Apr 04

Today’s News 4th April 2018

  • Tech Giants Race To Create An Alternate Reality

    Submitted by Michael Scott for SafeHaven

    Virtual reality, augmented reality, immersive reality, mixed reality and finally merged reality … Welcome to the world of digital layering, awash with cutting-edge technologies that are mostly powered by rather dorky and clunky hardware, but fascinating nonetheless.

    The digital reality industry is exploding, and tech titans are in an arms race to cut themselves a niche in the sector, earn bragging rights for the snazziest devices that will drive future billion-dollar valuations.

    VR and AR have been creating the most buzz, though the average user might be hard-put to tell one from the other. That’s hardly surprising when the media, and sometimes the innovators themselves, tend to use the two terms interchangeably. But when it comes to alternate realities, either one will emerge to redefine existence, or the two leaders will merge to become an even bigger reality.

    Similar Digital Realities, Different Technologies

    VR and AR are two sides of the same coin though they have significantly different capabilities.

    VR is the grandfather of our alternate reality, with the first VR devices dating all the way back to the era of the head-mounted Telesphere Mask.

    Much earlier attempts at VR had been made in the form of 360-degree murals. And modern examples of VR devices include Oculus VR, Samsung GearVR and HTC Vive.

    AR has been slower off the blocks, mainly because the underlying technology requires more fine-tuning for things like motion controllers, depth sensors and cameras for a truly awesome user experience. Apple’s brand new ARKit, Microsoft’s HoloLens, Snap glasses, Google Cardboard and Magic Leap’s soon-to-come AR glasses all belong to the AR camp.

    VR is a totally immersive experience that completely shuts out the outside world by creating a virtual environment for the user to inhabit. VR experiences can be totally cool but lack a real-world feeling because they involve little or no sensory input from the user or their environment.

    AR, on the other hand, works by mapping the real world and then laying virtual objects on top of it. The real world becomes the backdrop of the AR environment that the user is able to control. AR, unlike VR, is like a half-complete painting that allows you to add your own details.

    Another significant difference is the hardware. VR mostly relies on those unmissable head-mounted-displays (HMD), while AR devices mostly use smartphone cameras as their portal.

    Inflection point for AR

    VR has found a ready market in the entertainment industry, though CAVE automatic virtual environments might be fun for big labs and academia where they can be used to display virtual content in room-sized screens.

    AR, on the other hand, has more potential for long-term commercial applications.

    A case in point is this AR app by IKEA that allows customers to ”virtually” move furniture around and see how it’s going to look in their sitting rooms.

    Similarly, Snapchat has come up with a comparable albeit more goofy idea of a dancing hotdog that can be placed into different camera views. It’s only a matter of time before other marketing teams jump into the AR bandwagon.

    Quite naturally, smartphone companies like Apple have been hyping up AR’s potential over VR. However, they can now back up their claims using this SuperData Report that says consumer AR is set to pull ahead of VR somewhere around 2021, mainly driven by mobile AR and games like Pokémon Go.

    Gartner has placed AR only behind VR in its 2017 Hype Cycle chart of emerging technologies. Remarkably, the two are ranked as the most advanced emerging technologies, implying that an investment in either sector might pay off in the long-run.

  • Lockheed To Build NASA A Supersonic Jet Without The Sonic Boom

    NASA has awarded Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works a $247.5-million contract to design, build and flight test a low-boom X-plane that could lead to a new era of supersonic air travel in the next three to five years, according to a Lockheed Martin press release on Tuesday.

    The experimental aircraft is scheduled to take to the skies in 2021 with a top velocity of 1.5 times the speed of sound, or about 990 miles per hour (1,600 kilometers) at an altitude of 55,000 feet, Lockheed said. While the jet will only have room for a pilot, it will test design principles that soften the sonic boom.

    “It is super exciting to be back designing and flying X-planes at this scale,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics. “Our long tradition of solving the technical barriers of supersonic flight to benefit everyone continues.”

    Illustration of NASA’s Supersonic commercial travel is on the horizon. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® has partnered with NASA for more than a decade to enable the next generation of commercial supersonic aircraft.Credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin

    The news comes less than two weeks after President Trump signed the federal budget deal, which funds the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD) program, according to Space.com. In the budget proposal, the Trump administration noted that the X-plane “would open a new market for U.S. companies to build faster commercial airliners, creating jobs and cutting cross-country flight times in half.”

    With the funding in place, Lockheed Martin will build the full-scale experimental aircraft, combining NASA’s Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) into the airframe’s design. It has been over forty years since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banned commercial supersonic travel over skies of the United States, and subsequently, other nations such as Europe followed suit.

    However, the X-plane is expected to reverse the decades-old ruling, by utilizing NASA’s QueSST technology that would dramatically reduce the noise from a sonic boom.

    “This piloted X-plane would be built specifically to fly technologies that reduce the loudness of a sonic boom to that of a gentle thump,” Jaiwon Shin, associate administrator of NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, said during a news conference today.

    The X-plane would start test trials over select cities across the United States in mid-2022 and NASA will “ask the people living and working in those communities to tell us what they heard, if anything”, Shin added.

    Low-Boom Flight Demonstration aircraft as outlined during the project’s preliminary design review in 2017. NASA has selected Lockheed Martin to build the new supersonic jet. Credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin

    NASA will then compile the data from the human subjects, and submit the “scientifically collected human response” data to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), “so they can use the data to change the current rule that completely bans civil supersonic flights over land,” Shin said.

    “When the rule is changed, the door will open to an aviation industry ready to enter [a] new supersonic market in our country and around the world,” Shin said. “This X-plane is a critical step closer to that exciting future.”

    The maiden flight of the aircraft is scheduled for summer 2021. Shortly after that, NASA will conduct “Mach 1.4 flight tests at an altitude of 55,000 feet over 50-square-mile testing areas in the American Southwest,” said Popular Mechanics.

    At 940 mph, the X-plane is projected to “create a sound about as loud as a car door closing, 75 Perceived Level decibel (PLdB), instead of a sonic boom,” said Lockheed Martin. Compared to the Concorde, a retired British-French turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner, the X-plane would have a 31 percent reduction in noise when the aircraft breaks the speed of sound.

    Popular Mechanics indicates that the X-plane will be “affordable” using parts from preexisting American military aircraft.

    ”The supersonic plane is designed to be affordable by using parts taken from other jets, such as the canopy of a T-38, the landing gear of an F-16, and various components from the F/A-18. The engine is a GE 414-400, the same engine used on the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. The contract awarded to Lockheed Martin to build the jet is worth $247.5 million.”

    “We’re honored to continue our partnership with NASA to enable a new generation of supersonic travel,” said Peter Iosifidis, Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator program manager, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. “We look forward to applying the extensive work completed under QueSST to the design, build and flight test of the X-plane, providing NASA with a demonstrator to make supersonic commercial travel possible for passengers around the globe.”

    If everything goes as plan, NASA and Lockheed could usher in a new, quieter era of supersonic air travel, with commercial service available some time in the mid-2020s.

  • Why Nassim Taleb Thinks Leaders Make Poor Decisions

    Authored by Laurence Siegel of Advisor Perspectives

    Why do experts, CEOs, politicians, and other apparently highly capable people make such terrible decisions so often? Is because they’re ill-intentioned? Or because, despite appearances, they’re actually stupid? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher, businessman, perpetual troublemaker, and author of, among other works, the groundbreaking Fooled by Randomness, says it’s neither.

    It’s because these authorities face the wrong incentives.

    They are rewarded according to whether they look good to their superiors, not according to whether they are effective. They have no skin in the game.

    Seasoned readers of Taleb will be pleased to see the so-called “experts problem” pop up in living color in Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, Taleb’s latest collection of essays on risk, rationality, and randomness. According to Taleb, dentists, pilots, plumbers, structural engineers, and “scholars of Portuguese irregular verbs” are real experts; sociologists, policy analysts, “management theorist[s], publishing executive[s], and macroeconomist[s]” are not.

    The difference is that, when people from the first list are wrong about something, it’s obvious from the results and they suffer; they have skin in the game. Bad teeth, crashed planes, and leaky pipes are bad for business. People from the second list rationalize by substituting a different theory. They were not really wrong but just early, and, if they’re lucky, which is to say skillful at apple-polishing, earn promotion after promotion by not failing utterly. (Financial advisors can argue that the fiduciary standard is the most powerful tool for putting them in the first list.) Skin in the Game is full of insights like this, some recycled from his earlier work but many of them new. It is well worth the relatively quick read.

    Despite the many good qualities of Skin in the Game, Taleb’s work, including the present volume, is often infuriating. He is too sure of himself, too unkind to his enemies, too full of bluster and obscure humor. Acting on his belief that some kinds of experts are worthless, he has populated the book’s dust jacket with anonymous tweets instead of celebrity testimonials. Here’s the first tweet: “The problem with Taleb is not that he’s an ass— (spelled out in full on the jacket). He is an ass—. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.” I agree.

    Asymmetry, or why we are ruled by the most easily offended

    In chapter two of Skin in the Game, entitled “The Most Intolerant Wins,” Taleb asks why we seem to be governed by the most easily offended. You have to refrain from smoking in the non-smoking section, but you don’t have to smoke (that is, refrain from not smoking) in the smoking section, which, by the way, is much smaller. Few people really care whether you say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, but the latter has become de rigueur in some circles. Almost all soft drinks are kosher.

    The reason, Taleb explains, is that, for any given issue, there are a few people who care deeply about it and a great many people who do not. Those who care are spurred to action, even violent action in the case of religious or political passions. The rest of us, wishing to be left alone, rarely fight back with equal vigor. The results of this process include the increasing domination of Taleb’s beloved, multi-religious Lebanon by Muslims, for whom conversion to Islam is irreversible. Conversion away from Islam is at least theoretically punishable by death; Christians and Jews don’t much care if you leave the faith.

    In ancient Roman times, Taleb explains, Christians were the intolerant minority that pushed their views on the Roman majority. That’s how Christianity eventually became the official religion of the empire in 323 A.D. Times and players change but the principles of human nature remain the same.

    Almost all soft drinks are kosher because it’s relatively easy to make a drink kosher. So manufacturers put forth this small effort rather than have two kinds of each drink, one for observant Jews – a fraction of a percent of the total population – and one for everybody else.

    If this argument sounds familiar, it’s recycled in much more general form from Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th century French economist. Bastiat wrote that, for any given government action, such as a tax levied to subsidize some activity, there are a few people who will benefit greatly by it and they will work day and night to see it enacted. The great many who stand to lose will typically only lose a few pennies and will put forth little or no effort to prevent it. Thus the number of rules, regulations, taxes, handouts, and special favors granted by government grows exponentially with very little acting to restrain the growth.

    These are just a few of the asymmetries of daily life to which Taleb’s subtitle refers. Once you understand the principle, you’ll see it in everything.

    Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup

    The New York deli called Lindy’s is famous for its clientele of Broadway actors and comedians, and for having food so bad that it has inspired a bevy of jokes including the one that starts with, “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.” But, Taleb tells us, it is also well-known among mathematicians and other scholars as the place where the Lindy effect was first observed. This is the idea that the age of an inanimate object is a good indicator of its future longevity:

    Broadway shows that lasted for, say, one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy effect.

    Likewise, Judaism, 3,500 years old, will probably last another 3,500; Scientology will be lucky to get another 60. Shakespeare will last longer than Stephen King. Even living things that do not age on a particular schedule, like trees, tend to follow this rule. It could be because the old ones, having survived, are anti-fragile, a concept from Taleb’s earlier book by that title; they are not just robust, but gain further robustness from exposure to stresses. Or maybe, like Shakespeare, they’re just better.

    This principle is very powerful and Taleb applies it to many topics, with the Lindy theme running through the whole book. Academia, for example, sometimes resembles an athletic contest in which the hardest-working or most aggressive participants appear to win. It should not. “The winner is the one who finishes last,” said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; that is, the academic whose theories are least easily overturned, most enduring, had the best theories.

    Investors would do well to understand the application of the Lindy principle to their enterprise. Indexing as a concept is about 75 years old; value investing is even older. These great ideas are unlikely to be overturned any time soon. Instead, improvements around the edges are the best we can expect. The latest idea for earning alpha, whatever it is at the moment, will almost certainly turn out to be a flash in the pan, easily arbitraged away by the time it can be widely implemented.

    Why are there so many employees?

    To illustrate how the principle of skin in the game applies to labor contracting, Taleb compares the behavior of two private jet pilots. Bob is a freelance contract pilot who is sometimes useful to your little airline but is at other times too busy hauling Saudi princes to fancy resorts to do the work you need done. The result, an occasional stranded planeload of people, is disastrous for your business.

    The other, a pilot-employee – I’ll call him Bill – does more or less what you want, including working overtime in a pinch. Why the difference? Taleb writes,

    People you find in employment love the regularity of the payroll, with that special envelope on their desk the last day of the month, and without which they would act as a baby deprived of mother’s milk… [H]ad Bob been an employee rather than something that appeared to be cheaper, that contractor thing, then you wouldn’t be having so much trouble.

    Economics dictates that employment is just one of many ways to contract for labor, and a particularly inflexible one that requires you to pay the employee whether you can keep them busy or not. You’ve probably considered replacing employees with contractors in whatever business you operate or work. Yet there are a lot of employees! Taleb’s tale provides a clue to why: “Every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom.” Employment is the only legal way to achieve that sort of dependent relationship.

    What’s the connection to skin in the game? We tend to think of freelancers and entrepreneurs, such as Bob the pilot-contractor, as risk takers, skin-in-the-game players. And they are. But, as Taleb reminds us, “skin in the game is not [about] incentives, but disincentives.” You don’t want the employee to do what is best for himself in the short run – that’s what contractors do – so you set up an alignment of interest between his long-run welfare and yours. As an employee with a family and a mortgage, and considerable costs if he has to get another job and relocate, he has skin in your game.

    That’s why we have so many employees.

     

    Two very different kinds of risk

    Since investing is applied philosophy, Taleb’s whole book is relevant to investors, but the most directly applicable part is Chapter 19, “The Logic of Risk Taking.” He draws the distinction, fundamental but rarely fully understood, between ensemble probability and time probability. (Like double-entry bookkeeping, this is one of those wonderful ideas that’s obvious once you’ve heard it; less so in advance.) Ensemble probability involves a risk faced by a population at a given point in time, such as that of a hundred people visiting a casino once, where each person can make a one-time, double-or-nothing bet involving his or her entire fortune. In that single visit, about half of them will be ruined. The other half, having doubled their money, will be perfectly fine.

    Time probability, in contrast, involves an ongoing risk faced by an individual over time. Consider someone visiting a casino 100 times in succession, also making a double-or-nothing bet involving his entire fortune. In 100 visits, that person will be ruined; usually ruin will occur after just a few visits. No one who behaves this way will ever be fine.

    With ensemble probability, then, as Taleb explains, “the ruin of one does not affect the ruin of others.” With time probability it’s the opposite: once you get a sufficiently bad outcome, the game is over and you cannot become un-ruined.

    This distinction is relevant to investing because the risks investors face involve time probability, not ensemble probability. In most aspects of life, we are accustomed to thinking about risk in the ensemble sense: a football team has a 2-in-3 chance of winning a game, a disease has a 10% mortality rate. So we are familiar with that kind of risk, and comfortable extending the concept to other aspects of life.

    But, in investing, the state of a person’s wealth at any point in time is contingent on her wealth at the previous point in time; returns are cumulative; investing exposes us to time risk, cumulative risk. We are not typically able to do the mental approximations needed to think about that – if the risk of getting in a car accident on the way to work is one in 10,000, what is the risk of driving to work 10,000 times? (It’s not 100%, nor is it insignificant; it’s 64%. You should go to work anyway.)

    Thus, we need to be very careful when relying on intuition to tell us about investment risk. Investing involves more risk than you think. We also need to be wary of extrapolating from the past (and avoid the temptation that comes from the fact that it’s so readily accessible). Paul Samuelson famously said that “we have only one sample of the past,” meaning that far more things could have happened than did happen; there’s only so much you can learn from studying history. But it’s just as important that we will get only one sample of the future! The return pattern that we will experience is just one of the infinitely many possible ones, and it will not be the one that we “expect” statistically; it will be something different, possibly very different.

    Are you an IYI? I hope not

    Consistent with his famously combative persona, Taleb takes pot shots – frequent and vigorous ones – at intellectuals, or, in his acronym, IYI. An intellectual yet idiot (IYI) is someone who is beloved by the public for his or her knowledgeable airs but who is actually full of baloney, having no practical sense. Taleb considers Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now and a current darling, to be an example, and calls him a “journalistic professor,” not the psychologist and linguist that he obviously is. (I’m reviewing Pinker’s book, favorably, in an upcoming Advisor Perspectives.)

    When one gets past the gratuitous insult, however – Taleb doesn’t think much of journalists or professors – he has a point. When a real expert strays from his own field, he is susceptible to making the foolish mistakes of an amateur, except that an amateur is likely to be humbler.

     

    Taleb has not convinced me that Pinker is a wandering amateur; maybe it’s Taleb, not Pinker, who is wandering too far from the core of his knowledge. Intellectuals, whether or not IYI, must, when turning against their kind, be on guard against becoming AIYA: anti-intellectual yet ass­­­­—. (Pardon my French; Taleb inspires it.) At 16, I fit the description; I do not think Pinker does.

    Dedicated to the one I love?

    Book dedications are rarely interesting; they usually feature one’s parent, spouse, or teacher. But, in an odd twist that allows us to see (a little) into Nassim Taleb’s mind, he dedicates Skin in the Game to two well-known people whom I would have praised less lavishly. First, Ron Paul, “a Roman among Greeks”; second, Ralph Nader, “a Greco-Phoenician saint.”

    In a self-referential joke, Taleb’s comment about Ron Paul reverses the dedication of his earlier book, The Black Swan, to the great mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, “a Greek among Romans.” It took me a bit of effort to find out, by searching through Taleb’s tweets, that he admires the Romans’ practicality:

    As I came to realize…[,] the Romans were no-B.S. Fat Tonys; they resented grand theories and favored prudent and progressive tinkering. Much of what they built, from constitution, to Roman law, to bridges, to low income housing, to their literature, to their imperial administration (still around in the structure of the Catholic church), has survived 2000 years.

    Paul, a doctor and former congressman from Texas, is an honorable man who often stands alone in objecting to his colleagues’ expedient political follies. I’m not sure (and Taleb doesn’t say) why that makes him a Roman, but maybe an encomium is deserved; I would not have singled him out.

    But Ralph Nader a saint? He certainly sacrificed personal income, and subjected himself to harassment, when making the case that U.S. auto companies were making dangerous cars; he had skin in that game. But Nader has a dark side. Despite having taken a poverty vow and very publicly living like a monk, he revealed a personal fortune of $3.8 million in his 2000 presidential election filing – not a large fortune but not monkish either. He has also founded nonprofit organizations that do research of dubious quality, and his latest crusade is a meaningless fight against share buybacks (an important mechanism for enabling investors to get cash flow out of their portfolios). Nader is an odd choice for sainthood.

    Skin in the game everywhere

    Like many authors who’ve discovered a principle that they believe applies in many aspects of life, Taleb isn’t shy about discussing every aspect he can identify. They include the role of looks in choosing a surgeon: don’t choose a dignified, handsome one – one who looks more like a butcher “had to have much to overcome in terms of perception.” Military interventionism? He’s against it, arguing that policy analysts who make war from comfortable offices don’t know what it’s really like on the ground and have no personal stake in the consequences. Religions, at least at first, demand extreme sacrifices from their adherents because their leaders know they can only hold the tribe together if its members can see that fellow members have sacrificed too: “The strength of a creed,” Taleb writes, “did not rest on ‘evidence’ of the powers of its gods, but evidence of the skin in the game on the part of its worshippers.”

    This campfire-style storytelling makes the book seem, in places, more like a collection of loosely related essays, as I referred to it at the outset, than a coherent book. This approach has an upside and a downside. It’s easy to read parts of the book without losing the train of thought, since many of the parts were written as magazine articles and stand well on their own. The downside is that, if you try to read the book as a coherent whole, you’ll find it too full of interruptions and asides.

    Conclusion

    Taleb’s writing is nothing if not lively. What other philosopher, let alone investment writer, creates characters like Fat Tony, a worldly-wise trader who cares little for book learning; Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova, a neuroscientist with three philosopher ex-husbands who writes a runaway best-seller called A Story of Recursion; and Nero Tulip, a thinly disguised version of Taleb himself? Taleb entertains, educates, and infuriates all at once, a heady combination for readers who score high on curiosity but frustrating for those who are just in a hurry to gather information and get on with it. This is Sunday afternoon, not Monday morning, reading.

    Mercifully, Skin in the Game is also relatively short, unlike Taleb’s previous book, Antifragile. It can be consumed effectively by a casual reader and does not require sustained attention.

    Skin in the Game is not Taleb’s best book – that’s Fooled by Randomness – but it’s his most accessible. I highly recommend it.

    Laurence B. Siegel is the Gary P. Brinson Director of Research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation and an independent consultant. He may be reached at lbsiegel@uchicago.edu.

  • YouTube Shooter Identified As Nasim Aghdam

    As it turns out, Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube headquarters (which has so far resulted in zero deaths other than that of the shooter, who committed suicide) had nothing to do with domestic violence and everything to do with blowback to YouTube’s demonetization efforts – as many initially feared.

    The shooter was identified as Nasim Aghdam who slammed YouTube for purportedly censoring her after she claimed that they demonetized her channels, including an exercise one devoted to exercise videos and another devoted to veganism. Aghdam channeled her anger toward YouTube into a paranoid manifesto published online. She wrote in her purported manifesto: “Be aware! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care for personal and short-term profits and do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people, hiding the truth, manipulating science and everything, putting public mental and physical health at risk, abusing non-human animals, polluting the environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism and sexual degeneration in the name of freedom and turning people into programmed robots!”

     

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    She identified herself as an Iranian activist as well as an animal rights activist. Shortly after she was identified, photos of her holding signs with anti-YouTube messages were found online and shared.

     

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    Along with her now-deleted Instagram…

     

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    …One now-deleted YouTube page bore anti-YouTube messages.

     

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    She recently published a video ranting about her treatment by YouTube, complaining that they’d deprived her of views. She said the practice was tantamount to censorship. She also maintained a website that remained live late Tuesday evening. It lists five channels for Aghdam.

    And driving that point home, she published a video debating whether the US or Iran did more to protect freedom of speech.

     

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    A Facebook artist page she created had more than 1,600 followers according to a cached version from archive.org. The Facebook page contains a trove of videos. They range in subject matter from lighthearted and comical to recipes for helping people eat vegan, as well as her exercise videos.

    Contrary to initial reports, ABC said Aghdam wasn’t in a relationship with anyone at the facility (so much for those initial suspicions).

    She did not have an ID badge, and was carrying a purse. Aghdam was apparently a prolific maker of YouTube videos, maintaining several accounts for videos of different subjects.

  • Netflix, Spotify, And Uber Are Making You Fat, New Survey Finds

    The corporate architects of America’s modern economy, otherwise known as “the gig economy,” have unleashed the sharing economy popularized by Uber and Airbnb, and the subscription economy pioneered by Netflix and Spotify. These oligarchic capitalists intend to transform participants in this system into temporary workers trapped in low wage/skill, part-time service-sector employment with no career prospects, insurmountable debt loads and no financial security.

    And lots of fat.

    It has now been nine years since America’s modern economy clawed out of the Great Recession through an unprecedented monetary injection from global Central Banks, leaving the current economic expansion or whatever you want to call it, poised to become the second longest on record this quarter.

    However, SocGen recently spoiled the party warning of late-cycle volatility bursts “in credit, dispersion and cross-asset volatility as the equity/bond correlation itself becomes more volatile.” We must also note that, residing on the upper end of the s-curve in terms of a late stage in the business cycle, there are some troubling developments in the labor market.

    According to a new national survey, the hectic lifestyle associated with the “gig economy” is making Americans overweight.

    “The Truth about Weight Loss” is a survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Zaluvida, a full-circle life science group, which surveyed 1,000 healthcare professionals and more than 1,000 adults living in the United States.

    The results from the Zaluvida Weight Loss Survey reveals “today’s modern lifestyle has made losing weight more difficult than ever before, and that U.S. adults who are trying to do so need a new approach that’s compatible with how we live today.”

    The Fast Company, an American business magazine, chimes in and suggests that “Uber and Netflix are making you fat.” The report shows 88% of Americans moved less in this economic cycle due to increased “screen time” and “on-demand services” on smartphones, such as meal delivery, ride-sharing services, or mobile shopping apps.

    Caught in a cycle of weight-loss failures and frustrations, many U.S. adults [millennials] stay out of the picture — especially women.

    According to the Zaluvida, this has depressing effects: 30 percent of adults in the U.S. said, “their weight keeps them from wanting to be photographed.” Another 40 percent of adults are trying to lose weight, but only 30 percent are confident they will be able to drop the excess fat.

    The Fast Company adds,

    “Healthcare professionals say options like Seamless and UberEats don’t necessarily offer the same nutritional value as healthy, home-cooked meals. In their defense, 29% of those surveyed say they use on-demand services to accommodate time-strapped schedules. Primary care physicians sympathize, with 77% agreeing it’s harder today than it was for previous generations to stay fit due to busy lifestyles.”

    Zaluvida claims that Americans who are participating in today’s modern economy need “a new approach to weight loss.”

    What the experts say:

    “These findings highlight that while the way we live has changed dramatically over the past 10 to 20 years, our approach to weight loss has not evolved sufficiently to address those changes,” said Dr. Frank Greenway, medical director and professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a press statement. “The results underscore that we need to take a step back and evaluate what weight-loss strategies can best set people up for success given the demands of their daily lives.”

    Key findings of the report:

    • Approximately eight in 10 healthcare professionals and 62% of U.S. adults believe losing weight is harder today than it was for previous generations because of the busy, modern lifestyle of Americans.
    • In fact, approximately seven in 10 healthcare professionals say it’s harder for Americans to lose weight now compared to just 10 years ago.
    • The vast majority believe Americans need to take a new approach to weight loss that fits with today’s modern lifestyle.

    And so, America’s obesity problem, which recently grew to never before seen proportions – please pardon the pun – continues to get worse as the sharing/subscription economy steamrolls all legacy commerce which in turn has an adverse impact on American biology, while further deteriorating already depressed American productivity. At what point does the modern economy – and the spiraling obesity it leads do- become a national security threat, and how can/will it be resolved?

  • YouTube Shooting Witness: "I Didn't Have a Gun on Me, But Wish I Did"

    A man who witnessed the shooting at YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters on Tuesday said he wished he had been carrying a gun when the shooting occurred.

    “I didn’t have a gun on me, but wish I did,” said the man, who was ordering food across from the company’s headquarters when the shooting began.  

    “I knew I had to be smart. You’ve got to be fast. You’ve got to think fast.”

    Police confirmed that the female shooter, who has not been named, was not a YouTube employee and didn’t know anyone at the company.  Witnesses say the shooting broke out at an employee party, which is thought to be how the woman may have gained access to the building.

    It didn’t take long before the YouTube shooting turned political. After journalist Jack Posobiec tweeted an official report from a local Bay Area news outlet listing the shooter as a “white, adult female wearing a dark top and head scarf,” blue-checked Twitter users performed quick mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion that conservatives are “spreading vile conspiracies that ANTIFA is behind the YouTube HQ shooting.” 

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    Apparently ABC7 was in on it too…

    Others made tasteless jokes:

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    Gamergate figure Briana Wu decided to use the shooting to promote her congressional campaign. 

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    And some simply wished that Trump voters were all dead, ideally murdered by drowning in molten gun metal.

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    Naturally, it didn’t take long before the NRA got the blame – including from “blue checked” Democrats such as New York State Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz.

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    The formerly famous Alyssa Milano got in on the action;

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    And as we previously reported, prominent California politicians wasted no time turning this into a gun control issue before the shooter’s body was even cold.

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    And somehow it’s Russia’s propaganda that is the source of daily outrage.

  • Facebook: Trump Campaign Was Better At Facebook Than Clinton Team

    Despite a record $1.2 billion Hillary Clinton’s campaign spent before losing the 2016 election, the former Secretary of State – who has horrible twitter game – was also out-Facebooked by the Trump campaign according to an internal Facebook whitepaper, published days after the election. And that’s excluding the alleged “help” of Russia.

    “Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook between June and November of 2016,” the whitepaper’s author wrote, citing internal revenue figures of $44 million spent by the Trump campaign vs $28 million for Clinton during the same period. “But Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes.”

    The paper, first obtained by Bloomberg and “describes in granular detail the difference between Trump’s campaign, which was focused on finding new donors, and Clinton’s campaign, which concentrated on ensuring Clinton had broad appeal.“

    The data scientist says 84 percent of Trump’s budget asked people on Facebook to take an action, like donating, compared with 56 percent of Clinton’s.

    In other words, Clinton’s team felt they needed to convince voters to start liking Hillary. 

    According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign ran 5.9 million different versions of ads during the campaign – immediately testing audience response in order to push the ones with the highest levels of engagement, according to the paper. 

    Clinton ran just 66,000 ads during the same period. 

    A former Facebook employee referred to the internal white paper in a memo to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who said that Schiff and other congressional investigators could use the document in order to “ask the right questions” about whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia. 

    For example, according to the paper, more than a quarter of Trump’s ad spending was tied to third-party data files on voters, and leveraged a Facebook tool that helped the campaign show ads to people who looked similar to the names on file. Clinton’s ads aimed for broader audiences, with only 4 percent of her Facebook spend on the lookalike tool. –Bloomberg

    “Did Russian operatives give the Trump campaign a list of names to include or exclude from advertising that was running on Facebook?” the former employee asked in the memo.

    The House Intel Committee closed down their investigation into Russia days later, which Rep. Schiff – who sat on it – says left “questions unanswered, leads unexplored, countless witnesses uncalled, subpoenas unissued.” 

    Meanwhile, Congress is looking into the use of third-party information on Facebook in the wake of the company’s data harvesting scandal uncovered in an exposé of GOP-linked political data firm Cambridge Analytica, which revealed that over 50 million users were compromised. 

    That said – Facebook knew early on – days after the election in fact, that Trump’s team simply “out-Facebooked” Clinton, and that her team was focused on trying to get America to just like her. And, as a result of that failure, and in order for Clinton’s team to deflect blame, the nation has been gripped by the most ridiculous wave of anti-Russian hysteria since the days of Joe McCarthy.

  • And The Country With The 'Most Expensive' Plate Of Food Is…

    When people in poor countries go hungry, it’s often because food is unaffordable.

    A report from the World Food Programme (WFP) analyzed the glaring gap in food costs around the world, finding that in many cases, people living in poor countries have to spend the bulk of their wages on basic nourishment. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the research measured the proportion of daily income that people spent on ingredients for a basic bean stew in different countries last year before retro-projecting the ratio on to a resident of New York State.

    Infographic: The Cost Of A Plate Of Food Around The World | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    An average person living in New York State would spend about 0.6 percent of his or her daily income on ingredients for a 600 kilocalorie bean stew, approximately $1.20.

    In India, most people would find those ingredients readily affordable, with real costs coming to $9.25 or 4.25 percent of daily income. The situation is far more serious in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa.

    Someone living in South Sudan would have to work for a day and a half to afford a basic meal with the cost of the ingredients 155 percent of daily income.

    The real price of a plate of bean stew in South Sudan would be $321.70 and unsurprisingly, many of the country’s inhabitants are struggling to feed themselves.

  • Mueller Tells Trump's Lawyers President Not A Criminal Target But Remains Under Investigation

    After a busy news day in which Trump tripled-down on his feud with Amazon, met with the leaders of the Baltic states and threatened to scrap NAFTA and foreign aid to Central America if Mexico doesn’t stop a caravan of migrants from reaching the US border, the Washington Post has published the most notable update about the Mueller probe in recent history.

    Citing three people familiar with the investigation, the paper reports that Mueller told Trump’s legal team last month that the president isn’t a criminal target in the Russia probe at this point.

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    However, Mueller also informed Trump’s lawyers that he is preparing a report about the president’s conduct while in office, and that report will include details about Trump’s purported obstruction of justice. Of course, the prosecutor didn’t hesitate to use this report as leverage to try and convince the Trump legal team to assent to an unrestricted interview between Trump and Mueller.

    Mueller has described Trump as a “subject” of the investigation – a term that has also been used to described his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s involvement.

    Some of Trump’s legal advisors have taken this as a positive sign, but others have warned that Trump’s status could easily be moved from “subject” to a criminal indictment.

    Mueller’s description of the president’s status has sparked friction within Trump’s inner circle as his advisers have debated his legal standing. The president and some of his allies seized on the special counsel’s words as an assurance that Trump’s risk of criminal jeopardy is low. Other advisers, however, noted that subjects of investigations can easily become indicted targets — and expressed concern that the special prosecutor was baiting Trump into an interview that could put the president in greater legal peril.

    Typically special counsel probes end with a private report to the attorney general or deputy attorney general (in this case, the latter). That report can then be made public at their discretion – but, according to WaPo, it appears as if Rod Rosenstein has already made up his mind that some record of the investigation must be released to the public.

    Mueller’s team has also told Trump’s legal team – which has endured an unprecedented shakeup in recent weeks – that the DOJ intends to issue the report in stages, with the first stage dealing with obstruction, and the next detailing what Trump knew about his campaign advisors contacts with Russian officials.

    Mueller’s investigators have indicated to the president’s legal team that they are considering writing reports on their findings in stages — with the first report focused on the obstruction issue, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

    Under special counsel regulations, Mueller is required to report his conclusions confidentially to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who has the authority to decide whether to release the information publicly.

    “They’ve said they want to write a report on this — to answer the public’s questions — and they need the president’s interview as the last step,” one person familiar with the discussions said of Mueller’s team.

    Trump’s attorneys expect the president would also face questions about what he knew about any contacts by his associates with Russians officials and emissaries in 2016, several White House advisers said. The president’s allies believe a second report detailing the special counsel’s findings on Russia’s interference would be issued later.

    The president has privately expressed relief at the description of his legal status, which has increased his determination to agree to a special counsel interview, the people said. He has repeatedly told allies that he is not a target of the probe and believes an interview will help him put the matter behind him, friends said.

    However, legal experts said Mueller’s description of Trump as a subject of a grand jury probe does not mean he is in the clear.

    Under Justice Department guidelines, a subject of an investigation is a person whose conduct falls within the scope of a grand jury’s investigation. A target is a person for which there is substantial evidence linking him or her to a crime.

    A subject could become a target with his or her own testimony, legal experts warn.

    “If I were the president, I would be very reluctant to think I’m off the hook,” said Keith Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University and impeachment expert.

    Trump has repeatedly said he’d be happy to sit down with Mueller, but his legal team has been working to limit the scope of his testimony to written answers or agreeing to exclude certain topics.

    It’s also widely believed that Trump’s legal team has been split on whether Trump should testify, with Dowd reportedly leaving because the president ignored his advice. Even if Trump refuses to meet with Mueller, it’s unlikely he’d decide to subpoena the president or pursue him further. Such an act would instigate a legal battle that could escalate to the Supreme Court, where Mueller risks an embarrassing defeat.

    So, why risk it? It’d be easier to put the president’s mind at ease while exerting some pressure on his legal team, hoping the mixture convinces them all that Trump – the “walking perjury trap,” according to one source – assents to the interview.

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