[Note: This item comes from friend David Rosenthal. DLH]
US Wealth Distribution, Stock Ownership Edition
By Barry Ritholtz
Jun 30 2017
http://ritholtz.com/2017/06/us-wealth-distribution/
Interesting chart via Deutsche Bank ‘s Torsten Sløk:
Last week when I sent around the chart with the US income distribution I got a lot of client questions about the US wealth distribution. The chart below shows that the top 10% of families in the US own about 75% of total household wealth.
[snip]
[Note: This comment comes from friend Steve Schear. DLH]
From: Steven Schear <steven.schear@googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
Date: June 30, 2017 at 1:03:09 AM EDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com
Copyrights were originally granted to guilds so The Crown could more easily control society. Now, they are to advance the useful arts and encourage the creation of new works. These scientific publishers are guilds collecting rents. If you care about free/affordable access to scientific literature its time to donate to sci-hub.io and libgen.io and help crush the guilds.
Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell.
By Stephen Buranyi
Jun 27 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
[Note: This comment comes from friend Andrew Odlyzko. DLH]
From: odlyzko@umn.edu (Andrew Odlyzko)
Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
Date: June 28, 2017 at 11:03:31 AM EDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com
Dewayne,
It is a very nice article. But it conflates several issues, and has
some serious distortions.
High profits at Elsevier (as well as at other publishers, including
quite a few non-profit professional societies) are one issue. They
provide an interesting perspective on the general evolution of the
economy, in which high profits are often attained with small investments
by seizing strategic choke points. I wrote about this in “”Open Access,
library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce,”
Evaluation Review, vol. 39, no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 130-163, preprint at
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf
Another issue is simply the unnecessarily high costs of scholarly
publishing. Elsevier (as well as many non-profit society publishers)
collect about $5,000 in total on average for each article. There is
plenty of evidence (see the article cited above) that 10% of that
would suffice to provide a peer reviewed journal system of quality
comparable to the present one. (Just the distribution of articles
by themselves is almost trivial, the arXiv prepring archive operates
at a cost of about $10 per preprint.) The main obstacle is the
intertia of academia. Scholars could easily change the system,
but coordinating them (or even getting them to pay any attention
to the issues) is hard.
Yet another issue is the influence of the journal system on the
whole research enterprise. But there it seems that journals (and
in this respect it is not clear Elsevier and other commercial
publishers are much different from professional society ones)
simply reflect the general sociology of science. Even if Elsevier
gave away its journals, those problems would not change. There is
a slew of publications on the problems with with current system, and
just one example is the paper of Vinkers et al. in Br. Med. J. in 2015,
“Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between
1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis,”
www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6467
with a popular writeup by Philip Ball in Nature,
A fourth issue in the Buranyi article is the role of Robert Maxwell.
There was much negative about his contributions. But if one reads
the Buranyi piece carefully, one gets some glimpses of the positive
effects that Maxwell had on scholarly publishing. He did recognize
the rapid expansion of the research establishment, and in particular
the rise of new fields, fields that traditional professional societies
were neglecting. I have not heard of any cases where he tried to
influence the scientific content of his journals (say, by suppressing
articles about dangers of tobacco, or of pollution). So yes, the high
prices and high profits that he extracted were regrettable. But he just
exploited the opportunities that traditional scholarly publishers had
left open.
Andrew
Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell.
By Stephen Buranyi
Jun 27 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
[Note: This comment comes from friend Andrew Odlyzko. DLH]
From: odlyzko@umn.edu (Andrew Odlyzko)
Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] The Magical Apple Spin-Off That Almost Invented the iPh
Date: June 28, 2017 at 10:33:44 AM EDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com
Dewayne,
A fascinating story.
It can be read in several ways.
One is as an example of great technical insight and inspiration.
Another one is as an example of the disconnect from reality by
really smart and knowledgeable folks who should have known
that their vision could not be realized with the technologies
available at that time. The issue was not that “the world
wasn’t quite ready for handhelds in the mid-1990s.” It was
that the heldhelds that could be built at that time could
not do much.
Andrew
The Magical Apple Spin-Off That Almost Invented the iPhone … in 1993
By Sean Braswell
Jun 27 2017
http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-magical-apple-spin-off-that-almost-invented-the-iphone-in-1993/40708
NRA Issues Call for White Supremacy and Armed Insurrection
The gun lobby’s new “recruitment ad” is really a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, deliberately crafted to stir anger and fear.
By BILL MOYERS AND MICHAEL WINSHIP
Jun 29 2017
http://billmoyers.com/story/new-low-nra/
Take a look at the ad below and ask whether the National Rifle Association can go any lower. Ponder this flagrant call for violence, this insidious advocacy of hate delivered with a sneer, this threat of civil war, this despicable use of propaganda to arouse rebellion against the rule of law and the ideals of democracy.
On the surface this is a recruitment video for the National Rifle Association. But what you are really about to see is a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, each word and image deliberately chosen to stir the feral instincts of troubled souls who lash out in anger and fear:
Disgusting. Dishonorable. Dangerous. But also deliberate. Everything deplored by the NRA in the ad is committed by “they” — a classic manipulation turning anyone who disagrees with your point of view into “The Other” — something alien, evil, foreign.
“They use their media to assassinate real news,” “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”
“And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”
Well, we all know who “they” are, don’t we? This is the vitriol that has been spewed like garbage since the days of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blasted from lynch mobs and demagogues and fascistic factions of political parties that turn racial and religious minorities into grotesque caricatures, the better to demean and diminish and dominate.
It is the nature of such malevolent human beings to hate those whom they have injured, and the NRA has enabled more injury to more marginalized and vulnerable people than can be imagined. Note how the words “guns” or “firearms” are never mentioned once in the ad and yet we know that the NRA is death on steroids. And behind it are the arms merchants — the gun makers and gun sellers — who profit from selling automatic rifles to deranged people who shoot down politicians playing intramural baseball, or slaughter children in their classrooms in schools named Sandy Hook, or who massacre black folks at Bible study in a Charleston church, or murderously infiltrate a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Watching this expertly produced ad, we thought of how the Nazis produced slick propaganda like this to demonize the Jews, round up gypsies and homosexuals, foment mobs, burn books, crush critics, justify torture and incite support for state violence.
It’s the crack in the Liberty Bell, this ad: the dropped stitch in the American flag, the dregs at the bottom of the cup of freedom. It’s a Trump-sized lie invoked to bolster his base, discredit critics, end dissent. Joseph McCarthy must be smiling in hell at such a powerful incarnation on earth of his wretched, twisted soul.
With this savage ad, every Democrat, every liberal, every person of color, every immigrant or anyone who carries a protest sign or raises a voice in disagreement becomes a target in the diseased mind of some tormented viewer. Heavily armed Americans are encouraged to lock and load and be ready for the ballistic solution to any who oppose the systematic looting of Washington by an authoritarian regime led by a deeply disturbed barracuda of a man who tweets personal insults, throws tantrums and degrades everything he touches.
[snip]
The U.S. fertility rate just hit a historic low. Why some demographers are freaking out.
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Jun 30 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/06/30/the-u-s-fertility-rate-just-hit-a-historic-low-why-some-demographers-are-freaking-out/
The United States is in the midst of what some worry is a baby crisis. The number of women giving birth has been declining for years and just hit a historic low. If the trend continues — and experts disagree on whether it will — the country could face economic and cultural turmoil.
According to provisional 2016 population data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday, the number of births fell 1 percent from a year earlier, bringing the general fertility rate to 62.0 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. The trend is being driven by a decline in birthrates for teens and 20-somethings. The birthrate for women in their 30s and 40s increased — but not enough to make up for the lower numbers in their younger peers.
A country’s birthrate is among the most important measures of demographic health. The number needs to be within a certain range, called the “replacement level,” to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks. If too low, there’s a danger that we wouldn’t be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable. Countries such as France and Japan that have low birthrates have put pro-family policies into place to try to encourage couples to have babies. The flip side can also be a problem. Birthrates that are too high can strain resources such as clean water, food, shelter and social services, problems faced by India, where the fertility rate has fallen over the past few decades but still remains high.
The debate now is about whether the United States is headed toward a “national emergency,” as some have feared, or whether this is a blip and the birthrate will level off soon.
“It’s about millennials,” says Donna M. Strobino, a professor of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Those supposedly entitled young adults with fragile egos born in the 2000s who live in their parents’ basements and hop from job-to-job — it turns out they’re also much less likely to have babies, at least so far. Some experts think millennials are just postponing parenthood while others fear they’re choosing not to have children at all.
Strobino is among those who is optimistic and sees hope in the data. She points out that the fall in birthrates in teens — an age when many pregnancies tend to be unplanned — is something we want and that the highest birthrates are now among women 25 to 34 years of age.
“What this is is a trend of women becoming more educated and more mature. I’m not sure that’s bad,” she explained.
Indeed, as fertility treatments have extended the age of childbearing, the birthrates among women who are age 40 to 44 are also rising.
[snip]
[Note: This item comes from friend Judi Clark. DLH]
Thoughts on Insurance
By Aaron Harris
Jun 29 2017
http://blog.ycombinator.com/thoughts-on-insurance/
Two years ago, I printed up Chubb’s 10k and started reading.1 I’d become interested in the insurance industry through a number of conversations with my father-in-law, who is a commercial broker. While I’d thought a bit about health insurance before that, it was mostly in the context of my own access to it, and the never-ending debate around Obamacare.
As I read Chubb’s financials, industry reports, Warren Buffet’s letters, and various blogs I came to realize that the insurance industry was both far more complex and rife with opportunity than I’d assumed. While I’ve always been attracted to fractured and regulated markets, nothing quite mimics insurance in its scope, nuance, and size. I wasn’t the only person thinking about this, as the number of recent insurance tech companies indicates.
Problems
Here are a few core problems built into the structure of insurance today.2
Data
Insurance is fundamentally a data problem. Insurance carriers set their rates based on actuarial models designed to predict the likelihood of future events. Without access to oracular powers, these models rely on the best available data when they are built and as they are updated.
This data is necessarily incomplete. It only becomes more incomplete as time goes on and more events pile up in a very large and unordered world. For instance, a home insurer would be able to better predict the likelihood of fire if it knew the details of every overloaded power strip in every home in its portfolio. It does not.
The issues faced by carriers with data extends to the setup of carrier/broker relationships. These relationships necessarily involve lots of paper because there are few simple systems that easily integrate the two sides. This means that information about customers is often relayed poorly, misunderstood, or simply ignored.
Structures
Trying to figure out all of the different players in the industry is difficult at best.
When it comes to the distribution side, I can’t do it any better than Kyle did here: https://medium.com/@kylenakatsuji/so-your-startup-wants-to-sell-insurance-a0167581f7b1.
However, there are even more players involved behind the scenes which are important to understand if you want to uncover opportunities:
Reinsurer – There are companies that purchase insurance risk from carriers. They are critical to the system because insurers will often find that they are overexposed to a given risk (like that presented by hurricanes in the Gulf Coast) and will need to offload some of that risk. Reinsurers traditionally purchase risk from carriers and from other reinsurers. Reinsurers have also begun expanding the types of risk that they will purchase and the stage at which they’ll do it, sometimes acting nearly identically to carriers.
ILS buyers – ILS are Insurance Linked Securities. The most of famous of these are CAT (catastrophe) bonds. These are created by insurers and reinsurers who wish to syndicate risk beyond the insurance world. This is done by creating a bond which pays an interest rate and defaults in the case of particular event. The market for these is currently fairly small, and the bonds are generally purchased by hedge funds. This market will likely expand over time as capital continues to look for yield.
Fronting carriers – These are carriers that form partnerships with other entities, like MGAs (Managing General Agent, defined in Kyle’s post above), wherein the MGA writes risk using the regulatory framework of the fronting carrier, and then immediately sells the risk to a third party. This structure allows entities that could not otherwise sell insurance – whether through business choice, lack of regulatory capital, or lack of expertise necessary to form a carrier – do so as long as the fronting carrier agrees.
Fronting carriers are not capitalized in the same way that large carriers are, as they don’t hold risk on their own books. They generally collect a fee – for the use of the regulatory framework – from the entity finding and pricing risk.
[snip]
Iranian city soars to record 129 degrees: Near hottest on Earth in modern measurements
By Jason Samenow
Jun 29 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/06/29/iran-city-soars-to-record-of-129-degrees-near-hottest-ever-reliably-measured-on-earth/
A city in southwest Iran posted the country’s hottest temperature ever recorded Thursday afternoon, and may have tied the world record for the most extreme high temperature.
Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at French meteorological agency MeteoFrance, posted to Twitter that the city of Ahvaz soared to “53.7°C” (128.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Kapikian said the temperature is a “new absolute national record of reliable Iranian heat” and that it was the hottest temperature ever recorded in June over mainland Asia. Iran’s previous hottest temperature was 127.4.
Weather Underground’s website indicates the temperature in Ahvaz climbed even higher, hitting 129.2 degrees at both 4:51 and 5 p.m. local time.
If that 129.2 degrees reading is accurate, it would arguably tie the hottest temperature ever measured on Earth in modern times.
Christopher Burt, a weather historian for Weather Underground, has exhaustively analyzed world temperature extremes and determined the 129.2 degree readings posted in Mitribah, Kuwait on July 21, 2016, and Death Valley, Calif., on June 30, 2013, are the hottest credible temperature measurements that exist in modern records.
Officially, Death Valley set the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth on July 10, 1913, soaring to 134 degrees (57 Celsius). But Burt posted a devastating critique of that measurement in October 2016, concluding it was “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective,” and that the weather observer committed errors.
For the 129.2 degree-reading Ahvaz posted on Weather Underground to stand and match the highest modern global temperature, it will require review by the World Meteorological Organization.
The scorching temperature reading was brought about by a dome of heat centered over the Middle East.
The excessively hot air over Ahvaz, a city of 1.1 million people, felt even more stifling due to high humidity. As the temperature climbed into the high 120s, the dew point, a measure of humidity, peaked in the low 70s; a high level for the desert location (due to air flow from the Persian Gulf, to the south). The heat index — a measure of how hot it feels factoring in the humidity — exceeded 140 degrees. This combination of heat and humidity was so extreme that it was beyond levels the heat index was designed to compute.
In the Persian Gulf city of Jask, Iran, about 800 miles southeast of Ahvaz, the humidity was even more suffocating. The dew point on Wednesday morning hit 91.4 degrees. Dew points above 90 are quite rare. The highest dew point ever measured on Earth is 95 degrees (35 Celsius), set at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on July 8, 2003.
Thursday marked the second straight day of record heat in Ahvaz. On Wednesday, it hit 127.2 degrees (52.9 Celsius), breaking the record for Iran’s hottest June temperature, only to be exceeded the next day.
[snip]
California’s top elections officer to Trump’s voting fraud panel: No
By John Myer
Jun 29 2017
http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-california-s-top-elections-officer-1498771356-htmlstory.html
President Trump’s voter fraud commission will not be getting the names and addresses of California’s registered voters. The panel’s request was denied on Thursday by Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who said it would only “legitimize” false claims of massive election cheating last fall.
Padilla refused to hand over data, including the names, addresses, political party and voting history of California’s 19.4 million voters. Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas who serves as vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, sent letters to all 50 states on Wednesday for information he said would help the group examine rules that either “enhance or undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of federal elections processes.”
Padilla, though, suggested the effort is little more than a ruse.
“I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally,” he said in a written statement. “California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, the Vice President, and Mr. Kobach.”
Last November, Trump tweeted that California was one of three states where “serious voter fraud” took place in the general election. No state or local elections official has found any evidence to back up the president’s assertion.
Kobach’s request says the panel seeks only “publicly available” information. Basic information about California voters is routinely shared with journalists, political campaigns and researchers after a written request and payment of a fee.
The letter asks for data including “information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information.”
Padilla also criticized the selection of Kobach to help lead Trump’s commission, accusing the Kansas official of past efforts at racial profiling and suppressing voter turnout.
“His role as vice chair is proof that the ultimate goal of the commission is to enact policies that will result in the disenfranchisement of American citizens,” Padilla said.
The presidential commission’s first meeting is scheduled for July 19.
Presidential Commission Demands Massive Amounts of State Voter Data
A commission created by President Donald Trump to enhance confidence in America’s elections has asked all 50 states for copies of their voter records which often include names, addresses and ages. The commission has said it intends to make the information widely available.
By Jessica Huseman
Jun 29 2017
https://www.propublica.org/article/presidential-commission-demands-massive-amounts-of-state-voter-data
On Wednesday, all 50 states were sent letters from Kris Kobach — vice chair for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — requesting information on voter fraud, election security and copies of every state’s voter roll data.
The letter asked state officials to deliver the data within two weeks, and says that all information turned over to the commission will be made public. The letter does not explain what the commission plans to do with voter roll data, which often includes the names, ages and addresses of registered voters. The commission also asked for information beyond what is typically contained in voter registration records, including Social Security numbers and military status, if the state election databases contain it.
President Donald Trump established the commission through an executive order on March 11. Its stated goal is to “promote fair and honest Federal elections” and it is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence. The commission plans to present a report to Trump that identifies vulnerabilities in the voting system that could lead to fraud and makes recommendations for enhancing voters’ confidence in election integrity. No deadline has been set for completion of the work.
A number of experts, as well as at least one state official, reacted with a mix of alarm and bafflement. Some saw political motivations behind the requests, while others said making such information public would create a national voter registration list, a move that could create new election problems.
“You’d think there would want to be a lot of thought behind security and access protocols for a national voter file, before you up and created one,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola University School of Law and former Department of Justice civil rights official. “This is asking to create a national voter file in two weeks.”
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also expressed serious concerns about the request. “It’s probably a good idea not to make publicly available the name, address and military status of the people who are serving our armed forces to anyone who requests it,” he said.
Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas, has been concerned about voter fraud for years. His signature piece of legislation was a law requiring Kansans to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote, which is currently ensnarled in a fraught court battle with the American Civil Liberties Union. He has written that he believes people vote twice with “alarming regularity,” and also that non-citizens frequently vote. Multiple studies have shown neither happens with any consistency.
Kobach also runs the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a proprietary piece of software started by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh in 2005. Under the program, 30 states pool their voter information and attempt to identify people who are registered in more than one state.
Some expect the information Kobach has requested will be used to create a national system that would include data from all 50 states.
[snip]
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