Tag Archives: daily-onslaught

Friday Cat Blogging – 5 December 2014

Mother Jones

In today’s episode of Friday catblogging, Hilbert is trying to prove that he’s a size 12. He was unconvincing, despite plenty of squirming to try to fit his entire body into the shoe box. The result was an interestingly blurred face, but not an entire cat in the box.

In other news, we’ve had to clear off the mantle over the fireplace because it turns out that Hopper can shinny up the bricks and start whacking away at whatever is up there. But there’s more to the story. We figured that Hilbert was a bit too gravity-bound to pose any similar danger, so we were blaming Hopper whenever something got knocked over. But on Wednesday night, during the 9 pm play hour, we watched in awe as Hilbert careened across the living room floor, flung himself straight up the brick facing, and grabbed onto the mantle. He barely made it, and had to chin himself up the last few inches, but make it he did. Nothing is safe around here anymore.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 December 2014

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Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

Mother Jones

Well, this is weird. Danielle Kurtzleben summarizes a new study called “The Wages of Sinistrality”:

In the data, around 11 to 13 percent of the population was left-handed. And when broken down by gender — that is, comparing women to women and men to men — those lefties have annual earnings around 10 to 12 percent lower than those of righties, Goodman writes, which is equal to around a year of schooling. (That gap varied by survey and by gender, however.) Most of this gap can be attributed to “observed differences in cognitive skills and emotional or behavioral problems,” he writes, adding that since lefties tend to do more manual work than right-handers, the gap appears to be due to differences in cognitive abilities, not physical.

Apparently the cognitive differences were already well known (though I didn’t know about them), but this paper is the first to document the earnings gap. It’s surprisingly large. So if you’re a lefty and you’re doing well, congratulations! You’ve beaten the odds.

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Lefties Earn 10% Less Than Righties

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No, the Garner Case Doesn’t Show That Body Cameras Are Useless

Mother Jones

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Very quick note: ever since last night, a lot of people have been making the point that Eric Garner’s killing produced no grand jury indictment even though the whole incident was captured on video. So maybe the whole idea of body cameras on police officers is pointless.

This is ridiculous. There are pros and cons to body cameras, but only in the rarest cases will they capture a cop killing someone. Even if, arguendo, they make no difference in these cases, they can very much make a difference in the other 99.9 percent of the cases where they’re used. The grand jury’s decision in the Garner case means a lot of things, but one thing it doesn’t mean is that body cameras are useless.

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No, the Garner Case Doesn’t Show That Body Cameras Are Useless

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April 23rd Is the Saddest Day of the Year

Mother Jones

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According to Google—sort of—the saddest times of the year are spring and fall. Weird. Click here for the explanations, which seem a bit ad hoc to me. I mean, less light? Then why is winter such a happy time? Not to mention spring. “As it turns out,” the article explains, “lengthening daylight may discombobulate people’s chemical regulatory system.” So….less light is bad. But more light can also be bad. And winter is OK even though it has the least light of all. This might all be true, but it’s sure a bit of a chin scratcher.

And the unhappiest day of the year in 2014 was April 23. WTF? I could understand April 15. But what’s the deal with the 23rd? Anybody got a theory? Am I missing something here?

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April 23rd Is the Saddest Day of the Year

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Chart of the Day: Oil Prices Are Plunging Thanks to OPEC

Mother Jones

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OPEC finished up its winter meeting yesterday and decided not to cut oil production. This came as a surprise to those who still think of OPEC as the maniacal oil hawks who roiled global petroleum markets in the 70s, but less so to those who know that cartels are notoriously difficult to hold together—especially when it’s a leaky cartel that’s missing some key producers. In any case, OPEC members couldn’t agree on just who would pay the price of cutting production, and the Saudis, for reasons still unclear, were unwilling to shoulder the burden themselves this time around. So OPEC oil production will remain unchanged.

The result? After six months of declining oil prices, we suddenly got plunging oil prices. Why? Not so much because of the shale oil revolution in the US. For all the attention it gets, fracking has increased global oil production by only a few percent and would normally have only a moderate effect on prices. Unfortunately, these aren’t normal times: in addition to a small increase in the oil supply, the global economic slowdown has depressed demand. That’s a bigger factor than fracking, and with European and Asian economies looking increasingly fragile, not one that seems likely to be corrected anytime soon.

How low will oil go? No one knows. When will it turn up again? Probably not until the global economy starts to grow at a decent pace. And no one knows when that will happen either.

For more, check out Brad Plumer, who has a much more detailed explanation of the both the politics and the economics of the oil scene here.

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Chart of the Day: Oil Prices Are Plunging Thanks to OPEC

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Thanksgiving Cat Blogging – 27 November 2014

Mother Jones

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This year we have new catblogging stars, and thus new cats dreaming about the traditional turkey clipart. In case you’re curious, no, I didn’t pose Hilbert. This is his natural way of sleeping.

Have a nice day, everyone, and please avoid doing any shopping. Tomorrow is early enough. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Thanksgiving Cat Blogging – 27 November 2014

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

Mother Jones

Via James Pethokoukis, here’s a chart from a new CBO report on federal policies and innovation. Needless to say, you can’t read too much into it. It shows the growth since 1963 of total factor productivity (roughly speaking, the share of productivity growth due to technology improvements), and there are lots of possible reasons that TFP hasn’t changed much over the past five decades. At a minimum, though, the fact that patent activity has skyrocketed since 1983 with no associated growth in TFP suggests, as the CBO report says dryly, “that the large increase in patenting activity since 1983 may have made little contribution to innovation.”

The CBO report identifies several possible innovation-killing aspects of the US patent system, among them a “proliferation of low-quality patents”; increased patent litigation; and the growth of patent trolls who impose a substantial burden on startup firms. The report also challenges the value of software patents:

The contribution of patents to innovation in software or business methods is often questioned because the costs of developing such new products and processes may be modest. One possible change to patent law that could reduce the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit patent protections for inventions that were relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, patents on software and business methods could expire sooner than is the case today (which, with renewals, is after 20 years), reducing the incentive to obtain those patents. Another change that could address patent quality, the processing burden on the USPTO, and the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit the ability to obtain a patent on certain inventions.

Personally, I’d be in favor of limiting software and business method patents to a term of zero years. But if that’s not feasible, even a reduction to, say, five years or so, would be helpful. In the software industry, that’s an eternity.

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

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