Category: Miscellaney Page 7 of 13

“Lawmakers who supported the ban said cashless stores were unintentionally discriminating against people in the community who don’t have debit or credit cards, since they would be unable to make purchases. Cash is also an appealing choice for people who want to keep their purchasing history private from retailers, credit card companies, or perhaps even spouses. It also negates any potential risks, in the event a company is breached and customer information is leaked to hackers. While cash and coins are legal tender, there is no federal law that requires businesses to accept them, according to the Federal Reserve’s website.”

Why the Amazon River Can’t Be Crossed By Bridge

“[T]he Amazon is the world’s longest river not crossed by any bridges… For most of its length, the Amazon isn’t anywhere close to too wide to bridge—in the dry season. But during the rainy season, the river rises thirty feet, and crossings that were once three miles wide can balloon to thirty miles in a matter of weeks. The soft sediment that makes up the river bank is constantly eroding, and the river is often full of debris, including floating vegetation islands called matupás, which can measure up to 10 square acres. It’s a civil engineer’s worst nightmare. But the real reason for the lack of bridges is simply this: the Amazon Basin has very few roads for bridges to connect.”

When you’ve studied stock market charts for three decades, you can’t help but notice that something very peculiar has been happening to the U.S. stock market in recent years. Rather than taking off at the opening bell and holding an upward bias or a downward bias for the balance of the trading day – the way stock markets historically behave – the Dow Jones Industrial Average frequently spends the morning hours rotating between sharp upward spikes and big drops as if an invisible force (say an algorithm, for example, operating in the futures market) has the controls.

“The concept of equilibrium is one of the most central ideas in economics. It is one of the core assumptions in the vast majority of economic models, including models used by policymakers on issues ranging from monetary policy to climate change, trade policy and the minimum wage. But is it a good assumption? In a recently-published Science Advances paper, Marco Pangallo, Torsten Heinrich and Doyne Farmer from the University of Oxford, investigate this question in the simple framework of games, and show that when the game gets complicated this assumption is problematic. If these results carry over from games to economics, this raises deep questions about when economics models are useful to understand the real world.”

“Container ships move things as diverse as clothes, food, furniture, electronics and heavy-industry parts. In the years before the 2008 financial crisis, boxships fueled globalization. Demand for ocean trade rose as much as 8% annually and owners spent billions to buy more vessels. This created loads of excess tonnage that, at the current rate of new ship deliveries, will take at least two years to absorb. It also means that on top of higher fuel expenses, freight rates likely will continue to hover way below break-even levels across some of the biggest ocean trade routes. With China’s economy slowing and shipments taking a hit from the evolving trade war between Washington and Beijing, operators are already cutting their full-year forecasts. ‘We see clearly a global economic growth that is declining,’ Soren Skou, chief executive of A.P. Moller-Maersk AS, the world’s top container operator by capacity, told an investor conference call recently. ‘We see weaknesses, in particular, in China and Europe. We expect container demand growth to fall to 1% to 3% this year from 3.7% to 3.8% last year.’”

Restoring Balance to the Economy

If you have a cell phone, a credit card, or even if you just have a job, there’s a very good chance that you’ve been forced to sign away your right to sue your cell phone company, bank, or boss. Indeed, under the Supreme Court’s forced arbitration cases, your boss may order you to sign away your rights under penalty of termination.

On Thursday, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced legislation called the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (FAIR) Act, which seeks to eliminate many forms of forced arbitration. Though versions of this bill have kicked around Congress for more than a decade — often under the name “Arbitration Fairness Act” — the FAIR Act stands out because of the broad coalition of lawmakers who now support it…. According to the Economic Policy Institute, workers and consumers are significantly less likely to prevail before an arbitrator than before a real judge, and they are awarded significantly less money when they do prevail.

Information Age Dystopia

Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information

“Thanks to a new Vermont law requiring companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the Secretary of State, we’ve been able to assemble a list of 121 data brokers operating in the U.S. It’s a rare, rough glimpse into a bustling economy that operates largely in the shadows, and often with few rules…..”

“All that data can be used to target you with ads, classify the riskiness of your lifestyle, help determine your eligibility for a job. Like the companies themselves, the risks can be hard to see. Apart from the dangers of merely collecting and storing all that data, detailed (and often erroneous) consumer profiles can lead to race or income-based discrimination, in a high-tech version of redlining. Piles of personal data are flowing to political parties attempting to influence your vote and government agencies pursuing non-violent criminal suspects. Meanwhile, people-search websites, accessible to virtually anyone with a credit card, can be a goldmine for doxxers, abusers, and stalkers. (The National Network to End Domestic Violence has assembled a guide to data brokers.)”

Barry Ritholtz, March 6, 2019 [The Big Picture]

Facebook’s new move isn’t about privacy. It’s about domination

Duke University won’t allow a portion of a proposed 7.7-mile light-rail line to pass through its campus. The decision effectively kills the project. GoTriangle is tasked with building the $3.3 billion line that would link UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, downtown Durham and N.C. Central University.

Airbus CEO Tom Enders discusses European aerospace over next 25 Years

Tom Enders, March 5, 2019 [Aviation Week & Space Technology]

In the mid-1990s, European horizons ended at national borders. Industrial consolidation on a national level was well underway—but cross-border cooperation was limited to joint ventures in the fields of missiles, satellites and helicopters. This changed with the big consolidation wave in the U.S., prompted by the “Last Supper”—the U.S. government’s call for restructuring following the drastic decline in U.S. defense budgets after the end of the Cold War. Boeing’s acquisition of McDonnell Douglas sent shockwaves through Europe’s aerospace boardrooms…. Fortunately, Europe’s response was decisive, with the full merger of three “national champions”—France, Germany and Spain—and the transformation of Airbus into a real corporate entity….

The key challenges of the next 25 years will be fundamentally different:

• There will be unprecedented changes in technology that have already started to hit us: digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and biotech. Data will play at least as important a role as propulsion or aerodynamics. The future competitiveness of European aerospace will be determined by our ability to harvest and utilize this data.
• Aerospace companies must adapt to tectonic shifts in the competitive landscape as powerful new players emerge, especially in China but maybe also from other industries. Aerospace is already on the agenda of daring billionaires in the Silicon Valley. What if one of the West Coast giants teams or merges with our biggest competitor?
• People will become even more important. In the era of globalization, competition for the best and brightest—already a scarce resource today—will intensify. And a whole generation of aerospace engineers is about to retire: 30% of Airbus’ workforce will leave in the next 10 years.
• We must speed up our transition toward sustainable flight. Air passenger growth is expected to keep doubling every 15 years. This is a great business prospect, but it is an even more important responsibility.

SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo Departs Space Station
Irene Klotz, March 8, 2019 [Aerospace Daily & Defense Report / Aviation Week and Space Technology

SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon, nearing the end of an unmanned, six-day demonstration mission, undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on March 8, aiming for a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean

Though cargo Dragons have successfully returned from low Earth orbit 17 times since 2010, the new Dragon 2, which is designed to ferry astronauts, has a different, asymmetrically shaped backshell to accommodate eight SuperDraco engines that serve as the capsule’s launch escape system.

Record-breaking device uses sunlight to produce hydrogen at 15% efficiency 

Engineers and scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles are 3D printing mechanical logic gates, the basic building blocks of computers that can performing any kind of math calculations.
These 3D-printed logic gates could be used to build just about anything, researchers said, embedded into any type of architected material and programmed to react to its environment by physically changing shape without the need for electricity. This would make them useful in areas of high radiation, heat, or pressure…. The gates could be useful in rovers sent to hostile environments such as Venus, as well as in low-power computers intended to survive nuclear or electromagnetic pulse blasts.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and engineers combed mechanical computing with 3D printing to create “sentient” materials that respond to changes in their surroundings, even in extreme environments.

Researchers Gauge Cell Stiffness in Search of Disease
[Machine Design Today, 3-6-19]

A cell’s stiffness or elasticity can reveal much about its health. Cancer cells, for instance, are known to be softer than normal, while asthma-affected cells are rather stiff.

This led researchers at MIT to theorize that determining a cell’s mechanical properties of cells may help doctors diagnose and track the progression of certain diseases. Current methods to do this involve directly probing cells with expensive instruments, such as atomic force microscopes and optical tweezers, which make direct, invasive contact with the cells.

Now MIT engineers have devised a way to assess a cell’s mechanical properties simply by observation. The researchers use standard confocal microscopy to zero in on the constant, jiggling motions of a cell’s particles—telltale movements that can be used to decipher a cell’s stiffness. Unlike optical tweezers, the team’s technique is noninvasive, running little risk of altering or damaging a cell while probing its contents.

Groundbreaking research shows that when a zebrafish sleeps, so do its nerve cells – freeing them to focus on repairing their DNA

Disrupting Mainstream Politics

First few paragraphs have the details on how a handful of people, with no knowledge of each other, protesting through social media, sparked the gilets jaunes protests in France in November 2018.

The gilets jaunes are more than a protest. This is a modern-day jacquerie, an emotional wildfire stoked in the provinces and directed against Paris and, most of all, the elite…..

Many have said that the gilets jaunes are merely another “populist movement,” although the term is now so broad that it is nearly meaningless. Comparisons have been made to the Britain of Brexit, the United States of Donald Trump, and especially the Italy of Cinque Stelle. But the crucial difference is that the gilets jaunes are apolitical, and militantly so. They have no official platform, no leadership hierarchy, and no reliable communications. Everyone can speak for the movement, and yet no one can. When a small faction within it fielded a list of candidates for the upcoming European parliamentary elections in May, their sharpest opposition came from within: to many gilets jaunes, the ten who had put their names forward—among them a nurse, a truck driver, and an accountant—were traitors to the cause, having dared to replicate the elite that the rest of the movement disdains….

On the whole, the gilets jaunes are not the poorest members of French society, which is not surprising. As Tocqueville remarked, revolutions are fueled not by those who suffer the most, but by those whose economic status has been improving and who then experience a sudden and unexpected fall. So it seems with the gilets jaunes: most live above the poverty line but come from the precarious ranks of the lower middle class, a group that aspires to middle-class stability and seeks to secure it through palliative consumption: certain clothing brands, the latest iPhone, the newest television….

There is an aspect of entitlement to the gilets jaunes, who are also protesting what the French call déclassement, the increasing elusiveness of the middle-class dream in a society in which economic growth has not kept pace with population increase. This entitlement appears to have alienated the gilets jaunes from immigrants and people of color, who are largely absent from their ranks and whose condition is often materially worse….

The gilets jaunes have no substantive ideas: resentment does not an ideology make. They remain a combustible vacuum, and extremist agitators on the far right and the far left have sought to capitalize on their anger. Both Marine Le Pen of the recently renamed Rassemblement National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the left-wing La France Insoumise have tried hard to channel the movement’s grassroots energy into their own political parties, but the gilets jaunes have so far resisted these entreaties….

The intellectual void at the heart of an amorphous movement can easily fill with the hatred of an “other.” That may already be happening to the gilets jaunes….

“The majority of America’s largest companies are incorporated in Delaware, and its Supreme Court chief justice, Leo E. Strine, Jr., is a highly influential and outspoken voice on corporate law…. ‘When people talk Bernie Sanders as if he’s a communist, they show a profound ignorance’ of the market and of history, Strine said. He added that while he doesn’t agree with all of Sanders’ proposals, they’re not actually radical from a historical or global perspective. Per Strine, Sanders is actually a centrist by the standards of some of our closest and most prosperous European allies.”

“A generation of organizers and activists who have come of age post-Occupy are articulating visions for transforming the United States, including the relationship of the state to its constituents, and of human communities to each other and the planet. We should all—politicians, professionals, students, engaged community members—embrace the challenge posed by social movements rather than seek to deflect it, as Feinstein did in the meeting with her young constituents. For too long, the agendas of politicians on the center-left have been dominated by top-down, expert-driven, single issue forms of lawmaking supported by sporadic popular mobilization. Think of the Center for American Progress or MoveOn.org as the prototypical institutions oriented toward liberal legislative action in the last two decades. This was the approach used by the Obama Administration to pass its two historic legislative achievements, the Affordable Care Act and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That formula—supported in part by corporate donors to the Democratic Party— tamps down anger with the way things are and prevents people from calling out their enemies in the new American oligarchy. The D.C. “policy-industrial complex” co-opts popular sentiment, demands specific policy proposals, embraces and internalizes public austerity values, and advances their own non-universal half-measures that do not threaten donor interests on Wall Street or in the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, for example.”

“They Are Not All Going to Be Able to Raise Enough”: Elizabeth Warren’s Rookie Mistake Foreshadows a 2020 Money War

“During his first visit to South Carolina last month as an official Democratic candidate for president, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker didn’t spend all his time in the cities with the largest media markets. He didn’t make public appearances with South Carolina’s best-connected Democratic “gatekeepers” — such as Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin or former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler — who are often called upon to introduce candidates to voters in the “First in the South” 2020 primary state. Instead, the New Jersey lawmaker held forums at rural high schools and colleges, tailoring a national policy platform to people in the room who were worried about access to hospitals, clean drinking water and reliable Broadband.”

Trump’s Judicial Nominees Aren’t Just Ideologues. They’re Really Young.

A motion to recommit is a privileged motion for the House minority — Republicans, these days — giving them an opportunity to amend a bill on the House floor when they otherwise have very little influence in the majoritarian chamber. The minority usually does offer such a motion whenever a bill comes up for a vote on the floor, but they historically almost always fail because the majority will vote the motion down.

The procedural arcana has escalated into a major story for two reasons, it seems: Republicans are being very aggressive and a little clever in the motions that they make, and green House Democrats have gotten mixed signals from leadership about how they should vote on these motions….

The problem had already been simmering for weeks. Politico reported earlier this month these procedural votes were becoming a headache for Pelosi; Democrats kept losing some of their members to the Republicans on them. Democrats actually decided to support one Republican motion en masse, condemning anti-Semitism on an otherwise unrelated bill a few weeks ago, the first successful motion to recommit since 2010.
One handy chart, from Catholic University professor Matthew Green, shows the escalating problem: