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Goodbye to the Bull Market for US Treasury Bonds - Bloomberg
Second, the US government’s fiscal health keeps deteriorating: Last month, the Congressional Budget Office raised its estimate of this year’s federal budget deficit to $1.7 trillion from $1.5 trillion, and no improvement is likely anytime soon given the political deadlock in Washington. The outlook will probably deteriorate further as higher interest rates drive up debt service costs and retiring baby boomers push up Medicare and Social Security expenditures. Larger deficits push up r*, and add to the bond term premium by increasing the risk of long-term lending to the US government.
Pret a Manger, Itsu Founder Says High UK Interest Rates Not ‘End of the World’ - Bloomberg
Americans, it's a fundamentally different thing. So your marketing and your communication in America has got to be unbelievably clear because Americans are much more gullible and less cynical than here in Europe. Europeans are unbelievably cynical where Americans are not.
Americans on the whole will believe you so your marketing communication has got to be unbelievably good. So when we opened it … initially Itsu made a terrible mistake in America where everything was self service for speed and Americans … they can't get their head around the concept of fresh food being self service.
They like interaction, they're so used to bespoking their food. So they have to be able to make it theirs. Now we are ready. If we went into America today, Itsu would probably be very successful. We would have to do better on communication. Healthy is too blunted. You have to really, really communicate why it's better for them. And are they ready to eat gyoza? Maybe now. Yeah, maybe. As long as you can explain.
How the Other Half Votes: The United States, Part One – Sabato's Crystal Ball
Overall, Joe Biden won 126 of the 151 top half counties, although that still means that Donald Trump won 25 of them, which might be somewhat surprising in a national electorate where population density seems so highly correlated with partisanship. Biden’s haul was up from Obama, who won 112, but Obama won more counties overall, 692 to 538 for Biden (those numbers come from Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Louis Jacobson, who wrote about county-level voting patterns for us in 2021).
Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.
As of 2021, the top 10 dealership groups in the U.S. had annual revenues around $100 billion, more than any company that actually makes cars.* The NADA became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with 16,000 dues-paying businesses spanning 32,500 franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA convention became routine for presidential hopefuls and even presidents. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs; Bill Clinton and both Bushes came after they left the White House.
Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.
hen the first car dealership opened in 1898, in Detroit, it was seen as a convenience for cash-strapped manufacturers, who were overwhelmed just by producing the cars. They needed a means to reach customers without having to build their own sales networks. A class of middlemen sprang up. Car dealers quickly became pioneers of influence, concocting new and astonishing breakthroughs in the very American alchemy of converting riches to political sway.
As the automobile industry flourished, so did the dealership model—but the American entrance into World War I threatened to interrupt that ascent. So, in 1917, a group of 30 Chicago dealers went before Congress to argue that cars shouldn’t be classified as luxuries by the tax code. The luxury distinction would have allowed car-manufacturing facilities to be converted to use for wartime production. That would have been fine for manufacturers, which would have continued making money manufacturing, but disastrous for car dealers, who couldn’t just sell tanks.
Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.
Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.
Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future? | The New Yorker
Lauren Stokes, the Northwestern historian, is a leftist with her own radical critiques of liberalism; nonetheless, she, too, thinks that the right-wing post-liberals are playing with fire. “By hitching themselves to someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to discard liberal norms,” Stokes told me. “When a Hungarian court does something Orbán doesn’t like—something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant—he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to listen to it.’ I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”
Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future? | The New Yorker
Representation in Hungary has grown less proportional in recent years, thanks to gerrymandering and other tweaks to the electoral rules. In April, Fidesz got fifty-four per cent of the vote but won eighty-three per cent of the districts. “At that level of malapportionment, you’d be hard pressed to find a good-faith political scientist who would call that country a true democracy,” Drutman told me. “The trends in the U.S. are going very quickly in the same direction. It’s completely possible that the Republican Party could control the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2025, despite losing the popular vote in every case. Is that a democracy?”
Human tracks may be earliest evidence of people in North America | NOVA | PBS
Months later, they came. The seeds revealed that the footprints they were embedded within are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old—thousands of years older than what scientists generally consider to be the earliest evidence of people in the Americas.
“For forever, people thought Clovis were the first people to cross over [the Bering Strait] about 13,000 years ago,” Pigati says, referring to the commonly-held view among archaeologists. As the story goes, ice sheets in what is now Canada blocked passage between what is now Alaska and the rest of the Americas. Once these ice sheets began retreating, people came south through an ice-free corridor, Pigati explains. His team’s findings now challenge this belief. Carbon dating of the seeds within the White Sands footprints suggest that people were in the Americas while ice sheets still covered much of northern North America. “A lot earlier” than previously thought, Pigati says.
The girl in the Kent State photo and the lifelong burden of being a national symbol - The Washington Post
John remembers the soldiers ordering students who were lingering at the scene to disperse — “or they’d shoot again.” A few moments later, soldiers using bullhorns announced that the university was closed. “They ordered everyone to go home.”
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance. | MIT Technology Review
The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. “The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” say the researchers.
So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co.
The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”
Private Schools Are Indefensible - The Atlantic
The most astonishing of Gallagher’s admonitions was this: “While I often arrive at the office well before 8:00 a.m., that does not mean a parent should ever be waiting for me in the vestibule, parking lot, or outside my office door.” This is what prosecutors in murder cases call “lying in wait.”
Gallagher’s email made it clear that parents had been trying to thwart others’ college prospects in order to enhance their own children’s odds. He sent his missive shortly before winter break, which in private schools is the equivalent of a Friday news dump. It was the kind of school communication that simultaneously put bad actors on notice and reassured the other parents that evil was not triumphing. Inevitably, every parent in the senior class was freaked out that their own children might have been targeted.
After the break, the school’s head, Bryan Garman, sent a follow-up email reiterating the policies Gallagher had announced. He also reminded parents that the college counselors would not “respond to any inquiry for student records” for other people’s kids. The parents’ behavior, Garman said, had become “increasingly intense and inappropriate” and had included “the verbal assault of employees.” But these transgressions were placed within a therapeutic context of acceptance and nonjudgment. College admissions, he wrote, “can stretch the patience and emotional capacity of parents.” (If you want to know if you’re rich, try behaving badly and see if someone in authority will apologize for stretching your patience and emotional capacity.) By the end of the school year, two of Sidwell’s three college counselors had quit.
How Getting Canceled on Social Media Can Derail a Book Deal - The New York Times
The clauses vary from publisher to publisher, and even from one literary agency to the next — every agency strikes its own deal with each publishing house — but the general principle is that they take aim at conduct that would invite widespread public condemnation or significantly diminish sales among the book’s intended audience, and that the publisher didn’t previously know about when it signed the deal. If an author has a propensity for getting in fistfights, for example, the book cannot be dropped because he or she gets in another one.
The politics of synonyms: Subtle choice of synonyms may tip your hand as to which political party you support -- ScienceDaily
In the study, the researchers used machine learning to scan the Congressional Record (2012 to 2017) and the presidential debate corpora to isolate linguistic variation between the two political parties. They identified 8,345 words that were part of the Republican corpus and 7,873 with the Democratic corpus.
#StopTheSteal: Timeline of Social Media and Extremist Activities Leading to 1/6 Insurrection
Most of the material found in this report was posted in plain sight on social media platforms and online forums, designed to convince more Americans of falsehoods about the 2020 elections. The Stop the Steal movement was far from monolithic, though, and included groups across a spectrum of radicalization: hyperpartisan pro-Trump activists and media outlets; the neo-fascist Proud Boys, a group with chapters committed to racism and the promotion of street violence; unlawful militias from around the country with a high degree of command and control, including the so-called Three Percenters movement; adherents to the collective delusion of QAnon; individuals identifying with the Boogaloo Bois, a loosely organized anti-government group that has called for a second civil war; and ideological fellow travelers of the far-right, who wanted to witness something they believed would be spectacular.
[Article] The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter | Harper's Magazine
the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world
Republican congressman Andy Harris’s real Hungarian roots – Hungarian Spectrum
So, Zoltán Hariss was never a forced labor inmate in the Gulag. Instead, he got involved with a very bad cause and ultimately served under the Hungarian branch of the SS. I suspect that Andy Harris is not entirely familiar with the true story of his father’s involvement with the Hungarian Nazi movement, which applauded the extermination of Jews and sent more than 400,000 people to die in Auschwitz. But if he is ignorant of his family history, it would be high time to learn the true facts.
Rural areas lag in degree attainment while urban areas feature big racial gaps
Fully 84 percent of the counties in the bottom 10 percent on degree attainment rates are mostly or completely rural, the group found. And just 16 percent of the counties in the top 10 percent are rural. Counties with low attainment rates are most heavily concentrated in the South, running from the borders of Oklahoma and Texas to the Atlantic Ocean.
Proximity to a college campus is a major driver of the rural attainment gap. Rural counties are home to 14 percent of the nation's campuses, the analysis found, even though these areas cover 97 percent of land area in the U.S.
USDA ERS - Rural Education
While the overall educational attainment of people living in rural areas has increased markedly over time, the share of adults with at least a bachelor's degree is still higher in urban areas. In 1960, 60 percent of the rural population ages 25 and over had not completed high school; by 2018—58 years later—that dropped to 13 percent. Over the same period, the proportion of rural adults 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or higher increased from 5 percent to 20 percent; in urban areas, this proportion stood at 35 percent in 2018. The proportion of rural adults with a bachelor's degree or higher increased by 5 percentage points between 2000 and 2018, and the proportion without a high school degree or equivalent, such as a GED, declined by 11 percentage points.
The Place of College Grads in the Urban-Rural Divide - Bloomberg
While college grads make up 55 percent of the workforce in most leading urban counties (there is one urban county, Falls Church, Virginia, where the share of college grads is a staggering 80 percent), less than 10 percent of adults hold a college degree in the lowest-performing urban counties. By way of comparison, college grads make up a similar 55 percent in the leading rural counties and less than 5 percent or so in the lowest-performing rural counties.
Obesity Rates Continue to Rise Among Americans | MedPage Today
According to data from the 2017-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the prevalence of obesity in American children, adolescents, and adults was higher than it has ever been in nearly 60 years.
Among American adults ages 20 and older, 42.4% had obesity, reported Cheryl Fryar, MSPH, of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) in Hyattsville, Maryland, and colleagues in the latest Health E-Stats.
Another 30.7% of adults were categorized as overweight, and 9.2% had severe obesity.
When the results were stratified by age, adults 40 to 59 saw the highest rates of obesity, with 45% of this age group with a BMI of 30 or higher. Middle-age men had the highest prevalence of obesity, at a rate of 46%.
Here's why conservatives and liberals differ on COVID-19: New Lehigh University College of Business study looks at getting everyone to agree on the pandemic threat -- ScienceDaily
According to the paper, "Getting Conservatives and Liberals to Agree on the COVID-19 Threat," published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research in September, conservatives tend to see free will as the primary driver of outcomes in life, whereas liberals are more accepting of the idea that randomness plays a role. Compared to liberals, conservatives tend to attribute outcomes to purposeful actions. So in the context of the pandemic, they're more likely to blame any negative outcomes in their lives on these more agentic policymakers or fellow Americans rather than the virus itself.
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon | by Rabbit Rabbit | curiouserinstitute | Sep, 2020 | Medium
I’m not sure how much difference there already is between what believers in Q feel now and what people who belong to a religion feel. Already the gist of the mildly religious is present.
“I’m a QAnon/Catholic/Jew and I like the community and I like the activities, but I’m not sure I really believe EVERYTHING is literal. I agree with the basic ideas though.”
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon | by Rabbit Rabbit | curiouserinstitute | Sep, 2020 | Medium
It’s like a Darwinian fiction lab, where the best stories and the most engaging and satisfying misinterpretations rise to the top and are then elaborated upon for the next version.
The American University, the Politics of Professors and the Narrative of “Liberal Bias,” Charlie Tyson and Naomi Oreskes – Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
This notion of conservatives as marginalized and therefore epistemically privileged borrows from feminist and Marxist standpoint theory while diluting it to mere perspectivalism. Marxist standpoint theory as developed by Georg Lukács held that workers, because of their social location, can correctly see whose interests are served by the capitalist system; feminist standpoint epistemology similarly claims that women’s social situations can help them see through sexist fantasies about women, or identify how patriarchy fails to meet everyone’s needs.[83] Conservative standpoint theory follows a different pattern. As the examples from Dunn and Shields suggest, conservative standpoint theory claims that conservatives, because of their situatedness, are able to see the truth about other groups: women, or black people, or homosexuals.
The American University, the Politics of Professors and the Narrative of “Liberal Bias,” Charlie Tyson and Naomi Oreskes – Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
Professors, in other words, reflect the population from which they are drawn: highly educated people. People with PhDs tend to be more liberal than people without them. The general liberalizing effect of higher education, Gross suggests, is probably supplemented by a self-selection effect: because academia has a reputation for liberal politics, smart young liberals are more likely to consider a career in academia than are smart young conservatives.[40] Institutional factors matter as well, of course. In some quarters, conservative organizational efforts have been able to combat liberal self-selection effects, most notably in one influential area of graduate education: law school. Since the early 1980s, organizations such as the Federalist Society have succeeded in motivating young conservatives to attend law school by creating strong professional networks of conservative and libertarian legal professionals (“counter-networking,” to borrow Steven Teles’s term).[41] More recently, institutions attached to the conservative Christian legal movement, such as the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, have immersed law students from around the country in “the Christian foundations of the law”—and then helped to get them internships.[42]
