China just announced one of the largest single layoffs in history →

China may soon have a rust belt of its own.
Chinese officials announced plans to lay off roughly 1.8 million workers in the coal and steel industries, as part of president Xi Jinping’s politically difficult effort to restructure the world’s second-largest economy. It’s unclear as to the time frame for the cuts, which were announced by Yin Weimin, China’s minister for human resources and social security.
In recent decades, China built its economy on heavy state investment in export-oriented manufacturing industries. Those investments created large numbers of jobs for low-skilled people flooding China’s fast-growing cities.

No, raising the local minimum wage doesn’t hurt local businesses →

It’s not a crazy concern. When the national minimum wage goes up, no business is at a competitive disadvantage — they all face the same wage floor. It’s fair to wonder whether sub-national minimum wages might encourage businesses to avoid an increase by moving, a question with implications for people all over the country — from Olympia, Wash., to Lexington, Ky., to Bangor, Maine — who are trying to secure a raise. The geographical variation that has sprung up over time, however, has allowed economists to test Hubbard’s claims, and the evidence supports the actions of the Birmingham city council.
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This variation has provided opportunities for something rare in empirical economics: quasi-experimental studies. In one famous paper, economists Alan Krueger and David Card compared fast-food employment in New Jersey, which raised its minimum wage in 1992, with that in Pennsylvania, which did not. “We find no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment,” they concluded.
Are sub-state localities different from states? Another important study gets at this question by looking at county-level data, comparing every contiguous county across state borders where minimum wages differed over the course of 16 years. Instead of “all sorts of problems,” the researchers found “no evidence of job losses for high impact sectors such as restaurants and retail.”

Being a good parent will physiologically destroy you, new research confirms →

If the best parenting comes at such a high cost, and raising the next generation is such an important job, society should recognize the effort, and reward it.

Kids with empathetic parents have well-documented advantages: less depression, less aggression, more empathy themselves. Parents also report better self-esteem when they make the effort to understand their children’s feelings.
But inside, it’s tearing them up.
A team from Northwestern University has examined the hidden costs of parental empathy. They found that while the children of empathetic parents are better off physically and emotionally, the parents’ cells reveal chronic, low-grade inflammation. When their children suffer psychologically, empathetic parents’ immune systems take a hit.

Iran elections: gains for Rouhani could help promote greater opening to the west →

Early results in Iran’s hard-fought elections are showing strong gains for supporters of President Hassan Rouhani that could help promote greater opening to the west and limited political advances at home – and secure him a second term in office.
Friday’s polls for the parliament and the assembly of experts – its role is to choose the Islamic republic’s clerical supreme leader – were extended by nearly six hours due to a high turnout that was seen as likely to favour the reformist-moderate camp.
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Reports from the semi-official Fars and Mehr news agencies and a count conducted by the Associated Press showed the hardliners were the main losers of the vote.

170 Economists Endorse Bernie Sanders’ Plan To Reform Wall St. And Rein In Greed →

A letter signed by 170 economists including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, University of Texas Professor James K. Galbraith, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC., Brad Miller, former U.S. Congressman from North Carolina, and William K. Black, University of Missouri-Kansas City endorsed the Sanders plan to reform Wall Street.
The economists wrote:

In our view, Sanders’ plan for comprehensive financial reform is critical for avoiding another ‘too-big-to-fail’ financial crisis. The Senator is correct that the biggest banks must be broken up and that a new 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment from commercial banking, must be enacted.

Should you edit your children’s genes? →

The answer made Ethan Weiss, a physician–scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, think. Weiss is well aware of the rapid developments in gene-editing technologies — techniques that could, theoretically, prevent children from being born with deadly disorders or with disabilities such as Ruthie’s. And he believes that if he had had the option to edit blindness out of Ruthie’s genes before she was born, he and his wife would have jumped at the chance. But now he thinks that would have been a mistake: doing so might have erased some of the things that make Ruthie special — her determination, for instance. Last season, when Ruthie had been the worst player on her basketball team, she had decided on her own to improve, and unbeknownst to her parents had been practising at every opportunity. Changing her disability, he suspects, “would have made us and her different in a way that we would have regretted”, he says. “That’s scary.”
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But emerging technologies are already testing the margins of what people deem acceptable. Parents today have unprecedented control over what they pass on to their children: they can use prenatal genetic screening to check for conditions such as Down’s syndrome, and choose whether or not to carry a fetus to term. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis allows couples undergoing in vitrofertilization to select embryos that do not have certain disease-causing mutations. Even altering the heritable genome — as might be done if CRISPR were used to edit embryos — is acceptable to some. Mitochondrial replacement therapy, which replaces a very small number of genes that a mother passes on with those from a donor, was approved last year in the United Kingdom for people who are at risk of certain genetic disorders.

Virginia Senate passes bill to keep police officers’ names secret →

Several years ago, local journalists noticed that three of the largest police agencies in Virginia — the Fairfax County Police Department, the Alexandria Police Department and the Arlington County Police Department — were summarily denying all open-records requests. Virginia actually has pretty decent open-records laws, but these agencies were simply choosing to ignore them. This came to light after a number of police shootings in which the agencies involved had refused to name the officers responsible. Journalist Michael Pope found that the agencies were even declining to release information about cases they were simultaneously touting in press releases.
This was essentially an open defiance of state law. Yet the Alexandria commonwealth’s attorney not only defended the lack of transparency, he blamed the media for wanting such information in the first place, and derisively referred to “the sacred ‘right of the public to know.’ ”

Security vs. Surveillance →

Both the "going dark" metaphor of FBI Director James Comey and the contrasting "golden age of surveillance" metaphor of privacy law professor Peter Swire focus on the value of data to law enforcement. As framed in the media, encryption debates are about whether law enforcement should have surreptitious access to data, or whether companies should be allowed to provide strong encryption to their customers.
It's a myopic framing that focuses only on one threat -- criminals, including domestic terrorists -- and the demands of law enforcement and national intelligence. This obscures the most important aspects of the encryption issue: the security it provides against a much wider variety of threats.
Encryption secures our data and communications against eavesdroppers like criminals, foreign governments, and terrorists. We use it every day to hide our cell phone conversations from eavesdroppers, and to hide our Internet purchasing from credit card thieves. Dissidents in China and many other countries use it to avoid arrest. It's a vital tool for journalists to communicate with their sources, for NGOs to protect their work in repressive countries, and for attorneys to communicate with their clients.
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We're not being asked to choose between security and privacy. We're being asked to choose between less security and more security."