Interesting stuff!
"…the data we’ve analyzed shows that Uber has a point when it claims that it is doing a better job than taxis in serving the boroughs of New York City outside of Manhattan. Of the 4.4 million Uber rides for which the data shows a pickup location, 22 percent started outside of Manhattan, compared with just 14 percent of the 88.4 million yellow and green taxi rides."
"The states have no good reasons to believe that tax cuts will bring the desired manna. Yet some continue to erode their tax bases in the name of business growth in an era in which few states can afford to cut critical services (that businesses care about) ranging from education to infrastructure repair. Some ideas live on and on, no matter how much evidence accumulates against them. States that accept them as gospel anyway do so at their peril."
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/01/reality-check-in-the-factory.html
What Amengual found surprised him. A large thread within political science theory, drawing from the German sociologist Max Weber, holds that states can best enforce labor laws when they act as politically neutral arbiters of regulations. But such neutral arbiters largely did not exist in Argentina. There, many regulators only learned where to find malfeasance by working closely with non-neutral parties, say, union leaders, or immigrant groups. The process of regulation needed to be politicized to happen at all.
http://gizmodo.com/nycs-new-public-wifi-is-obscenely-fast-1753825735
From the article: "Today, the first of New York City’s public, gigabit wifi hotspots opened to the public. I tried them, so take it from me: They’re insanely fast. How fast? Fast enough that Starbucks’ free internet is about to get killed."
Cleese means to validate only “those mistakes which, at the time they were committed, did have a chance.” A reasonably good try, in other words. There are some absolutes in the world, after all, and there are “true copper bottomed mistakes, like spelling the word ‘rabbit with three m’s or … starting a land war in Asia.”
A student in PADM 753 sent this to me; good stuff and confirms what we’d expect. [EGADS!!! Confirmation bias!]
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/01/14/462135458/pretty-girls-make-higher-grades?sc=tw
The researchers found that the women judged as least attractive earned significantly lower grades, after controlling for their ACT scores. The best-looking women earned higher grades. And male professors were more likely than female professors to give better-looking women higher grades.
But here’s what the study’s lead author, Rey Hernández-Julián, calls the "key finding": When these same exact students took online courses, where appearance is not an issue, the benefits of being pretty all but disappeared.
After an uproar last year between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the ride-hailing app Uber over the company’s growth in New York City, the two sides reached something of a truce on Friday with the release of a very short — and very expensive — traffic report from the city.
The long-awaited report concluded that the mayor’s contention that Uber vehicles and other ride-hailing services had worsened traffic in Manhattan was unfounded.
Long, but interesting. “Temporal flexibility.”
State and local government employees already earn less than similar private-sector workers. The wage and compensation gaps between public- and private-sector workers are significantly higher in right-to-work states…
http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/privacy-and-information-sharing/
Most Americans see privacy issues in commercial settings as contingent and context-dependent. A new Pew Research Center study based on a survey of 461 U.S. adults and nine online focus groups of 80 people finds that there are a variety of circumstances under which many Americans would share personal information or permit surveillance in return for getting something of perceived value. For instance, a majority of Americans think it would be acceptable (by a 54% to 24% margin) for employers to install monitoring cameras following a series of workplace thefts. Nearly half (47%) say the basic bargain offered by retail loyalty cards – namely, that stores track their purchases in exchange for occasional discounts – is acceptable to them, even as a third (32%) call it unacceptable.
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