Economy
‘We squandered a major economic recovery’: Harvard professor (Adam)
“We had this wonderful recovery. It could have given us the chance to take some significant resources and devote them to some of our well-known challenges, like infrastructure or health care…none of that happened. Instead, we squandered a major economic recovery and didn’t use it to make things better,” said Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, a co-author of the study.
Why protests are erupting over India’s new citizenship law (tmn)
The law has deepened worries that Modi, who leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, is pursuing policies that effectively turn India’s Muslims into second-class citizens. In August, the prime minister stripped India’s only Muslim-majority state — Jammu and Kashmir — of its autonomy and statehood, reversing seven decades of policy. In November, India’s Supreme Court allowed the construction of a grand Hindu temple at the site of a 16th-century mosque illegally destroyed by Hindu extremists.
Paul Craig Roberts: Neoliberal Economics Destroyed the Economy and the Middle Class (Don R.)
“The creation and trading of property and financial assets at rising prices has been fueled by rising debt levels owed to the financial sector. This sector’s returns therefore are best seen not as real wealth on the asset side of the balance sheet, but as overhead on the liabilities side. And the process is multi-layered: income accruing to the financial wealth owned by the top 10 Percent is paid mainly by the bottom 90 percent in the form of rising debt service and other returns to financial and other property.
Earning Income on the Side Is a Large and Growing Slice of American Life (jdargis)
The I.R.S. data on the level and trend in self-employment contradicts information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The B.L.S. has shown a slight decline in the share of workers who are self-employed and estimates it at now around 10 percent. The discrepancy arises because both the bureau’s Current Population Survey and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey identify people as self-employed based only on the job in which they spend the most time working.
America’s obesity epidemic, especially among women, expected to get worse (Thomas R.)
The health implications of carrying too much weight have been well documented with links to heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, as well as at least a dozen types of cancer. In January, the American Cancer Society found that obesity-related cancers are rising, including a third of liver cancer deaths linked to obesity.
The View From Olympus: Spreading Disorder and 4GW (Thomas R.)
What we are seeing in spreading disorder is not Fourth Generation war itself. But it is a failure of the state. As Martin van Creveld argues in The Rise and Decline of the State, the state arose for only one purpose: to establish and maintain order and safety of persons and property. States that cannot do that lose their legitimacy.
Difficulties With Gold? Q&A with Lynette Zang and Eric Griffin (pinecarr)
Lynette and Eric, from ITM Trading, answer listener’s questions on getting through the anticipated financial reset. Per Lynette, “It will not be business as usual for sure”, and “Be prepared to be as independent as possible, which is why community is so important.”
The Naughty List and Grizzly Bears (GE Christenson)
Suppose you owed one dollar to the hypothetical Christopher Columbus Bank in 1492. The bank charged 8.8% interest per year. By 2019 the debt would be thousands of dollars—right?
Guess again! By 2019 that $1.00 debt would have grown to $20,110,000,000,000,000,000, or about $21 million trillion, nearly 1 million times the current national debt.
Is Your City Infrastructurally Obese? (tmn)
In living creatures, obesity is caused by an energy imbalance — an imbalance of calories consumed versus calories burned. We can apply this to our cities too — complex living systems in their own right — by comparing infrastructure (calories consumed) to population and activity (calories burned). Infrastructure includes the size and number of streets, bridges, commercial spaces, homes and public spaces, utilities infrastructure, etc. Activity refers to how much those things are used by the people who live there. It also includes the use of fixed assets (machinery, vehicles, appliances) and liquid assets of a city relative to its size and population.
Ohio gas well blowout leaked more than many countries do in a year (jdargis)
To calculate a total for the entire 20-day release, the researchers use that as their average. That probably underestimates it, though, as the measurement comes two weeks in. You would expect the emissions to start higher and drop as the pressure declines. Using these numbers, the total release is 60,000 (±15,000) tons. The 2015 accident in California—the second biggest recorded methane leak ever in the US—released about 97,000 tons.
Satellite observations reveal extreme methane leakage from a natural gas well blowout (newsbuoy)
Methane emissions due to accidents in the oil and natural gas sector are very challenging to monitor, and hence are seldom considered in emission inventories and reporting. One of the main reasons is the lack of measurements during such events. Here we report the detection of large methane emissions from a gas well blowout in Ohio during February to March 2018 in the total column methane measurements from the spaceborne Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument.
Ring of fire: Australian state declares emergency as wildfires approach Sydney (tmn)
“The firefront has been spreading very quickly and intensely,” NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told reporters in Sydney, adding that two firefighters had been airlifted to hospital with burns to their faces and airways. “It’s still a very difficult and dangerous set of circumstances.”
Athabasca oil sands region snow contains efficient micron and nano-sized ice nucleating particles (newsbuoy)
The Athabasca Oil Sands Region (AOSR) in Alberta, Canada, is an important source of atmospheric pollutants, such as aerosols, that have repercussions on both the climate and human health. We show that the mean freezing temperature of snow-borne particles from AOSR was elevated (−7.1 ± 1.8 °C), higher than mineral dust which freezes at ∼ −15 °C and is recognized as one of the most relevant ice nuclei globally. Ice nucleation of nanosized snow samples indicated an elevated freezing ability (−11.6 ± 2.0 °C), which was statistically much higher than snow-borne particles from downtown Montreal.
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The post Daily Digest 12/19 – Ohio Gas Blowout Leaked More Than Many Countries Do In A Year, How We Squandered A Major Economic Recovery appeared first on Peak Prosperity.
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