Our
society is organized around fears, mostly imaginary.
Relax:
GlaxoSmithKline, which was fined $3 billion for fraudulently
promoting several of its drugs, has known
for over 15 years that its antidepressant drug Paxil is neither safe
nor effective when given to adolescents and has withheld this
information while pushing the drug's use. The fine will undoubtedly
be some small fraction of the profits they made selling a drug that
caused suicidal thoughts in nearly 15% of of the adolescents given
it.
On
Immigration:
Either we believe in our founding principles, or we should give up
the pretense.
Yellen,
Passing The Graveyard:
“Let
me be clear that negative interest rates was not something that we
considered very seriously... at all... today.” Today.
Stay
tuned.
Bigger
Brother:
Swiss
health insurers are developing a plan to require their clients to
wear digital health and fitness monitoring devices so they could
charge higher premiums to sedentary couch potatoes.
Odds
On:
Nearly 3,000 of the 440,000 refugees who have attempted
to cross the Mediterranean
this year have drowned. That's a 0.6% death rate, which may beat the
odds if you own
a GM vehicle.
Readin':
Children
in
countries
where the
kids
are “most comfortable with computers”, have
much poorer reading skills that in countries not quite so addicted to
the tiny sceen.
The
more children use computers at school, the lower
their reading skills. And
cutting-and-pasting isn't writing, either.
What
Could Go Wrong?
Japan
has
changed
its constitution to
allow Japanese troops to fight
abroad after
70 years of repressed
aggression
official pacifism.
Quote/Note:
Our
perception of how we are doing economically
is based on how the Jones are doing. Not the 1% Jones. Not even the
10% Jones, but the Jones in our group. It is not the actual level of
increase or decrease in our wages that matter, but whether we're
doing as well or better than the neighbors. As for the 10%, we we
wish them well because we deeply believe that we'll get there one day
soon.
Second
Chances: The
Catholic Church continues to ship US and European priests who
sexually abuse children to South America, instead of jail.
This
Is Only A Test:
A military coup lin
Burkina Faso, ed
by the country's former spy chief, has overthrown the
country
democratic
government.
Your task: find Burkina Faso on a map. Hint: it's
in Africa.
If
Only: The
Supreme Court has banned all
corporate contributions
to individual political
campaigns and to
political parties.
That's Brazil's Supreme
Court, not ours.
Another
Verse: So far
this year over half a
million children have fled attacks by the Islamist group Boko Haram.
Maybe we need to
rethink a whole lot of things.
Tradition:
A seventeen year old Saudi convicted of protesting against the
government will be crucified. This does not seem to be an
improvement over the more traditional beheading.
Food
For Thought:
August 2015 was the hottest August on record (as were the three
previous months). It has been 100 years since a month – any month
- set the record for being cold.
3 comments:
About Romer's model: "What happens if you open up 3 different lines to speed up the processing to see who will win and who will lose? The total number of people waiting in line will triple but the time that each person spends in line will be unchanged."
This assumes that all people put exactly the same value on the queueing time, which is obviously false. Adding more capacity results in shorter queues, because the pool of people who are willing to wait for a longer time is depleted.
This is also why queues get shorter over time at the launch of a new product, for which there is no continuously replenishing demand.
The same holds for humanitarian immigration. Eventually all the people who both have a valid cause and want to apply for asylum will have done so, and the "flood" will dry up.
Reino - To some degree of the drop-of in migration of those "who both have a valid cause and want to apply for asylum" depends on who is defining "valid cause." Staying alive may seem like a valid cause, but it depends on what the reviewing officials determine to be valid/invalid threats to life. Also, the drying of of the flood assumes that the conditions at the points of origin remain the same or ameliorate over time. The great suspicion of those paid to worry about such things is that the conditions at the points of origin are not going to moderate, they are going to worsen, progressively, as the heat gets hotter, the dry gets dryer and the strong steal from the less-so.
Will famine be a valid reason to emigrate? Years and years of drought? Continued misrule by brigands (and are they our brigands or no?)?
I suspect the flood will one day abate, but only because those who have the resources, physical, material and personal, to make the journey have all fled.
Eventually, as you said. But boy will thre be a lot of miserable events before "ally" arrives.
Note how few of these immigrants are from areas with near zero cellphone access, and how many come from areas were even internet access is common.
Moving has always been a risk, what has changed is how much lower the risk has become thanks to the internet and wireless networking. A pilots rutter was once a tightly guarded secret, now information is available on wikis, constantly updated, sometimes contaminated with bad information, but so much more reliable and available than ever before. Any change in policy by Germany has rippled through the immigrant community fast than it has among US mass media.
The flood has just started.
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