It was a rough start to an election with so much at stake: Nigeria needs to show it can make it through this vote fairly and peacefully to get its big economy humming and to press forward with tackling the Boko Haram Islamist militants.
But the technology that was supposed to make the election process easier is threatening to undermine it. Election officials said some polling stations would extend voting into Sunday after problems with hand-held devices used to verify voter identity.
Hypercritical →
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that criticism, for lack of a better word, is good. Criticism is right. Criticism works. Criticism clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit…
Okay, let me try that again. Actually, I'm on the same page as Gordon Gekko in one important respect. Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it's presented in large doses. It's impolite. It's unnecessarily obsessive. It's just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what's wrong with it to begin with.
This character flaw, this curse, this seemingly most useless of skills is actually the yin to the more widely recognized yang of creative talent. Is a preternatural ability to find fault enough on its own to make something great? Probably not, but it can help amplify mundane competencies and produce results well beyond what you could have achieved with your creative skills alone.
No, we can't all be Steve Jobs, but there's room in life for both the grand and the prosaic. Every day is a new chance to do something a little bit better ("I am the Steve Jobs of this sandwich!"), to find something wrong with what you're doing and understand it well enough to know how to fix it. If this is not your natural proclivity, you may have to work at it a bit. I think you'll be pleased with the results…but not completely, I hope.
Earth's Untallied Biological Bounty, from L.A. Suburbs to Deep Seabed Sediments →
The extent and diversity of Earth’s sheath of living things continues to surprise scientists, making Howard Ensign Evans’s classic 1966 book “Life on a Little-Known Planet” ever more germane. Here is fresh evidence from some Los Angeles back yards and the “deadest” depths of deep-sea sediments:
Recent chats with Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University drew me this week to remarkable new discoveries of traces of life in sediment layers up to 200 feet beneath the South Pacific Ocean seabed that were long presumed to be sterile.
The findings, from analysis led by Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island, were described earlier this month in a news release with this remarkable title: “No Limit to Life in Sediment of Ocean’s Deadest Region.”
Australia: one of the worst housing bubbles ever →
By all accounts, Australia is experiencing what is one of the greatest credit-fuelled real estate bubbles in modern times. On the back of a collapsing mining sector, we can thank the RBA, APRA, ASIC and the political elite in Canberra for creating a flawed household wealth-creation strategy that shares all the hallmarks of a predictable economic disaster.
In plain English, since the mid-1990s, Australia’s strategy is for home buyers and investors to borrow heavily from lenders and flip houses to the next buyer who has taken out even more debt to speculate.
Today, all this country has to show for it is a $1.9 trillion mountain of household debt that will make the US credit-fuelled housing bubble of the last decade look like a walk in the park when our housing bubble bursts.
The unfortunate victims of today’s “wealth-creation” strategy are young home buyers and middle-income earners who are either completely priced out of the market or leveraged through the roof.
Egypt Says It May Send Troops to Yemen to Fight Houthis →
Egypt said Thursday that it was prepared to send troops into Yemen as part of a Saudi-led campaign to drive back the Iranian-backed Houthi advance, signaling the growing likelihood of a protracted ground war on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
A day after Saudi Arabia and a coalition of nine other states began hammering the Houthis with airstrikes and blockading the Yemeni coast, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt said in a statement that the country’s navy and air force had joined the campaign and that its army was ready to send ground troops “if necessary.”
Social Insurance Makes America More Entrepreneurial →
Entrepreneurs are actually more likely than other Americans to receive public benefits, after accounting for income, as Harvard Business School’s Gareth Olds has documented. And in many cases, expanding benefit programs helps spur new business creation...
Obviously only up to a point. And yes, there is always going to be some waste and abuse. But it's about finding that optimal point.
Small businesses may be losing a lifeline →
The Great Recession produced a startling change in the makeup of America's banks. According to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, from 2007 through 2013 the number of new commercial banks fell by 14 percent. Most of the decline came from community banks, the type of institution most of us think of when we hear the term "traditional bank."
And given the how much small businesses rely on community banks for funding, this shrinkage could have an impact on the formation and survival of small business enterprises.
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Why have bank entries tumbled? The report cites two possible explanations: the fall in bank profits during the Great Recession, and regulatory changes from the Dodd-Frank legislation. The drop in bank profits appears to be the biggest factor, but earnings also fell to similar levels during previous recessions, yet bank formation didn't turn down as much. So, changing regulations may be at work as well.
Which one of these factors turns out to be the primary cause has implications for the banking system's structure in the future. If falling profits are to blame, then bank entries ought to recover as the economy rebounds. But if regulations are holding back entries, the difficulties that creates for small business could be more permanent.
The Real Cost of Coal →
CONGRESS long ago established a basic principle governing the extraction of coal from public lands by private companies: American taxpayers should be paid fair value for it. They own the coal, after all.
Lawmakers set a royalty payment of 12.5 percent of the sale price of the coal in 1976. Forty years later, those payments remain stuck there, with actual collections often much less. Studies by the Government Accountability Office, the Interior Department’s inspector general and nonprofit research groups have all concluded that taxpayers are being shortchanged.
This is no small matter. In 2013, approximately 4o percent of all domestic coal came from federal lands. A recent study by the independent nonprofit research group Headwaters Economics estimates that various reforms to the royalty valuation system would have generated $900 million to $5.6 billion more overall between 2008 and 2012.
This failure by the government to collect fair value for taxpayer coal is made more troubling by the climate-change implications of burning this fossil fuel. Taxpayers are already incurring major costs in responding to the effects of global warming. Coastal infrastructure is being battered by sea rise and storm surges; forests are being devastated by climate-aided pest infestations; and studies are suggesting that temperature rises have increased the likelihood of devastating droughts in California.
Moreover, as the Council of Economic Advisers documented in a report last July because of the long-lived nature of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, these costs will continue to rise.