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Is this how men are reacting to the implementation of feminist policies and feminist views of marriage? That's the impression that I got from reading a few recent articles.

Anyways, here's a bit of a recent Globe and Mail article:

I’ve no idea how the new world order will play out. Ms. Rosin thinks more men will eventually catch on and find their places in it. Meantime, there’s one scene I can’t get out of my mind. It’s a village in the hills of Thailand that my husband and I visited a few years ago. The women did all the work – the child rearing, the farming, the cooking, the wood and water gathering, the long trek to town to sell their vegetables. The men sat around discussing politics and smoking opium. They didn’t seem terribly miserable; I guess they’d gotten used to it.

... and from the Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Rosin makes us face the uncomfortable evidence that many men are engaging in a sit-down strike. In macho cultures, such as those of Spain, men import poorer, more traditional women from other countries to marry. In Japan, Ms. Rosin reports, men are causing something of a national crisis because of their indifference to dating, marrying and even having sex.

Here in America, many men have dialed down their ambitions, and not simply in response to a loss of job opportunities. Although three-fourths of the jobs lost in the recent recession were in fields that are overwhelmingly male (including construction, manufacturing and finance), the same number of new ones emerged in health fields, service industries and teaching. Yet surprisingly few men are entering these areas or seeking the education they would need to do so. "Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest," writes Ms. Rosin, "is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and home, and as women make all the decisions."

The result, Ms. Rosin painstakingly shows, is virtually a reversal of the psychological landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Then, men wondered why they should give up freedom and sex for marriage, child care and the burden of financial responsibility; now it is women asking that question. Then, men complained of clinging, freeloading wives; now Ms. Rosin hears repeatedly from women that, in the words of one executive, women should "be very careful about marrying freeloading, bloodsucking parasites." Then, it was women who tamped down their aspirations, knowing the objective unlikelihood of attaining them; now it's the men who have "fear of success" and a "why bother?" attitude. Then, if women had casual sex it was to keep the guy happy; now many have casual sex for their own pleasure and to keep from being derailed from their career goals with something "serious."

MGTOW - standing for Men Going Their Own Way - is the acronym you might hear associated with the idea from time to time. Other than references to the Japanese "herbivore" movement, these few recent articles are the first times that I've encountered this in the mainstream press.

Given the current state of family and labour law - producing a society in which women report greater career ambitions and men are more afraid of undesired pregnancy - such male antipathy towards hard work (both in terms of relationships and the labour force) seems somewhat inevitable. It also seems likely to lead to dissatisfaction amongst the female population, and some of this increasing unhappiness has already been documented.

Study Shows Power of Cute Improves Concentration

"Through three separate experiments a team of scientists from Hiroshima University showed that people showed higher levels of concentration after looking at pictures of puppies or kittens." I wonder if said cats were wanting cheezburger.

Feds cut minority religion prison clergy as part-time contracts end

To quote the government spokesperson: "the Government of Canada is not in the business of picking and choosing which religions will be given preferential status through government funding. ... chaplains employed by (the Correctional Service of Canada) must provide services to inmates of all faiths." In some sense by taking such a position the government has given priority to a set of religious beliefs - i.e. that all religions are the same. To quote Kate Hansen, a Wiccan priestess cited in the article "I’m disturbed that the government believes that all these minority faith people can be dealt with by Christian chaplains." To that I'd add that depending on what these "services" are the chaplains also wouldn't be Christian. Things can often both coexist but also contradict. Ergo classic tolerance not the modern everything-is-true variety.

Euro Zone Country With Lowest Debt Says Austerity Works

"Having a national debt of just 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a budget surplus and economic growth of nearly eight percent in 2011 may sound like an unrealistic economic situation for a euro zone member state these days, but it is Estonia’s economic reality. ... When Estonia’s economy contracted by 18 percent in 2008-2009 following the global economic crisis, the Estonian population showed willingness to take on the hard measures needed, Ligi said in an exclusive interview. Civil servants in Estonia took a 10 percent pay cut and ministers saw 20 percent shaved from their salaries. The government raised the pension age, cut job protection and made it harder to claim health benefits, according to the European federation of Public Service Unions. And, unlike in other parts of Europe, these measures went through without nationwide strikes, social unrest, or the toppling of the government. Instead, Estonians “understood they had to give up something,” the finance minister said."

A while back some were speculating that Amazon was going to be introducing same-day delivery for most of its products. Amazon later denied this, with the CFO suggesting that this couldn't be done economically at a broad scale. Yet at the same time if think about it there are a lot of warehouse-like buildings for food kicking around - they're called grocery stores. What could you do if you tried to apply lots of technology to them? Would consumers like the results? (So far the attempts have been fairly unsuccessful, but I wonder if this might be due to inadequate levels of automation). Anyways, here follows some speculation as to what the future might look like... (and also outlines perhaps a bit of why I'm a bit confused as to what the workforce and the economy will look like in the more distant future).

The existing way of grocery shopping in Canada and the US should leaving environmentalists sobbing. Here for example is Energy Star's description of grocery stores:

On average, supermarkets in the United States use around 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity and 50 cubic feet of natural gas per square foot per year — an average annual energy cost of more than $4 per square foot. For an average-size (50,000 square foot) store, this equates to more than $200,000 annually in energy costs and results in 1,900 tons of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere — equivalent to the emissions from 360 vehicles in one year! Refrigeration and lighting account for over 50 percent of total energy use in the average supermarket, making these systems the best places to start looking for energy efficiency opportunities. Especially since the profit margins of supermarkets are so thin, on the order of 1 percent, ENERGY STAR estimates that one dollar in energy savings is equivalent to increasing sales by $59!

A big problem: lots of open fridges and freezers, trying to simultaneously keep adjacent areas at different temperatures without barriers in the way that would obstruct humans from gaining access. Compare to FreshDirect, an existing online grocery store:

Unlike a neighborhood grocer, FreshDirect’s warehouse has seven different climates to keep various products at optimal temperatures, helping the company purvey top-quality food.

One of the big obstacles to implementing electronic grocery shopping is that consumers seem to want to touch items in an attempt to search for the best ones, yet I wonder if I the potential freshness advantages of electronic grocery shopping might be enough to overturn this consumer preference. From that same article comparing traditional grocery stores to online ones:

inventory turns are faster for online grocers — it takes the average grocery store 28 days to turn over everything in stock, while SPUD’s turns in nine days, with items like produce and milk turning in 24 hours.

Right now online grocers seem to be more expensive than their non-electric counterparts, but I wonder if that might change in the not too distant future. There's always the possibility of substantial energy savings (and better quality products) from being able to store each in optimal environment. But that's not the only thing. What happens if you introduce robot order pickers - basically a souped-up version of Amazon's Kiva warehouse robots? Here are a few more things that might result:

• there'd be no need to individually label items for sale or the hassle of updating labels as prices change from week to week
• there's be no need to light the facility to the same degree
• density can be increased
• warehouse robots (already) can operate faster than humans
• 24/7 operation wouldn't be a problem
• no need to wait in a checkout line
• can pack the warehouse in the most efficient fashion to retrieve orders - taking into account frequency of purchase for example rather than stocking all the different kinds of, e.g., laundry detergent in the same area.
• few employee related issues (wages, wage negotiations, vacations, absenteeism, ...)

To expand on this a bit more, what happens if you were to add robotic delivery vehicles similar to Google's self-driving car? If there are no humans in the vehicle there wouldn't be the same need to safety devices - throwing out a load of groceries ever now and then probably makes more sense. Including just the mandatory safety devices on cars added about 86 pounds per vehicle between 1968 and 2001 and average car weight is up 800 pounds since the 70s oil shock even though the now-common SUVs and pickups are excluded from that average. That's a substantially lighter vehicle - don't forgot also the weight of a human driver. You'd also no longer need to design the vehicle to meet human needs - should it be bigger? smaller? (I'm guessing a limited-speed, light-weight vehicle would be easier to get government approval of than running full-size vehicles). You could eliminate most of the parking lot for most grocery stores and, as the vehicles would be operating within a short range of home base electric vehicles might be more feasible. Of course there are a lot of issues still be resolved to get a system like this working.

A lot of the challenges to do this seem to be related to robots and robots seem to be getting close to the stage were a lot of this is feasible. I've mentioned warehouse robots before. They already seem to be going in at the distribution level:

distribution, where robots that zoom at the speed of the world’s fastest sprinters can store, retrieve and pack goods for shipment far more efficiently than people. Robots could soon replace workers at companies like C & S Wholesale Grocers, the nation’s largest grocery distributor, which has already deployed robot technology. ... And at Earthbound Farms in California, four newly installed robot arms with customized suction cups swiftly place clamshell containers of organic lettuce into shipping boxes. The robots move far faster than the people they replaced. Each robot replaces two to five workers at Earthbound
(Source: NYT)

Lately robots are also being deployed in places like vineyards - handling pruning as well as picking grapes - showing you some of the capabilities of current technology.

Also interesting is a machine that I'll dub the burger bot. The manufacturers claim a payback period of less than one year for a machine that in a manner more consistent, more sanitary, and more fresh (tomatoes, pickles, onions, etc. sliced at the time of order rather than during prep) can whip up about 360 burgers per hour. (HT: econfuture)

What impact would this likely have on the economy if jobs disappear in quite a few sectors? How do you replace those, particularly given how automation seems to be taking over some of the knowledge sector of the economy as well? How do you avoid increased economic inequality? (A lot of this stuff is likely to prove very capital intensive). The warehouse robots are already out there or fairly feasible to extend. Automated vehicles aren't quite there yet - how long might it for something like a robotic delivery vehicle to be economical (outside certain industries)?

(Some ways in which different approaches are currently being tried: scan the code of an item on a billboard and get the item delivered and oversized vending machines)

15 sharp-witted, reading-themed cartoons from an Iranian comic contest

"Last year, Iran Cartoons organized an international contest for single-panel cartoons on the theme of reading. Some of the submissions were dark and sarcastic, others optimistically inspiring. Some were make-you-think obtuse, others pleasantly straightforward. Here are selections from the 39 finalists…"

Open-access deal for particle physics

"After six years of negotiation, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics is now close to ensuring that nearly all particle-physics articles — about 7,000 publications last year — are made immediately free on journal websites. Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access."

The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action

Based on an upcoming which argues "[w]hy racial preferences in college admissions hurt minority students -- and shroud the education system in dishonesty." One of the more interesting findings there is that when California banned affirmative action they found a significant drop in the number of students admitted fitting the profile of the affirmative action admittee but no drop in the number of degrees awarded to that class of individuals.

Beyond Obamacare

What's in a name? "We need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget. ... Many countries whose health care systems are regularly extolled — including Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have systems for rationing care. Take Britain, which provides universal coverage with spending at proportionately almost half of American levels. Its National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence uses a complex quality-adjusted life year system to put an explicit value (up to about $48,000 per year) on a treatment’s ability to extend life."