Kurtz: [intercepted radio message] I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor
{ Traditional rug-making techniques meet contemporary political imagery | full story }
economics
‘Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.’ —H. L. Mencken
Miners earn newly minted bitcoins for adding new sections to the blockchain. But the amount awarded for adding a section is periodically halved so that the total number of bitcoins in circulation never exceeds 21 million (the reward last halved in 2012 and is set to do so again in 2016). Transaction fees paid to miners for helping verify transfers are supposed to make up for that loss of income. But fees are currently negligible, and the Princeton analysis predicts that under the existing rules these fees won’t become significant enough to make mining worth doing in the absence of freshly minted bitcoins.
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.
Australia has begun exporting camels to Saudi Arabia.
More than 100 animals are being shipped from the Australian port city of Darwin and are due to arrive in Saudi Arabia in early July [2002].
The vast majority are destined for restaurant tables in a major camel-consuming nation.
photo { Janet Biggs, Point of No Return, 2013 }
Can you imagine a world with no hypothetical situations?
Women hold about 60 per cent of the total jobs in the thirty occupations projectedby the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to have the most net job growth in the decade through 2022. […]
The projections obviously should be interpreted more as a guide to current trends than as a reliable forecast. But combined with the number from the NWLC, they suggest that if those trends don’t change, then the recent struggles of men — and especially young men — finding work in a labour market that continues to shift towards traditionally female-dominated occupations will only worsen. […]
The jobs of the new labour market are lower-paying, and therefore difficult to accept for men who were accustomed to making more, even if the old jobs aren’t coming back. Many of these jobs are in traditionally female-dominated occupations, which require training that men are less likely to have. And they pay higher wages to college grads, the vast majority of which are now women. […]
The composition of future jobs is unlikely to get “manlier”.
Entropy isn’t what it used to be
In the last years news are over and over again about record breaking prices reached for an artwork at a public auction. Such high pricing strucks not only the old masters but also works for still living artists. As you might know the prices for young artist’s paintings are often assessed by canvas size. So the question for my use-case arises: Is there also a correlation between size and hammer price of famous artworks at auctions?
‘Max I can loose is 100%. Max I can gain is unlimited.’ —Shit /r/Bitcoin says
The arguments for ditching notes and coins are numerous, and quite convincing. In the US, a study by Tufts University concluded that the cost of using cash amounts to around $200 billion per year – about $637 per person. This is primarily the costs associated with collecting, sorting and transporting all that money, but also includes trivial expenses like ATM fees. Incidentally, the study also found that the average American wastes five and a half hours per year withdrawing cash from ATMs; just one of the many inconvenient aspects of hard currency.
While coins last decades, or even centuries, paper currency is much less durable. A dollar bill has an average lifespan of six years, and the US Federal Reserve shreds somewhere in the region of 7,000 tons of defunct banknotes each year.
Physical currency is grossly unhealthy too. Researchers in Ohio spot-checked cash used in a supermarket and found 87% contained harmful bacteria. Only 6% of the bills were deemed “relatively clean.” […]
Stockholm’s homeless population recently began accepting card payments. […]
Cash transactions worldwide rose just 1.75% between 2008 and 2012, to $11.6 trillion. Meanwhile, non traditional payment methods rose almost 14% to total $6.4 trillion.
{ TransferWise | Continue reading }
The anal stage is the second stage in Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, lasting from age 18 months to three years. According to Freud, the anus is the primary erogenous zone and pleasure is derived from controlling bladder and bowel movement. […]
The negative reactions from their parents, such as early or harsh toilet training, can lead the child to become an anal-retentive personality. If the parents tried forcing the child to learn to control their bowel movements, the child may react by deliberately holding back in rebellion. They will form into an adult who hates mess, is obsessively tidy, punctual, and respectful to authority. These adults can sometimes be stubborn and be very careful over their money.
related { Hackers Hit Mt. Gox Exchange’s CEO, Claim To Publish Evidence Of Fraud | Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox? }
Full of win
Today, credit cards are on supersale. Pageler says that means a big breach just happened.
Strangely, platinum credit cards on the site are selling for less money than gold cards. […]
The bots send out emails, and between 5 percent and 10 percent of recipients open the attachment, which lets the crooks in.
In these dancers of Saint John and Saint Vitus we can recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks
Bitcoin itself may not flourish as a currency, but the underlying technology is beginning to suggest valuable new applications. […]
For example, Namecoin is a system used to create and exchange domain names: the coins contain information about the domain names themselves. Recall that the domain name market has about $3 billion in revenue per year: it’s a good example of a weird, scarce digital resource. And Bitmessage is a Bitcoin-inspired messaging platform that allows for anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) communication. What Namecoin and Bitmessage share is that they allow data to be added to the transaction, making the exchange one not just of perceived value but also of information.
Or take digital art. Larry Smith, a partner at the business architecture consultancy The matix and an analyst with long experience in digital advertising and digital finance, asks us to “imagine digital items that can’t be reproduced.” If we attached a coin identifier to a digital image, Smith says, “we could now call that a unique, one-of-a-kind digital entity.” Media on the Internet—where unlimited copying and sharing has become a scourge to rights holders—would suddenly be provably unique, permanently identified, and attached to an unambiguous monetary value.
To restore silence is the role of objects
The husband and wife team behind the handmade cosmetics company Lush – which this week won a high court battle against Amazon over its use of the word “lush” to sell rival cosmetics – has trademarked the name “Christopher North” as a brand name for a new range of toiletries, which could eventually extend to deodorants and hair removing cream. North is the managing director of Amazon.co.uk.
‘The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.’ –Nietzsche
There are two basic critical responses to today’s art market. One argues that the market has nothing to do with art, and that whatever happens in the market is irrelevant to the actual content, meaning and love of art. Art is to the art market as sailing is to the business of hawking mega-yachts to multibillionaires. The other view, succinctly stated by Perl, is more pessimistic: The art market is ruining art, spiritually and as a cultural practice.
It was a very fancy hotel. They even made you wear a tie in the shower.
CNN booked 11 rooms in one @Sochi2014 media hotel five months ago. We have been here for a day and only one room is available. #cnnsochi
— Harry Reekie (@HarryCNN) February 4, 2014
This is the one hotel room @Sochi2014 have given us so far. Shambles. #cnnsochi pic.twitter.com/RTjEkmyan3
— Harry Reekie (@HarryCNN) February 4, 2014
{ Journalists at Sochi are live-tweeting their hotel experiences }
The colossal project, which cost more than $50 billion – more than all previous Winter Olympics combined – was expected to turn Sochi into a sporting paradise, packed with arenas and a new airport. Instead, corruption and construction accidents have plagued preparations, with hotels still unfinished just days before the opening ceremony.
Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the isle of Man.
The key way that economists model behavior is by assuming that people have preferences about things. Often, but not always, these preferences are expressed in the form of a utility function. But there are some things that could happen that could seriously mess with this model. Most frightening are “framing effects”. This is when what you want depends on how it’s presented to you. […]
One of the most important tools we have to describe people’s behavior over time is the notion of time preference, also called “discounting”. This means that we assume that people care about the future less than they care about the present. Makes sense, right? But while certain kinds of discounting cause people’s choices to be inconsistent, other kinds would cause people to make inconsistent decisions. For example, some people might choose not to study hard in college, even though they realize that someday they’ll wake up and say “Man, if I could go back in time I would have studied more in college!”. This kind of thing is called hyperbolic discounting. It would make it a lot harder to model human behavior. But the models would still be possible to make.
But what would be really bad news is if people’s time preferences switched depending on framing effects! If that happened, then it would be very, very hard to model individual decision-making over time.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what experimental economist David Eil of George Mason University has found in a new experiment.
Zarathustra descended alone from the mountains, encountering no one
Now add $1.99 per month subscription to connect Nest to Google services, and you’ve opened a lot more consumers to replacing their “ugly” thermostat, rather than paying the upfront $249 Nest one-off purchase cost. Which could allow Nest to work its way into millions of homes; this means that 56% of all electricity used, the monthly service that we all are forced to pay, will largely be monitored and controlled by one of the most powerful companies in the world: Google. […]
a shift from one-off product sales to services that will become essential to our everyday lives, things that we will pay for over and over again.
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle
Countries print 150 billion new notes each year, at a cost of about $10 billion. Cash attracts grime and dirt, gets stuffed into underwear drawers, is daubed with pens, and exposed to harsh UV light. In other words, money goes through a lot, with the result that 150,000 tons of it has to be destroyed annually.
As a new paper explains, one of the main problems with keeping money in good condition is sebum, the substance the body produces to protect the skin. Waxy and oily, sebum builds up on the surface of the paper and then reacts with the air, eventually turning bills a nasty shade of yellow.
The paper, published in an American Chemical Society journal, discusses a new process that might keep more notes circulating longer, and therefore cut the cost of printing and distributing new bills. It involves subjecting notes to supercritical CO2.
image { Intricate mechanical and chemical separation is needed to extract and recover pigment from US currency. The ink is then re-stabilized, divided into individual doses and packaged into medical vials. | Diddo, The Cure for Greed }
The future never happens
The news around shopping during the holiday season was dominated by two separate stories. One talked about how traffic to brick-and-mortar stores was well below expectations, and that these retailers were forced to discount tremendously to drive sales. The other talked about how an enormous late surge in packages coming from e-commerce companies overwhelmed the capacity of UPS and, to a lesser extent, FedEx, and caused many of these packages to arrive after Christmas.
But, to me, these two stories are not at all separate, they simply reflect different sides of the same narrative: We’re in the midst of a profound structural shift from physical to digital retail.
‘Sleeping is the height of genius.’ ―Kierkegaard
Shaun Khubchandani’s 10-week internship at Citigroup […] he was paid a $70,000 annual salary prorated on a weekly basis, or about $1,300 per week. […] a typical day during his internship:
8 a.m.: Wake up.
8:45 a.m.: Board subway at Columbus Circle to Citigroup’s offices in Tribeca.9-9:30 a.m.: Arrive at the office.
9:30 a.m.–12 p.m.: Do light tasks, like reading S-1 filings or internal memos, or double-checking numbers in Excel spreadsheets.12-12:30 p.m.: Grab lunch with fellow interns at a nearby Whole Foods—ideally a prosciutto-and-ham panini, with bread pudding for dessert.
1 p.m.–5 p.m.: Work alongside analysts, assisting them however possible. Ask for feedback on financial models or help with difficult calculations.
5 p.m.–6 p.m.: Assigned to a project—such as updating a PowerPoint slideshow or hard copies of client-presentation materials with the latest market data—by a managing director on his or her way out the door, sometimes to be completed by the next morning.
8 p.m.: Order dinner delivery with other interns and the analysts, courtesy of the bank: Italian on Mondays, Thai on Tuesdays, salads on Wednesdays and tacos on Thursdays. (On Fridays, dine out.)
10:30 p.m.–2 a.m.: Leave for the night.
‘It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.’ —Faulkner
Over half a century ago, the global economy largely depended on just ten or so different materials. Most important products were made out of wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, silver or a few plastics — and that was about it.
Things are wildly different today. A huge chunk of modern-day technology, from hybrid cars to iPhones to flat-screen TVs to radiation screens, use dozens of different metals and alloys. A computer chip typically involves more than 60 different elements that are specifically selected to optimize performance, like europium or dysprosium.
And that’s long raised a concern: What would happen if we run short of any of these valuable metals? Say there’s a war. Or unrest in a crucial mining region. Or China decides to lock up its strontium deposits. Could we easily come up with substitutes? Or is modern society vulnerable to a materials shortage?
Here’s the case for vulnerability: A fascinating recent paper in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science looks at 62 different metals that are widely used in modern-day industry. For a dozen metals, potential substitutes are either inadequate or flat-out unavailable. And there are no “excellent” substitutes for any of the 62 metals.
art { Robert Indiana, The X-5, 1963 }
My advice to teens who DON’T want to get pregnant and become a statistic, in one word: anal
The auto-playing ads will appear on both the desktop version of Facebook and the mobile app for Android and iOS phones. But the ads won’t gobble up a bunch of costly data while playing. Facebook said the videos will download ahead of time while the user is within range of Wi-Fi, not while using cellular data like 4G. The app has to be open for the ad to download. The video ad is stored on the phone – how much storage it takes up is an open question — and then played at the appropriate scroll point.
related { Facebook saves everything you type - even if you don’t publish it }
