Interesting Links for 24-08-2017

[andrewducker]

Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers Have Had Enough

(tags: Amazon work )

Rescued piglets served up as sausages to firefighters

(tags: fire food pigs viaSwampers )

Whether you snack or not is more about the presence of temptation than your willpower

(tags: willpower food self-control )

AccuWeather Caught Sending User Location Data, Even When Location Sharing Is Off

(tags: weather apps location OhForFucksSake )

End of fixed prices within five years as supermarkets adopt electronic price tags

(tags: shopping pricing Technology )

Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming

(tags: economics )

French firm offered spyware to 'find out if your son is gay'

(tags: lgbt surveillance hacking OhForFucksSake children )

Time on a therapist’s couch yields persistent personality changes

(tags: counselling psychology personality )

Women-only train carriages are a terrible idea

(tags: women trains transport uk )

Alaska's permafrost is filling the air with carbon dioxide, worsening climate change

(tags: Alaska usa globalwarming )

How 139 countries could be powered by 100 percent wind, water, and solar energy by 2050

(tags: power renewables thefuture )

Smokers in clinical studies who say they've quit often haven't

(tags: smoking fraud research )

The most popular pop songs are the most surprising

(tags: music psychology )

Best ever image of a star's surface, atmosphere

(tags: space stars )

Vegan Vlogger discovers that meanness sells, has no ethical qualms

Particularly for the bit where he refuses to accept that his actions have consequences, or that he's at all responsible for anything more than "entertainment".
(tags: abuse OhForFucksSake videos vegetables )

Cognitive-behavioral therapy particularly efficient in treating ADHD in adults (neurofeedback useless)

(tags: cbt adhd )

On The Enlightenment, and why Europe was different

(tags: history Technology science )

The 2017 General Election: Volatile Voting, Random Results

(tags: voting uk fail )

Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

(tags: automation cars driving google )

The Brilliant Sorcery of England's 7-Circle Magic Roundabout

(tags: transport design uk driving )

Five ways in which the Home Office is "demonstrably not fascist"

(tags: UK politics OhForFucksSake )

Comments

Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming

[jack]

I thought we were still in the last recession :(

Re: Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming

[andrewducker]

Not since 2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_Kingdom

The problems since then have been austerity, not recession. We've been growing, but the rewards have been going to the top few percent, not everyone.

Re: Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming

[danieldwilliam]

I'm not that sure we ever properly left the last recession

Trend growth in the UK from 1955 to 2007 averages 2.68% a year.

Then we have two years, 2008 and 2009, where the economy contracts by 5.9% in total.

From 2010 until now growth has averaged 1.96%. After we stopped being officially in recession in Q3 2009 we had a period until Q4 2012 where growth averaged 1.48% with a few quarters of contraction. So from Q1 2008 until Q4 2012 the UK economy basically didn't grow at all. Then for a couple of years, in 2013 and 2014 we have growth of 2.85% per year (pretty close to trend), Since then, for 2015, 2016 and 2017 to date we have average annual growth of 1.72%.

The pattern that you would expect is that following a recession you have a few quarters, perhaps a year where growth is low and sputtery and then several really good years which largely put the economy back where it would have been had the recession not happened. Then you get a period of some years where growth is at trend. Instead, what we've had is a recession, then 3 years of low and sputtery growth followed by a few years of growth *at* trend (not above it) and then a few years of growth below trend. And then we get Brexit.

One reading of that is that we never properly moved out of the recessionary period. The reasons for that are probably many. I'd look at austerity for sure, productivity issues and infrastructure, labour hoarding but I think also the continued private debt burden and the state of banks' balance sheets.

(There is, to my mind, a problem with the way the UK defines recessions. We call any two quarter period of contraction a recession based purely on GDP growth and no other factors. So a year with Q1 0.5%, Q2 -10%, Q3 0.5% and Q4 0.5% would not count as a recession but a year with Q1 3%, Q2 -0.1%, Q3 -0.1%, Q4 3% would have a recession in it.)

Re: Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming

[andrewducker]

So over the last ten years we've had growth, just slowly.

So, not recession.

The pattern behind the last recession is definitely different. But that's because we were so heavily leveraged, and the economy so financial. Plus, of course, Brexit. And the fact the economy has been so mismanaged.

Re: Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming

[danieldwilliam]

I think an important part of this discussion is the definition of recession.

Which is officially two quarters of negative growth in the UK (and I think most other EU countries) but the US takes a different, broader view and the original definer of recessions, Julius Shiskin, took an even broader view. (Although no one claims to be able to find the original article.)

But views vary from country to country and also vary depending on what you are measuring and who is doing the measuring. The IMF defnition of a world recession appears to include GDP growth below postive 3%.

This is an interesting and short paper on the various definitional difficulties.

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0ahUKEwizlPr8m_LVAhWECcAKHabzAZIQFghFMAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tcd.ie%2FEconomics%2Fassets%2Fpdf%2FSER%2F2009%2FEmma_O_Donoghue.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFqUMQHYXEREQuvXnCJQtXvJ8aNIw

So, is the UK officially in recession? Not according to its own definition. I would contest that the definition is not helpful or particularly meaningful (and that my contention of this is pretty mainstream and not me being contrary). On a broader definition of recession I would argue that the last decade has been recessionary. We've seen low levels of wage growth, high levels of insecure employement, low GDP per capital growth, lower than trend levels of growth (perhaps, what's trend?), low levels of business investment.

I think the important thing here is that the UK has performed significantly worse economically than was expected. What's the cause of that? Could be the application of austerity fiscal regimes rather than classic Keynesiam stimulous. I rather think there is something else going on, which is linked to the nature of the 2008-9 contraction as a balance sheet recession (in both senses). If I'm right about that then certainly part of the last ten years has been shifting lower economic growth from 2010 and 2011 to the 2012 and subsequent years through monetary policy. Instead of a four years of sharply negative growth we may have bargained to have ten or more years of sluggish growth instead.

Re: Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming

[dewline]

Seconding that. Austerity doctrine has been a Problem for too long.

[digitalraven]

As someone who has been on numerous wagons, ain't no such thing as fully "quit", only a very long time between relapses.

[cmcmck]

'Women only carriages'

Sigh :o(

And I have to start wearing a burqa when, exactly?.....

[elf]

The comments on the women-only carriages article are... predictable.

“Catch and convict the offending men!” Lyn Featherstone. Yes, of course, but try doing that in a carriage full of rowdy half drunken football fans on their way home on a Saturday evening – or in some cases going even on a Saturday morning. I’ve seen it – it’s real.

Erm, if the drunken sports fans were harassing other men, sometimes tearing at their clothes and groping at their genitals, would guys be saying, "meh, dudes be dudes, whaddaya gonna do?"

I'm always fascinated when anyone proposes segregating the likely victims of assault on the grounds that there are too many assaulters to stop. Of course, they only do that if the expected victims aren't white men.

[cmcmck]

Point is of course that the railway companies carry drunks illegally- it's supposed not to happen but of course their profits count more than our safety and dignity.

They also seem to forget that some of us are part of married couples and we tend to travel together quite a bit.

The point on trans women was also well made and I should know!

Pigs want us to eat them

[danieldwilliam]

If we lived in a vegan world the pigs wouldn't have been spared suffering, they wouldn't have existed and their sub-species would be extinct.

All of our domesticated animals are co-evolved with us to be adapted for an environment which is largely made up of being bred by humans to be farmed and eaten. At an evolutionary level they have traded being eaten by us for us ensuring that their genes survie in to the future.

There is no plausable world where large numbers of domesticated animals live long happy lives, being cared for by humans and then don't get eaten.

Which is not to say that people shouldn't be vegans or that we shouldn't replace farmed meat with vat-grown meat when we can. There are many good reasons to do that. One might also reasonably take the view that pigs not existing is morally superior to pigs existing but being eaten. However, a vegan or vat-grown future is a future where domestic pigs, chickens, cows, goats, and sheep are extinct.

Re: Pigs want us to eat them

[andrewducker]

I'm perfectly happy to eat pigs.

Although I'd rather they weren't treated too badly before I do so.

Re: Pigs want us to eat them

[danieldwilliam]

Indeed.

I'm happy to eat them. I respect other people's right to not eat them for whatever reason. I definately don't want them to be badly treated whilst they are alive and they should be slaughtered with the minimum amount of pain and distress possible.

[fanf]

There are at least four magic roundabouts :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout
My family lived near High Wycombe so I am quite familiar with that one. It's a lot bigger (so less intense) than the Swindon one...

[buddleia]

I think the article about women-only carriages missed the point. They're not about punishing women, they're about respite. 12 year old me would have been so fucking relieved.