Mapping a hidden and improbable water supply piping

 

I had to do it on Saturday early morning because normally there is no parking in the area, not even illegally. Hard work in a hidden garden, and for this old fat Jew - dangerous too.  

Maria - tango de Julio Sosa

 Que vieja y cansada imagen me devuelve el espejo... 

China: A different opinion

易富贤Yi Fuxian《大国空巢》

@fuxianyi

·

1h

Economists made exaggerated economic forecasts based on wrong population data, misleading China's leaders into a strategic miscalculation of "the East is rising and the West is declining". U.S. leaders and think tanks have mistook China, an old, sick cat, for an aggressive lion.

Quote Tweet

Chris Reed

@calwhine

·

2h

The biggest uncovered story of modern life: China's population is collapsing. India is now the most populous nation on Earth and has been for years. India is far more wired, its schools are improving, and is at least as poised as China to be a long-term global U.S. rival. twitter.com/fuxianyi/statu…

The Motley Fool about ZIM

The Motley Fool economic web magazine writes about the fall of the container shipping business. It appears that the AI robot that writes its articles has improved its style.

...protests against a government "zero-Covid" policy are spreading across China, threatening both the ruling regime's stability, the country's economy, and its ability to produce products that would need container shipping services to reach foreign markets. To cite just one example, CNBC reported this morning that Apple is likely to produce 6 million fewer iPhone Pro smartphones this month than it would like to produce, as a result of a combination of Covid outbreaks at its factories, government measures to contain the outbreaks, and protests against the containments.  

Result: Less demand for ocean-going container shipping.

Now what

But this, too, shall pass.

There's an old saying in economics: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." As applied to today's situation, we can understand why China's government wants to stamp out Covid and has imposed draconian measures to accomplish this goal. But after three years of trying, and failing, and seeing its economic growth rate hobbled in consequence, it's starting to become apparent that "zero-Covid" is a policy that cannot be sustained forever.  

Therefore, it will stop...eventually.

Kashmir and the Israeli leftist

This week there was an international film festival in India, with the jury presided by an Israeli. He harshly condemned the Indian film "The Kashmir Files" declaring that it was not artistic but gross anti-Muslim propaganda. Hindus had been massacred and expelled from Kashmir in the nineties. India lost half of the province. The film had been financed and promoted by the President of India himself, and a formal diplomatic protest followed.

The Hindu director of "Kashmir" said that Lapid - that is name of the Israeli artist - favors the Muslim rapists and assassins. That he is traitor. Of course he is. Israeli intellectuals, as a class, are hardcore leftists, identified with the Palestinian cause and hating everything Western and Israeli. "Kashmir" being a government-supported film could not be but instinctively odious for them.  

About Regulatory Compliance in the US

 

We quantify firms’ compliance costs of regulation from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor input expenditure to comply with government rules, a primary component of regulatory compliance spending for large portions of the U.S. economy. Detailed establishment-level occupation data, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment’s wage bill owing to employees engaged in regulatory compliance. Regulatory costs account on average for 1.34 percent of the total wage bill of a firm, but vary substantially across and within industries, and have increased over time. We investigate the returns to scale in regulatory compliance and find an inverted-U shape, with the percentage of regulatory spending peaking for an establishment size of around 500 employees. Finally, we develop an instrumental variable methodology for decoupling the role of regulatory requirements from that of enforcement in driving firms’ compliance costs.

That is from a new NBER working paper from Francesco Trebbi and Miao Ben Zhang.  Keep in mind those are the costs of compliance narrowly interpreted, not the costs of regulation overall.  And they do not consider the longer-term innovation costs of “having to turn the firm over to the lawyers.” (Cowen has a certain sense of humor).

For the last ten years, I have been working in this area, more precisely in the water planning field with enormous attention to complying with regulatory rules. There is almost no freedom to design - it is always done with one eye on the regulators. It is not a happy, creative occupation.

I have back ache from sitting too much in front of the computer, overweight, and lack of exercise and walking. 

Stone-age Art