Rotundus.com

Why Boredom Is Good for Your Creativity

An awesome quote from Graham Linehan to start things off: "I have to use all these programs that cut off the internet, force me to be bored, because being bored is an essential part of writing, and the internet has made it very hard to be bored."

Sharing the knowledge burden

"I'm most inclined to think that it's the pace of societal evolution that is most binding: growth proceeds at the fastest pace that legal and social institutions can tolerate.
Think of the challenges that would face the would-be tacocopter entrepreneurs. Consider that issues surrounding liability and law, rather than technology, now appear to be the biggest obstacle to autonomous vehicles."

Wishful thinking: If we only had a stable energy policy

"In this column energy expert Rapier provides three examples — originating with both Democrats and Republicans and impacting both renewable energy and fossil fuels — of how constantly shifting legislation makes it very difficult to plan and execute energy projects." Found this via KP who disagree somewhat with the article's conclusion that "the real reason we have dysfunctional energy policies is that we elect dysfunctional leaders" - arguing instead that stable policy "would reduce policymakers’ significance to that of mere policy-caretakers, and no one shows much reverence for caretakers (nor donates to the caretakers’ Super-PACs)."

Cut to grow

A paper from a conservative think tank. Based on a graph of % change in GDP vs. % change in government spending in the country it draws the conclusion that "there is no obvious relationship between a decrease in government spending and a decrease in GDP. Keynesians would expect the line to slope upward; in fact, it slopes slightly downward. ... The chart has two policy implications. First, austerity has not caused even near-term harm to countries that have undertaken it. Second, austerity is something of a free lunch. This is because, as studies (such as a 2010 paper by economists Andreas Bergh and Martin Karlsson) show, longer-run growth is higher in countries with smaller governments. Nations that reduce spending today can do so without fearing that the longer-run growth is beingpurchased with a costly near-term recession."

In escape from Japan doomsday, capital takes flight

"For many, nuclear radiation leaks at Fukushima served as a catalyst to take another hard look at Japan's economic woes - massive public debt, an ageing population, low economic growth and deflation - and made them seem more insurmountable than before." - seems that it's now not just the old but also the young looking at acquiring property outside of Japan and eventually moving there.

Valuing Domestic Product

The NYT tackles the issue of how the work done at home impacts GDP: "Marry your butler (or your research assistant) and share your income equally instead of paying him by the hour. The size of G.D.P. will shrink. Divorce him, and G.D.P. is likely to expand. ... the new estimates of the value of unpaid domestic work represent a conservative lower bound. Yet they are by no means low: inclusion raises the level of G.D.P. 39 percent in 1965 and 25.7 percent in 2010. ... Within the United States (as in other countries), there is far less variation across households in the value of home production than in the value of market income. As a result, the value of home production reduces the overall level of inequality in living standards. Full-time housewives are, in a sense, equalizers."

In shocking news, cougars don’t like to starve to death.

“I was very upset, I’m such an animal lover,” said Wells. “I know it’s natural, but the look in her eye, the blood all over her face, she was terrified. That was pretty upsetting to see that.”

A lot of people want to hide from things like where the meat in a grocery store comes from or abortion. Welcome to reality.

Japan PM says 2 nuke reactors must be restarted

Japanese politics encounters a strange phenomenon known as "reality" - whatever energy policy you adopt it'll have a mixture of consequences, some good and some bad - just came across another article today on endangered species being killed by wind turbines.

Let’s (Not) Get Physicals

"FOR decades, scientific research has shown that annual physical exams — and many of the screening tests that routinely accompany them — are in many ways pointless or (worse) dangerous, because they can lead to unneeded procedures."

Are men really more unfaithful than women?

"nearly twice as many married men as women admitted to having had sexual relations with someone other than their spouse. … Dr Catherine Mercer, head of analysis for the Natsal study, says the gender gap may in part be because women are less likely to own up to cheating than men. "We can't directly observe unfaithfulness so we have to rely on what people tell us and we know there are gender differences in the way people report sexual behaviours," she says. But that's not the whole story."

Euro Breakup Precedent Seen When 15 State-Ruble Zone Fell Apart

Something to think about.

Smart bed makes itself after you roll out of the sack

I could use one of these.

World food prices fall in May -UN's FAO

They went down last month too, and the UN seems to be seeing this as the start of a trend.

From the Federal Reserve as cited in the NYT's economix blog:

Decreases in incomes were much larger for the higher education groups, and mean income actually rose for the no-high-school-diploma group

The data that this is looking at is family income from 2007-2010. The writer notes that this is "a finding that seems at odds with the vast majority of recent research on the economic importance of education", but in the next few sentences suggests "I’m afraid this isn’t the kind of post where I now proceed to explicate the puzzle. Maybe we’ll have one of those later today, after the lights come on."

I wonder if some of this may be the start of the bursting of the higher education bubble, with the number of degrees in technical areas holding stable or decreasing in science/technology over the last 25 years and a doubling of the number of arts/humanities/social-sciences degrees.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education back in April 2012:

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

The Chronicle of Higher Education mentions that a lot of these jobs aren't easily replaceable with computers but automation seems likely to increase in areas like fast food and self-checkouts are becoming a lot more common in stores. Add in Google's research into autonomous vehicles and perhaps in that 30 year time frame automation might be more of a challenge to things like trucking.