Fertility in the heart of Covid19

In New York City the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, the fall in birthrate was quite dramatic in Spring 2020.A rcent report found that the birth rate fell by c. 19% among 10 New york hospitals during the period Dec20 to Feb 21.Other researchers have cast doubt over a "baby bust" as there was a decline even before the pandemic esp among the foreign born mothers due to decreased immigration.The decline was followed by a large increase in 2021 which suggests a baby bump rather than bust.
In this analysis we explore how the Covid 19 pandemic impacted the reproductive choices In NY region. First the economic and health shocks to the city were much larger and precipitous than the rest of the US.Second, NY City has been the entry point for foreign nationals.49% of all births in NY city were to foreign born nationals.If decreased immigration and not pandemic has led to the decrase in births then there should little deviation in birth rates of US born women. Thirs we have data to indicate whether the change in behavior like induced abortions led to the change.Fourth analysing the data by month of conception which could suggest any patterns in reproductive behavior.

Based on the data, it is found that the borths of NY residents that were privately financed did not deviate from the trend till nov'20. Wehn we plot these by month of conception the abrupt drop happens in Mar'20. The percent of births to NY residents delivered outside the city jumped from 6 to 12 percent and was concentrated among affluent women. Finally we report a steep drop in induced terminations (abortions). This would usually tend to increased births but the decline is also concistent with fewer conceptions.All totalled the precipitous drop in brths in New York Cioty in the early phase of the pandemic and it srapid rebound is ocncistent with the parallel spike in deaths and economic shutdown in Covid 19.

The results of the data shows that the decline in birth rates was much greater in the NY city than among the women in the rest of the country.The birth rates of NY resident women was 22 percent below the projected trend at their trough in Dec20.It also masked a much larger difference by nativity where the foreign born women fell sharply as compared to their US counterparts.

The sharp drop and rapid recovery in borth rates to NY city appears more closely linked to the perceived health risk than the unemployment rate. This is evidenced in the analysis of the month of conception which had the largest drop in Mar'20. Also further stratification of the data suggests that the birth rates of NY residents outside the city increased among affluent women

Conclusion : The spike in death due to Covid 19 , the extreme economic contraction and the intense public health response in New York City were more sudden and more extreme than in the rest of the US. The severity of the shock made possible the disentanglement of the pre-existing trends in fertility from changes in repsonse to the pandemic. We could not definitively identify whether the abrupt drop in borths was due to the fear of Covid 19 or the uncertain consequences from the economic shutdown and its indeterminate length. Yet the simultaneous spikes in deaths and drop in conceptions along with their brief duration suggested that people responded more to the unknown health risks than the economic contraction. This reponse was consistent with fall in birth rates following the outbreaks of Ebola and Zika.

Also unclear was whether the dramtic fall in induced terminations prevented an even greater fall in births than was observed. Women, for example may have used medication abortion to avoid a sugical procedure or couples may have practiced more effective contraception to prevent unintended pregnancies. The rapid rebound in births is more difficult to be attributed to the reversal of negative health shocks. The changes in fertility that occured in NY were sudden, large but brief.

From the research paper published by Daniel Dench,Wenhui Li,Theodore Joyce,Howard Minkoff,Gretchen Van Wye *****

The Whale

Big changes in indian economy

Paal Dabba

The New Middle Corridor Trade Route

Japan has actually changed

By Noah Smith

Reading the widely discussed farewell essay by the BBC’s outgoing Tokyo correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, I felt a deep sense of frustration. The veteran journalist summed up his impression of Japan — where he has lived and worked since 2012 — as one of stagnation and stasis, declaring that “after a decade here I have got used to the way Japan is and come to accept the fact that it is not about to change.”

And yet as someone who has lived in Japan, and who has gone back there for about a month out of every year since 2011, and who has written fairly extensively about the country’s economy, I can tell you that it absolutely has changed, in important and highly visible ways.

But before I go through Wingfield-Hayes’ article and explain all the things I think it gets wrong, I should say that although I’ve never met him, he seems like a good guy who honestly wants to see Japan do better than it’s doing. And some of the criticisms he makes are both accurate and very important.

For example, I think he’s absolutely right to identify gerontocracy as Japan’s fundamental problem. Wingfield-Hayes points to political gerontocracy — elderly voters maintaining the power of an elderly, ossified political class — but I think an equally or even more important problem is corporate gerontocracy. The near-universal practice of seniority-based promotion, combined with low startup rates and population aging, has led to an ossified class of corporate executives and managers who would rather preside comfortably over declining little empires than embrace new technologies and business models and take new risks. That in turn has caused Japanese companies to fall behind foreign rivals as they miss technological revolution after revolution — microprocessors, smartphones, semiconductor foundries, battery-powered cars, etc.

Wingfield-Hayes is also right to decry the low-productivity menial jobs that Japan has in abundance. Hiring 6 people to do the job of 2 is sadly common in Japan, and it’s a big reason why Japanese people earn such low and stagnant wages. The heart of the problem is the lack of new high-growth companies, which is due to deficiencies in R&D, lack of late-stage startup funding, and (especially) Japanese companies’ failure to tap export markets in lieu of their shrinking home market.

So Wingfield-Hayes is right to see Japan as a country that used to embrace the future and no longer does, and he’s right to point the finger at gerontocracy as the key problem. But his broader characterization of Japan as a stagnant, static society is very much off the mark. And I worry that this kind of article leads Western readers to think about Japan in terms of the cliches of the 1980s and 1990s — the postwar manufacturing successes, the bubble economy, the lost decade, etc., all of which Wingfield-Hayes repeatedly mentions. Those events were certainly important, but they don’t really define modern Japan or the challenges it faces in the 2020s.

Anyway, now let’s talk about some of the big recent changes in Japan that I think Wingfield-Hayes failed to appreciate.

Japan builds and builds and builds

The BBC correspondent’s most baffling argument is — if I read him right — that the built environment of Japanese cities has stagnated. This would be very strange indeed for a country that famously tears down its buildings after 30 years. Every time I go to Japan, I’m stunned at how many new buildings there are.

Wingfield-Hayes’ waxes nostalgic about the urban landscape of early 1990s Japan:

When I arrived in Japan for the first time in 1993…[what struck me was] how exquisitely clean and orderly Tokyo was…Tokyo was a concrete jungle, but it was a beautifully manicured one…In front of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the skyline was dominated by the glass towers of the country's corporate titans - Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Hitachi, Sony.

This was true enough, but in fact Tokyo is much more like this now than it was in 1993. The city is actually much more beautifully manicured than when I first saw it two decades ago. Grungy “shitamachi” areas have been modernized, many dowdy old “Showa” style apartment buildings have been replaced with modern construction, sculptures and decorations have been added everywhere.

Meanwhile, the glittering signs and soaring towers that we associate with urban Japan have only multiplied. If you’re impressed by big buildings, for example, it’s impossible to miss the vast, towering structures that the Mori Building Company is putting up all over the city. The biggest one, shown in the photo at the top of this post, is due to open this year. But it’s not just big towers getting built. Shopping centers, bars, clubs, and glittering zakkyo buildings (the ones with all the signs) continue to multiply. How could you live in Tokyo for a decade and miss all that?

In fact, Japan’s fervor for constant scrap-and-build construction is a major reason why rent there is so affordable, and why local politics haven’t halted dense development as they have in the West. Wingfield-Hayes opens his article by complaining that Japanese houses tend to depreciate instead of appreciate:

In Japan, houses are like cars.

As soon as you move in, your new home is worth less than what you paid for it and after you've finished paying off your mortgage in 40 years, it is worth almost nothing.

It bewildered me when I first moved here as a correspondent for the BBC - 10 years on, as I prepared to leave, it was still the same.

Weirdly, this is presented as a chronic problem — something Japan should have fixed long ago, but hasn’t. But in reality, depreciating real estate is one of Japan’s biggest strengths. Because Japanese people don’t use their houses as their nest eggs, as they do in much of the West, there is not nearly as much NIMBYism in Japan — people don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent any local development that they worry might reduce their property values, because their property values are going to zero anyway.

As a result, Japanese cities like Tokyo have managed to build enough housing to make housing costs fall, even as people continued to stream from the countryside into the city. If you think Japan is stagnant, consider this comparison between Tokyo and some leading Western cities:

In the bubble era that Wingfield-Hayes pines for, Japanese urban apartments were widely derided as “rabbit hutches”, but four decades later their floor space per person is similar to European standards and higher than in the UK.

Why does Wingfield-Hayes think depreciating housing is a problem? Perhaps he believes this means the Japanese middle class is unable to build wealth. But when property tends to depreciate, it means that houses don’t cost as much to buy in the first place; that lower price frees up household cash that can be put into stocks and bonds.

Basing wealth on productive assets instead of unproductive land is good for the economy — housing scarcity might pump up prices and build individual wealth for homeowners, but at the national level it simply holds back economic growth. And as it turns out, it’s good for middle-class wealth as well — in 2022, Japan’s median wealth per adult was about $120,000, compared to around $93,000 in the U.S. (And this is despite the fact that Japan’s once-legendary household savings rate has collapsed!)

So Japan’s somewhat unusual choice not to tie middle-class wealth to housing prices seems like a smart one. Over the past two decades, the country has done better in terms of housing policy, construction, landscaping and urbanism than just about any country in the West. And it did this by embracing constant change rather than the physical stagnation that has prevailed in Western cities.

Babies, immigrants, and women in management: more than you think Wingfield-Hayes, like many others, dings Japan for its low birth rate:

A third of Japanese people are over 60, making Japan home to the oldest population in the world, after tiny Monaco. It is recording fewer births than ever before.

As I wrote in a post earlier this week, aging is a real problem. But it’s a problem that every developed country is dealing with. What few people seem to know is that Japan’s fertility rate is actually higher than any of the other countries in its region:

As Bloomberg’s Gearoid Ready has noted, the only reason we associate the low fertility trend with Japan is that it started there first.

The BBC correspondent also claims that Japan has not embraced immigration as a solution to its aging problem:

[Japan’s] hostility to immigration has not wavered. Only about 3% of Japan's population is foreign-born, compared to 15% in the UK…If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start.

This would have been a very fair characterization in the 1990s or the 2000s. But during Wingfield-Hayes’ decade in the country, Japan’s immigration policy changed substantially, and he ought to have noticed. Here’s a Bloomberg article I wrote in 2019 about the changes implemented by the late Prime Minister Abe Shinzo:

In recent years, the Abe administration has adopted major changes that will probably sustain the influx of immigrants. In 2017 Japan implemented fast-track permanent residency for skilled workers. In 2018 it passed a law that will greatly expand the number of blue-collar work visas, and -- crucially -- provide these workers with a path to permanent residency if they want it.

These changes thus represent true immigration, as opposed to temporary guest-worker policies (despite the common use of the term “guest worker law” to describe the new visas). In time, it will mean a more ethnically diverse Japanese citizenry. Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.

The BBC even reported on some of these changes when they happened.

As a result of these policies and some others, the number of foreign-born workers in Japan doubled in the first few years Abe was in power.

The 3% number that Wingfield-Hayes cites represents a dramatic increase over the 1% of just a few years earlier. Tokyo itself is an international city now; in 2018, 1 out of 8 people turning 20 in the city proper wasn’t born in the country.

Yet another example is the role of women in the workforce. Wingfield-Hayes rightfully dings Japan for not having enough women in corporate management, but neglects to mention that the percentage increased from 11% to 15% during his time there — not a massive social transformation, but not a picture of stasis either.

And this was accompanied by a large-scale movement of women into the workforce, such that Japan’s female employment rate now exceeds America’s.

Out with the old cliches

In other words, although Wingfield-Hayes lived in Japan during the 2010s, his assessment of the country seems very much stuck in the 1990s. Despite the fact that (by his own admission) he does not speak much Japanese, he really ought to have noticed the big changes that were happening all around him.

Anyway, perhaps you’re asking: Why does any of this matter? I admit that part of my determination to rebut charges of Japanese stasis is just personal pique — irritation at the cliched cultural essentialism that still defines Japan in the minds of too many Westerners. I suppose thinking of Japan in terms of the bubble and crash of the 80s is less ridiculous than thinking of it in terms of samurai traditions and The Chrysanthemum and The Sword. But still. Come on.

Perhaps, though, there actually might be a little bit at stake here. As Japan becomes a more open, globalized country, Western ideas and opinions have the potential to change Japan for the better. Outside perspectives could help Japan to solve the very real problems of the 2020s — corporate ossification, technological slowness, etc. But if Westerners essentialize Japan — if they think of it as a country and culture frozen in amber — they won’t have much to offer the country in the here and now. Japan is, in fact, a very dynamic and changeable place.

Jerome Powell Speech

I will address three main points. First, the Federal Reserve's monetary policy independence is an important and broadly supported institutional arrangement that has served the American public well. Second, the Fed must continuously earn that independence by using our tools to achieve our assigned goals of maximum employment and price stability, and by providing transparency to facilitate understanding and effective oversight by the public and their elected representatives in Congress. Third, we should "stick to our knitting" and not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals and authorities.

Central bank independence and transparency

On the first point, the case for monetary policy independence lies in the benefits of insulating monetary policy decisions from short-term political considerations.1 Price stability is the bedrock of a healthy economy and provides the public with immeasurable benefits over time. But restoring price stability when inflation is high can require measures that are not popular in the short term as we raise interest rates to slow the economy. The absence of direct political control over our decisions allows us to take these necessary measures without considering short-term political factors. I believe that the benefits of independent monetary policy in the U.S. context are well understood and broadly accepted.2

In a well-functioning democracy, important public policy decisions should be made, in almost all cases, by the elected branches of government. Grants of independence to agencies should be exceedingly rare, explicit, tightly circumscribed, and limited to those issues that clearly warrant protection from short-term political considerations.

With independence comes the responsibility to provide the transparency that enables effective oversight by Congress, which, in turn, supports the Fed's democratic legitimacy. At the Fed, we treat this as an active, not passive, responsibility, and over the past several decades we have steadily broadened our efforts to provide meaningful transparency about the basis for, and consequences of, the decisions we make in service to the American public. We are tightly focused on achieving our statutory mandate and on providing useful and appropriate transparency.3

Sticking to our mandate

It is essential that we stick to our statutory goals and authorities, and that we resist the temptation to broaden our scope to address other important social issues of the day.4 Taking on new goals, however worthy, without a clear statutory mandate would undermine the case for our independence.

In the area of bank regulation, too, the Fed has a degree of independence, as do the other federal bank regulators. Independence in this area helps ensure that the public can be confident that our supervisory decisions are not influenced by political considerations.5 Today, some analysts ask whether incorporating into bank supervision the perceived risks associated with climate change is appropriate, wise, and consistent with our existing mandates.

Addressing climate change seems likely to require policies that would have significant distributional and other effects on companies, industries, regions, and nations. Decisions about policies to directly address climate change should be made by the elected branches of government and thus reflect the public's will as expressed through elections.

At the same time, in my view, the Fed does have narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks. These responsibilities are tightly linked to our responsibilities for bank supervision.6 The public reasonably expects supervisors to require that banks understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change.

But without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals.7 We are not, and will not be, a "climate policymaker."

The Menu : Movie

What is Ethics ?

What is ethics? I knew, but I've forgotten.

"The study of morality.Of the precepts of conduct: of being decorous, noble, decent and honest. Of the heights of goodness, to which probity and morality carry up the human spirit. And of the chasms of evil, into which malice and immorality are flung ..."

'The heights of goodness!' she snorted. 'Probity! Morality! Don't make me laugh, or the scar on my face will burst. You were lucky that you weren't hunted, that they didn't send bounty hunters after you, people like .... You'd see what chasms of evil are. Ethics? Your ethics are worth shit, .... It isn't the evil and indecent who are flung down into the depths, no! Oh, no! The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.'

'Thanks for the lesson,' he sneered.'In truth, though one may have lived a century, it is never too late to learn something new. Indeed, it is always worth listening to mature, wordly and inexperienced people.'

'Mock. Go ahead and mock.' She tossed her head.'While you still can.For now it is my turn, now I shall entertain you with a tale.I'll tell you what happened to me.And when I'm done we'll see if you still feel like mocking me.'

Stanford hates fun

By John Cochrane

Stanford hates fun is the title of the second Stanford article in the Wall Street Journal this week. (On the first, Stanford's guide to acceptable words, enough said already.)

This has been bubbling up for a while. Last June, Ginevra Davis wrote a powerful article in Palladium, "Stanford's war on social life." She recounted how the slightly transgressive Stanford atmosphere in the 90s, which seeded the slightly transgressive get it done attitude of tech in the early 2000s, is being smothered by the Administration. For example, back in the early 90s,

...The brothers were winding down from Kappa Alpha’s annual Cabo-themed party on the house lawn.... a day-to-night extravaganza that would start sometime in the morning and continue long after midnight. The girls wore bikini tops and plastic flower leis, and the boys wore their best Hawaiian shirts.

Uh-oh, I can already smell trouble if you tried that today. But the point,

That year, the brothers had filled the entire main level of Kappa Alpha’s house with a layer of sand six inches deep. The night was almost over; the guests were leaving and the local surf rock band had been paid their customary hundred dollars in beer. The only question was what to do with all the sand.

No one remembers who had the idea to build the island. A group of five or six brothers managed the project. One rented a bulldozer...

Later that year, the brothers installed a zipline from the roof of their house to the center of the island. They also built a barge, which they would paddle around the lake on weekends and between classes.

More generally

Through the late 1990s, Stanford ... featured a wacky campus culture that combined collegiate prep with West Coast laissez-faire. Stanford was home to a rich patchwork of wild and experimental campus life. Communal living houses (“co-ops”) encouraged casual nudity, while fraternities threw a raucous annual “Greek Week” and lit their houses on fire. Until 2013, Stanford hosted a fully student-run anarchist house, where residents covered the walls with eccentric murals.

Today,

The Kappa Alpha boys have been kicked out of their old house. Lake Lagunita was closed to student activities in 2001,...

...In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses...

A powerful observation: This spirit of self-organization, slightly transgressive but organized fun taught students how to organize things like the 2000s tech revolution. Stanford’s support for the unconventional pioneered a new breed of elite student: the charismatic builder who excelled at “breaking things” in nearby Silicon Valley.

... unlike most elite schools, ...Stanford ... was also fun. Stanford had created a global talent hub combined with explicit permission for rule-breaking. As a result, students learned a valuable lesson: they had agency; they could create their own norms and culture instead of relying on higher authorities.

Young kids need to be out in the playground negotiating the rules themselves, without lots of parents and coaches around. College students need self-organized parties and pranks to learn to be tech entrepreneurs. I had always disparaged "party schools" as places with too much drinking and not enough studying, and most parties seem to me like a pointless drunken bacchanalia. But the importance of self-organized activity is something I had missed.

The article explains nicely the advantages of fraternities and sororities to young people.

In the middle of my freshman year, I started noticing that students, particularly older ones not in a housed Greek organization, seemed quite aimless and very lonely....

When students live together, united by a shared identity, they tend to look after each other. The boys in one fraternity sleep together in a pile on the floor. Girls in housed sororities leave their doors open and treat their clothes like a communal wardrobe.

The process

In 2013, the administration took over the student-run anarchist house and painted over the old murals. The next year, Stanford drained the remnants of Lake Lagunita, where students used to gather to host bonfires, and ended the annual anything-but-clothes party known as Exotic Erotic. And the year after that, in 2015, the administration put the notoriously anti-establishment Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band on “super-probation,” the culmination of years of increasing restrictions on their antics.

over the ensuing years, the Band mostly lost its raucous, fraternity-esque culture, and stopped doing anything particularly controversial. Once, the Band mocked Stanford’s rivals with crass marching formations; today, the Band designs all their pranks based on pre-approved themes from the university and clears the final plans with a panel of administrators.

Then they came for the fraternities

One night, I was biking home late from the Caltrain. I made it halfway back to my dorm before I realized that something was missing. Music. It was a Friday night, but the campus was completely silent.

Unlike Harvard, which abruptly tried to ban “single-gender social organizations” and was immediately sued by alumni, Stanford picked off the Greek life organizations one by one to avoid student or alumni pushback. The playbook was always the same. Some incident would spark an investigation, and the administration would insist that the offending organization had lost its right to remain on campus. The group would be promptly removed.

...When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” ...

Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing. Stanford reserves the right to unhouse any organization that does not, in their opinion, uphold these principles.

Covid provided the excuse to really clamp down. The new system sounds awfully bleak.

The first thing Stanford announced was the introduction of a new housing system, designed to promote “fairness” and “community” on campus. Under the system, new freshmen would be assigned to one of eight artificially-created housing groups called “neighborhoods,” each containing a representative sample of campus housing.

The reality of the neighborhood system is that it strips students of their ability to form distinct personalities or formal friend groups. I am in Neighborhood S. Some of my friends are in Neighborhood N. It doesn’t actually matter. The neighborhoods are not based on geography—many houses in the same “neighborhood” are on opposite sides of campus—and have no personalities outside of their letter name. They are distinctions without meaning.

... students in “bad housing”—the labyrinth of themeless, meaningless dorms awaiting most Stanford students—rarely bother to learn their neighbor’s names. Hallways are quiet and doors are locked. Without a strong existing support network, these students can easily bounce from anonymous dorms, to lecture halls, to cavernous dining halls without anyone acknowledging their presence for days.

..Stanford students live in brand new buildings with white walls. We have a $20 million dollar meditation center that nobody uses. But students didn’t ask for any of that. We just wanted a dirty house with friends.

When I tell current Stanford students the story about JP and his island, I swear their eyes pop out of their heads. Everything was so different then. It sounds like a story from another school—the house, the lake, and the groundskeeper who let the boys pass. But mostly, what feels foreign is the spirit expressed by the six brothers, the wild unfettered joy.

A bottom line

Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands..

***

Izzy Meyerson followed up in the Stanford Daily. Izzy transferred from the University of Chicago,

...the place where “fun goes to die.” Yet, in my first quarter at Stanford, I found myself missing the unique community hubs that so easily brought people together at the University of Chicago: the student run coffee shops, each with its own personality (the one for indie kids, the one for econ bros and their adjacents, the one for more edgy, subversive “alt” students, etc…), the student center, even the silent Harper Library, which was a place for me to hang with friends and meet new people...

When I was at UChicago, there was an active effort underway to make the school more appealing to the general high achieving high school student... This involved embracing looser restrictions ... and a new community-driven student life strategy. It seems to me that Stanford is heading in the opposite direction, embracing the “where fun goes to die” mantra that UChicago is trying so hard to shed.

...when I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2021, I saw a dull and tired campus, one that had forgotten it was supposed to be the fun California school... I spent much of my time working in my room, and I am someone that hates working in my room. But there were few social places to work on campus where you could meet new people. I felt awkward and unwelcome when I walked into the first floor of Green to absolute silence and stares from people as the squeak of my shoes seemed to fill the emptiness of the space.

Izzy has a deep point. The lack of campus social life is about a lot more than big alcohol-fueled parties.

...Stanford has been eroding away traditions (such as Full Moon on the Quad) and historical community hubs through the Neighborhood System. This was easy for them to do — there was an entire year of remote schooling in which traditions were not passed down to the incoming class, and so their demise was imminent. Though such traditions may seem frivolous, it is exactly these small, uniquely Stanford events that bring people together...

..what makes college so valuable is the relationships you make with others across wide and varying backgrounds.... But we must have access to abundant social interactions and involvements for such meaningful growth to take place. So, I implore you, Stanford, to embrace “fun” again, revitalize our unique campus culture, not simply for the enjoyment of the student body but to allow your students to build themselves into complex and diverse beings.

The WSJ notes

Stanford began mandating students file an application two weeks ahead of a party including a list of attendees, along with sober monitors, students said.

The number of registered parties dwindled to 45 during the first four weeks of school this fall, down from 158 over the same period in 2019, according to the Stanford Daily.

My jaw dropped. Filing an application for a party two weeks ahead of time? You must be kidding. I went to MIT, lived in a dorm, and even there parties were organized about 5 minutes ahead of time! "List of attendees?" Is this China? The university keeps track of who is invited to what party?

What's going on? It's right there -- "Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing.." " Stanford announced was the introduction of a new housing system, designed to promote “fairness”.." The bureaucrat's vision of "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" cannot stand any self-organization by students. Voluntary association might not be sufficiently "diverse" and "inclusive" (except, of course, the "affinity" groups which are deliberately not diverse and inclusive.) The only way to be "equitably" "included," apparently, is to be equally, intensely, lonely and miserable. So even the most minor social organization, like having a party, must be policed by bureaucrats. And smothered in the process.

No wonder there is a mental health crisis! Living all alone in a faceless dorm with closed doors would drive any 18 year old nuts. I found my first years in a college dorm intensely difficult, and only the fellowship of the irreverent Burton Third Bombers got me through. (Thank you all!) I can't imagine living all alone in a motel-like silent dorm a thousand miles from home. I would have cracked too.

***

Stanford's response, per WSJ, could be written by The Onion,

Samuel Santos Jr., associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning within the Division of Student Affairs, says the school is working to address students’ concerns about Stanford’s social atmosphere.

The party-planning process will be streamlined and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.

“We want events to be fun, inclusive and safe and those things can happen,” Mr. Santos says. “They just require collaboration and honesty.”

Maybe the problem is reflected in the fact that Stanford has an "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning" in the first place! Streamlining the paperwork to ask mommy for permission to have a party is not the answer. And "more administrators will be hired !" Jaw drops again. Isn't it breathtakingly obvious that the problem is too many administrators in the first place?

***

This may seem minor. Who cares if undergraduates have fun? Well, maybe some people care if undergraduates mature into confident people, capable of organizing a party without guidance and permission from the Ministry of Parties, before they head out into the world to start the next generation of tech companies. Or, more likely take jobs as deputy directors of "inclusion, community and integrative learning" at the newly sclerotic old tech companies.

I hope, however, that Stanford's alumni will wake up and take notice. They are a key constituency for an institution that lives off their generous donations. The loss of academic freedom and free speech doesn't seem to bother them much, even when taken to the ridiculous such as the guide to acceptable words. The imposition of far-left politics under the "IDEAL" banner hasn't woken them up.

But they give money in memory of the great time they had as undergraduates -- and the experiences that made their lifelong friends, molded their personalities, and were core foundations of their current success and personal happiness. Perhaps news that these core fond memories have gone up in smoke will catalyze them.

The Pitchers Season 2

Chainsaw Man

Men : Movie Explained

Why are there no more protests in Russia

Sergey Radchenko on Twitter

On the question of why protests are breaking out in China and in Iran but *not* in Russia. This has nothing to do with any kind of predisposition for authoritarianism or some special degree of subservience that the Russians supposedly possess. Let's look at what's happening.

1. The most important factor is economic. Russians today are not doing great but in comparative terms - compared to where they were even twenty years ago - they are still fairly well off. Russian nominal GDP per capita today is 5 times what it was 20 years ago, more than $12,000.

The impact of sanctions is being felt, and inflation is going up, but this is really not the 1990s. In the 1990s, the town I lived in (in the Russian Far East) suffered daily blackouts and the absence of hot or, often, cold water, and no one was even bombing it.

2. Russia is a moderately repressive society. We know for instance that brave, honest activists like Navanly and Kara-Murza are in prison, and there are laws in place to put anyone behind bars for made-up reasons. But people can go much as before if they don't go out on a limb.

There is a certain degree of normality to life in Russia (unlike, say, in China since covid). So life goes on, more or less, as before. Except of course that some are being drafted to die in Ukraine. But - crucially - a relatively small number (still).

3. There is a degree of novelty to this situation. The war began in February - en eternity ago - but its reality has not quite sunk in. Partly, it's related to the above: life more or less goes on as before, and the war is something happening far away, not here and now.

4. Russia still allows people to leave. True, they can't go to Europe but those most opposed to the regime have been able to leave and restart their lives in places like Kazakhstan, Georgia, even Turkey and Mongolia. Russia is not a pressure cooker

5 (crucially). Putin has benefited from the rallying-around-the-flag effect, something denied to the Iranian and Chinese rulers. Although Russia has invaded Ukraine (not the other way around), there is a factor of us-vs-them in this war.

This has of course been helped by Western narratives about de-colonizing Russia, proclaiming it a terrorist state, banning all Russians from Europe, etc. Those who understand the problematic effect of these measures on Russia (including me) have long drawn attention to this.

So, no, I am not surprised that there are no large scale protests in Russia. Are you?

Life on Titan

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has a surface temperature of 94 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, about a third of Earth’s. Titan is located 9.5 times farther than the Earth-Sun separation and the surface temperature of Solar system objects declines roughly as the square-root of their distance from the Sun.

Coincidentally, 94 degrees was the temperature of the cosmic microwave background about a hundred million years after the Big Bang when the first generation of stars formed, as described in my 2010 book. An object like Titan forming out of gas enriched by heavy elements from the first supernovae, would have had this surface temperature irrespective of its distance from a star. As I wrote in a new paper, the bath of cosmic radiation would have kept the object warm for tens of millions of years, sufficiently long for primitive forms of life to emerge on it.

This coincidence of temperatures raises the fascinating possibility of testing how early life could have arisen in the Universe by studying Titan. In other words, the question of whether Titan hosts life has cosmic implications. It could unravel the roots of Life in the Cosmos, the title of the book I published last year with my former postdoc, Manasvi Lingam.

In the Solar system, Titan is the only object besides Earth that has rivers, lakes and seas on its surface, as well as a cycle of methane and ethane liquids raining from clouds, flowing across its surface and evaporating back into the atmosphere, similarly to Earth’s water cycle. Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water. Its atmosphere is primarily nitrogen like Earth’s, but with a 5% contribution of methane. Titan’s landscape is covered with dark dunes of hydrocarbon grains, resembling coffee grounds, primarily around the equatorial regions.

Gravity measurements by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed that Titan has an underground ocean of liquid water, likely mixed with salts and ammonia. Radio signals detected by ESA’s Huygens probe in 2005 strongly suggested the presence of an ocean 55 to 80 kilometers below the icy surface, allowing for the chemistry of life-as-we-know-it. In addition, Titan’s rivers, lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane might serve as a foundation for the chemistry of life-as-we-do-not-know-it on the moon’s surface.

Whether the physical conditions on Titan gave birth to these forms of life is unknown. The realization that Titan’s atmosphere is rich in organic compounds led to speculation that chemical precursors of life may have been generated there.

In June 2010, papers analyzing data from the Cassini–Huygens mission reported anomalies in the atmosphere near the surface which could be consistent with the presence of an exotic lifeform of methane-consuming organisms, but may alternatively be due to non-living chemical or meteorological processes.

The Miller–Urey experiment and its follow-ups have shown that UV irradiation of Titan’s atmosphere can generate complex molecules and polymer substances like tholins. The reaction starts with dissociation of nitrogen and methane, forming hydrogen cyanide and acetylene.

After applying energy to a combination of gases like those in Titan’s atmosphere, the planetary scientist Sarah Hörst detected in her laboratory in 2010 the five nucleotide bases which make DNA and RNA, as well as amino acids — the building blocks of protein, among the many compounds produced. In 2013, NASA reported that complex organic chemicals could arise on Titan based on studies simulating the atmosphere of Titan. A few months later a paper reported the detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in Titan’s upper atmosphere.

In 2015, a model for a hypothetical cell membrane capable of functioning in liquid methane was modeled. The proposed chemical base for these membranes is acrylonitrile, which was detected in Titan’s atmosphere by Cassini and ALMA. Unfortunately, the Cassini–Huygens mission was not equipped to search for biosignatures or complex organics

Here’s hoping that future space probes will reveal whether Titan hosts life in its liquid bodies of methane, ethane, water and ammonia. Finding life on Titan would not only reveal that we are not alone but also that we may be relatively late to the party. The cosmos may have been teeming with life after the first stars formed.

In retrospect, such a finding would be embarrassing to most cosmologists who treated the Universe as lifeless for over a century, while focusing attention on dead objects like stars, black holes and dark matter halos. In reality, the Universe may have been full of life starting from the first generation of Titan-like objects, about a hundred million years after the Big Bang. Our cosmic neighbor, Titan, may be first to reveal this cosmic secret to us.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has a surface temperature of 94 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, about a third of Earth’s. Titan is located 9.5 times farther than the Earth-Sun separation and the surface temperature of Solar system objects declines roughly as the square-root of their distance from the Sun.

Coincidentally, 94 degrees was the temperature of the cosmic microwave background about a hundred million years after the Big Bang when the first generation of stars formed, as described in my 2010 book. An object like Titan forming out of gas enriched by heavy elements from the first supernovae, would have had this surface temperature irrespective of its distance from a star. As I wrote in a new paper, the bath of cosmic radiation would have kept the object warm for tens of millions of years, sufficiently long for primitive forms of life to emerge on it.

This coincidence of temperatures raises the fascinating possibility of testing how early life could have arisen in the Universe by studying Titan. In other words, the question of whether Titan hosts life has cosmic implications. It could unravel the roots of Life in the Cosmos, the title of the book I published last year with my former postdoc, Manasvi Lingam.

In the Solar system, Titan is the only object besides Earth that has rivers, lakes and seas on its surface, as well as a cycle of methane and ethane liquids raining from clouds, flowing across its surface and evaporating back into the atmosphere, similarly to Earth’s water cycle. Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water. Its atmosphere is primarily nitrogen like Earth’s, but with a 5% contribution of methane. Titan’s landscape is covered with dark dunes of hydrocarbon grains, resembling coffee grounds, primarily around the equatorial regions.

Gravity measurements by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed that Titan has an underground ocean of liquid water, likely mixed with salts and ammonia. Radio signals detected by ESA’s Huygens probe in 2005 strongly suggested the presence of an ocean 55 to 80 kilometers below the icy surface, allowing for the chemistry of life-as-we-know-it. In addition, Titan’s rivers, lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane might serve as a foundation for the chemistry of life-as-we-do-not-know-it on the moon’s surface.

Whether the physical conditions on Titan gave birth to these forms of life is unknown. The realization that Titan’s atmosphere is rich in organic compounds led to speculation that chemical precursors of life may have been generated there.

In June 2010, papers analyzing data from the Cassini–Huygens mission reported anomalies in the atmosphere near the surface which could be consistent with the presence of an exotic lifeform of methane-consuming organisms, but may alternatively be due to non-living chemical or meteorological processes.

The Miller–Urey experiment and its follow-ups have shown that UV irradiation of Titan’s atmosphere can generate complex molecules and polymer substances like tholins. The reaction starts with dissociation of nitrogen and methane, forming hydrogen cyanide and acetylene.

After applying energy to a combination of gases like those in Titan’s atmosphere, the planetary scientist Sarah Hörst detected in her laboratory in 2010 the five nucleotide bases which make DNA and RNA, as well as amino acids — the building blocks of protein, among the many compounds produced. In 2013, NASA reported that complex organic chemicals could arise on Titan based on studies simulating the atmosphere of Titan. A few months later a paper reported the detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in Titan’s upper atmosphere.

In 2015, a model for a hypothetical cell membrane capable of functioning in liquid methane was modeled. The proposed chemical base for these membranes is acrylonitrile, which was detected in Titan’s atmosphere by Cassini and ALMA. Unfortunately, the Cassini–Huygens mission was not equipped to search for biosignatures or complex organics

Here’s hoping that future space probes will reveal whether Titan hosts life in its liquid bodies of methane, ethane, water and ammonia. Finding life on Titan would not only reveal that we are not alone but also that we may be relatively late to the party. The cosmos may have been teeming with life after the first stars formed.

In retrospect, such a finding would be embarrassing to most cosmologists who treated the Universe as lifeless for over a century, while focusing attention on dead objects like stars, black holes and dark matter halos. In reality, the Universe may have been full of life starting from the first generation of Titan-like objects, about a hundred million years after the Big Bang. Our cosmic neighbor, Titan, may be first to reveal this cosmic secret to us.

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He chairs the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project, and is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, is scheduled for publication in August 2023.

Why shouldn’t Poland be richer than Britain?

It’s not the 80s anymore

Ben Sixsmith on The Critic.co.uk

23 November, 2022

You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:

It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.

This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?

A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland

Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.

Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.

Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.

Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.

Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.

Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.

It would be fantastically condescending, and dishonest, to suggest that everything is sunshine and lollipops in Polish life. Any Pole could tell you eloquently and knowledgeably about their struggles. You think an inflation rate of 11.1 per cent is bad? How about 17.9? Wages tend to be lower in Poland than in Western Europe, leading to high emigration. Seeing a GP is simple enough, but getting an operation is a right pain in the ass. Poles are bitterly divided on socio-cultural issues like abortion and the role of the Church.

Many people don’t see that decline is not always a fact of life

Nor is Britain failing in all respects. If that were the case we would not have so many Poles who want to live there. My intention is not just to big up Poland — fond as I am of doing that — or to thumb my nose at my homeland. It is to shake Britain by its national shoulders.

It is tempting to imagine that our economic, institutional and cultural conditions are as they are because, well, that’s just how things are. This is not always an instinct that should be resisted. The first premise of conservative philosophy is that individual and collective lives have limits. We can’t click our fingers and be rich, safe and cheerful. Many people, though, have an excess of gloomy acquiescence. They don’t see that decline is not always a fact of life — as natural as the changing colours of the leaves — but a process that is at least somewhat within our leaders’ control. That countries with less solid and deep political, cultural and economic foundations can equal and surpass British outcomes is proof enough of that.

It is understandable that Britons want to be richer than Poles, just as they want to be richer than Germans, Swedes, Norwegians and the French. Shock at the possibility of being overtaken by a bunch of Slavs, of all people, shows how much Britons have ignored not just their own decline but the accomplishments of others. Let’s do our best, going forwards, to succeed together.

Wholesome moment

FedNow payment service explained

The Tom Cruise Paradox

The Devils Hour : Amazon Prime Series

The Devil’s Hour review – proof that Peter Capaldi is the world’s most terrifying actor That face! The grief it conveys! The ex-Doctor’s turn in this new supernatural crime drama is chilling – and joins a stunning performance from Jessica Raine as a harrowed mother

By Lucy Mangan in The Guardian

Fri 28 Oct 2022 15.00 BST
Last modified on Mon 31 Oct 2022 06.00 GMT
I do not damn with faint praise when I say that the back of Peter Capaldi’s head is the most frightening thing in the opening episode of The Devil’s Hour, Amazon Prime Video’s new spooky six-part drama by Tom Moran. I mean only to place on record the underacknowledged truth that Capaldi is the most frightening actor working today. The only reason a generation of children were not permanently traumatised by his years as Doctor Who is because they do not yet know enough of life. If you do, you see that all of it lives in Capaldi’s face and that most of it is suffering, grief and pain.

We see little of that haunted visage at first, though it is clear his character is the pivot around which the whole thing will swing. Our main concern is with Lucy (Jessica Raine), an overstretched social worker also dealing with an aged mother who has dementia, the end of her marriage to Mike (Phil Dunster) and an unreachable, heartbreaking puzzle of a child, Isaac (Benjamin Chivers). He is emotionless, suggestible, vulnerable and given to seeing and hearing from figures invisible to others. Lucy wakes up every night at 3.33am exactly, wrenched from awful visions as she sleeps. Are they ordinary nightmares caused by current stresses and strains, or the results of buried trauma – as other momentary hallucinations and apparent flashbacks suggest? Or are they, as Capaldi’s face implies, something worse?

Meanwhile, DI Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel) – a suave young man except when he is vomiting over bloody crime scenes – is investigating a bloody murder. The perpetrator is linked to the disappearance of a young boy years ago and, by the end of the first episode, to Lucy too.

Just about every horror trope you could ask for is here, piling up like poisoned candy in a child’s Halloween bucket. There is the Omen-meets-Sixth Sense character of Isaac. There are flickering figures half-glimpsed and gone. Images of bloodstained soft toys and nightgown hems and a shotgun under a chin. There are shadows everywhere.

And then there’s Capaldi, handcuffed to a table in a darkened interview room, talking gnomically to Lucy about everything that has unfolded for them, to which we are not yet entirely privy. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever experienced?” he asks her – an unsettling enough question anyway, that he is asking with That Face, which should cause all the skin to fly off her body. “All of this!” replies Lucy “You!”

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” he replies sorrowfully. “You’ve suffered far worse than me. You just don’t know it yet.” Dum dum DAAAAAH!

It’s great fun. Its many, many pieces – which if they gel will make it a great show in all sorts of other ways – are currently held together by Raine’s absolutely storming performance. She is fantastic as the mother consumed by love and worry, the courageous professional – there is a well-wrought domestic violence storyline that ratchets up the tension – and the possible victim who is afraid she might be losing her grip on sanity (although whether she’s a victim of a past, present or future evil we cannot be sure). The supernatural element is less important so far than the acute psychological horror her performance evokes. It’s brilliantly done. If the rest of the series matches up to her, we are in for a truly terrifying treat

Objectivism : The proper alternative thought

You must attach clear specific meaning to words i.e be able to identify their referents in reality ..... All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations. You must not take catchphrase - or any abstract statement - as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Dont translate it, dont glamorize it, dont make the mistake of thinking, as many people do "Oh nobody could possibly mean this ! and then proceed to endow it with some whitewashed meaning of your own.Take it straight for what it does say and mean.

Instead of dismissing the catch phrase, accept it as true, for a few brief moments. Tell yourself, in effect "If I were to accept it as true , what would follow ?" This is the bet way of unmasking any philosophical fraud...... To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true. Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. Inorder to evaluate it properly ask yourself what a given theory of accepted , would do to a human life , starting with your own. (Rand, 1982 . P.16)

New York Job Transparency Law

By Jennifer Liu in CNBC

Starting Tuesday, businesses hiring workers in NYC are required to list the minimum and maximum salary range for a job on any printed or online posting.

Advocates say it's long overdue that companies become more transparent with their pay practices. Workers hope it will give them more leverage to discuss and negotiate their pay. And the law's main aim is to help close the wage gap.

But as numbers started rolling out this week, New Yorkers began calling out some companies for posting extremely broad ranges: $50,000 to $145,000 for a reporter opening, $125,800 to $211,300 for a senior technical writer, $106,000 to $241,000 for a general counsel position.

In one case, Citigroup listed several jobs with a range of $0 to $2 million, Gothamist reports.

A Citigroup representative told Gothamist it has since updated its ranges, and that the shockingly wide range was an error caused by a computer glitch.

Still, a revised entry for a post for a client services officer listed the salary range between $61,710 and $155,290 as of Wednesday, before it was taken down. A Citi respresentative tells CNBC Make It the company "is proactively reviewing all job postings to ensure the correct salary range is listed" and has "temporarily unposted select job postings and will repost when the salary range is confirmed."

The posting gaffe highlights the numerous ways companies can still find ways around complying with the new salary transparency law, whether intended or not.

Employers test what it means to list a 'good faith' range

The law specifically states businesses hiring in New York City must post a "good faith salary range" for every job, promotion or transfer opportunity.

A "good faith" range is one the employer "honestly believes at the time they are listing the job advertisement that they are willing to pay the successful applicant(s)," says the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which enforces the law.

Businesses may need to offer a wide range if they're open to people of varying levels of experience and to be competitive in a tight hiring market, says Domenique Camacho Moran, a New York-based attorney with Farrell Fritz.

A common strategy for business is to find a target budget for an open role and give a range 20% below and above that point, adds Tony Guadagni, senior principal of research at consulting firm Gartner.

But a $100,000-plus range could be an error or a display that "what an organization is willing to pay for a job could be quite variable," Guadagni says.

"It's hard to imagine that the two agencies that investigate possible violations of the new law — the City's Commission on Human Rights and the Law Enforcement Bureau — would consider a posting that included a minimum salary of $30,000 and a maximum salary of $300,000 a good faith representation of the salary range," he adds. But it's up to investigators to show a salary range isn't in good faith — not on companies to prove it is.

A $90,000 salary range, like the one Citi listed on the amended post that was later taken down, is still "extremely broad" and "does raise the question whether this is a good faith effort," says Beverly Neufeld, president of PowHer New York and a proponent of new law.

Similarly wide ranges could reflect poorly on the business's respect for workers, Neufeld says: "It says a lot about companies when they do use potential loopholes. The spirit of the law is to create transparency, and any company having large salary ranges like that doesn't create any transparency."

Avoiding job posts altogether

Per the law, employers must post the minimum and maximum salary on offer for a particular role when it's listed on an internal job board, as well as external sites like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and other job search platforms. It also applies to any written description of an open job that's printed on a flyer, distributed at a job fair or submitted to newspaper classifieds.

In response, some businesses may stop advertising jobs outright and instead rely on other means of recruiting and hiring.

Some companies may opt to take down job postings and encourage applicants to submit their resume to a general email address, The Wall Street Journal reports. Others might tap employee search firms to find candidates on their behalf, rather than advertise an opening and have to post the pay range themselves.

Employers could also avoid compliance if they hire remote workers but say the job can't be done from NYC. That happened in Colorado, where a similar law went into effect in January 2021. The state's labor department sent warning to hundreds of employers to comply with the law and, as of July, had fined three businesses for violation.

Camacho Moran rejects the idea that businesses are deliberately trying to skirt around compliance, as doing so and getting caught could result in lawsuits that'll cost an employer time and money.

In NYC, if a company isn't complying with the new law, job seekers and workers can file complaints or leave an anonymous tip with the city's Commission on Human Rights. Businesses will have 30 days to fix the violation, otherwise they could face civil penalties of up to $250,000.

Despite the law's uneven application so far, Neufeld is optimistic businesses will continue to firm up their pay ranges with the help of public account and legal enforcement.

The aftermath of the law could prove beneficial for employers and employees alike. Job seekers are overwhelmingly in favor of salary transparency, and more than half say they wouldn't apply to a job or company if the pay isn't listed, according to Monster.com data. Listing pay could end up being a good recruiting tool.

"It'll take some time for people to comply," Neufeld says, but "in time, companies are going to come around to see this as a benefit, not as a punishment."

Meta Reality Labs

The Liz Truss Tragedy

The Liz Truss Tragedy

The former British prime minister’s downfall holds important lessons for growth-minded policymakers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. While her diagnosis of the country’s economic problem was spot on, she fatally mismanaged both the politics and the messaging of her policy response.

STANFORD – Liz Truss’s stint as British prime minister is over, but she was right that the United Kingdom needs growth. Her downfall is tragic, because growth is the only path out of the country’s economic dilemma.

The UK is surprisingly poor. Its GDP per capita is just $43,000, compared to $60,000 in the United States. The average British home is one-third the size of the average US home. Worse, the country’s economy is not growing. Its GDP per capita is lower than it was in 2007. Productivity – the underlying source of economic growth – has been flat for over a decade.

The UK desperately needs supply-side reforms. Surging inflation tells us that demand-side stimulus is a spent force.

If anything, Truss’s proposed reforms were too mild. A 40% top marginal income tax rate (down from 45%) would not make the UK a low-tax free-market Shangri-La, especially considering that it would also still have a 20% value-added tax (VAT), national insurance taxes, property taxes, corporate taxes, and more. Recall that US President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (a Democrat) cut the top federal marginal rate from 70% to 28%.

Truss also proposed free-market “investment zones.” But if one accepts that pro-investment tax and planning conditions are good in blighted areas, why not the whole country?

The UK is at a post-Brexit crossroads. Will it become a free-trade, entrepreneurial, financial hub – a “Singapore on Thames”? Or does Brexit mean protecting and subsidizing inefficient businesses and places even more than the European Union allows?

Unfortunately, we now know the answer. Truss’s critics have no counterproposal that has any chance of reigniting growth. The stage is set for further high-tax, high-subsidy, over-regulated decline.

As sound as Truss’s plans were in economic-policy terms, her government’s handling of the messaging and the politics was spectacularly inept. That is an important lesson for those of us who want to see more growth-oriented policies in the US, Canada, and Europe.

One obvious mistake was Truss’s announcement of a £60 billion ($68 billion) blowout to hold down gas prices. That is not a good way to launch a pro-growth revolution.

She then moved on to “tax cuts,” predictably raising the ire of the high-tax intelligentsia. In announcing the policy, neither Truss nor her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, explained the point of lowering tax rates. For example, Kwarteng sold tax cuts as “putting money back into people’s pockets.” But such Keynesian stimulus is the last thing the country needs amid historic inflation. Kwarteng should have explained that lower tax rates improve the incentives to work, save, invest, start a business, or, in the case of corporate taxes, move a business to the UK or keep it there. (Ideally, one cuts tax rates but broadens the base, maintaining revenues until spending falls.)

If you can’t explain that clearly and consistently, you either don’t understand or believe your own message, or you think voters are too dumb to comprehend it. Either way, your revolution will fail. In the face of predictable, implacable hostility from the entrenched left-wing media and economic commentariat, a free-market revolution needs great communicators.

By starting with taxes and subsidies, Truss and Kwarteng guaranteed that nobody would pay attention to the most important parts of the plan: the essential pro-growth regulatory reforms that they had described in the 2012 book Britannia Unchained. Britain’s housing restrictions, as in the US, lead to absurdly high prices, which stymies many businesses and the workers they might hire. The situation is especially harmful to less-advantaged people who cannot afford to live near high-productivity jobs. Truss had also planned to bring back North Sea oil production and lift the UK’s ban on fracking. These are sensible responses to a global energy crisis.

The lesson is that growth-minded policymakers should start with microeconomic reforms. Everyone can see that over-regulation and restrictions on housing and energy production are hobbling supply. Even climate-change activists are noticing that it is too difficult to get permits for windmills and transmission lines. Everyone can see that schools are awful and getting worse. Workers as well as business owners and managers can see that labor regulations are straitjacketing their workplaces. People can see in everyday experience how social-program disincentives lead some people not to work at all.

Patiently explaining these problems to voters can also make for good politics. We all long for simple mind-the-store competence in our governments. Fixing dysfunction is a visible achievement that works right away, with no short-run cost.

Truss’s handling of the politics was even worse than her marketing. Margaret Thatcher and Reagan faced the same withering scorn from the chattering classes, and they had to endure years of hardship before their reforms took root. But they held firm.

Truss’s critics seized on UK bond-market hiccups, though these were tiny compared to those of the 1980s. They also were largely attributable to the Bank of England raising rates, and to a pension risk regulation fiasco. [Previous posts ending here.] Nonetheless, Truss quickly gave in. By starting with an energy blowout to placate the left, she already encouraged her opponents to go in for the kill. When a shark is on your trail, you don’t offer it a foot and then assume that you’ll both get along. When an iron lady was needed, Truss proved to be made of straw.

The US, too, is a high-tax, over-regulated, over-subsidized, high-debt, slow-growth economy. For us, too, supply-side reforms are the only way out. Yet many of our conservative voices now pander to voters by advocating big-government big-tax nationalism, protectionism, subsidies, and crony capitalism, albeit directed in different directions than the left.

For those of us who still understand that the only real solution lies in economic freedom and small, competent government, Truss’s downfall offers important lessons. We must heed them so that we don’t blow our chance if we get one.

John H. Cochrane is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute.

Jon Hartley is a PhD student in economics at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

Dont Fret over the Rupee depreciation

By Dhiraj Nayyar, Chief Economist at Vedanta

There is much fretting about the depreciation of the rupee vis-a-vs the dollar.It is commonplace to equate a strong curency with a strong economy.But that is not true, especially in an emerging economy.As long as there isnt too much volatility and sufficient foreign reserves a depreciation of the rupee is nothing to worry about.

It is important to note that the exchange rate is a price fundamentally determined by the forces of demand and supply.What has happened in the last several weeks is that the Us Federal Reserve has increased the interest rates in a bid to curb the unprecedented inflation in US.This has led to the flight of capital from emerging economies like India back to the US increasing the demand for dollars and the sell off of Indian rupee.

The RBI can sell off their existing dollar reserves inorder to stem off the fall in the rupee.Indeed it has done so,but in the end the quantum of money that trades in the financial markets dwarfs the reserves maintained by the RBI.So the central bank can only mitigate and not reverse the trend.In any case, it is a fallacy to equate a strong or apreciating exhange rate with a strong and prosperous economy.Perhaps the only countries that have prospered with a strong or overvalued exchange rate is the oil producing economies. But they have a peculiar economic structure.They export an epensive commodity which has a price inelastic demand and they need to import practically every other goods.Hence it makes sense for them to maintain a strong currency which makes exports expensive and imports cheap.

Every other country particularly emerging economies prosper when the exchange rate is relatively undervalued against major currencies giving them a competitive advantage for export of goods and services.Chinas entire growth strategy for the past 3 decades depended on a depreciated yuan.In India there has been an implicit preference for a strong currency.Part of the reason is political optics and part of the reason is also economic,India is hugely depndent on pil imports.It imports almost 90% of its oil demand. And a weak rupee makes this critical item more expensive in domestic markets.Since oil is the major input in every other economic activity, it impacts the general level of inflation and even growth.

India or atleast its policymakers would be much more comfortable about the level of rupee if they had energy self reliance.That is a worthwhile goal and requires a two pronged approach - a) Increasing the exploration and supply of oil/gas domestically ,b) Investing in the scaling up of renewable energy technologies.. A weaker would complement the other policis that the union government has put inplace to boost manufacturing in India.

It must also be noted that currently the rupee is not a global currency because there is no full capital account convertability.Again policymakers have been righly cautious about liberalisation which can also open the door to more volatility.However eventually as a major economy, India will open its capital account fully.
A stronger currency rarely lays the foundation for a strong economy. But the strong economy paves the way for a strong currency.

Tamil Nadu Fertility rate

TN’s total fertility rate declines to 1.4, lowest in India: SRS data The state has the highest concentration of the elderly (12.8 per cent) in its urban areas

Tamil Nadu’s total fertility rate declined to 1.4 in 2020 from 1.8 recorded in the 2011 Census, according to latest data released by Sample Registration System (SRS) recently.

The state’s TFR along with West Bengal’s is the lowest in the country. Kerala is slightly ahead with a TFR of 1.5.

“Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have reported the lowest TFR (1.4). It is noteworthy that the replacement level TFR of 2.1 has been attained at the national level,” said the SRS report.

A decline in TFR means a fall in the number of children in the age group of 0-4 years – which is 5.6 per cent of the total population. Children in the age group of 0-14 years form 19.1 per cent of the population. The drastic fall in TFR may translate into the shutdown of primary schools and primary classes in big schools in the future as there may not be enough children to attend these schools or classes.

The number of people in the working age group of 15-58 – 69.2 per cent of the population – is also likely to decline as there are not many children who will reach this age group.

More adults, fewer children

“At the national level, the percentage of aged (60+) population is 8.1 per cent. The composition of 60+ aged female population is higher than males in all of the bigger states and UTs except Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha and Telangana,” the report said.

In rural areas, those above 60 years constitute 8 per cent of the total population. The percentage of adult population in rural areas is the lowest in Bihar and Delhi (5.9 per cent) and highest in Kerala (13.2 per cent). Tamil Nadu’s senior citizen population is 11.7 per cent of its total population and is mostly concentrated in urban areas. This group constitutes 12.8 per cent of the urban population of the state, said the report.

The proportion of aged population in urban areas is 8.4 per cent, ranging from 5.9 per cent in Telangana to 12.8 per cent in Tamil Nadu. In case of females, the aged population (60 years and above) ranges from 6 per cent in Assam to 13.6 per cent in Kerala. The same ranges from 6.1 per cent in Delhi to 12.2 per cent in Kerala for males.

The crude birth rate in Tamil Nadu is also the lowest in the country. Tamil Nadu’s crude birth rate is 13.8 per cent, which is also the lowest in the country and Bihar has the highest crude birth rate of 25.5 per cent, said the report.

Luckiest Girl Alive : Netflix Movie

The Boys Japanese Dub is just as awesome as you would expect

The High Speed Rail Germany needs

The High-Speed Rail Germany Needs

Written by Alon Levy

I’ve argued in two previous posts that Germany needs to build a complete high-speed rail network, akin to what China, Japan, France, South Korea, and Spain have built. Here is the network that Germany should build in more detail:

The red lines denote high-speed lines, some legacy 250-280 km/h lines but most built to support 300-320 km/h, that are justifiable within the context of domestic travel. Some of these already exist, such as the Frankfurt-Cologne line and the majority of the Berlin-Munich line; Berlin-Hamburg is a legacy line upgraded to 230, currently tied with Frankfurt-Cologne for fastest average speed between two major cities in Germany. A handful of red lines are key legacy connections, i.e. Dresden-Leipzig and Dortmund-Duisburg. Some more detail on the red lines is available in Google Maps.

The blue lines denote high-speed lines, generally built to 300, that only make sense in an international context. The lines in France are the LGV Est and its short low-speed branch across the border to Saarbrücken. In Belgium the line preexists as well as HSL 3 and HSL 4, but is quite slow, averaging only 140 km/h from Brussels to Aachen thanks to a combination of a slow segment to Leuven and a speed-restricted western approach to Liege. In the Netherlands, Switzerland, Czechia, Austria, and Poland the lines are completely speculative, though in Czechia a high-speed line from Prague to Dresden is under study.

Update 8/19: here is another map of the same network, color-coded differently – red is proposed lines (most by me, a few officially), yellow is lines under construction, blue is existing lines, black is low-speed connections. Note that outside Berlin’s northern approaches, urban approaches are not colored black even if they’re slow.

Trip times

To compute trip times, I dusted off my train performance calculator, linked here. The parameters I used are those planned for the next-generation Velaro (“Velaro Novo“), i.e. a power-to-weight ratio of 20.7 kW/t and an initial acceleration rate of 0.65 m/s^2; the quadratic air resistance term is 0.000012, as any higher term would make it impossible to reach speeds already achieved in tests. On curves, the lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane is set at 2.09 m/s^2 on passenger-priority lines, mirroring what is achieved on Frankfurt-Cologne, and 1.7 elsewhere, accounting for lower superelevation.

These are aggressive assumptions and before running the code, I did not expect Berlin-Munich to be so fast. With intermediate stops at Erfurt, Nuremberg, and maybe also Ingolstadt, this city pair could be connected in 2.5 hours minus a few minutes for interchange time at the terminals. In general, all trip times printed on the map are a few minutes slower than what is achievable even with some schedule padding, corresponding to dwell times at major through-stations plus interchange at terminals. The upshot is that among the largest metro areas in Germany, the longest trips are Hamburg-Stuttgart at 3:30 minus change and Hamburg-Munich at 3:15 minus change; nothing else is longer than 3 hours.

The stopping pattern should be uniform. That is, every 320 km/h train between Berlin and Munich should stop exactly at Berlin Südkreuz, Erfurt, Nuremberg, and maybe Ingolstadt. If these trains skip Ingolstadt, it’s fine to run some 250 km/h trains part of the way, for example between Munich and Nuremberg and then northwest on legacy track to Würzburg and Frankfurt, with the Ingolstadt station added back. Similarly, from Hamburg south, every train should stop at Hanover, Göttingen, Kassel, and Fulda.

In certain cases, the stopping pattern should be decided based on whether trains can make a schedule in an exact number of quarter-hours. That is, if it turns out that Munich-Nuremberg with an intermediate stop in Ingolstadt takes around 42 minutes then the Ingolstadt stop should be kept; but if it takes 46 minutes, then Ingolstadt should be skipped, and instead of running in the depicted alignment, the line should stay near the Autobahn and bypass the city in order to be able to make it in less than 45 minutes. I think Ingolstadt can still be kept, but one place where the map is likely to be too optimistic is Stuttgart-Munich; Ulm may need to be skipped on the fastest trains, and slower trains should pick up extra stops so as to be 15 minutes slower.

Frequency and service planning

Today, the frequency on the major city pairs is hourly. Under the above map, it should be half-hourly, since the faster trip times will induce more ridership. As a sanity check, TGVs connect Paris with each of Lyon’s two stations hourly off-peak and twice an hour at the peak. Paris is somewhat larger than the entire Rhine-Ruhr, Lyon somewhat smaller than Stuttgart or Munich and somewhat larger than the Rhine-Neckar. But the ICE runs somewhat smaller trains and has lower occupancy as it runs trains on a consistent schedule all day, so matching the peak schedule on the TGV is defensible.

The upshot is that Berlin can probably be connected every 30 minutes to each of Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and the Ruhr proper. Frankfurt-Munich is likely to be every 30 minutes, as are Hamburg-Frankfurt and Hamburg-Munich. To further improve network connectivity, the schedule at Erfurt should be set in such a way that Hamburg-Munich and Berlin-Frankfurt trains are timed with a cross-platform transfer, regardless of the pulse anywhere else. A few connections to smaller cities should be hourly, like Berlin-Bremen (with a timed transfer at Hanover to Hamburg-Frankfurt or Hamburg-Munich), Leipzig-Munich, Leipzig-Frankfurt, and Frankfurt-Basel.

The loop track around Frankfurt is based on a real plan for mainline through-tracks at the station, currently in the early stages of construction. The near-Autobahn loop is not included, but such a connection, if done at-grade, could provide value by letting trains from Munich enter the station from the east and then continue northwest toward Cologne without reversing direction.

If the international connections are built as planned, then additional hourly and even more frequent connections can be attractive. Zurich-Stuttgart might well even support a train every half hour, going all the way to Frankfurt and thence to either Cologne or Berlin. Similarly, Berlin-Frankfurt-Paris could plausibly fill an hourly train if Frankfurt-Paris is cut to 2:30 via Saarbrücken, and maybe even if it takes three hours via Karlsruhe.

The one exception to this interconnected mesh is Fulda-Würzburg. The Hanover-Würzburg line was built as a single 280 km/h spine through West Germany with low-speed branches down to Frankfurt and Munich. Unfortunately, completing the Würzburg-Nuremberg segment has little value: Munich-Frankfurt would be almost as fast via Stuttgart, and Hamburg-Munich would be half an hour faster via Erfurt with not much more construction difficulty on Göttingen-Erfurt. Fulda-Würzburg should thus be a shuttle with timed transfers at Fulda, potentially continuing further south at lower speed to serve smaller markets in Bavaria.

Cost

The domestic network depicted on the map is 1,300 km long, not counting existing or under-construction lines. Some lines require tunneling, like Erfurt-Fulda-Frankfurt, but most do not; the heaviest lifting has already been done, including between Erfurt and Nuremberg and around Stuttgart for Stuttgart 21 and the under-construction high-speed line to Ulm. I doubt 100 km of tunnel are necessary for this network; for comparison, Hanover-Würzburg alone has 120 km of tunnel, as the line has very wide curve radii to support both high-speed passenger rail and low-speed freight without too much superelevation. The cost should be on the order of 30-40 billion euros.

The international network is more complex. Berlin-Prague is easy on the German side and even across the border, and the only real problems are on the Czech side, especially as Czech planners insist on serving Usti on the way with a city center station. But Stuttgart-Zurich is a world of pain, and Frankfurt-Saarbrücken may require some tunneling through rolling terrain as well, especially around Saarbrücken itself.

Even with the international lines added in, the German share of the cost should not be too onerous. Getting everything in less than 50 billion euros should not be hard, even with some compromises with local NIMBYs. Even on an aggressive schedule aiming for completion by 2030, it’s affordable in a country where the budget surplus in 2018 was €58 billion across all levels of government and where there are signs of impending recession rather than inflation.

With its mesh of medium-size cities all over the country following plausible lines, Germany is well-placed to have the largest high-speed rail network in Europe. It has the ability to combine the precise scheduling and connections of Switzerland and the Netherlands with the high point-to-point speeds of France and Spain, creating a system that obsoletes domestic flights and competes well with cars and intercity buses. The government can implement this; all it takes is the political will to invest in a green future.

The Midnight Club

Dont call it a Mystery

There is never really one truth

Lets say there are A and B.One day they collide on the stairs and B falls down and gets hurt.B was always getting bullied by A.He claims this time he was pushed on purpose as well,but A never considered himself a bully.He thought they were just playing.He says this instance was just an accident.Neither is lying so what is the truth in this case?

Well.... A wasn't bullying B and B got the wrong impression. They just ran into eachother and fell.

Do you think so? Really ?

The only one who thinks there was no bullying is A .His assumption is just as wrong as B's.People can only see things subjectively.And they can only call that the truth.

If another person,C, saw the whole thing,he might even have another perspective. Without a god like third party, we can't see everything. Thats why opposing sides of wars and conflicts have different versions of what happened. Even if neither is lying nor exaggerating, they will have different stories.To A, A's version is the truth.To B,B's version is the truth. So you see, there is not only one truth, there aren't even two or three truths. There are many truths as there are people.

But... there is one truth. In this case, A and B collided and B was injured. Thats what the police should investigate and not the truth about people.You fail to carry out justice because you are obsessed with an abstract concept like truth.

What the hell.....are you talking about ?

Echoes Season Review

How Conan landed Late night

Pressure on British PM Liz Truss policies

British Prime Minister Liz Truss | Reuters

New British Prime Minister Liz Truss came under growing pressure Wednesday from opponents and inside her Conservative Party to reverse announced tax cuts that are fuelling a financial crisis in an already struggling economy.

The Bank of England stepped in to buy up government bonds in an attempt to stabilise the cost of borrowing after the government said last week that it would slash income tax and scrap a planned corporation tax hike, all while spending billions to cap soaring energy bills for homes and businesses.

Friday's mini-budget sparked market unease about the level of U.K. government debt and sent the pound plunging to a record low against the U.S. dollar.

Neither Truss nor Treasury chief Kwasi Kwarteng has made a public statement on the turmoil. Conservative lawmakers watched with mounting alarm as the currency struggled along at near-record lows. Britain's central bank signalled a hefty interest rate hike was in the cards for its next meeting, due in November.

This inept madness cannot go on, Simon Hoare, a Conservative member of Parliament, wrote on Twitter. Another Tory legislator, Robert Largan, said he had serious reservations about some of the government's announcements.

There's a lot of concern within the parliamentary party, there's no doubt about that, Mel Stride, the Conservative chairman of the House of Commons Treasury committee, said.

Andrew Griffith, a junior minister in the Treasury, said the government would not reverse course but would get on and deliver" its plan.

All the main opposition parties demanded calling Parliament back early from a two-week break so lawmakers who are not due back in the House of Commons until Oct. 11 could confront the crisis.

Many people will now be extremely worried about their mortgage, about prices going up, and now about their pensions," Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said. "What the government needs to do now is recall Parliament and abandon this budget before any more damage is done.

Truss was appointed prime minister on Sept. 6 after winning a Conservative Party leadership contest to replace Boris Johnson, who stepped down in July after a three-year term tarnished by ethics scandals.

Truss, a champion of low-tax, free-market conservatism who cites 1980s political icons Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as inspirations, promised during her campaign to slash taxes and red tape in order to energize Britain's sluggish economy.

Truss and Kwarteng vowed to challenge economic orthodoxy that they claim is holding Britain back. One of Kwarteng's first acts in office was to fire the top civil servant in the Treasury, Tom Scholar.

But many Conservatives were surprised by the scale of the announced tax cuts and by the strength of the market reaction.

The 45 billion pounds ($49 billion) in cuts, to be funded by borrowing, would come after the government just agreed to spend billions more to help shield homes and businesses from soaring energy prices driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The growing debt raises the prospect the government will have to borrow more, at ever higher cost, and will have to cut public spending as a result.

The government says it will set out on Nov. 23 how it plans to pay for the cuts, alongside an economic forecast by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility.

I don't think we can wait until November," Conservative lawmaker Roger Gale told the BBC. We need a statement in very short order indeed to steady the nerves, steady the market and set out very clearly what the business plan is.

Adam Tomkins, a former Conservative member of the Scottish Parliament, said Trussonomics was profoundly unconservative.

Tomkins, now a professor of law at the University of Glasgow, said the hammering of the pound is the strongest possible sign that the markets don't buy the newfound recklessness, the dogma that you can tax-cut your way to lower public spending.

What we are witnessing right now is not only the Conservative Party trashing its own brand: it's the Conservative Party trashing the economy, he wrote in the Herald newspaper.

(AP)

How China removes illegally parked cars

China is very advanced in removing illegally parked cars. pic.twitter.com/Z22VDENS0k

— Curiously Curious (@justcurious1313) September 30, 2022