dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Why are Middle-Aged Men Missing from the Labor Market? ( NY TImes ) Men ages 35 to 44 are staging a lackluster rebound from pandemic job loss, despite a strong economy.

Has someone ever told you, "Y'know, the Chinese word for crisis contains the word for opportunity"? Yeah well, as a card-carrying Chinese person I'm (belatedly) going to show you why that's BS.

Yes, it's possible. Yes, it's powerful. Yes, it saves you money. Here's how I did it.

Got a site which won't allow you access from overseas?  Got no VPN? Got an internet-connected Raspberry Pi?  Read on.

Household formation was dullishly ordinary before it became the Australian 'dream'.

Same again tomorrow. One thing I like to tell myself during bear markets: On any given trading day, three quarters of a percent of the U.S. market turns over .

Healthcare would be more heroic without its inefficiencies.

To aid division of assets under Australian Family Law. There are many resources to aid understanding of the property division/settlement process, the SA Law Handbook comes to mind, but few help with the calculations or how they map onto various elements in the court forms. As a result, parties risk negotiating without a clear idea of the assets in play, or how the division can be achieved. Closer to finalisation, the draft orders may be difficult to understand. After finalisation a poorly communicated division may lead parties to convince themselves that it was unfair.  So here's a Google Sheet: Family Law - Property Division Calculator (AU)   ... to help people reconceptualize the negotiations. It is, of course, free and you don't need to create a login (unlike some other online aids.)

The STI benchmark for Singapore's stock exchange is easy to visualise as it has just 30 well publicised constituents. Go on, click the sector headings to drill down. It's easy to see how diverse it is. Is it too concentrated?

TLDR: Copying is the fast track to immortality. Why go to college? Why get a good job? Why have kids, then send those kids to college? 🥅 Your default reason for those time-consuming and costly endeavours may be, 'because I want to'. But does that express true desire, or is it rationalisation after-the-fact? Was a concerted effort made to explore alternatives? After all, the virtue of conventional goals are taken as givens, such that non-pursuit - rather than pursuit - must be defended. Parents need not justify their choice to procreate, while the childless are expected to explain not having children. Arthur Schopenhauer enters the chat:

...so that your web-based Linux admin app gets auto-updates. You probably already know this, but Webmin is a web front-end for administering Linux systems. It really shines when you can't use a graphical user interface, e.g. when your system is 'headless', i.e. not connected to a display, and/or you don't want to use a remote command line.

The same people whinging about low interest rates debasing the U.S. dollar ... After snoozing through the period of zero interest rates, we are bound to awaken with some suddenness to the consequences of monetary debasement, which we have been collectively ignoring for too long. ... now complain that raising interest rates will wreck the economy .

Declining labour share of income is no sign of foul play. "Productivity and profits are up, but real wages are down." is an increasingly common refrain, implying that business and government collude to deprive workers of their fair share.

The answer to "Will I regret this?" might be "Do other people?"

Australian houses have gotten larger while Australian families have gotten smaller.

Quick visualisations of Australian government tax and spending to provide context to the 2022 federal election. In 2019-2020, Australia's governments collected about AUD$552 billion in tax and spent about AUD$578 billion .

As Australia's 2022 federal election draws near, I would like to explore the idea that voter age will matter more than location.

Which industries are ripest for technological disruption? Australia labour productivity and value-add by industry.

Versus robots. "No! Demo-GRAPH-y!" The flood of low cost Chinese labour will ebb, according to Goodhart and Pradhan in "The Great Demographic Reversal", leading to: higher inflation. manufacturing elsewhere becoming more competitive. ( un-paywalled from Nikkei Shimbun ) Apparently good news for those in developed nations who have long clamoured for fair prices and fair wages, and who blame globalisation for undercutting them. But when? And for how long? Well, not right now . China labour costs are stagnant, not rising. source: tradingeconomics.com Even as China's working age population loses 5 million a year, assuming the baseline scenario. (Source: Reserve Bank of Australia .) One may scoff at the suggestion that these lost workers could be - or are being - replaced with robots or other automation, such as AI. Robots have been around for decades but opinion on how they impact workers vary, from ' a little ' to 'responsible for  50-70% of i

Protectionists hate this one weird trick. For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken The Labour Force (LF) framework supposedly works like this: If more people enter the labour force than get jobs, the unemployment rate goes up. If less people enter the labour force than get jobs, the unemployment rate goes down. Sounds fair, right?

Art makes it (too) easy to compare civilisations. As you enter Taipei's  National😉 Palace Museum ( 國立故宮博物院 ) you go through a room which surrounds you with a timeline of the art of different cultures at the same different points in history. Though nothing really prepares you for the firehose of history that follows in the main exhibits, twirling clockwise and taking some of it in helps you brace yourself. I'm going to attempt something similar: a three-culture snapshot of circa 1000AD.

Teach them well and let them lead the way. How education can save liberalism.

They've been using social media for centuries. My wife is an academic and constantly in fear of: Senior peers ignoring and not citing her work; Younger peers publishing more, faster; Anticipated critiques of her papers. She's not alone. Her colleagues also live in dread, and academia as a whole has long been described as 'Publish or PERISH.'

Q: How can you tell if someone has an investment property? A: Don't worry, they'll tell you.