Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Corporations are paying a lot less in taxes than they used to. Let's figure out why.
Pre-tax profits aren't anywhere near a record, are about as high as
they were for most of the 1940s and 1950s, and are not far above
the highs of the 1960s and 1970s. After-tax profits, on the other
hand, have for most of the past decade-plus been markedly higher
than at any time since 1929, when the top corporate income tax rate
was just 11 percent.
...
But the biggest reason seems to be the explosion in corporation-like
entities that are not, for tax purposes, corporations.
Lack of competition lets them gouge consumers, underpay workers and invest too little.
Since the 1980s, antitrust enforcement has gotten weaker. As a result, a few big companies have managed to capture a much bigger share of the market in various industries. Technology may have helped too, by letting big companies spread their geographic reach, and by creating network effects that keep customers locked in to platforms like Facebook. Anyway, as a result of this increased market power, the big superstar companies have been raising their prices and cutting their wages. This has lifted profits and boosted the stock market, but it has also held down real wages, diverted more of the nation’s income to business owners, and increased inequality. It has also held back productivity, since raising prices restricts economic output.
Simply put, safe email is plain-text email -- showing only the plain words of the message exactly as they arrived, without embedded links or images. Webmail is convenient for advertisers (and lets you write good-looking emails with images and nice fonts), but carries with it unnecessary -- and serious -- danger, because a webpage (or an email) can easily show one thing but do another.
I convert my html email to text with the html to ascii converter vilistextum and 99% of the time there is no loss of important information.
When the creative people move out of a city due to high rents, all that is left are aging landowners, overstretched professionals, and urban slums. It’s no longer a pleasant place to live. Suburbs look a lot better than cities, and given the powerful psychological effect of nature, it’s worth taking that seriously.
Data Reasoning for the Digital Age`
Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.
Russ Roberts thoughts about the current political climate.
So we manage to convince ourselves that the evidence speaks so
loudly, so emphatically, that we have no choice but to declare our
allegiance to a particular tribe as a result of that evidence. The
red tribe. Or the blue one. Or the white one. Or the black one. It
rarely crosses our minds to notice that causation is probably going
the opposite direction--the tribe we are in determines the evidence
we notice and accept.
...
I would summarize these suggestions as saying--when the world
is increasingly uncivilized, take a step toward civility.