Interesting reads
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The Outlaw
The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs.The Extraordinary Life of William S. Burroughs
Peter Schjeldahl on the unorthodox life and work of the Beat Generation writer: “He had no voice of his own, but a fantastic ear and verbal recall.”
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@antipodean said in Interesting reads:
A monumentally good data driven rant about the state of Australia's economy. And it's not a good picture.
Australia's Economy is a House of Cards
The largest four companies by market capitalisation globally as of the end of Q2 2017 globally were Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook is eight. Together, these five companies generate over half a trillion dollars in revenue per annum. That's equivalent to about half of Australia's entire GDP. And many of these companies are still growing revenue at rates of 30% or more per annum.
These are exactly the sorts of companies that we need to be building.
With our population of 24 million and labour force of 12 million, there’s no other industry that can deliver long term productivity and wealth multipliers like technology. Today Australia's economy is in the stone age. Literally.
By comparison, Australia's top 10 companies are a bank, a bank, a bank, a mine, a bank, a biotechnology company (yay!), a conglomerate of mines and supermarkets, a monopoly telephone company, a supermarket and a bank.
This was a fantastic read, have shared it amongst a few Aussie/kiwi mates. Thanks a lot.
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Fantastic rant! Just got better and better.
Had always thought the Aus economy is a house of cards, over-dependence on mining, very inefficient federal/state/local government levels, massively over-taxed, the NSW state government payroll tax I just couldn't believe when I found out we were paying that, just a naked tax grab over and above PAYE, unbelievable.
Hope the Federal government might have the balls to try some of these things to promote growth but seems unlikely currently.
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Are you a jerk?
Nautilus | Science Connected
Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. Our stories take you into the depths of science and spotlight its ripples in our lives and cultures.
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Gold.
I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor
And then served customers frozen dinners on its opening night.
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@gt12 Funnily enough my wife operates under extreme scepticism when it comes to trip advisor. Particularly when people offer low ratings for the smallest, inconsequential complaints.
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Yeah, I go round and round with my French friend's wife, who relies on it whenever we are traveling around over there. I don't know anyone, who I actually trust, who actually posts on that site, so I've got no idea why I should follow their recommendations.
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Epic. Call Spielberg this would make a great mini series
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The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone
Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education.
"Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job."
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Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?
The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decline in the rate of income convergence across states and in population flows to wealthy places. These changes coincide with (1) an increase in housing prices in productive areas, (2) a divergence in the skill-specific returns to living in those places, and (3) a redirection of unskilled migration away from productive places. We develop a model in which rising housing prices in wealthy areas deter unskilled migration and slow income convergence. Using a new panel measure of housing supply regulations, we demonstrate the importance of this channel in the data. Income convergence continues in less-regulated places, while it has mostly stopped in places with more regulation.
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Generation Screwed
Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
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@rocky-rockbottom I think an unfortunate and significant question for millennials (and beyond) is "how much better can you do your job than someone in China"? And if the answer is "not that much", the appropriate comparison is not how well you live compared to the boomers, but how well you live compared to the guy in China who might take your job.
It's a shit position to be in a high cost - low wage economy.
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@rocky-rockbottom said in Interesting reads:
@jegga said in Interesting reads:
Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
Read the whole thing. What a mindfuck from beyond the orbit of Planet: Fuck.
I gave up.
It read as someone that feels entitled complaining about how unfair it is being labelled as someone that feels entitled.
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I thought it was an interesting article but I don’t have a lot of time for the argument that picks a particular set of circumstances at a particular moment in history and asks why things can’t be still like that.
It’s not just the author , politicians do it too. Yes houses were cheaper in the 70s would she swap her life now to live back then? Would she fuck.
Other than that there was some interesting stuff about how the gfc has affected her generation . -
How the Apollo 1 fire propelled the lunar program.
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@jc said in Interesting reads:
How the Apollo 1 fire propelled the lunar program.
There is an episode on that incident on Time's podcast The Countdown
TIME Podcast - THE COUNTDOWN
TIME Podcast - It's Your Universe, Hosted by Jeffrey Kluger Hosted by Jeffrey Kluger @jeffreykluger The Countdown [protected-iframe id="d3f603617dd571af0f206174a0593cb2-1359921-40681012" info="https://art19.com/shows/2b823515-37f7-43af-99ce-5a2b1131d38d/embed?theme=dark...
Space does not wish you well. It has no shortage of ways to kill you, and in the fifty years humans have been flying spacecraft around the Earth and out to the moon, the mortal perils have been evident. But ten of the missions were the most harrowing of all. Some of them ended in tragedy, some ended successfully—but all of them involved astronauts playing for the very highest stakes in the very deadliest place. Countdown tells the tale of those ten missions—some of them American, some Russian —with authentic audio from the spacecraft, the ground and the broadcast booth. Written and narrated by Jeffrey Kluger—author of Apollo 13 and Apollo 8—Countdown recreates the space crises that every astronaut has feared, and that an unlucky handful were forced to live.re
Category: Science
