Tag Archives: Physical

The Case Against Postal Banking

by DaltonHauslaib Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dean Baker thinks the Washington Post is wrong to imply that the postal service hasn’t been aggressive about improving its productivity. Agreed. Then this:

The other point is that the Postal Service could improve its finances by expanding rather than contracting. Specifically, it can return to providing basic banking services, as it did in the past and many other postal systems still do. This course has been suggested by the Postal Service’s Inspector General.

This route takes advantage of the fact that the Postal Service has buildings in nearly every neighborhood in the country. These offices can be used to provide basic services to a large unbanked population that often can’t afford fees associated with low balance accounts. As a result they often end up paying exorbitant fees to check cashing services, pay day lenders and other non-bank providers of financial services.

Color me skeptical. I know this sounds like a terrific, populist idea, but I can think of several reasons to be very cautious about expansive claims that the USPS is uniquely situated to provide basic banking services. Here are a few:

What’s the core competency that would allow USPS to excel at banking? The Inspector General says that “the first and possibly most important factor is the sheer ubiquity of the Postal Service.” In other words, they have lots of locations: 35,000 to be exact. But who cares? Physical real estate is the least compelling reason imaginable to think an organization would be great at basic banking. After all, you know who else has lots of branches? Banks. Even after years of downsizing, there are nearly 100,000 branch banks in the United States.
What else? The Inspector General suggests “trust and familiarity with the postal ‘brand.'” Meh. Americans trust McDonald’s too. That doesn’t mean they’d flock to do their banking there. This kind of thing reminds me of hundreds of really bad marketing presentations I’ve attended in my lifetime.
When you say “postal banking,” most people think about small mom-and-pop savings accounts. But that’s not really what the postal service has in mind. The IG report focuses more on (1) payment mechanisms (i.e., electronic money orders), (2) products to encourage savings, and (3) reloadable prepaid cards. The first is fine, but not really “postal banking.” The second is problematic since even the IG concedes that the reason poor people tend not to save is “largely due to a lack of disposable income among the underserved.” That’s quite an understatement, and it’s not clear what unique incentives the postal service can offer to encourage savings among people who have no money to save. That leaves prepaid cards—and maybe a good, basic prepaid card sponsored by the federal government is a worthwhile idea. But that’s really all we have here.
Finally, there’s the prospect of providing very small loans. But as much as we all loathe payday lenders, there’s a reason they charge such high rates: they also have high rates of default. The postal service can charge less only by (a) losing money or (b) providing loans only to relatively good customers. If you read the IG report, they basically recommend the latter. It’s not clear to me that this is truly an underserved niche.
Yes, other countries have postal banking services. But these were mostly established long ago, before commercial banking became ubiquitous. It may have been a good idea half a century ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea now.

If the government wants to provide basic banking services for the poor, it’s not clear to me why USPS should do it. They have literally no special competence at this, and the motivation behind it is to provide a revenue stream that offsets losses from mail services. That’s just dumb. Why on earth should public banking services subsidize public mail services? They have nothing to do with each other.

If we really want some kind of government-sponsored basic banking service, we should simply create one and partner with commercial banks to offer it. If this is truly profitable, banks will bid to host these accounts. If it’s not, the subsidies will show up directly in the annual budget accounts. That’s the way it should be.

I’m not yet convinced that this is a good idea to begin with, but I could be persuaded. However, if it is a good idea, there’s honestly no reason to get the postal service involved in this. We already have a Treasury Department, and we already have a commercial banking industry. They truly do have core competencies in offering financial services. Why not use them instead?

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The Case Against Postal Banking

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Just living close to Walmart makes you fat

by Emilie7110 Posted on August 15, 2014

Just living close to Walmart makes you fat

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15 Aug 2014 5:34 PM

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New research published in the Journal of Transport & Health offers more evidence to bolster theories we already had: People living in dense, urban environments are far healthier than people living in the ’burbs.

Specifically, according to two engineers at the University of Connecticut and Colorado University, it’s the design of the street grid that makes the biggest difference. The more intersections between streets, the lower the rates of those four American juggernauts: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. In other words, the more walkable the city, the better its residents’ health.

According to the report, broad, multi-laned streets, characteristic of suburban sprawl, are linked with higher levels of obesity and diabetes. Same goes for “big box” stores, which are associated with 24.9 percent higher rates of diabetes and 13.7 higher rates of obesity. The reason? Both factors indicate that the neighborhood is less friendly to pedestrians.

From The Atlantic:

68 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, which means that someone you know is overweight or obese. Most people don’t get the CDC’s minimum recommended amount of physical activity. Americans spend more time driving every year. So it is logical to conclude, as [Norman] Garrick and [Wesley] Marshall do in their paper, “The role of the street network and how we put together the bones of our communities should not be overlooked as a potential contributing factor to health outcomes.”

As the great urban-versus-suburban debate continues, it seems high time for city planners — and, oh, the federal government — to actually consider these scary health outcomes.

Oh, and that other thing. The planet.

Source:
Do We Look Fat in These Suburbs?

, The Atlantic.

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Just living close to Walmart makes you fat

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GOP Congressman Says Central America Too Dangerous for Congressmen—But Not for Kids

by LeonoraKwan Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.), who spent the weekend visiting Honduras and Guatemala with six other members of Congress, reaffirmed his belief on Wednesday that the ongoing humanitarian crisis along the southern border is to send migrants home—even though he found his host city too dangerous to go outside.

Per the Santa Fe New Mexican:

Congressman Steve Pearce said Wednesday that most immigrants from Central America who are crossing illegally into the United States are driven by economic reasons, not fear of physical danger in their homeland.

…

Pearce said he and the rest of the House delegation that visited Honduras and Guatemala did not venture from their hotel very often because of the dangers, but the message they received in both countries was consistent: “Send back our children.”

So to recap: Tegucigalpa is too dangerous for grown members of Congress to leave their downtown hotel rooms, but a perfectly fine place to send an eight-year-old kid. (According to a press release, the congressional delegation did leave their hotel to visit an outreach center funded by the US government. They also met with the president and first lady of Honduras.) Meanwhile, not content with the results of Pearce’s investigation, a rival Congressional delegation, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is en route to Central America now. We’ll see if they find it safe enough to walk around.

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GOP Congressman Says Central America Too Dangerous for Congressmen—But Not for Kids

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Digital Privacy Is Fundamentally Different From Physical Privacy

by FrankieReeder Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim Lee argues—or perhaps merely hopes—that yesterday’s decision protecting cell phones from warrantless searches might signal a turning point for the Supreme Court’s attitude toward digital information in general:

The government has typically pursued a simple legal strategy when faced with digital technologies. First, find a precedent that gave the government access to information in the physical world. Second, argue that the same principle should apply in the digital world, ignoring the fact that this will vastly expand the government’s snooping power while eroding Americans’ privacy.

….The government hoped the Supreme Court would take this same narrow, formalistic approach in this week’s cell phone privacy case. It wanted the justices to pretend that rifling through the vast quantity of personal information on a suspect’s cell phone is no different from inspecting other objects that happen to be in suspects’ pockets. But the Supreme Court didn’t buy it.

….The Supreme Court clearly recognizes that in the transition from information stored on paper to information stored in computer chips, differences of degree can become differences of kind. If the police get access to one letter or photograph you happen to have in your pocket, that might not be a great privacy invasion. If the police get access to every email you’ve received and every photograph you’ve taken in the last two years, that’s a huge invasion of privacy.

This is a problem that’s been getting more acute for years. The basic question is whether courts should recognize the fact that digital access to information removes practical barriers that are important for privacy. For example, the state of California keeps lots of records about me that are legally public: DMV records, property records, birth and marriage records, etc. In the past, practically speaking, the mere fact that they were physical records provided me with a degree of privacy. It took a lot of time and money to dig through them all, and this meant that neither the government nor a private citizen would do it except in rare and urgent cases.

In the digital world, that all changes. If a police officer has even a hint of curiosity about me, it takes only seconds to compile all this information and more. In a technical sense, they don’t have access to anything they didn’t before, but in a practical sense I’ve lost a vast amount of privacy.

In the past, the Supreme Court has rarely (never?) acknowledged this. In yesterday’s cell phone case, they not only acknowledged it, they acknowledged it unanimously. Is it possible that this means they’ll be applying a more skeptical view to similar cases in the future? Or even revisiting some of their past decisions in light of the continuing march of technology? We don’t know yet, but it’s certainly possible. Maybe the Supreme Court has finally entered the 21st century.

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Digital Privacy Is Fundamentally Different From Physical Privacy

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Robots Aren’t Here Yet, But That Doesn’t Mean They Never Will Be

by Silvester Mongan Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Robert Gordon is one our preeminent scholars of economic growth. He’s also a well-known pessimist about the future: he believes that well-known trends in demographics, education, inequality, and government debt will suppress growth rates over the next several decades.

Fair enough. But what about the possibility that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will have a huge impact between now and 2050? In a new paper, Gordon dismisses the idea in a few disdainful paragraphs. Here’s an excerpt:

Much attention has been paid in the popular media to small robots since “Baxter,” the inexpensive $25,000 robot, made his debut on the TV program 60 Minutes….Reflections on Baxter lead to skepticism that it/he is a major threat to American jobs outside of routine tasks in manufacturing, which only makes up 8 percent of American employment. For his demonstration at the TED conference in Long Beach in late February, 2013, Baxter had to be packed in a suitcase. He could not get his own boarding pass and walk onto the plane. This is the problem with robots — they are both mentally and physically limited to narrow tasks. They can think but can’t walk, or they can walk but can’t think.

….This lack of multitasking ability is dismissed by the robot enthusiasts — just wait, it is coming. Soon our robots will not only be able to win at Jeopardy but also will be able to check in your bags at the sky cap station at the airport, thus displacing the skycaps. But the physical tasks that humans can do are unlikely to be replaced in the next several decades by robots.

….What is often forgotten is that we are well into the computer age, and every Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and local supermarket has self-check-out lines that allow you to check out your groceries or paint cans by scanning them through a robot. But except for very small orders it takes longer, and so people still voluntarily wait in line for a human instead of taking the option of the no-wait self-checkout-lane. The same theme — that the most obvious uses of robots and computers have already happened — pervades commerce. Airport baggage sorting belts are mechanized, as is most of the process of checking in for a flight.

I promise that this is a fair excerpt (and of course you can decide for yourself by clicking on the link). Gordon’s entire argument is that computers were invented a long time ago and we still don’t have smart robots today. And if we don’t have them by now, we won’t have them anytime soon.

This is an embarrassingly bad argument. I can somehow imagine a circa-1870 version of Gordon arguing that all this folderol about electricity is ridiculous. Why, we’ve been studying electricity for over a century, and what do we have to show for it? Some clunky batteries, the telegraph, a few arc lamps with limited use, and a steady supply of techno-optimist inventors who keep telling us that any day now they’ll invent a practical generator that will replace steam engines and change the world. Don’t believe it, folks.1

It’s funny. Every time I write about AI, I get email from some friends and regular readers telling me that I’m all wet. And these correspondents have good arguments. I don’t happen to think they’re right, but they’re good arguments from people who have obviously thought about this stuff. Gordon, however, doesn’t even pretend to engage with the AI literature. He just says that since the current level of AI is primitive, it’s obviously all a bunch of bunk.

But if that’s all you’re going to say, why even bother? A little over a year ago Gordon wrote an op-ed in which he dismissed the prospects of several evolving technologies, but didn’t even mention AI. At the time, I wrote that this was a blinkered view: “At the very least, you need to acknowledge it, and then explain why you think it will never happen, or why it won’t produce a lot of future growth even if it does.” This time around, Gordon hasn’t ignored AI completely, but he certainly hasn’t taken it remotely seriously.2 This is, to be frank, not the work of a scholar who seriously wants to engage with the prospects of future technological growth. It’s the work of someone who’s just checking off a box in order to fend off critics of his pre-ordained conclusion.

1Ironically, Gordon writes that in the mid-1870s everyone knew what was coming: “Inventors were feverishly working on turning the telegraph into the telephone, trying to find a way to transform electricity coming from batteries into the power source to create electric light, trying to find a way of harnessing the power of petroleum to create a lightweight and powerful internal combustion engine. The 1875 diaries of Edison, Bell, and Benz are full of such ‘we’re almost there’ speculation. Once that was achieved, the dream since Icarus of human flight became a matter of time and experimentation.” But for some reason, similar feverish work on intelligent machines in the 2010s is treated as obviously going nowhere.

2This would actually be fine if he’d just say so. AI is speculative enough that it would be perfectly reasonable to simply treat it as a wild card: write a paragraph acknowledging that, yes, it could upend everything, but that this particular paper is a look into a future in which AI remains immature for the foreseeable future. Nothing wrong with that.

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Robots Aren’t Here Yet, But That Doesn’t Mean They Never Will Be

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There’s More to Life Than This – Theresa Caputo

by Myrna Posted on October 1, 2013

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There’s More to Life Than This

Healing Messages, Remarkable Stories, and Insight About the Other Side from the Long Island Medium

Theresa Caputo

Genre: Spirituality

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: October 1, 2013

Publisher: Atria Books

Seller: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc.


Brassy and beloved medium Theresa Caputo, star of the hit TV show Long Island Medium , opens the door to her world and invites you to experience her exceptional gift of communicating with those who’ve crossed over to the Other Side. Theresa Captuo, funny, frank, and down to earth, began communicating with Spirit at the age of four, but she didn’t fully accept her gift until she was thirty-three years old. She had a good life as a busy wife and mom, but she also suffered from chronic anxiety that, as it turned out, came from ignoring her abilities. Once Theresa began channeling, she realized that she felt much better after delivering a message from Spirit and releasing that energy. Since then she’s used her extraordinary gift to help people heal from the loss of their loved ones. Theresa feels that it’s her purpose to make us all aware that there is more to life than what we see here in the physical world and that your deceased loved ones are safe and at peace and assisting you from The Other Side. There’s More to Life Than This explains how Theresa’s mediumship works, what happens to your soul when you die, what Heaven is like, what the deceased want you to know, and the many roles that your family, friends, angels, guides, and God play here and in the afterlife. It also explores how to safely connect with Spirit, so that you can recognize when your loved ones are reaching out. Through Theresa’s personal story, compelling anecdotes, and fascinating client readings, she teaches us about Spirit and helps us to understand and appreciate the important lessons and touching messages that we’re meant to embrace every day.

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There’s More to Life Than This – Theresa Caputo

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Serve to Win – Novak Djokovic & William Davis, MD

by Myrna Posted on September 8, 2013

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Serve to Win

The 14-Day Gluten-Free Plan for Physical and Mental Excellence

Novak Djokovic & William Davis, MD

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $10.99

Publish Date: August 20, 2013

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Random House, LLC


In 2011, Novak Djokovic had what sportswriters called the greatest single season ever by a professional tennis player: He won ten titles, three Grand Slams, and forty-three consecutive matches. Remarkably, less than two years earlier, this champion could barely complete a tournament. How did a player once plagued by aches, breathing difficulties, and injuries on the court suddenly become the #1 ranked tennis player in the world? The answer is astonishing: He changed what he ate. In Serve to Win, Djokovic recounts how he survived the bombing of Belgrade, Serbia, rising from a war-torn childhood to the top tier of his sport. Then he reveals the diet that transformed his health and pushed him to the pinnacle. While Djokovic loved and craved bread and pasta, and especially the pizza at his family’s restaurant, his body simply couldn’t process wheat. Eliminating gluten—the protein found in wheat—made him feel instantly better, lighter, clearer, and quicker. As he continued to research and refine his diet, his health issues disappeared, extra pounds dropped away, and his improved physical health and mental focus allowed him to achieve his two childhood dreams: to win Wimbledon, and to become the #1 ranked tennis player in the world. Now Djokovic has created a blueprint for remaking your body and your life in just fourteen days. With weekly menus, mindful eating tips for optimal digestion, and delicious, easy-to-prepare recipes, you’ll be well on your way to shedding extra weight and finding your way to a better you. Djokovic also offers tips for eliminating stress and simple exercises to get you revved up and moving, the very same ones he does before each match. You don’t need to be a superstar athlete to start living and feeling better. With Serve to Win, a trimmer, stronger, healthier you is just two weeks away. From the Hardcover edition.

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Serve to Win – Novak Djokovic & William Davis, MD

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Drunk Tank Pink – Adam Alter

by Myrna Posted on April 6, 2013

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Drunk Tank Pink

And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

Adam Alter

Genre: Psychology

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: March 21, 2013

Publisher: Penguin Group US

Seller: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


An illuminating look at the way the thoughts we have and the decisions we make are influenced by forces that aren&#39;t always in our control Why are people named Kim, Kelly, and Ken more likely to donate to Hurricane Katrina victims than to Hurricane Rita victims? Are you really more likely to solve puzzles if you watch a light bulb illuminate? How did installing blue lights along a Japanese railway line halt rising crime and suicide rates? Can decorating your walls with the right artwork make you more honest? The human brain is fantastically complex, having engineered space travel and liberated nuclear energy, so it&#39;s no wonder that we resist the idea that we&#39;re deeply influenced by our surroundings. As profound as they are, these effects are almost impossible to detect both as they&#39;re occurring and in hindsight. Drunk Tank Pink is the first detailed exploration of how our environment shapes what we think, how we feel, and the ways we behave. The world is populated with words and images that prompt unexpected, unconscious decisions. We are so deeply attracted to our own initials that we give more willingly to the victims of hurricanes that match our initials: Kims and Kens donate more generously to Hurricane Katrina victims, whereas Rons and Rachels give more openly to Hurricane Rita victims. Meanwhile, an illuminated light bulb inspires creative thinking because it symbolizes insight. Social interactions have similar effects, as professional cyclists pedal faster when people are watching. Teachers who took tea from the break room at Newcastle University contributed 300 percent more to a cash box when a picture of two eyes hung on the wall. We&#39;re evolutionarily sensitive to human surveillance, so we behave more virtuously even if we&#39;re only watched by a photograph. The physical environment, from locations to colors, also guides our hand in unseen ways. Dimly lit interiors metaphorically imply no one&#39;s watching and encourage dishonesty and theft, while…

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Drunk Tank Pink – Adam Alter

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