Interesting Links for 01-10-2013

[andrewducker]

• Petition : Put an end to commercial 'parenting club' reps in Maternity Units
  (tags: petition children nhs )
• Ads Are Coming To Gmail For Android
  (tags: advertising gmail )
• AMD's Direct3D alternative is a fascinating move in the consumer 3D API space
  (tags: computers technology 3d amd graphics )
• By the end of 2014 solar power should no longer need

Comments

[artkouros]

Furphy? I have a vision on Celtic warriors dressed like teddy bears and pandas at a huge convention held at Stonehenge.

[andrewducker]

You may have been playing too much World Of Warcraft :->

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/requests-341/2-bugs-model-help-89954/

[artkouros]

Nope - I'm the only person on the internet who doesn't play video games.

Solar Parity

[danieldwilliam]

C'mon solar pv - grid parity.

I genuinely think it's a huge game changer.

Re: Solar Parity

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. I was always in favour of subsidising solar power on the grounds that this would get it to the scale/efficiency that it would be a success on its own grounds. It's a perfect example of where government should intervene - that there is a better option available, but getting to it requires you to leap over a wall that nobody will leap over without help.

Now it's (almost)there by itself it should be a runaway process.

Time to glaze over the Sahara!

Re: Solar Parity

[danieldwilliam]

The irony that we go from being dependent for energy on unstable, middle-eastern, terrorist sponsoring Arab states to being dependent for our energy on unstable, North African, terrorist sponsoring Arab states who have seen how we treat Arab states when we are energy dependent on them is strong with me. We should probably stop destabilising places.

Australia probably becomes per capita the most energy rich place in the world. It’s just a shame that the desserts there are so remote they are not even close to the rest of Australia.

Re: Solar Parity

[andrewducker]

I forsee giant robot factories plants in the middle of the Outback.

Bounty Packs

[danieldwilliam]

I remember the bounty packs. They were quite useful and I don’t recall the people being at all obtrusive.

IIRC we were given a voucher in the hospital along side a bunch of other paperwor which we could hand in at Boots (???) and get the pack full of samples of stuff.

I may not be remembering this at all well as the births of both my children were very long drawn out affairs lasting in total nearly a week and I was pretty close to exhausted at the end of both of them.

[del_c]

Instead of all these schemes to make employment involuntary on the part of the employed, I prefer Roosevelt's approach: make employment involuntary on the part of the employers. It worked, but boy did the rich hate it.

[danieldwilliam]

I quite like the idea of a scheme that runs

“Hey employer - here are 500 long term unemployed people, you’ll be paying them the minimum wage for 8 hours a day 5 days a week - better think of something useful to do with them. Sucks to be you.”

It reminds me slightly of the Athenian approach to funding capital items. If they needed a new warship or temple they would pick the richest person in the city who hadn’t paid for something this year and hand them the bill. They could only avoid the bill if they could prove that someone else was richer than them.

[del_c]

Alternatively, have the employer be the government, and the unwilling wage-payers be the taxpayers, as in the WPA of the US Depression.

[andrewducker]

That would do it.

Long Term Unemployment

[danieldwilliam]

I notice that long term unemployment has a really strongly cyclical element.

I also notice that the various schemes that have been tried for improving the employability of the long term unemployed don’t seem to have great results. Not saying that the better ones aren’t making a difference but they don’t seem to be turning half of the long term unemployed who are on the schemes from unemployed to permanently employed.

I worry that we’ll end up spending quite a lot of money not very effectively trying to get people into employment when the most effective thing we could do would be to get economic growth back up to long term trend and then try some endogenous growth theory ninjistu on the long term growth rate.

Re: Long Term Unemployment

[andrewducker]

I favour either the state being the employer of last resort, or universal benefits.

(I need to write a big LJ post about this - but the short version is 25% of the median wage for everyone, remove all income tax brackets, combine NI, and make everyone pay 45% on all income. This gets rid of huge swathes of bureaucracy, relieves all sorts of stress, and makes it much easier for people to move around without worrying about whether there's a job instantly waiting for them.)

Re: Long Term Unemployment

[cartesiandaemon]

Apparently something similar is used in rural India, to mixed reception, but had at least some effect of raising living standards effectively. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi_National_Rural_Employment_Guarantee_Act

Re: Long Term Unemployment

[danieldwilliam]

Labour mobility seems to be an important part of taking advantage of new economic opportunities.

I recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons that the US was emerging from the slump more slowly than usual was that negative equity and higher levels of home ownership have reduced labour mobility.