Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits.
Almost none of these stories will explain how these shortages and
price hikes were also brought to life through bad public policy
coupled with decades of corporate greed. We spent a half-century
allowing business executives and financiers to take control of our
supply chains, enabled by leaders in both parties. They all hailed
the transformation, cheering the advances of globalization, the
efficient network that would free us from want. Motivated by greed
and dismissive of the public interest, they didn't mention that
their invention was supremely ill-equipped to handle inevitable
supply bottlenecks. And the pandemic exposed this hidden risk,
like a domino bringing down a system primed to topple.
...
THE ROOTS OF THE SUPPLY SHOCK lie in a basic bargain made between
government and big business, on behalf of the American people but
without their consent. In 1970, Milton Friedman argued in The New
York Times that "the social responsibility of business is to
increase its profits." Manufacturers used that to rationalize
a financial imperative to benefit shareholders by seeking the
lowest-cost labor possible. As legendary General Electric CEO
Jack Welch put it, "Ideally, you'd have every plant you own
on a barge," able to escape any nation's wage, safety, or
environmental laws.
Evidence from a modern-day prohibition.
This paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a lower bound on the true impact of alcohol on injury-induced mortality. We also document a sharp drop in violent crimes, indicating a tight link between alcohol and aggressive behavior in society. Our results underscore the severe harm that alcohol can cause and point towards a role for policy measures that target the heaviest drinkers in society.
But the latest Bing follow-up study, by a team of researchers that included Mischel, casts doubt that a preschooler's response to a marshmallow test can predict anything at all about her future.
Following the Bing children into their 40s, the new study finds that kids who quickly gave in to the marshmallow temptation are generally no more or less financially secure, educated or physically healthy than their more patient peers. The amount of time the child waited to eat the treat failed to forecast roughly a dozen adult outcomes the researchers tested, including net worth, social standing, high interest-rate debt, diet and exercise habits, smoking, procrastination tendencies and preventative dental care, according to the study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting"
In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn't to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED's longtime curator, puts it, "We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something." And yet, TED's archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future - the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human - that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.
To investigate the evolution of music tastes across the world, The Economist trawled through the top 100 tracks in 70 countries according to Spotify. Examining 13,000 hits in 70 languages along with other data like genre, lyrical language and nationality of artist, we sought to group countries according to musical similarity.
On these 320,000 records, we employed a principal-components analysis
to assess the degree of musical kinship between countries, and
then a clustering algorithm (known as k-means) to group them. Three
broad clusters emerged: a contingent in which English is dominant;
a Spanish-language ecosystem; and a third group that mostly enjoys
local songs in various tongues. Across all, one trend emerged:
the hegemony of English is in decline.
...
There is no doubt that, despite its decline, English is still king.
Of the 50 most-streamed tracks on Spotify over the past five years,
47 were in English. And the genres it incubated are being widely
adopted elsewhere. There is now excellent rap available in Arabic,
Russian and, of course, Spanish.
Why did the Beatles become a worldwide sensation? Why do some cultural products succeed and others fail? Why are some musicians, poets, and novels,, unsuccessful or unknown in their lifetimes, iconic figures decades or generation after their deaths? Why are success and failure so unpredictable? On one view, the simplest and most general explanation is best, and it points to quality, appropriately measured: success is a result of quality, and the Beatles succeeded because of the sheer quality of their music. On another view, social influences are critical: timely enthusiasm or timely indifference can make the difference for all, including the Beatles, leading extraordinary books, movies, and songs to fail even if they are indistinguishable in quality from those that succeed. Informational cascades are often necessary for spectacular success; in some cases, they are both necessary and sufficient. For those who emphasize social influences and informational cascades, success and failure are not inevitable; they depend on seemingly small or serendipitous factors. History is only run once, so this proposition is difficult to prove. ...
We use AlphaZero, a system that learns to play chess from scratch, to explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level.
Atomic changes to the rules of classical chess alter game balance with the material value of the pieces being altered accordingly, resulting in either more draws or more decisive outcomes. The findings of our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess.
It's as American as Dixieland Jazz