Facebook really is dying
You know I hate the word "dead" applied to things that were never alive, but in this case I can't think of a better way to say it. Facebook is turning into a ghost town. Here's how I know.
The U.S. misunderstood not only how China would respond to economic growth, but how the U.S. would respond to China.
Many in the United States believed that capitalism would never work without political freedom. Then China began to rise.
Sadly, China may be taking advantage of their mixed economy, but they don’t seem to have the level of freedom we’ve got.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Any sufficiently advanced financial instrument is indistinguishable from fraud. — xthlc, on MetaFilter
SEASON 37: EPISODE 3
FRONTLINE investigates the role of state governments and Wall Street in driving America’s public pensions into a multi-trillion-dollar hole. Marcela Gaviria, Martin Smith, and Nick Verbitsky go inside the volatile fight over pensions playing out in Kentucky, and examine the broader consequences for teachers, police, firefighters and other public employees everywhere.
SEASON 36: EPISODE 16
Intimate stories of one Rust Belt city’s struggle to recover in the post-recession economy. FRONTLINE and ProPublica report on the economic and social forces shaping Dayton, Ohio, a once-booming city where nearly 35 percent of people now live in poverty.
Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood. ❧
King may have adopted this passage from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s The Hope of the World [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933], p. 25:
“Any church that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, the economic order that cripples them . . . that kind of church, I think, would hear again the Master’s withering words: ‘Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”’
—annotation in The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project (okra.stanford.edu) “Address at the Religious Leaders Conference on 11 May 1959” on page 200
Foreign companies will no longer be allowed to sell products from their own affiliated companies in India
NEW DELHI—India is tightening restrictions on foreign e-commerce companies operating in the country, a new challenge to Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. as they bet billions on the nascent market.
Current rules forbid non-Indian online sellers from holding their own inventory and shipping it out to consumers, as is typically done in other countries. Instead, they have found a work-around by operating as online marketplaces and selling what are effectively their own products held by their affiliated local companies.
They will no longer be allowed to sell such goods, a division of India’s Commerce and Industry Ministry said in a statement Wednesday, an apparent attempt to close that loophole.
The new rules, which take effect Feb. 1, also bar foreign companies from entering into exclusive agreements with sellers. Amazon, for example, has in the past been the exclusive third-party online retailer to sell smartphones from the popular Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus.
Abneesh Roy, an analyst at Edelweiss Securities, noted that ahead of elections set for early next year, the government could be moving to appease owners of smaller shops that have been hit as customers buy more goods online.
“Shopkeepers have been unhappy,” he said. “In an election year, the government will definitely listen more to voters.” ❧
It’s nice to see foreign countries looking at what has happened to coutries like America with the rise of things like e-commerce, actually thinking about them and the longer term implications, and making rules to effect the potential outcomes.
Now the bigger follow up question is: is this a good thing? Perhaps there won’t be the community interruption we’ve seen in the US, but what do the overall effects look like decades hence? From a community perspective, from a competitive perspective?
December 27, 2018 at 12:26PM
There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company, in playing for the team that’s winning big.
Study explores the micromechanisms underlying regional economic diversification.
César A. Hidalgo (Scientific American Blog Network)What is knowledge? How does it disseminate? And what’s its value?
U.S. stocks plunged, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling almost 800 points, as a litany of concerns wiped out the rally in risk assets.
Trade-sensitive shares sank as angst mounted that the U.S. and China made no meaningful progress on the trade front this weekend. Financial shares got hammered as the yield curve continued to flatten, with the latest nudge from a hawkish comment by a Federal Reserve official.
With the rise of online retailers like Amazon, consumers’ expectations about the speed of delivery have been transformed. But at what cost?
Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)Disrupt your industries, if that is what you are in business to do, but do not disrupt the bonds that tie employees, however loose or unspoken they may be.—Isabel Berwick, 'Workplace communities matter–now more than ever'
In this future, we’re all being asked to accept that the sticker price of our success is indifference to how things turn out for others. Of course, this isn’t a novelty, and it’s barely a disruption; this is how the demands of profit have needed work to be managed for a long time. ❧
December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM
It’s treating someone else’s wellbeing, someone’s lost job, someone’s public dressing-down, someone’s stolen idea as somehow not your problem, not your shoes. ❧
December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM
This is what higher education is currently saying to its long-term casual staff. While universities are underfunded for teaching and expected to compete globally on the basis of research, then the revenue from teaching will be diverted into research. This isn’t a blip, and there won’t be a correction. This is how universities are solving their funding problems with a solution that involves keeping labour costs (and associated overheads like paid sick leave) as low as possible. It’s a business model for bad times, and the only thing that makes it sustainable is not thinking about where the human consequences are being felt. ❧
This last sentence is so painful…
December 03, 2018 at 08:58AM
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. By Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl. Princeton University Press; 368 pages
Do the rich world’s problems stem from an overdose of liberal principles, or their insufficiently bold application? Glen Weyl and Eric Posner argue that the ideals of thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Henry George can still inspire radical change. Such luminaries were unafraid of challenging the status quo. Following suit, the pair suggest expanding and refining markets, putting them to work for society as a whole. Property may not be theft, for example, but it is monopoly. Every individual should put a value on each item she owns, down to the last pencil, and be taxed on her total declared wealth. The twist: she must stand ready to sell any item at its declared value, should a buyer emerge. Such policies are so radical that they are unlikely ever to be adopted. But they may help jolt liberals out of their hand-wringing.