- The Average Croatian Doesn't Leave Home Until They're 32!!
Figures from Eurostat have revealed the average age at which young people leave their parent’s house in Europe.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, at the top of the list is Montenegro where the nest is generally flown at the ripe age of 32.5.
This is also indicative of the trend that young people in the more southern nations tend to stay with their parents for longer, with Croatia, Slovakia and Italy all at the top of the ranking.
At the bottom, the north of the continent is represented by Finland, Denmark and Sweden.
- Europe: National Sovereignty Vs. International Conquest, At Stake Over Iran
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Europe now faces its ultimate ideological fork-in-the-road, which it has thus far ignored but can no longer ignore:
They need to decide whether they seek a world of nations that each is sovereign over its own territory but over no other (and this would not be a world at war);
or whether they seek instead a world in which they are part of the American empire, a world based on conquests – NATO, IMF, World Bank, and the other US-controlled international institutions – and in which their own nation’s citizens are subject to the dictatorship by America’s aristocracy: the same super-rich individuals who effectively control the US Government itself (see this and this — and that’s dictatorship by the richest, in the United States).
Iran has become this fateful fork-in-the-road, and the immediate issue here is America’s cancellation of the Iran nuclear deal that America had signed along with 6 other countries, and America’s consequent restoration of economic sanctions against Iran — sanctions against companies anywhere that continue trading with Iran.
First, however, some essential historical background on that entire issue:
The US aristocracy overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Government in 1953 and imposed there a barbaric dictatorship which did the bidding of the US and allied aristocracies, by installing the Pahlavi Shah there, just as they had earlier, in 1932, installed the Saud King in Saudi Arabia — which land never ever had known democracy. As Wikipedia says of Ibn Saud, who became King in 1932, “After World War I, he received further support from the British, including a glut of surplus munitions. He launched his campaign against the Al Rashidi in 1920; by 1922 they had been all but destroyed,” with Britain’s help.
Similarly, the US and its British Imperial partner installed Pahlavi as Iran’s Shah in 1953. This was done by US President Dwight David Eisenhower. After the death of the anti-imperialistic US President FDR, in 1945, the US Government quickly became pro-imperialistic under President Harry S. Truman (whom imperial England’s Winston Churchill wrapped around his little finger), and then even more so under Eisenhower, so that during the brief presidency of Ike’s successor President JFK, the anti-imperialistic ghost of FDR was coming to haunt the White House and thus again threaten the conjoined US-UK’s aristocracies’ surging global control. Kennedy was quickly souring on, and coming to oppose, imperialism (just as FDR had done) – he was opposing conquest and dominion for its own sake.
So, he was assassinated and the evidence was covered-up, so that the CIA, which Truman had installed and which Eisenhower placed firmly under the control of America’s aristocratically controlled military-industrial complex, became increasingly America’s own Deep State, designed for global conquest (though using an ‘anti-communist’ excuse and cover for their real and ruling motive of global conquest and dominion).
When the US-imposed Shah was overthrown by an authentic revolution in 1979, America’s continued alliance with the UK-US-installed Saud family turned into a US-UK alliance against Iran, which nation has ever since been demonized by the US and UK aristocracies as being a ‘terrorist regime’, even though Saudi Arabia actually dominates global Islamic terrorism, and Iran is opposed to terrorism (except to terrorism that’s aimed against Israel). And everybody who knows anything on sound basis is aware of these established historical facts. But, actually, the US-Saudi alliance is even worse than that: global Islamic terrorism was invented and organized by the US aristocracy in conjunction with the Saud family starting in 1979 when Iran freed itself from the US-UK dictatorship and restored Iranian sovereignty (even though in a highly compromised Shiite theocratic way, nothing at all like the secular Iranian democracy that had been overthrown by the US and UK aristocracies in 1953).
The US and Sauds created Islamic terrorism in 1979 in order to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and ultimately used these terrorist proxy “boots on the ground” so as to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan — thereby draining the Soviet economy in the hope of ultimately conquering the USSR and then conquering Russia itself, which the US President GHW Bush on the night of 24 February 1990 made clear that the US and its allies must do — he gave the European vassal-nations their marching-order on that date, and they have reliably followed that order, until now.
Russia, which the US aristocracy craves to conquer, is an ally of Iran (which they hope to re-conquer).
The basic principle of America’s aristocracy is repudiation of national sovereignty. That’s what the US Government globally stands for today.
Russian Television headlined on May 11th, “‘Are we America’s vassals?’ France vows to trade with Iran in defiance of US ‘economic policeman’” and reported that US President Donald Trump’s re-imposition of US economic sanctions against any companies that do business with Iran, is being resisted by all the other nations that had signed the Obama-Kerry nuclear accord with Iran, the “JCPOA” treaty: UK, France, China, Russia, US, and EU (which is led by Germany).
The US regime knows that if even America’s allies — UK, France, and Germany — hold together with Iran, to defy the Imperial actions punishing them for continuing with Iran even after the US pull-out from the treaty, then the Western Alliance will be jeopardized, if not terminated altogether, and finally the Cold War, which GHW Bush had ordered the allies to continue even after the end of the USSR, and of its communism, and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance mirroring America’s NATO alliance, will finally end also on America’s side, just as it had ended in 1991 on the Soviet Union’s side. Such an end to the Cold War would possibly cause America’s military-industrial complex — and the stock values of mega-corporations such as Lockheed Martin — to collapse.
Thus, the US aristocracy is afraid of peace replacing their existing permanent-war economy. All those trillions of dollars that have been invested in machines of mass-murder abroad, could plunge in value, if UK, France, and Germany, terminate the Western Alliance, and become individual sovereign nations who join with Iran — another individual sovereign nation — to say no to the Imperial power (the US), and yes to national sovereignty, which sovereignty constitutes the sole foundation-stone upon which any and all democracies are constructed. No democracy can exist in any nation that is a vassal to some other (the imperial power). In a world where national sovereignty is honored, democracy would not necessarily exist everywhere, but it would no longer be internationally prohibited by an imperial power, which inevitably is itself a dictatorship, no real democracy at all.
On March 3rd, the 175-year-old imperial magazine, The Economist, headlined against China as an enemy in this continuing Cold War, “How the West got China wrong” and explained “the Chinese threat”:
“China is not a market economy and, on its present course, never will be. Instead, it increasingly controls business as an arm of state power… Foreign businesses are profitable but miserable, because commerce always seems to be on China’s terms.”
The imperialistic view is that the international dictator and its corporations should rule — there should be no real sovereign other than this dictatorship, by the US regime now, since America is today’s imperialist nation.
Perhaps Europe now will make the fateful decision, between international dictatorship on the one side, or else the supreme sovereignty of each and every nation on the other, to determine its own laws — and to require any corporation that does business there to adhere to its legal system and to none other: the supremacy of each nation within its own territory, not of any international corporations, not even of ones that are based in some international-bully country that says it’s “the one indispensable nation” — meaning that every other nation is “dispensable.” Russia won’t accept that. Iran won’t accept that. China won’t accept that. Will Germany accept it — the land of the original: “Deutschland über alles”? Will France? Will UK?
Americans accept it. The US public are very effectively controlled by America’s aristocracy. A Yougov poll at the start of 2017 (the start of Trump’s Presidency) asked over 7,000 Americans to rate countries as “enemy”, “unfriendly”, “friendly”, “ally”, or “not sure”; and, among the 144 rated countries, Americans placed at the most hostile end, in order from the very worst, to the 13th-from-worst: North Korea, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Sudan. Other than Saudi Arabia, which the US Government treats as being its master if not as being its very top ally, and which is, in any case, by far the US military’s biggest customer (other than the US Government, of course), that list from Yougov looks very much like, or else close to, what America’s aristocracy would want to see targeted, as being America’s ‘enemies’. So, other than Americans’ including the top ally both of America’s aristocracy and of Israel‘s aristocracy, Saudi Arabia, on that list of enemies, the list was very much what the US aristocracy’s ’news’media had been promoting as being America’s ‘enemies’.
In fact, even though those ‘news’media haven’t informed Americans that 92% of Saudi Arabians approve of ISIS, or that the Saudi royal family financed and organized the 9/11 attacks (in conjunction with others of George W. Bush’s friends), Americans view Saudi Arabia hostilely. That’s acceptable to America’s aristocracy, because the Saud family’s hatred is focused against Iran, the main Shiite nation, and the US public (have been deceive to) prefer Saudi Arabia over Iran. In fact, a 17 February 2016 Gallup poll showed that Iran was seen by Americans as being even more hostile toward Americans than is Saudi Arabia.
So, America’s aristocracy have no reason to be concerned that their chief ally and second-from-top governmental customer, the Saud family, are unfavorably viewed by the US public. Both in America and in Saudi Arabia, the aristocracy effectively controls its public. Thus, the American people think in the way that the American aristocracy want them to — supporting any conquest (e.g., Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012-) that the aristocracy want to perpetrate. Of course, the way to achieve this control is by means of the windows through which the public get to see the world around them, which windows on the world are the nation’s ‘news’media.
On May 12th, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) reported that the American people are very effectively controlled to believe Iran to be America’s enemy and very dangerous to us. The headline was “Media Debate Best Way to Dominate Iran” and the article documented that the American people are being very intensively propagandized by the aristocratically controlled media, to favor aggression against Iran, and are being heavily lied-to, in order to achieve this.
So, though the American public will continue to support the American Government (despite distrusting both their government and their ‘news’media), foreign publics aren’t so rigidly under the control of America’s aristocracy; and therefore Europe’s aristocracies could abandon their alliance with the US aristocracy, if they strongly enough want to. Their ‘news’media would obediently do whatever they’re told, and could begin immediately portraying the reality of the US Government, to their people — including, for example, the reality that the US stole Ukraine, and some of the participants have even confessed their roles; Russia did not steal Crimea (and the Crimea-Ukraine issue was the alleged spark for the ‘restoration’ of the Cold War — which The West never actually ended on its side, only Russia did on its side).
An end of The Western Alliance (America’s empire) could happen. But it would require — from the EU’s leaders (and/or from Turkey’s Erdogan) — courage, conviction, and a commitment to national sovereignty’s being the foundation-stone to any democracy anywhere, and this change-of-political-theory would be something drastically new in Europe (and-or in Turkey), which is a region that has historically been staunchly supportive of empires, and thus supportive of dictatorships (ones that are compliant — foreign stooge-regimes). It would require a historic sea-change.
- Special Ops Getting 1000s Of Small Glide Munitions That Pack A Bigger Punch Than Hellfires
As global counterterrorism operations show no signs of slowing down, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are receivingthousands of light, gliding missiles that are smaller and more powerful than an AGM-114 Hellfire and fired from a Lockheed C-130 Hercules above the modern battlefield.
Dynetics Small Glide Munition. (Source: Defense News)
In recent years, insurgent groups have outsmarted American precision-guided weapons launched from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with fast traveling vehicles. However, a new powerful gliding munition can chase down and destroy these fast-moving targets.
Dynetics Small Glide Munition. (Source: Aviation Week)
According to the United State Special Operations Command (SOCOM) report about an upcoming contract award, it signed a deal with Alabama-based defense contractor Dynetics for the supply of about 4,000 more of the 59-lb. GBU-69B Small Glide Munitions (SGM) over the next four years.
The GBU-69B Small Glide Munitions (SGM) can glide for more than 20 miles and slam into a moving target traveling up to 70 mph with its lightweight, 36-lb. warhead, which is more powerful than a Hellfire, but has about half the weight coming in at 59-lb.
Breaking Defense points out that Dynetics’ secret to weight reduction is in “a lighter tube thanks partly to the fact that the SGM is unpowered, and uses wings that unfold after launch to glide to its target.” The company told Breaking Defense that the weapon was designed to be “modular” so that the SGM could fit on a wide variety of platforms.
In a justification document breaking down why it was not purchasing more SGMs, SOCOM said it wanted to “expeditiously complete development, integration, test, and fielding an SGM capability for the AC-130W, AC-130J, and other Special Operations Forces (SOF) platforms” because “the combat need is immediate.” The document also discussed how SOCOM had terrible luck with another comparable munition, which “was removed from service on SOCOM aircraft due to failure to achieve lethality performance and high cost to redesign to meet mission requirements.”
The contract, which could be awarded as early as July, will require Dynetics to provide “700 SGMs in 2018 and 2019, with 900 more in 2020,” said Breaking Defense. The number is expected to increase to 1,000 per year in 2021 and beyond.
Highlighted in the recent Department of Defense’s National Defense Strategy (2018), counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, Yemen, Eastern Africa and Libya will be abundant well into the 2020s. According to the newest US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC, these operations will be considered hybrid wars, that are small, fast-paced, and rely on precision-guided munitions to protect Special Operations Forces.
Dynetics told Breaking Defense that the SGMs laser-guided munition uses lattice control fins at the back of the missile are similar to the GBU 43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, and the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator.
In the past, SOCOM tested several other lightweight munitions, but none seemed to pan out with successful field tests. SOCOM tested Raytheon’s Griffin, Northrop Grumman’s Viper Strike, and Textron’s G-CLAW. Here is what the justification document said:
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SOCOM “phased the Viper Strike out of the inventory due to failure to achieve lethality performance, and high cost to redesign to meet mission requirements.”
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Textron’s G-CLAW “is 2-3 years behind the SGM in maturity and experienced failures in its first flight test with a seeker,” and
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Raytheon’s Griffin “does not address the required aspects of the 360 degree employment zone, launch signature, and support engagement scenarios in which attack azimuth and impact angle must be precisely controlled. At this time, there is no viable alternative to the SGM.”
Dynetics further told Breaking Defense that the company is experimenting with strapping the SGMs to fighter jets and helicopters, and “nothing that would preclude it from unmanned or light aircraft or gunship derivatives.” Dynetics added that the SGM could be an excellent fit for the Army’s lightweight precision munition program.
Perhaps, lightweight munitions for SOCOM’s hybrid wars in Africa and the Middle East is another way of saying, the military cannot afford to field overpriced munitions, as its endless wars could undoubtedly bankrupt this nation.
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- An Empire Of Nothing At All – A Staggeringly Well-Funded Blowback Machine
Authored by Tom Engelhardt via TomDispatch.com,
[This essay is the introduction to Tom Engelhardt’s new book, A Nation Unmade by War, a Dispatch Book published by Haymarket Books.]
As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets).
On average, that’s at least $23,386 per taxpayer.
Keep in mind that such figures, however eye-popping, are only the dollar costs of our wars. They don’t, for instance, include the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They don’t include the costs to this country’s infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkably — in these years, almost uniquely — bipartisan fashion into what’s still laughably called “national security.” That’s not, of course, what would make most of us more secure, but what would make them — the denizens of the national security state — ever more secure in Washington and elsewhere. We’re talking about the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. nuclear complex, and the rest of that state-within-a-state, including its many intelligence agencies and the warrior corporations that have, by now, been fused into that vast and vastly profitable interlocking structure.
In reality, the costs of America’s wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable. Just look at photos of the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria, Sirte in Libya, or Marawi in the southern Philippines, all in ruins in the wake of the conflicts Washington set off in the post–9/11 years, and try to put a price on them. Those views of mile upon mile of rubble, often without a building still standing untouched, should take anyone’s breath away. Some of those cities may never be fully rebuilt.
And how could you even begin to put a dollars-and-cents value on the larger human costs of those wars: the hundreds of thousands of dead? The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight? How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettling other parts of the planet? Their presence (or more accurately a growing fear of it) has, for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing “populist” movements that threaten to tear Europe apart. And who could forget the role that those refugees — or at least fantasy versions of them — played in Donald Trump’s full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?
Opening the Gates of Hell
America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East — and ultimately the planet — as no other imperial power had ever done.
Their overwrought geopolitical fantasies and their sense that the U.S. military was a force capable of accomplishing anything they willed it to do launched a process that would cost this world of ours in ways that no one will ever be able to calculate. Who, for instance, could begin to put a price on the futures of the children whose lives, in the aftermath of those decisions, would be twisted and shrunk in ways frightening even to imagine? Who could tote up what it means for so many millions of this planet’s young to be deprived of homes, parents, educations — of anything, in fact, approximating the sort of stability that might lead to a future worth imagining?
Though few may remember it, I’ve never forgotten the 2002 warning issued by Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League. An invasion of Iraq would, he predicted that September, “open the gates of hell.” Two years later, in the wake of the actual invasion and the U.S. occupation of that country, he altered his comment slightly. “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.”
His assessment has proven unbearably prescient — and one not only applicable to Iraq. Fourteen years after that invasion, we should all now be in some kind of mourning for a world that won’t ever be. It wasn’t just the US military that, in the spring of 2003, passed through those gates to hell. In our own way, we all did. Otherwise, Donald Trump wouldn’t have become president.
I don’t claim to be an expert on hell. I have no idea exactly what circle of it we’re now in, but I do know one thing: we are there.
The Infrastructure of a Garrison State
If I could bring my parents back from the dead right now, I know that this country in its present state would boggle their minds. They wouldn’t recognize it. If I were to tell them, for instance, that just three men — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — now possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, of 160 million Americans, they would never believe me.
How, for instance, could I begin to explain to them the ways in which, in these years, money flowed ever upward into the pockets of the immensely wealthy and then down again into what became one-percent elections that would finally ensconce a billionaire and his family in the White House? How would I explain to them that, while leading congressional Democrats and Republicans couldn’t say often enough that this country was uniquely greater than any that ever existed, none of them could find the funds — some $5.6 trillion for starters — necessary for our roads, dams, bridges, tunnels, and other crucial infrastructure? This on a planet where what the news likes to call “extreme weather” is increasingly wreaking havocon that same infrastructure.
My parents wouldn’t have thought such things possible. Not in America. And somehow I’d have to explain to them that they had returned to a nation which, though few Americans realize it, has increasingly been unmade by war — by the conflicts Washington’s war on terror triggered that have now morphed into the wars of so many and have, in the process, changed us.
Such conflicts on the global frontiers have a tendency to come home in ways that can be hard to track or pin down. After all, unlike those cities in the Greater Middle East, ours aren’t yet in ruins — though some of them may be heading in that direction, even if in slow motion. This country is, at least theoretically, still near the height of its imperial power, still the wealthiest nation on the planet. And yet it should be clear enough by now that we’ve crippled not just other nations but ourselves in ways that I suspect — though I’ve tried over these years to absorb and record them as best I could — we can still barely see or grasp.
In my new book, A Nation Unmade by War, the focus is on a country increasingly unsettled and transformed by spreading wars to which most of its citizens were, at best, only half paying attention. Certainly, Trump’s election was a sign of how an American sense of decline had already come home to roost in the era of the rise of the national security state (and little else).
Though it’s not something normally said here, to my mind President Trump should be considered part of the costs of those wars come home. Without the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and what followed, I doubt he would have been imaginable as anything but the host of a reality TV show or the owner of a series of failed casinos. Nor would the garrison-state version of Washington he now occupies be conceivable, nor the generals of our disastrous wars whom he’s surrounded himself with, nor the growth of a surveillance state that would have staggered George Orwell.
The Makings of a Blowback Machine
It took Donald Trump — give him credit where it’s due — to make us begin to grasp that we were living in a different and devolving world. And none of this would have been imaginable if, in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Co. hadn’t felt the urge to launch the wars that led us through those gates of hell. Their soaring geopolitical dreams of global domination proved to be nightmares of the first order. They imagined a planet unlike any in the previous half millennium of imperial history, in which a single power would basically dominate everything until the end of time. They imagined, that is, the sort of world that, in Hollywood, had been associated only with the most malign of evil characters.
And here was the result of their conceptual overreach: never, it could be argued, has a great power still in its imperial prime proven quite so incapable of applying its military and political might in a way that would advance its aims. It’s a strange fact of this century that the U.S. military has been deployed across vast swaths of the planet and somehow, again and again, has found itself overmatched by underwhelming enemy forces and incapable of producing any results other than destruction and further fragmentation. And all of this occurred at the moment when the planet most needed a new kind of knitting together, at the moment when humanity’s future was at stake in ways previously unimaginable, thanks to its still-increasing use of fossil fuels.
In the end, the last empire may prove to be an empire of nothing at all — a grim possibility which has been a focus of TomDispatch, the website I’ve run since November 2002. Of course, when you write pieces every couple of weeks for years on end, it would be surprising if you didn’t repeat yourself. The real repetitiousness, however, wasn’t at TomDispatch. It was in Washington. The only thing our leaders and generals have seemed capable of doing, starting from the day after the 9/11 attacks, is more or less the same thing with the same dismal results, again and again.
The U.S. military and the national security state that those wars emboldened have become, in effect — and with a bow to the late Chalmers Johnson (a TomDispatch stalwart and a man who knew the gates of hell when he saw them) — a staggeringly well-funded blowback machine. In all these years, while three administrations pursued the spreading war on terror, America’s conflicts in distant lands were largely afterthoughts to its citizenry. Despite the largest demonstrations in history aimed at stopping a war before it began, once the invasion of Iraq occurred, the protests died out and, ever since, Americans have generally ignored their country’s wars, even as the blowback began. Someday, they will have no choice but to pay attention.
- Graduates From America's Largest Schools Move Here With Their Diplomas
The notion that Americans need a college education to succeed in the modern workforce is at the root of most of the millennial generation’s problems: With Americans bearing a collective $1.4 trillion debt burden, economists have blamed this debt pile for holding back millennials – keeping them from buying homes and starting families.
But the truth is much more complex.
In a recently published study, the Wall Street Journal gathered data from 445 large research universities and liberal arts colleges – as well as NCAA D-I schools – detailing where their alumni move after college.
The maps below show their movement to 70 big metropolitan areas, as well as the share who moved to smaller communities.
As one might expect, graduates from brand-name Ivy League schools, along with their cohorts at smaller liberal arts institutions, overwhelmingly flock to urban areas like New York City, Washington DC and San Francisco.
Meanwhile, students who attended large public research universities are more likely to settle down in suburban areas.
WSJ breaks down its findings in a presentation showing how graduates disperse throughout the country.
Las Vegas Has Little To Offer:
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Some Punch Above Their Weight:
The biggest cities don’t necessarily draw the most students from colleges and universities in our study.
San Francisco, for example ranks 11th in population but fifth in drawing power, attracting 2% or more of alumni from 139 schools.
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Smaller Metro Areas Sometimes Have More Drawing Power:
Boston is the 10th biggest metro but ranks sixth in drawing 2% or more of alumni from institutions traced by some 120 schools.
However, New York City, the country’s largest city, also draws 2% or more of the alumni of 263 schools, the most of any US city.
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Smaller Metro And Rural Areas Have Less Drawing Power:
Only 62 schools in WSJ’s database saw more than half of their alumni move to smaller metropolitan and rural areas. Many of these colleges and universities are part of state university systems like the University of Connecticut or Purdue.
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Big East Alumni Are More Likely To Live In Cities; SEC Grads Less So:
The Big East is the most urbane conference. Schools like Georgetown and Villanova send a large segment of their grads to New York City and Washington DC. Each of the 10 schools in the conference sends more than 75% of its former students to big metropolitan areas.
The SEC, which includes Ole Miss, Auburn and Kentucky, sends more students to smaller cities and rural areas than any other conference. Among SEC schools, only Vanderbilt sends more than 75% of its alumni to big city metro areas.
And as millennials continue to favor urban environments, it’s likely these trends will continue to intensify, sending urban property values even higher than they already are.
- Ranking The Most (And Least) Productive Industries
A common complaint for people about their workplace is that things never get done. Bureaucracy, politics, and coordination costs among teams means that projects are completed at a snail’s pace, if it all.
You often see this complaint among people at large companies, where these dynamics can be especially pronounced. You also tend to hear about it in certain industries with a reputation for slowness.
But is that actually true? Does it take longer for big companies to get work done than small companies? Are certain industries more or less productive than others? We decided to analyze our data to find out the answers to these questions.
We analyzed data from Priceonomics customer Redbooth, a project management software company, to see how long it takes for work to get done at different types of companies. We looked at anonymized data from nine million tasks completed over the last year to see how long it takes to get work done and whether smaller or larger companies get work done faster. Not only that, but we also looked at whether some industries were more productive than others.
We found that in fact, large companies get work done at about the same rate as small ones. However, medium sized ones are 6.7% less productive than small ones, taking about 2.5 days more to complete a task.
Among industries, there is a huge variation in how long it takes to get work done. The energy industry ranks as the slowest to get tasks done (tasks take 59 days on average). Financial companies are the fastest industry, where a task is completed in 31 days on average.
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To begin, we look at how long it takes for work to get done and whether that varies by company size. On Redbooth, the foundational unit of measurement is a task. When you’re working on a project, users create a task and then mark the task as complete when they’re done. The time difference between task creation and completion is how long it takes to get your work done.
While projects across companies and industries may be very different, at the task level there is a lot of commonality in terms of things that need to get done; tasks are often things like complete an RFP, fix a broken wireless network, hire a new employee.
The chart below shows the average time it takes to complete a task, split by small, medium and large companies:
Data source: Redbooth
Enormous companies with over five thousand employees get work done about as quickly as small ones with less than fifty people. It takes about an average of 36 days for a task to get done at a small or large company.
Interestingly, mid-sized companies are the least productive. It takes 2.4 days more for an employee at a mid-sized companies to get their work done than at a small one. It’s possible that as companies grow, they become less productive as they cease to be small startups and now have to coordinate with many people. However, at some point, productivity enhancements need to be put in place to scale up to a large company.
Our findings partially confirm some recent economic research that in most countries, large companies are more productive than smaller ones. Not all small companies are fast moving startups after all, some are just small companies that struggle to compete against larger ones with more resources.
Below, we break down the company size cohorts into more granular buckets. A similar picture of productivity remains:
Data source: Redbooth
The segment of 51 to 10,000 employees is consistently the least productive. Companies with fewer than 10 employees or more than 100,000 both take on average about thirty five days to complete a task.
Our data indicates that large companies are just as productive as very small ones. Or if they are not, they’re at least good at scoping tasks in their project management system to be achievable during a reasonable time frame.
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As the data above shows, company size plays a sizable role in productivity, but what other factors influence how quickly work gets done at a company?
Next, we turn our attention to productivity by industry. Do certain sectors have more or less productive employees, as defined by how quickly it takes them to complete a task on average?
The chart below shows the average time to complete a task based on industry sector:
Data source: Redbooth
There is a pretty dramatic difference in how long it takes work to get done by industry. A task in the Energy sector takes about twice as long to complete as one in Financials. The next “slowest” industries are Materials and Utilities. Information Technology and Financials get work done the fastest. Later, we’ll dive into this data at a more granular level, but industries creating infrastructure and physical products tend to work at a more measured pace than ones that sell services.
It might not necessarily be a bad thing, however, for a company to take a long time to complete its work tasks. If the tasks in the Energy industry are more complicated than in IT, you would expect the tasks to take longer. Or if you work in highly regulated industry like Healthcare, additional compliance steps may result in work taking longer to complete.
We also have the ability to dive deeper into the industry taxonomy to get a more nuanced picture. Which “sub-industries” (more specialized work areas within a sector) get their work done completed fastest and slowest:
Data source: Redbooth
Of the 51 industries we looked at, IT Services gets their work done in the least amount of time. This isn’t terribly surprising if the tasks are high priority items like “fix the email server” that have to be completed quickly for businesses to operate. Dominating the “gets work done fast” are consumer facing industries ike Beverages, Personal Products, and Real Estate as well as “services” for businesses.
Next, we look at industries that take the longest to get tasks accomplished:
Data source: Redbooth
The industry that takes the longest to complete a task is Metals & Mining. It takes almost four times as long for a task to be completed here compared to IT services. Industries producing complicated physical goods like Aerospace & Defense and Technology Hardware, also take a long time for work to be completed.
Curious where your industry stacks up in terms of productivity? To conclude, we present all the data on how long it takes for task completion in each industry where we have sufficient data to provide a productivity estimate. The chart belows shows industries grouped by their sector, sorted from working the slowest to the fastest:
Data source: Redbooth
Within a given sector, there are huge differences in how long it takes to complete work. For example in the Material sector, Metals & Mining tasks take almost 73 days, whereas Containers & Packaging tasks take 26 days. Similarly, in the Financials sector, Capital Markets tasks take nearly twice as long as real estate ones do.
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Depending on your industry and company size, it takes different amounts of time for work to get done.
While one might expect big companies to be the slowest, the results revealed that they are just as productive at finishing their tasks as small companies. However, medium sized companies with 51 to 5000 employees are significantly slower at completing tasks than smaller or larger ones.
Not surprising, the industry you work in helps determine the pace at which work gets done. Industries like Metals and Mining, Technology Hardware, and Aerospace & Defense have work that takes a long time to complete. On the other hand, service providers like IT Services and Commercial Services providers are expected to get their work done much faster. If you’re building a rocket, you can take your time. If you’re responsible for fixing the Internet in the office, you best get the task done quickly.
- Median-Priced Home In San Francisco Requres $333,000 Annual Income
San Francisco County Real Estate is so hot right now that in order to afford a median priced home of $1,610,000, a household needs to bring in around $333,000 in annual income, according to a quarterly survey by the California Association of Realtors.
Nearby San Mateo county isn’t much better – where a $1,575,000 median priced home requires an income of $326,000.
The good news, at least for well off San Franciscans, is that more households – 15% – were able to buy a median-priced single-family home in the first quarter of 2018 vs. the fourth quarter of 2017, thanks to rising incomes which rose faster than the increase in home prices and interest rates.
Six out of nine bay area counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara) were responsible for the majority of the affordability gains, according to the CAR, while affordability decreased in two counties (Solano and Sonoma).
Statewide the situation is much more reasonable:
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Thirty-one percent of California households could afford to purchase the $538,640 median-priced home in the first quarter of 2018, up from 29 percent in fourth-quarter 2017 but down from 32 percent a year ago.
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A minimum annual income of $111,500 was needed to make monthly payments of $2,790, including principal, interest, and taxes on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at a 4.44 percent interest rate.
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Thirty-nine percent of home buyers were able to purchase the $449,720 median-priced condo or townhome. An annual income of $93,090 was required to make a monthly payment of $2,330.
In Southern California, affordability improved in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventuira, while remaining flat in Orange and San Diego counties during the first quarter in 2018.
For those seeking California’s most affordable areas, Lassen, Kern, Kings and San Bernardino counties top the list.
California counties have become far less affordable since “peak affordability” in 2012, with Bay Area homes dropping from 45% to 23% in just 8 years, while the overall affordability in the United States went from 75% in 2012 to 57% in Q1 2018.
Fun fact: Property tax on the average San Francisco home is $1,593 per month – while the average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in California is $1,430 per month ($940 nationally).
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- Big Brother: Police Raid Home Of Man Who Posted Pictures Of His Mushroom Dinner On Facebook
Authored by Jay Syrmopoulos via TruthInMedia.com,
On May 11, a man named John Garrison posted a public photo on Facebook showing morel mushrooms he had gathered while foraging with his girlfriend Hope Deery, and wrote of his plans to “sautee them with brown sugar and cinnamon and see how that turns out.”
Garrison went on to claim that his original Facebook post about morel mushrooms, which are a legal and sought-after delicacy, led to a visit to his home hours later from law enforcement apparently investigating possible use of psychedelic mushrooms commonly referred to as “magic mushrooms.”
Photography is Not a Crime reported that police appeared at his house less than 24 hours later, questioning Garrison and Deery about why they were “eating mushrooms and posting about it online.”
“We had just finished eating the Morels we found today and heard a knock on the door. A police officer and an RA were standing outside. We let them in and as soon as the police officer walked in he asked us why we were eating mushrooms and posting about it online. He thought he was on the biggest bust of his career thinking we were having a magic mushroom party before I explained to him that Morels are a native choice edible mushroom similar to truffles,” Garrison wrote in an additional Facebook post.
The officer allegedly refused to believe that the couple ingested legal mushrooms. Garrison, in an effort to prove that they were simply morel mushrooms, said that he retrieved a piece of the mushroom from the trash— but the officer still refused to believe they hadn’t broken the law until a second officer arrived on the scene and confirmed it was a legal mushroom. Before the officers left, Garrison said his ID was processed.
“He wasn’t convinced. So I rummaged through the trash to find a piece of a Morel so that he would have evidence that we weren’t taking psychedelic mushrooms. I showed him and he still wasn’t convinced that they weren’t magic mushrooms, Which was shocking to me because morels look nothing like a psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms and I figured a police officer would know what illegal drugs looked like. A second police officer showed up and I showed her the Morel and she immediately knew it was a Morel which was a relief. They processed our ID’s and eventually left. What an experience,” Garrison wrote.
It appears Big Brother is well and truly here… and he’s watching you!
- US Birth Rate Hits All-Time Low: What's Behind The Decline?
The number of babies born in the United States has hit a 40-year low, according to figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Provisional 2017 estimates reveal that around 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2017, a fertility rate of 1.76 births per woman. This is a 2% drop from 2016 – marking the largest single-year drop in the U.S. birth rate since 2010, and is significantly lower than the 4.31 million babies born in 2007 when the fertility rate was 2.08 births per woman.
When the data is restricted to women aged 15 – 44, there were around 60 births per 1,000 mothers – a 3% drop from 2016, and the lowest record rate since the government began keeping track in 1909.
Since 2007, fertility has fallen the most for the youngest women, but in the last year, declines have set in for women in their 30s as well. Fertility declines increasingly seem to be about much more than just postponed fertility, or else these women must be planning to have some very fertile 40s.
At least through 2016, this trend appeared to be mostly driven by changes in marital status. Births to never-married women are down more than births to ever-married women: age-adjusted marital fertility is down 14% since 2007, while age-adjusted never-married fertility is down 21%, as of 2016. Preliminary data from several states suggest these trends are likely to continue in 2017. –IFS
The teen birth rate fell 7% from 2016-2017, down to 19 births per 1,000 teen mothers aged 15-19 – while the birth rate for women under 40 generally declined to record lows.
When looking at fertility by race, the decline has hit minorities particularly hard vs. non-Hispanic whites.
the decline in fertility has been far greater among minorities than among non-Hispanic whites.
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The deficit varies across racial and ethnic groups. American Indians and Alaska Natives have it worst among racial groups, having lost a whopping 15% of expected fertility from 2008 to 2016, or about 83,000 births, with total fertility rates falling from 1.62 births per woman to a shockingly low 1.23. It’s unclear exactly why Native American fertility has fallen so quickly and why it is so low, but they are indisputably the hardest-hit race in the fertility declines of the last 10 years. –IFS
African American births are down 9.6%, or around 700,00 babies – which is only slightly worse than whites, who are down 9.3%, or around 3.2 million births.
“Black fertility declined from 2.15 births per woman to 1.89, while white fertility fell from 2.14 to 1.82,” reads IFR‘s analysis, while “Asians experienced a less severe decline, but their fertility was somewhat lower to start with.”
The fertility rate among whites is a bit misleading, admits IFR, as it includes most Hispanics – who have historically higher birth rates than non-Hispanic whites. When looking at Hispanics as a whole, the birth rate between 2008-2016 has declined nearly 19%.
Thus, in racial or ethnic terms, America’s “Baby Bust” is kinda, sorta, a little bit racist: it’s hammered Native Americans and Hispanics particularly hard, and hit even African Americans harder than whites generally, and certainly harder than non-Hispanic whites. The call to boost fertility is far from being a call for whites to keep up with minority fertility; rather, it’s an exhortation that we need to be listening to the fertility desires of women of racial and ethnic minorities, who are experiencing precipitous declines in fertility, largely unnoticed by the white-dominated world of mommy-blogs and late-in-life fertility treatments. Any serious pro-natal policy in America worth its salt would primarily result in birth gains among minority mothers, not white ones. Accelerating the national birth rate would also accelerate the pace at which the non-Hispanic white population share declines.-IFR
North Dakotans Are Gettin’ It On
While birth rates in most states have declined, North Dakota has experienced an increase in births.
On the other hand, residents of Arizona don’t seem to feel the need to breed – where fertility rates have fallen from 2.47 births per woman in 2007 to an estimated 1.81 last year.
Provisional data from early 2018 suggests these declines are likely to continue. Arizona is double-whammied by two different racial or ethnic trends: steep declines among Hispanics and steep declines among Native Americans. Both groups make up a larger share of Arizona’s population than the national average. Both groups have seen steep declines within Arizona; steeper even than their peers in other states. –IFR
In terms of education, the drop in fertility rates have been higher for less educated woman vs. their more educated peers. As IFR notes, “Age-adjusted fertility has fallen 15% for women with a bachelor’s degree or less, versus just 7% for women with graduate degrees. On the whole, births to women with no bachelor’s have totaled 12% below what would be expected if 2007 fertility rates had continued, yielding 3.1 million missing births, while births to women with a bachelor’s degree are down 10% for 1.1 million missing births, and births to women with a graduate degree are down just 7%, or 300,000.”
The takeaway is that class is not the biggest factor in declining fertility rates. Instead, race, ethnicity, marital status and geography appear to have far more relevance.
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