay-Grading Software, as Teacher's Aide - Digital Domain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • AS a professor and a parent, I have long dreamed of finding a software program that helps every student learn to write well. It would serve as a kind of tireless instructor, flagging grammatical, punctuation or word-use problems, but also showing the way to greater concision and clarity.
  • The standardized tests administered by the states at the end of the school year typically have an essay-writing component, requiring the hiring of humans to grade them one by one.
  • the Hewlett Foundation sponsored a study of automated essay-scoring engines now offered by commercial vendors. The researchers found that these produced scores effectively identical to those of human graders.
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  • humans are not necessarily ideal graders: they provide an average of only three minutes of attention per essa
  • We are talking here about providing a very rough kind of measurement, the assignment of a single summary score on, say, a seventh grader’s essay
  • “A few years back, almost all states evaluated writing at multiple grade levels, requiring students to actually write,” says Mark D. Shermis, dean of the college of education at the University of Akron in Ohio. “But a few, citing cost considerations, have either switched back to multiple-choice format to evaluate or have dropped writing evaluation altogether.”
  • As statistical models for automated essay scoring are refined, Professor Shermis says, the current $2 or $3 cost of grading each one with humans could be virtually eliminated, at least theoretically.
  • As essay-scoring software becomes more sophisticated, it could be put to classroom use for any type of writing assignment throughout the school year, not just in an end-of-year assessment. Instead of the teacher filling the essay with the markings that flag problems, the software could do so. The software could also effortlessly supply full explanations and practice exercises that address the problems — and grade those, too.
  • the cost of commercial essay-grading software is now $10 to $20 a student per year. But as the technology improves and the costs drop, he expects that it will be incorporated into the word processing software that all students use
  • “Providing students with instant feedback about grammar, punctuation, word choice and sentence structure will lead to more writing assignments,” Mr. Vander Ark says, “and allow teachers to focus on higher-order skills.”
  • When sophisticated essay-evaluation software is built into word processing software, Mr. Vander Ark predicts “an order-of-magnitude increase in the amount of writing across the curriculum.”
  • the essay-scoring software that he and his teammates developed uses relatively small data sets and ordinary PCs — so the additional infrastructure cost for schools could be nil.
  • the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate.
  • wanted to create a neutral and fair platform to assess the various claims of the vendors. It turns out the claims are not hype.”
Brian Zittlau

The Undeserving Rich - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more).
  • I’ve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.
  • What’s wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that don’t exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities? Even social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic phenomena: nothing takes a toll on family values like lack of employment opportunities.But the main thing about this myth is that it misidentifies the winners from growing inequality. White-collar professionals, even if married to each other, are only doing O.K. The big winners are a much smaller group. The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the “1 percent,” which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.
Javier E

The most expensive lottery ticket in the world | Felix Salmon - 0 views

  • No Exit, the new book from Gideon Lewis-Kraus, should be required reading for anybody who thinks it might be a good idea to found a startup in Silicon Valley. It shows just how miserable the startup founder’s life is
  • Silicon Valley is gripped by a mass delusion, compounded by a deep “fake it til you make it” attitude toward success. Why do so many people in Silicon Valley want to be founders? Because every founder they meet is always killing it, crushing it, having massive success, just about to close a huge round, etc etc
  • people tend to believe the evidence of their own eyes, and what they see is a combination of two things: the founders they know all seemingly doing great, and also a steady stream of headlines showing other founders cashing out for millions or even billions of dollars.
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  • No Exit makes it very clear that the life of a startup founder is a miserable one, and that engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company.
  • Financially, starting up a company in Silicon Valley makes very little sense. You have a very high chance (indeed, a certainty) of having to scrape by on a very low income in a very expensive city. At a time of your life when you should be out enjoying life and meeting friends and generally having lots of fun, you will instead be unhappily tethered to your laptop at all times. In return for sacrificing a six-figure salary elsewhere and general enjoyment of life, you’re given a lottery ticket: you get a minuscule chance of making untold millions of dollars.
  • So where does it come from, this intense Silicon Valley desire to buy the most expensive lottery ticket in the world?
  • The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum. Even on a purely financial basis, if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones. A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money.
  • Essentially the way that the startup ecosystem works is by taking the valuable labor of thousands of hopeful founders, and converting it into large amounts of capital for a tiny number of successes
  • On its face, the winners, here, are the people with the big successful exits. But after reading No Exit, a different conclusion presents itself. The real winners are the happy and well-paid engineers, enjoying their lives and their youth while working for great companies like Google. In the world of startups, the only winning move is not to play.
  • Everything in American culture would lead one to think that it is easy to launch a new restaurant, hair salon, company, or fill in the blank. I wouldn’t go so far to say that those who do it have a false sense of entitlement – but there’s seemingly no sense of contentment in being a no. 2 or lower in a company.
  • most of the website or mobile app start-ups that you guys in the general media (I will lazily generalize like you all do and lump you all together) lazily or ignorantly refer to as “tech” or “silicon valley” are not founded by computer engineers. They are started by coders, which are a couple notches below computer engineers on the knowledge and experience scale. They are willing to forego a big steady paycheck because they are short on knowledge and experience, and are not usually “incredibly qualified engineers – in fact, they are mostly just qualified to work on mobile apps and economically unsustainable web start-ups. Their value to established companies that need to develop products that generate revenue and profits is questionable, at best.
  • I don’t know if you have ever worked for a very large multi-national company that compartmentalizes your job into little tasks so that your skills can be exploited for a few years, and then discarded when they are obsolete. Many big companies are poorly managed, and while they may offer stable employment in the short term, when the errors of their executives impose their costs on the company, the employees usually pay the price. And then what do they do? People who avoid working for large companies and seek the excitement of start-ups have a different value system than you and all those who would choose the illusion of job security.
Javier E

What If Everybody Didn't Have to Work to Get Paid? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Santens, for his part, believes that job growth is no longer keeping pace with automation, and he sees a government-provided income as a viable remedy. “It’s not just a matter of needing basic income in the future; we need it now,” says Santens, who lives in New Orleans. “People don’t see it, but we are already seeing the effects all around us, in the jobs and pay we take, the hours we accept, the extremes inequality is reaching, and in the loss of consumer spending power.”
  • People in other countries, especially in safety-net-friendly Europe, seem more open to the idea of a basic income than people in the U.S. The Swiss are considering a basic income proposal. Most of the candidates in Finland’s upcoming parliamentary elections support the idea
  • But in the U.S., the issue is still a political non-starter for mainstream politicians, due to lingering suspicions about the fairness and practicality of a basic income, as well as a rejection of the premise that automation is actually erasing white-collar jobs.
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  • the stories told by the winners are inspiring. For example, one recipient is using his newfound freedom to write his dissertation. Another winner quit his job at a call center to study and become a teacher. Perhaps one anonymous commentator summed it up best: “I did not realize how unfree we all are.”
  • “The sad reality is that a lot of the people who will most need a basic income are not likely to generate a lot of sympathy among volunteer donors,” Ford says. “You see this already with charitable giving—people will give for families, children, and pets—but not so much for single homeless men.” Ford cautions against what he calls the “libertarian/techno-optimistic fantasy” of a private market solution. “Government, for all its deficiencies, is going to be the only real tool in the toolbox here.”
Javier E

Fury Shakes the Iowa Caucuses, Boosting Ted Cruz While Slowing Hillary Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • it sent a forceful message to Democratic leaders that it was unwilling to put aside its resentment of Wall Street and corporate America to crown a lifelong party insider who has amassed millions in speaking fees from the big banks.
  • voters are united in an impatience, even a revulsion, at what they see as a rigged system that no longer works for them.
  • For Republicans, the enemy is an overreaching government, strangling their freedoms and pocketbooks.
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  • For Democrats, it is an unfair economy, shrinking their paychecks and aspirations.
  • “It’s striking,” Mr. Gergen said, “that the winner of the Republican side represents the far right and the moral winner for the Democrats comes from the far left. It’s a clear vote of no confidence in the economic order.”
  • a disappointed-looking Ms. Clinton raised her voice to a near yell as she tried to demonstrate her own conviction. But she offered oddly little direct assuagement to the unsettled working class that still craves her assurance.That task fell instead, as it has throughout the campaign, to Mr. Sanders, Mrs. Clinton’s ultraliberal rival, whose denunciations of greedy plutocrats and an unfair economy are at the center of his message. “Given the enormous crisis facing our country,” he said here after voting had concluded, “it is just too late for establishment politicians and establishment economics.”
zachcutler

Marco Rubio defends Donald Trump attacks - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Florida Sen. Marco Rubio defended his position in the Republican presidential race, insisting his campaign doesn't ride on whether he wins his home state's March 15 winner-take-all primary.
  • "I don't want us to have a president that we constantly have to be explaining to our kids, 'Look, I know that's what the president did, but you shouldn't do that.' I don't want that," Rubio said.
  • "I didn't get into this to beat up on other candidates, I really didn't," Rubio said. He ticked off Trump's positions on Planned Parenthood, Israel and health care -- and added that a year ago, he'd have wondered, "on what planet would that be the Republican front-runner?"
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  • The Florida senator wouldn't say whether he has asked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- a one-time presidential rival -- for his endorsement ahead of Florida's 99-delegate, winner-take-all primary.
  • During the interview, Rubio also pledged he wouldn't nominate anyone for the Supreme Court in the last year of his tenure in the Oval Office if he's elected -- saying that President Barack Obama shouldn't fill deceased Justice Antonin Scalia's seat.
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