Some interesting factoids in this piece: ”The United States abandoned its own most worthless coin, the half-cent, in 1857, when a half-cent was worth more than a dime is today. By most measures, a quarter today has less buying power than a U.S. penny did in 1940.”
An interesting pair of sentences: ”The government says the changes are needed so the program – and Ottawa’s bottom line – are not overwhelmed by the large baby-boom generation of Canadians born between 1946 and 1964. Yet all but the tail end of this cohort will be protected from the higher eligibility age, which will be phased in between 2023 and 2029.“
"... employment rates fell so much more for these unmarried women who were heads of household. Employment per capita fell 4.7 percentage points among them, compared with 1.6 percentage points among married women. The job-loss gap associated with marital status turns out to be as large as the more widely recognized job loss gap associated with gender."
The Sahara has a few interesting properties: lots of sun, lots of sand, and lots of empty space. I first came across the idea of large-scale solar development in the Sahara in David MacKay's book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, looking at using it to power Europe.
(The Sahara is about 8.6 million square kilometeres... covering around 10% of that with solar panels would produce energy output equivalent to the entire world's current consumption. Add in the storage and distribution challenges of course).
”'People would expect in bigger and more diverse places you'd come into contact with a bigger and more diverse set of people,' says lead researcher Angela Bahns, a social psychologist at Wellesley. 'But you find the exact opposite.' … How can more people and more diversity lead to less diverse friendships? It's simple, really: We like people who are like us. Social scientists call it the 'similarity-attraction effect,' and it influences everything from whom we date and hire to where we choose to live. The bigger the pond, the more likely we are—consciously or not—to swim around until we find a group of like and like-minded people.”
"... if Grusky wants to measure market-generated income inequality, household income is not the proper metric; individual income is. That’s because market rewards—paychecks, capital gains, and dividends—go to individuals, not households. Gini coefficients, which measure inequality, decreased slightly for individuals between 1994 and 2010, while showing a modest uptick for households, meaning that individuals became more equal and households less so. The uptick in household inequality might be unrelated to the economy." Is it in some sense measuring broken families?
Scary: "... Western financial experts who fear a bursting of the Chinese real estate bubble point out that the Chinese economy is more dependent on house building than the United States economy was, before the sub-prime lending bubble burst in 2007."
Short answer: yes. The suggestion here is to move from large, centralized generation facilities to micro-generation. Perhaps but I'm not convinced. Sure there's transmission overhead but both economy of scale and the ability to site large projects in optimal locations - windspeeds in urban areas are typically lower than elsewhere - suggests to me that large scale energy installations still have an important role to play.
Google's Augmented Reality Glass system was announced yesterday. It's a bit tough to gauge from the video below how well this works in practice but it's still kinda interesting.
