Feb 10, 2019 in Link Post
Shinzō Abe has made increasing the participation of women in the workforce one of the key planks in his economic recovery plan. This is complicated by the frankly bonkers amount of work that women have to do as soon as they have kids in Japan – work men often cannot help with because they are expected to be in the office for 16 hours at a time. In addition to the normal tasks parents in North America expect (cooking, cleaning, etc.), parents in Japan have to do things like launder the linens their children use at school, fill out exhaustive diaries documenting everything their children do at home, and sign off on every piece of homework. I sometimes feel like someone needs to hijack the public-address system in Japan and play “work smart not hard” on repeat for as long as it takes for the message to sink in.
...Jan 9, 2019 in Link Post
Power generation and distribution is used in economics textbooks as the classic example of a natural monopoly. Lebanon proves this doesn’t have to be the case, with a mostly functional (and mostly illegal) parallel power distribution system that many people rely on to supplement the official system. I don’t think this should be used more generally – having a bunch of small generators is definitely more polluting – but it’s interesting to see that markets can work even in cases where people normally expect them to fail.
On the advice of a high school teacher, I once read most of the epic fantasy series “The Malazan Book of the Fallen”. One thing it made clear to me was just how dangerous and difficult it is to be an absolute ruler. Anyone who controls the information flow to you can essentially control you. By this token, it should be worrying that
Dec 2, 2018 in Link Post
This true crime story ticks a lot of my boxes. The villain is created by the slow entropic decay of corruption and temptation, while the hero chose to prosecute white collar crimes because he wanted to go after crimes of greed, not desperation. I continue to believe that as a society, we’re too lenient on crimes of greed and too harsh on crimes of desperation, so it was easy to cheer the prosecution on.
This post claims that the pharmaceutical industry is soon going to fall apart because returns on R&D aren’t keeping up; all the low hanging fruit is gone and none of the harder to reach stuff is profitable. If anyone can give me a sense of how deeply I should be worried by this, I’ll be deeply appreciative.
If your restaurant is failing, or if you want to maximize your chances of success when you...
Nov 4, 2018 in Link Post
When a poet writes about his experience of becoming a lawyer after his release from jail, you know it’s going to be a punch in the gut. One thing I noticed: he would have had a much easier time reintegrating to society, finding a job, etc. had he been tried as a juvenile, rather than an adult. Has there been any meaningful study on recidivism rates between these two groups? You could compare 17 year olds and 18 year olds charged with the same crime and look at outcomes fifteen years down the road.
Segway’s patents are now at the core of the new crop of ride-sharing scooters, which may finally bring about the original promise of the Segway. Perhaps one element of Segway’s downfall (beyond how uncool they were) is how proper they were about everything. They worked hard to get laws passed that made it legal...