Link of the day: Energy Markets Need Winter, and Climate Change Is Taking It Away
Oh the irony. The global fossil fuel industry relies heavily on demand for oil and gas to heat homes in cold winters. This January, however, was one of the warmest recorded, which meant that demand for fossil fuels decreased by quite a bit. The Bloomberg piece goes into more detail, but just reading the title warmed my heart a little.
Link of the day: Moneystuff on Catastrophe Bonds
Investors love to diversify portfolios. One way to do this is to buy or sell ‘catastrophe bonds’. Bonds like these pay high dividends if, for example, no more than 20 earthquakes of a certain size happen in a given year. If there are more earthquakes, the bond pays nothing. This is attractive to investors because these catastrophes often are not highly correlated with the rest of the economy: even if the economy … more
Link of the day: Scotland On Track to Reach 100% Renewable Energy in 2020. Also: Wikipedia on this
Scotland was at over 74% in 2018 and they plan to be at 100% this year. This is only energy production and consumption (so doesn’t yet include transport) and it is only net production (so they still have one gas plant). I haven’t looked much into the reasons behind it and the policies Scotland implemented. But especially given that Scotland has … more
Link of the day: Feasibility of controlling 2019-nCoV outbreaks by isolation of cases and contacts
While in London I co-worked on a paper about the Coronavirus. The study presents simulations of different outbreak scenarios and assess the feasibility of isolation and contact tracing to control the outbreak. Parameters modeled include among others the average number of people one individual infects, the delay from symptom onset to isolation, the proportion of contacts of one infected person that can be traced.
This … more
Link of the day: Why Do the Results of Immigrant Students Depend So Much on Their Country of Origin and so Little on Their Country of Destination?
When students move to a new country, their performance in schools is strongly dependent on their country of origin. Even though the countries they are moving to should have (on average) better education systems, their performs seems to resemble more the country of origin than the country they now live in. According to … more
Link of the day: Why Democratic Leaders Still Misunderstood the Politics of Social Class
The Democratic Party has a fundamental problem: Almost none of its members has any significant contact with non-academics. ‘We often tell ourselves: “Oh, we lost just the white working class because of race.” But the truth might be something closer to this: “It’s only because of race that we have any part of the working class turning out for us at all.” ’
Link of the day: UN special rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer about Julian Assange (German)
“Nach Aussagen der betroffenen Frau selber hat es nie eine Vergewaltigung gegeben. Und nicht nur das: Die Aussage dieser Frau wurde im Nachhinein ohne ihre Mitwirkung von der Stockholmer Polizei umgeschrieben, um irgendwie einen Vergewaltigungsverdacht herbeibiegen zu können.”
“Julian Assange hat Folter aufgedeckt, er wurde selber gefoltert und könnte in den USA zu Tode gefoltert werden.”
Links of the day: Biopharma has abandoned antibiotic development. Here’s why we did, too.
Recently, I wrote a piece arguing that pharma companies should be paid directly by the state for developing new drugs (really, they should). This article provides a more in-depth view into why so many pharma companies have abandoned developing antibiotics. Spoiler: It is currently almost impossible to make a profit of it.
Link of the day: Republicans passed tax cuts — then profited
Step 1: Own a lot of stocks and assets
Step 2: Reduce taxes on assets, give companies huge tax cuts so that stocks rise
Step 3: profit.
Time to prohibit parliament members from owning stocks…
Link of the day: The Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It
A private company in the US has collected millions of pictures from ordinary internet users and makes them available to law enforcement agencies. Through the company, the police have access to millions of photos of people who became unknowingly and unwillingly part of a giant database.
