- Desmond Morris
Only in Amerika Five-year-old caught driving parents’ car in Utah BBC
Only in Amerika Five-year-old caught driving parents’ car in Utah BBC
Deaths of Despair Boston Review
Deaths of Despair Boston Review
UK COVID-19 contact tracing app data may be kept for'research' after crisis ends, MPs told
Want to opt out of that
part? No chance, says NHSX chief
They blasted “Live and Let Die” while Trump walked around a Honeywell plant today in Arizona without a mask. It’s hard to believe this clip is real.pic.twitter.com/M1dMe8KaMK— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2020
'I hadn't signed up' for smear politics: Constance withdraws from byelection
The decision comes less than 24 hours after he declared he would run for the marginal federal seat of Eden-Monaro.
'Distraction at worst possible time': Knives out for Andrew Constance
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian will face pressure to dump Andrew Constance from her cabinet.
High-rise tower catches fire in United Arab Emirates
The blaze at the 48-storey Abbco Tower in Sharjah saw flaming debris shower neighbouring dusty parking lots and left metal siding littering surrounding streets.
Infamous property developer Nati Stoliar has re-entered Sydney's real estate industry with his involvement in a boutique eastern suburbs apartment block after being jailed in the US for multimillion-dollar fraud.
Infamous property developer Nati Stoliar has re-entered Sydney's real estate industry with his involvement in a boutique eastern suburbs apartment block after being jailed in the US for multimillion-dollar fraud.
The entrepreneur, 70, who was synonymous with some of the city's most palatial waterfront homes, including "Boomerang" at Elizabeth Bay, returned to Australia in 2017 after he was imprisoned in Nevada for two years for his part in a fake biofuel credits scheme that netted $US40 million.
Former jailed developer Nati Stoliar back on Sydney real estate sceneAs it happened: Global death toll nears 251,000; 4.5 million download COVIDSafe app; Trump administration forecasts higher death rate
Surprise surprise! Hostile states are hacking coronavirus vaccine research, warn UK and USA intelligence
Just ask us if you need help, urge NCSC and CISA
 |
Salim Mehajer pleads to be let back on social media while on ...
Daily Mail
... asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to relax his bail conditions so he could pay off a bill from the Australian Taxation Office. But a judge rejected most of his ...
Salim Mehajer's asbestos bid to delay declaring bankruptcy
Asbestos in the eye a very Salim excuse
The Daily Telegraph by Steve Zemek
Phoning it in: Pandemic forces Supreme Court to hear cases in a new way Reuters
Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style
But a rather purple tester put paid to that inflation-baiting bug
Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues May 2, 2020 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Managers turn to surveillance software to ensure employees are (really) working from home; Coronavirus impact: Meat processing plants weigh risks of prosecution if they’re blamed for spreading infection; How Cybercriminals are Weathering COVID-19; Zoom or Not?; and NSA Offers Agencies Guidance for Choosing Videoconference Tools.
April’s dumbest and most dangerous coronavirus declarations The Hill
WELL, THEY HAVE TO EARN A LIVING: Out-of-work chefs are leaving NYC to cook for billionaires.
Lesson From The Tax Court: The Eye Of The CDP Needle
How Cybercriminals are Weathering COVID-19
Krebs on Security. BC: “Fascinating info, especially the last paragraph
that scammers are feeling ethical pangs (honor among thieves) against
stealing from healthcare providers or using COVID19 as a part of a
scam.”
ZDNet – Drowning out the pandemic with streaming tunes – “With many of us stuck in our home offices during the pandemic, the silence gets pretty boring. You may require tunes to work — or maybe you need to drown out the distractions. Either way, while there are numerous music streaming services well worth paying for, there’s also plenty of stuff that you can access for free…”
This report by SimpliFlying “maps out over 70 areas on the day of travel and summarizes them in key stages of travel. Special sections featured in the report:
- The Touchless Cabin
- In-flight janitor
- The end of the 30-minute turn
- End of the printed in-flight magazine
- All bags to be “Sanitagged”
- The THA: Transport Health Authority..”
New York Times op-ed: In God We Divide, by Thomas B. Edsall:
A steady religious realignment has reshaped the white American electorate, turning religious conviction — or its absence — into a clear signal of where voters stand in the culture wars
Communism still matters liberty still matters
We analyze the long-term effects of living under communism and its anticapitalist doctrine on households’ financial investment decisions and attitudes towards financial markets. Utilizing comprehensive German brokerage data and bank data, we show that, decades after Reunification, East Germans still invest significantly less in the stock market than West Germans. Consistent with communist friends-and-foes propaganda, East Germans are more likely to hold stocks of companies from communist countries (China, Russia, Vietnam) and of state-owned companies, and are unlikely to invest in American companies and the financial industry. Effects are stronger for individuals exposed to positive “emotional tagging,” e.g., those living in celebrated showcase cities. Effects reverse for individuals with negative experiences, e.g., environmental pollution, religious oppression, or lack of (Western) TV entertainment. Election years trigger further divergence of East and West Germans. We provide evidence of negative welfare consequences due to less diversified portfolios, higher-fee products, and lower risk-adjusted returns.That is from a new NBER paper by Christine Laudenbach, Ulrike Malmendier, and Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi.
But if you are looking for a contrary point of view, consider this new paper by Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, and Ludger Woessmann:
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, World War II and the subsequent occupying forces affected East and West differently. Third, a selective fifth of the population fled from East to West Germany before the building of the Wall in 1961. In light of our findings, we propose a more cautious interpretation of the extensive literature on the enduring effects of communist systems on economic outcomes, political preferences, cultural traits, and gender rolesThat said, I still believe that communism really matters, and durably so, even if the longer history matters all the more so. And now there is yet another paper on East Germany and political path dependence, by Luis R. Martinez, Jonas Jessen, and Guo Xu:
This paper studies costly political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, 40% of the designated Soviet occupation zone was initially captured by the western Allied Expeditionary Force. This occupation was short-lived: Soviet forces took over after less than two months and installed an authoritarian regime in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We exploit the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within the GDR to show that areas briefly under Allied occupation had higher incidence of protests during the only major episode of political unrest in the GDR before its demise in 1989 – the East German Uprising of 1953. These areas also exhibited lower regime support during the last free elections in 1946. We argue that even a “glimpse of freedom” can foster civilian opposition to dictatorship.I take the core overall lesson to be that the eastern parts of Germany will experience significant problems for some time to come.
And speaking of communist persistence, why is it again that Eastern Europe is doing so well against Covid-19? Belarus is an extreme case, with hardly any restrictions on activity, and about 14,000 cases and 89 deaths. You might think that is a cover-up, but the region as a whole has been quite robust and thus it is unlikely to be a complete illusion. And no, it doesn’t seem to be a BCG effect.
Does communism mean there is less of a culture of consumption and thus people find it easier to just stay at home voluntarily? Or have all those weird, old paranoid communist pandemic ministries persisted and helped with the planning? Or what?
Double credit on this one to both Kevin Lewis and Samir Varma, neither less excellent in his conjunction with the other.