We have no way to define extinction—or existence—other than through the limits of our own perception. For many years, an animal was considered extinct a half century after the last confirmed sighting. The new standard, adopted in 1994, is that there should be “no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died,” leaving us to debate which doubts are reasonable.
I may have posted this back when it came out, but if so, it’s worth posting again. A fascinating example of unusually long-term consequences…
Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart. Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American. The median households and per capita incomes are well below their respective state’s median, in Hale nearly $10,000 less. Both were named after confederate officers–Stephen Fowler Hale and Francis Marion Bamberg. And although Hale’s county seat is the self-proclaimed Catfish Capitol, pulling catfish out of the Edisto River in Bamberg County is a favorite past time. These two counties share another unique feature. Amidst a blanket of Republican red both Hale and Bamberg voted primarily Democratic in the 2000, 2004, and again in the 2008 presidential elections. Indeed, Hale and Bamberg belong to a belt of counties cutting through the deep south–Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina–that have voted over 50% Democratic in recent presidential elections. Why? A 100 million year old coastline...
WHAT are the most dysfunctional parts of the global financial system? China’s banking industry, you might say, with its great wall of bad debts and state-sponsored cronyism. Or the euro zone’s taped-together single currency, which stretches across 19 different countries, each with its own debts and frail financial firms. Both are worrying. But if sheer size is your yardstick, nothing beats America’s housing market.
It is the world’s largest asset class, worth $26 trillion, more than America’s stockmarket. The slab of mortgage debt lurking beneath it is the planet’s biggest concentration of financial risk. When house prices started tumbling in the summer of 2006, a chain reaction led to a global crisis in 2008-09. A decade on, the presumption is that the mortgage-debt monster has been tamed. In fact, vast, nationalised, unprofitable and undercapitalised, it remains a menace to the world’s biggest economy.
Attention conservation notice: only of interest to computer science nerds. The web page discusses a number of topics, but the section on Chaitlin is all I’m really suggesting here.
So, amazingly complex things can be compressed into fairly little information. You can’t help but wonder: how complex can something be?
The answer: arbitrarily complex! At least that’s true if we’re talking about the Kolmogorov complexity of a string of bits: namely, the length of the shortest computer program that prints it out. Lots of long strings of bits can’t be compressed. You can’t print out most of them using short programs, since there aren’t enough short programs to go around.
Of course, we need to fix a computer language ahead of time, so this is well-defined. And we need to make sure the programs are written in binary, so the comparison is fair.
So, things can be arbitrarily complex. But here’s a more interesting question: how complex can we prove something to be?
Former Google designer Nicholas Jitkoff, who’s now the vice president of design at Dropbox, has created a really nifty new web tool he’s calling itty bitty sites, or self-contained microsites that exist solely as URLs. You can create your own by following this URL: itty.bitty.site. From there, you can fill the equivalent of about one printed 8.5 x 11-inch page with any combination of plain text, ASCII characters, or emojis. The actual byte limit depends on where you’d like to share it; Twitter and Slack allow for around 4,000 bytes, while the Mac version of Chrome can accommodate up to 10,000 bytes.
The site isn’t actually hosted anywhere — the entirety of the webpage exists as a URL compressed using what’s known as the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm. In an explanation page for itty bitty sites — stored, of course, as an itty bitty site — Jitkoff says this allows for a “significant reduction in size for HTML, and allows for a printed page worth of content in many cases.” From there, the compressed content is converted from binary into a string of characters that can function as a standard web link. The actual data is stored in the end of the link, comprised of everything after the # symbol. You can also share itty bitty sites as QR codes as well, so long as the site can be compressed into about 2,610 bytes.
Here’s a fantastic collection of useful mental models. Covers a pretty diverse range. About 1/4 of it is oriented toward business and startups, but most of it is useful for life in general. For example, here’s one section:
Communication
Story arc– human beings are wired to respond to storytelling. A story arc is a way to structure ideas to tap into this response, typically by describing a change in the world. Example:Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
Writing well– use arresting imagery and tabulate your thoughts precisely. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Don’t hedge – decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.
Charitable interpretation– interpreting a speaker’s statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. Charitable interpretation makes conversations (and relationships) go better.
Nonviolent Communication(aka NVC) – a communication framework that allows expressing grievances and resolving conflicts in a non-confrontational way. Structuring difficult conversations as described in NVC makes the process dramatically less painful. NVC contains four components: (1) expressing facts, (2) expressing feelings, (3) expressing needs, and (4) making a request. Example:You didn’t turn in the project yesterday. When that happened I felt betrayed. I need to be able to rely on you to have a productive relationship. In the future, could you notify me in advance if something like that happens?
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.
Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In hisannual New Year’s speech,Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”
That tough approach is embodied in the “ghetto package.” Of 22 proposals presented by the government in early March, most have been agreed upon by a parliamentary majority, and more will be subject to a vote in the fall.
Some are punitive: One measure under consideration would allow courts todouble the punishmentfor certain crimes if they are committed in one of the 25 neighborhoods classified as ghettos, based on residents’ income, employment status, education levels, number of criminal convictions and “non-Western background.” Another would impose a four-year prison sentence on immigrant parents who force their children to make extended visits to their country of origin — described here as“re-education trips”—in that way damaging their “schooling, language and well-being.” Another would allow local authorities to increase their monitoring and surveillance of “ghetto” families.
This is a really solid introduction to income inequality, how it’s measured, how it’s changing, and whether it matters:
How do you measure inequality?
Inequality can be defined or measured in a number of different ways.
One traditional approach was to compare the income of a relatively broad swath of affluent people — the top ten percent of the income distribution (the top decile) or the top twenty percent (the top quintile) — to the national median or average. One big advantage of this approach is that the relevant data is readily available from the Census Bureau and other survey-based sources. A major downside is that this method doesn’t tell you much of anything about the earnings of the very highest earners — people in the top 1 percent, for example.
A newer line of research pioneered by Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and their collaborators at the World Top Incomes Databasehas been to use tax records to focus on the incomes of the very top of the distribution. That lets you understand the top 1 percent, the top 0.1 percent, and even the top 0.001 percent. This work has been the basis of much subsequent discussion about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent but the even finer slices are interesting, too.
It is also at times interesting to look at the gap between the poor (say the bottom 10 percent) and the median household. Metrics that define poverty in relative terms tend to, in effect, look at this kind of inequality. So discussions of the living standards of the poor are normally framed in terms of poverty rather than inequality.
Last but by no means least, there is a widely used summary method of calculating inequality that is known as the gini coefficient. A gini coefficient of 0 corresponds to precise equality while a gini coefficient of 1 corresponds to a state of total inequality.
A useful reminder of how much standards of living increased over the past century.
Consider the “Little House on the Prairie” books, which I’d bet almost every woman in my readership, and many of the men, recalls from their childhoods. I loved those books when I was a kid, which seemed to describe an enchanted world – horses! sleighs! a fire merrily crackling in the fireplace, and children frolicking in the snow all winter, then running barefoot across the prairies! Then I reread them as an adult, as a prelude to my research, and what really strikes you is how incredibly poor these people were.
The Ingalls family were in many ways bourgeoisie: educated by the standards of the day, active in community leadership, landowners. And they had nothing.
There’s a scene in one of the books where Laura is excited to get her own tin cup for Christmas, because she previously had to share with her sister. Think about that. No, go into your kitchen and look at your dishes. Then imagine if you had three kids, four plates and three cups, because buying another cup was simply beyond your household budget – because a single cup for your kid to drink out of represented not a few hours of work, but a substantial fraction of your annual earnings, the kind of money you really had to think hard before spending. Then imagine how your 5-year-old would feel if they got an orange and a Corelle place setting for Christmas.
There’s a reason old-fashioned kitchens didn’t have cabinets: They didn’t need them. There wasn’t anything to put there.
