Interesting Links for 24-03-2018

[andrewducker]

Taller people more likely to get cancer

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Lots of Republican women are discovering their husbands are fascists

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IBM flouted age discrimination laws to cut loads of its older workers

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How do we deal with zombie companies?

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Huge crack opens in Rift Valley

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How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of Race

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Cambridge Analytica: search of London HQ delayed by wait for warrant

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Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica to make Facebook users more favorable to war

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Eye Tracking Is Coming to Virtual Reality

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How the Zanclean Flood refilled the Mediterranean

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Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

'Lots of Republican women are discovering their husbands are fascists' -- with the tags missing I can't tell if this is from a satirical website, or real...

[dewline]

"Discovering" or "admitting"?

[andrewducker]

I suspect that a lot of people who had been saying "I really like small government, and believe that States should be able to have more control over their laws" are now saying "Fuck Black people." - now that it's more acceptable.

[cyprinella]

"(tags: )"

Snort. I guess that's not fixed yet.

[andrewducker]

Not...quite.

(App isn't saving new tags, RSS feed isn't showing any tags)

[cyprinella]

You know, I went to go add my network feed to my rss account and was annoyed that it wasn't showing tags which made it useless for my purposes. I thought it was just a failure of rss design. However, it was within the last week or so, so I guess it would be part of the tag problem. I didn't bother to ask at the time because I didn't figure he would do anything about it around the fundraising.

(Wow, yes, I am being irrationally cranky about this. I should stop.)

[andrewducker]

It was definitely there before Pinpocalypse.

I've emailed and left a tweet response, hopefully he'll get things working soon.

I don't think it's irrational to want a service you pay for to work.

On Bolton and Cambridge Analytica

[dewline]

Okay, now that's just Damn Scary. That man wants to carve the planet into literally bloody pieces, but we've known this for the better part of two decades already, right?

[danieldwilliam]

Zombie companies are a bit of problem.

The Austrian economist in me sees productivity growth, and therefore economic growth, advancing mostly through the failure of existing firms and their replacement with new organisations who are better fitted to the new production or product technologies that are newly on offer.

We can probably expect a wave of insolvencies, restructurings and redundancies after a few interest rate hikes. This may turn out to be an economic shock sufficient to knock us in to recession.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, creative destruction is a problem if the creation side lags too much.

[danieldwilliam]

It also sucks if you are a coal miner.

For me, one of the big empirical lessons for and from economics over the last 30 years has been that areas that are heavily involved in some industries take much longer and much more effort to recover if those industries are quickly reduced. Generations, rather than years.

[andrewducker]

I think that can be the case if the industry is based in a location which doesn't have alternatives.

If coal mines were under London then those coal miners would have found other jobs. But with increased service industries and urbanisation, losing your job in the countryside leaves you with the choice of moving your family to a completely new place (without the support structure) or staying somewhere with no job prospects.

[danieldwilliam]

Or in small cities where one or two linked industries dominate.