mfairbank

In the US, it's a combination of factors. Personally, I receive unlimited 2% cash back with my credit card, which is enough of an incentive for me to use it wherever I can. In addition, it helps me build my credit score, which is a system that has a lot of issues but is not one I'm in a position to ignore. I don't know about the situation in Europe though, are there similar benefits for non-credit cards (debit cards), and is the credit score system as important?

I think your question gets at the salient point: I often think of the concept of "ownership" as black and white, I either own something or I don't. But in practice it's a gradient.

At one end of the spectrum, I pretty much own the clothes on my back and the items in my pockets. Sure, they're stolen occasionally in muggings (hasn't happened personally, knock on wood), but on the whole I spend no time in court or with police arguing over an ownership dispute about my underwear.

Any why is that? After all, my clothing is relatively nice and well looked-after, and the items in my pockets and on my person, including smartphone, wallet/cash, and watch are worth north of $1,000. If I were to leave the clothes and items in a bag on the sidewalk with nobody to look after them, the likelihood of their theft within the hour would skyrocket. So why am I not mugged every hour? Well, I think it boils down to the fact that I'm physically "there" wherever I go. Mugging me requires a certain level of brute force to make sure I don't fight back. Which is, relatively speaking, harder to come by than the effort required to pick up a bag of items when nobody is looking.

At the other end of the spectrum, let's say I own multiple properties in multiple locations. These real estate holdings can't be "stolen" in the traditional sense, but they can be occupied and used by people against my wishes. So how do I stop that? After all, I can only be physically present at any one property at a time. And even then, if it's a big property, I can only "guard" a portion of it. So how is it that I'm able to own all of these properties? It's the system of police and courts that makes this possible, and consequently I do spend a lot of time in court or with police arguing over contracts, tenant disputes, etc.

This "ownership" is only possible because of the system of laws and courts and police, paid for by the taxes of everyone. And so the voters that pay the taxes that allow these systems to work are naturally going to want a say in the matter. If I own a piece of land downtown, adjacent to a school and houses and office buildings, and decide to start pouring toxic waste onto it, the police and courts will not come to protect me while I'm doing so. They'll come to stop me. Even though I "own" the property.

And that's what's happening in Vancouver. These absentee property owners are not suddenly being deprived of their ownership. The change is actually happening right at the margin: the voters have decided they'd like to tweak the laws a bit so that the police and court resources they support aren't being spent to protect empty properties.

Now, is it right? Certainly I can see why the property owners are mad. They bought in expecting a certain set of laws to be enforced, and instead a new set is imposed. Which can also impact overall business and regulatory confidence. Delaware's popularity for incorporation is built upon its long history of changing its regulatory environment as little as possible, and trying to be as predictable as possible. But the situation in Vancouver is showing that there may be more latent unpredictability in regulatory and legal systems than is commonly thought.

Ah, the novel had missed my radar entirely until now, thank you!

Recently I've been enjoying films that cover little niches of the world, geographic or otherwise, that I know nothing about. Another good example is Premium Rush (2012). I don't know if there's a name for this genre, as on the surface the films look nothing alike, and can vary wildly in quality, but there's just something engrossing about them.

There's an indie film I quite enjoyed called The Hunter, starring Willem Dafoe, that fictionalizes the demise of the last remaining tiger. I recommend it highly for the outdoor landscapes and non-traditional plot alone.

Bob Woodward chronicled the access Rice had to Bush in his book "Bush at War"[0]. His impression matches your own. According to Woodward's account, her de facto role as National Security Advisor (before her tenure as Secretary of State) was to meet with the principals (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell) without the President, and then discuss alone with the President the positions of his various cabinet members. Rice met one-on-one with Bush much more often than the others, especially Powell. That said, her explicit role at the time was more about collating data and balancing priorities, not advancing her agenda. But it is definitely fair to say she had the President's ear during this period, perhaps more so than any other national security administration official.

On an semi-related note, "Bush at War" is a great, quick read about the months following 9/11, with a breathless day-by-day account of the meetings and phone calls held between the President and his advisors. Woodward had unparalleled access during this period, including multiple in-person interviews with Bush both in Washington and in Crawford. Fair warning, he does not mince words on his dissatisfaction with Bush's performance.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Bush-at-War-Bob-Woodward/dp/074324461...

I tried to address it in my paragraph after the snippets from the abstract, but I admit it was a rather superficial treatment. I actually am most interested in the core of the problem presented by service needs that fall naturally into monopoly (water, power, public transit). We have a long track-record of poor government administration when it comes to these services, and as the New York Times article suggests, private ownership may be no better. So what do we do? The only semi-acceptable answer I can think of is moving the voting date for city and state level elections to weekends/holidays, in the hopes of driving turnout and subsequently accountability among politicians responsible for overseeing these services.

As a counter-point to the idea that private equity buyouts harm consumers, here is a recent paper documenting the impact of PE transactions in the restaurant industry. [0]

Key bits from the abstract:

"Analysis of health inspections conducted for over 50,000 stores in Florida shows that food safety and sanitation improve after private equity takeover, especially in areas related to food handling, kitchen maintenance and consumer advising."

"Restaurants also reduce employee headcount and lower menu prices. This evidence suggests private equity firms are not simply financial engineers but rather active operators that improve management practices in the firm. Moreover, efficiency gains do not come at the expense of product quality."

Unfortunately this does not address the main thrust of the New York Times piece, which focused more on natural monopoly sectors such as water, public transit, and emergency response. It does make intuitive sense that private firms would have less of an incentive to improve operations when buying a monopolistic entity that comes with significant pricing power already baked in. Hopefully good research on these is out there or in the pipeline, as it seems like an in-demand and under-served area of academic inquiry.

Disclosure: I worked briefly as an undergrad for one of the paper's authors, on a distinct but similar project.

0: http://people.hbs.edu/asheen/BernsteinSheen_Restaurants_June...

Eliminating physical cash is not necessary to impose negative interest rates, even quite steep ones. By modifying the exchange rate between physical cash and bank deposits, the economic incentive to hoard physical cash is removed, allowing the central bank to impose an interest rate of their choice while still allowing citizens the flexibility of using their preferred payment methods over short time horizons. This piece[0] produced by the International Monetary Fund delves into the details about the steps banks will take to implement the necessary changes.

[0] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15224.pdf

Well it's all a bit vague in my mind, but the idea was that if a central bank coin is introduced, and if it achieves widespread use and popularity such that it becomes the default demand deposit mechanism, that the central bank could purchase the dispute resolution units from the private banks that presumably no longer have a use for them. The systems and human capital expertise to perform the functions would still exist, but it would be a question of whether they would be willing to work in the public sector instead of the private, and if the public sector could effectively manage them such that their performance remains acceptable.

Wait, do regular cars engage the emergency brake in a fail-safe way? I've always treated the emergency brake as a way to keep a stopped car from moving, not as a way to make a moving car stop.

I mostly agree, but the first big concerns that come to my mind are to do with security and how mistakes are fixed. With my (private) bank, I feel confident that improper withdrawals can be reversed, not least because I've successfully achieved such a result in the past. But if one day I check my CBcoin balance and it's not correct? Do I complain directly to the central bank? It strikes me that competent dispute resolution is not something that can be built overnight (though I suppose it could be absorbed from the top private banks).

Edit: grammar

The competing activist investor hedge fund Spring Owl released a plan [0] in December with its vision to turn Yahoo! around and achieve a stock price of $113 (currently $35). The basic gist is to focus on Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports, kill most everything else, and handle the Alibaba tax situation (ha, as if they haven't already been trying to do that). Things could get really interesting if multiple activists are fighting for board seats over competing visions for the company.

[0]: http://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/yahoopresentat...

I see this mentioned often, but it just isn't the case. In order to effectively implement negative interest rates, we will have to modify the exchange rate between physical cash and bank deposits to remove the incentive to hoard physical cash above the amounts needed for normal daily activity, but we will not need to ban it outright. This paper[0] from the International Monetary Fund explains in more detail the steps banks will take to implement the changes.

[0] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15224.pdf

Just don't lose sight of Chesterton's fence.