Be careful interpreting this. Delta and now Omicron are more contagious than the original virus precisely because they have higher peak viral loads and shed more virus from infected patients. Hence, the virus in wastewater per infected individual has been changing along with the number of infected individuals.
I've been asked to maintain the contact info for a non profit club. Something like this is almost what I need, but I would also need to be able to edit existing entries as well as to run some simple queries (who has not paid their dues?). Does any such cloud based open source software exist? CRM systems are overkill, and there are some downloadable tools, but nothing cloud based AFAIK.
California voters actually passed a referendum to move to year round DST, but federal law only allows year round standard time. I think most people prefer the idea of year round DST.
You accidentally conflated "conference" and "paper" which is true in computer science and also relevant to other fields. The crux of the problem is that almost no one reads papers. People get exposed to ideas at conferences, and conference organizers invite the people that wrote the seminal papers many years ago to be the keynote speakers. Even if a paper is cited, it is usually because they saw the author speaking at a conference.
It is pretty standard practice to submit any consulting/advisory contracts to HR at your full time employer before you sign the deal. They can verify there is no conflict of interest. You also generally need to declare these relationships when you start a new job. This article is not clear if these procedures were followed. I'm guessing that these deals were secretive, hence the crime.
I'm curious how they would handle this with regards to lift tests. You can ask Facebook to not show your ads to faction of the addressable audience, and then calculate sales for the treated and control groups. If they don't make the randomization binding across platforms, it can several reduce the incrementality measurement (effectiveness of Facebook ads).
The monopoly is not on the consumer side, it is on the advertising side. Google and Facebook are the only companies that have access to data on basically every sale on the internet (almost every site that uses their ad tools reports back their sales). This data gives them a defensible duopoly on digital advertising.
A Chinese friend once explained to me that local governments in China have very little ability to tax. Taxes all get sent to the central government and the central government never sends enough back to the local government. The most efficient way for a local government to raise revenue is to turn farmland into developable land and sell it to developers. Many of these empty homes come from such schemes. Obviously some of these developments turn into vibrant communities, but there are some that remain mostly empty and are held by individuals who are speculating that the prices of these empty condos will go up.
> Average New York City metropolitan area house prices are up 706% since 1980 (or 376% more than US consumer prices, and 326% more than US wages). For San Francisco the rise is 932%.
Mortgage interest rates were 14% in 1980, they are less than 3% now. This explains much (but not all) of the rise in the nominal cost of housing compared to wages. When people bought $50,000 houses in the nicest parts of Palo Alto in 1975, other people thought they were crazy because of the interest rates.
Yes, it seemed the G is not as guaranteed as is used to be. I had an interesting chat with a current UC Berkeley student trying to get into computer science department. They have a few classes that you need to do well in to get accepted internally. She was taking one of the classes for the third time, having dropped the course the first two times once she realized her grade was not high enough.
It's even better -- each UC is REQUIRED to take a certain number of community college transfer students. It's not quite the case anymore, but you could apply as a freshman into the guaranteed transfer programs and be guaranteed a spot in the UC of your choice by maintaining a certain easily attainable GPA. I had a friend in high school who was a middling student get a UC Berkeley biomedical engineering degree this way. More recently the program seems way underutilized -- some recent graduates I have known did 2 years in community college and had their choice of UC Berkeley, UCLA, or anywhere else.
San Francisco, Napa County and most of Sonoma County have fairly effectively banned short term whole house rentals, with these laws mostly predating AirBnB. It's not that difficult for local governments to address the "problem" before the industry grows. South Lake Tahoe is trying to put the genie back in the bottle after short term rentals became common, which I presume is much more difficult because homeowners don't want the value of their property going down. I suspect that in many places there isn't a majority consensus that this is bad for the citizenry.
I've always heard this is a great way to doom a friendship. Are you ever at odds with the other owners? I can imagine if you've planned your summer around a family vacation and the previous guest trashes the place (or breaks something making the place unusable) it could get ugly. Or worse yet, it is no pets and one owner starts bringing their dog.
While likely legal since the US Constitution only prohibits ex post facto criminal statutes, retroactive wealth confiscation is probably not a good precedent to set. A universal wealth tax would be much more palatable than a tax on wealth gained by certain people during a certain period of time.
The question is whether TikTok will continue to be as popular as they start onboarding more advertisers and showing more ads. Most apps tend to get worse when they start attempting to make money. Also, TikTok can't be cheap to operate unless they have somehow convinced all music labels to behave in a way they have never behaved before.
A carbon tax is a non starter in democratic countries because we have seen over and over again that raising the price of motor fuel is political suicide. Canada had to back off on a program that offered a carbon tax back as a rebate. Similar outcome in France with Yellow vest protest movement. Many countries have tried to get rid of fuel subsidies only to spark middle class street protests. In the US the main election issue in 2022 will be "inflation" which for many voters is the price of gas. Carbon taxes simply do not work in the real world.
I think it is more true that political polarization is used to make ad targeting more effective. Almost nobody uses Facebook to drive opinion or do "branding." Instead, they let Facebook target some campaign to the audience that maximizes ROI. All of the political Facebook ads you saw last year were fundraising ads, and the small net yield (revenue generated minus Facebook cut) was used on other platforms to pay for ads attempting to sway the few percentage of the electorate that was persuadable. Similarly, Exxon is paying for some sort of action on the part of the targeted consumer, not trying to change minds.
For some reason, plumbing is one of the few types of work where it doesn't seem to be as hard to find someone (at least in the Bay Area). Unless, as happened recently to me, you have a leaking shower drain in which case you are completely hosed.
My brother is an honest contractor in the Bay Area and he gets called several times per day by potential clients. The problem is that he can't scale to meet demand because of a dire shortage of labor and subcontractors (painters in particular at the moment). The contractors that will answer your call and give you an estimate tend to be what he calls "paper contractors" that don't have their own crew and subcontract out everything. These are the jobs that end up taking two years where there never seems to be anyone actually working. I don't think matching technology can fix the market -- what's needed is efficiency gains on the contractor side as well as some way to increase the labor pool.
This reminds me of some articles that came out when the states sued the tobacco companies in the 1990s. Many asked why the US federal government did not sue as well, and the answer turned out to be that smoking is good for the federal government finances. It tends to kill people quickly (heart attack) just after they retire and start collecting social security.
For multifamily housing the price of a building is usually such that if you put around 40% of the purchase price down the building is cash flow break even after mortgage, taxes, expenses. The same is basically true if you buy a house to rent out. This is the case because over long periods of time real estate has appreciated by 8% per year with much less volatility compared to the stock market, and favorable tax rules (particularly depreciation) mean you can "lose" a lot of money on paper and claim those losses to offset other income. Your landlord is not giving you a great deal.
A hidden intangible that cannot be measured is that owners are much more likely to know and socialize with their neighbors. Even in a mostly homeowner neighborhoods, "the renters" often don't develop social ties the same way that owners do. There is something about knowing you are stuck there quasi-permanently with the same people.
Many of these articles are about tourist towns that have had an influx of new residents and/or increased seasonal populations (in this case Hood River, Oregon and Lake of the Ozarks). I read an identical article yesterday about Ketchum, Idaho and last week about Telluride, CO. In such cases, the problem is two fold. There has been an increase in the total need for workers to serve the additional residents and visitors. At the same time, the supply of worker housing has gone down (and prices up). Raising wages is not enough to balance supply and demand since the housing market does not adjust quickly enough. I sometimes wonder if these towns are economically sustainable -- wages can never rise quickly enough across all necessary occupations to establish equilibrium with the outside money forcing workers out.
Your first point is important. Governments have protected citizen's quality of life by restricting the number of wires going around on poles and/or digging up of the streets. This is why local governments created regulated telephone and cable monopolies in the first place. Unfortunately the regulated telephone and cable infrastructure later become much more valuable due to the emergence of broadband internet. The companies that owned this infra then loaded up on debt based on the skyrocketing value of this infrastructure and we are forced to pay for this debt.
From wikipedia: Billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and current Facebook board member, paid $10 million to help finance lawsuits against Gawker Media, including the Bollea lawsuit. He called his financial support of Bollea's case "one of my greater philanthropic things that I've done."
I wonder how much of current asset appreciation is due to our largest trading partners (China, Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) wanting to make sure they can maintain large trade surpluses to maximize manufacturing employment. Rather than send trade proceeds home, they buy stuff in the US (treasuries and equities) to keep exchange rates stable.