What about an excess profits tax on the accountants at Deloitte?
As the FT notes this morning: Deloitte’s UK partners will receive an average payout of about £1m after the accounting firm’s profits rebounded from a
Read the full article…
Power Outages Hit China, Threatening the Economy and Christmas
John Hubbard: “One’s core beliefs are never quite the same as other people’s. At the very least, your “pursuit of happiness” may involve far different activities than mine. Even identical twins raised together have varying tastes, after all. So it’s little wonder, for instance, that not every “single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” If I were to map out the kinds of guiding ethical principles, universal maxims, and categorical imperatives which best define how I believe everyone should try to exercise whatever degree of free will we possess, bleeding-heart that I am, the list would go something like this…”
Vassily Ivanchuk annotating a game of his blindfold. Sometimes considered the greatest chess interview of all time.
Washington Post - We Need Software Updates Forever: “Whether you have a little or a lot of Google in your life, you should stay on top of these account settings. There’s probably a little bit of Google in every part of your life. The company hosts a sprawling network of tools and apps we use for everything — from school assignments and work emails, to watching how-to videos and making calls. The good news is that Google has tried to collect its most important privacy settings into one place, which means you can protect your data in Gmail and Google-owned YouTube at the same time….”
Covid: Immune therapy from llamas shows promise
Picasso’s Daughter Pays French Taxes With Nine Artworks
IEEE Spectrum: “Manufacturers should maintain their software and firmware indefinitely. Consumers have relied on the good graces of device makers to keep our gadget firmware and software secure and up-to-date. Doing so costs the manufacturer some of its profits. As a result, many of them are apt to drop support for old gadgets faster than the gadgets themselves wear out. This corporate stinginess consigns far too many of our devices to the trash heap before they have exhausted their usability. That’s bad for consumers and bad for the planet. It needs to stop. We have seen a global right-to-repair movement emerge from maker communities and start to influence public policy around such things as the availability of spare parts. I’d argue that there should be a parallel right-to-maintain movement. We should mandate that device manufacturers set aside a portion of the purchase price of a gadget to support ongoing software maintenance, forcing them to budget for a future they’d rather ignore. Or maybe they aren’t ignoring the future so much as trying to manage it by speeding up product obsolescence, because it typically sparks another purchase…”
BBC Chief Says Culture Wars Make It More Difficult To Be Impartial
Has Philosophy Really Been Replaced By Science?
What I’ve been reading
1. Anne Enright, The Green Road. Could Enright be the least heralded, English-language novelist in the United States today? I also was a big fan of her last book Actress. Her short pieces are wonderful as well. Having won a Booker, she is hardly obscure, and yet I have never had anyone tell me that I absolutely must read Anne Enright? Even after the very recent burst of interest in Irish writers…I will read more of her!
2. Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands. My favorite Fermor book, the best sections were on Trinidad and Haiti, but you might have known I would think that.
3. Nadia Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. Back then vaccines were quite often dangerous: “Victorian public vaccinators used a lancet (a surgical instrument) to cut lines into the flesh in a scored pattern. This was usually done in at least four different places on the arm. Vaccine matter, also called lymph, would then be smeared into the cuts…[often] vaccinators required infants to return eight days after the procedure to allow lymph to be harvested from their blisters, or “vesicles.” This matter was then inserted directly into the arms of waiting infants…After 1871, a fine of up to 20 shillings could be imposed on parents who refused to allow lymph to be taken from their children for use in public vaccination.” Oddly, or perhaps not, the arguments against vaccines haven’t changed much since that time.
4. Andrew G. Farrand, The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity. There should be more books like this! Imagine a whole book directed at…not getting someone tenure, but rather helping you understand what it is actually like to be in Algeria. Sadly I have never been, but this is the next best thing. As I say repeatedly, there should be more country-specific books, simply flat out “about that country” in an explanatory sense. As for Algeria, talk about a nation in decline…
Eswar S. Prasad, The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance is a useful overview of its source material.
Anna Della Subin, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine, starts with the question of how Emperor Haile Selassie became a god to Rastafarians in Jamaica, and then broadens the question accordingly, moving on to General Douglas MacArthur, Annie Besant, and much more. I expect we will be hearing more from this author. At the very least she knows stuff that other people do not.
You can learn the policy views of Thomas Piketty if you read his Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021. Oddly, or perhaps not, his socialism doesn’t seem to involve government spending any more than fifty percent of gdp, which would be a comedown for many European nations.
Kathleen Harward and Gabriella Sulbarán, The Shared Dog, for young children, teaching the economics of property rights through the tale of a dog. From BrandyPie Books.