A turkeyyyyyyyyy.

On the Value of Virtual Currencies

This paper develops an economic framework to analyze the exchange rate of virtual currency. Three components are important: first, the current use of virtual currency to make payments; second, the decision of forward-looking investors to buy virtual currency (thereby effectively regulating its supply); and third, the elements that jointly drive future consumer adoption and merchant acceptance of virtual currency. The model predicts that, as virtual currency becomes more established, the exchange rate will become less sensitive to the impact of shocks to speculators’ beliefs. This undermines the notion that excessive exchange rate volatility will prohibit widespread use of virtual currency.

Reminder that bitcoin is primarily used to avoid government appropriation and buy illegal goods and services off darknet markets.

BHL

The Department of Justice report seems to provide enough evidence to justify ending federal contracting with private prison firms.

But the gaps it identifies between public and private prisons are very, very much smaller than the gaps between the American public carceral state and either a) normal conditions (including the prevalence of incarceration itself) in other liberal democracies, or b) a morally tolerable and decent state of affairs.

And DOJ– through the US Attorneys, through the Bureau of Prisons– is itself an actor in that morally intolerable state of affairs. So I can’t help but see an element of deflecting blame in deciding to start with the particular symptom that is intolerable private prisons. If DOJ and the administration wanted to seriously address the crisis of the carceral state, they could end the directive to US Attorneys to seek maximum sentences, to take just one example. But that would involve acknowledging their own institutional responsibility.

Private prisons hold <10% of all prisoners in the correctional system. (The separate immigrant detention system is more heavily private, and also terrible.) Private prison firms have been followers, not leaders, in the growth of mass incarceration (see this chart, via). They have been profiting from misery and injustice, and I certainly don’t feel any pain for their shareholders today. And they have sometimes, as documented in the DOJ report, been the proximate cause of misery and injustice. But they are not the ultimate cause of it, and there’s a real limit to how much credit DOJ gets for acting against one outside actor profiting on a wicked system that it continues to oversee.

The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, including the billion-person Communist dictatorship in China. And today’s announcement won’t change that, at all.

Noah Smith

I recently wrote a Bloomberg View post about political-economic ideologies, and how society is quicker to change than individual human beings. The upshot was that free-market ideology seems - to many Americans, and also incidentally to me - to have mostly hit a wall in terms of its ability to improve our lives, and so society will inevitably embrace an alternative, despite the protests of diehard free-marketers.

Bryan Caplan is flabbergasted at the notion that free-market ideology (aka "neoliberalism") has actually been tried in the U.S.:
The claim that "free-market dogma" is the "reigning economic policy" of the United States or any major country seems so absurd, so contrary to big blatant facts (like government spending as a share of GDP, for starters), that I'm dumb-founded. 
This is pretty much exactly the attitude I described in my post! "Of course neoliberalism hasn't failed; we just never really tried it."

David Henderson has a longer and more measured response. He challenges the idea that free-market ideology has demonstrated any failures at all.

Now I could simply make a weak claim - i.e., that free-market ideology seems to have hit a wall, and that in the end, that general perception is much more important than what I personally think. But instead, I'll make the much stronger claim - I'll defend the idea that free-market ideology has, in fact, really hit a wall in terms of its effectiveness.

Exhibit A: Tax cuts. Tax cuts, one of free-marketers' flagship policies, appear to have given our economy a boost in the 1960s, and a smaller boost in the 1980s. But any economic boost from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 was so small as to be invisible to all but (possibly) the most careful econometricians. Notably, a number of attempts to encourage savings - capital gains tax cuts, estate tax cuts, and the like - have not halted the steady decline in personal savings rates.

Exhibit B: Financial deregulation and light-touch regulation. It seems clear to me that under-regulation of derivatives markets and mortgage lending played a big role in the financial crisis. The counter-narrative, that government intervention caused the crisis, has never held much water, and has been debunked by many papers. This was a private-sector blowup.

Exhibit C: Light-touch regulation of monopoly. The evidence is mounting that industrial concentration is an increasing problem for the U.S. economy. Some of this might be due to intellectual property, but much is simply due to naturally increasing returns to scale.

Exhibit D: The China shock. While most trade booms seem to lead to widely shared gains, the China trade boom in the 2000s - which free marketers consistently championed and hailed - probably did not. High transaction costs (retraining costs, moving costs, and others) lead to a very large number of American workers being deeply and permanently hurt by the shock, as evidenced by recent work by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson.

Exhibit E: Faux-privatization. True privatization is when the government halts a nationalized industry and auctions off its assets. Faux-privatization is when the government outsources an activity to contractors, often without even competitive bidding. Faux-privatization has been a notable bust in the prison industry, and school voucher programs have also been extremely underwhelming. Charter schools have fared a bit better, but even there the gains have been modest at best.

Exhibit F: Welfare reform. Clinton's welfare reform saved the taxpayer very little money, and appears to have had little if any effect on poverty in the U.S.

Exhibit G: Research funding cuts. The impact of these is hard to measure, but cuts in government funding of research appear to have saved the taxpayer very little money, while dramatically increasing the time that scientists have to devote to writing grant proposals, and increasing risk aversion in scientists' choice of research topics.

Exhibit H: Health care. The U.S. health care system is a hybrid private-public system, but includes a proportionally much larger private component than any other developed nation's system. Free-marketers have fought doggedly to prevent the government from playing a larger role. Our hybrid system delivers basically the same results as every other developed country's system, at about twice the cost. Private health care cost growth has been much faster than cost growth for Medicare and other government-provided programs, indicating that much of our excess cost has been due to the private component of our system, not the public part.

I could go on, but these are the big ones I can think of. In some of these cases, free-market policies seem to have produced some gains in the late 20th century, but by the 21st century all appeared to be either having no effect, or actively harming the economy.

No, this is nowhere near as big a failure as that of communism (though in some ways, notably health care and financial deregulation, we've done worse than the somewhat-socialist nations of Europe). The analogy with communism was a way of illustrating a certain mindset, not to draw an equivalence between the results of neoliberalism and communism.

Also, I personally think there is still scope for many neoliberal policies to improve our economy. Reduced occupational licensing, urban land-use deregulation, simplification of the tax code, and various other kinds of deregulation all seem to show promise. If free-market policies have hit a wall, it's a porous wall - in real life, nothing is as cut-and-dry as in our ideological debates.

But overall, I think the last decade and a half have shown clearly diminishing returns, and sometimes negative returns, from neoliberal reforms. So our society is right to be looking for alternative policy packages. Though that doesn't necessarily mean we'll choose a good alternative - I think Sanders-style socialism would probably be a mistake.

From YouGov.

Now that Britain has voted to leave the EU, the government is going to have to develop a new immigration policy. For many – including new Prime Minister Theresa May – the message of the referendum result was that immigration levels will have to come down drastically.

A new YouGov survey confirms the extent of this message, showing that an overwhelming majority of the public – 70% of people – think that immigration into Britain has been too high over the last ten years. Close to half (44%) say it has been "much too high". The government is going to face a backlash if it is not able to design an immigration system that is popular with the public.

However, the frank preferences on what kind of immigrants the public would like to see more of or less of will be difficult to translate into government policy.

Spoiler

There is a strong desire for a reduction in migrants from Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. At least one in five people say that the UK should not admit a single migrant from Turkey, Romania, Nigeria, Egypt or Pakistan.

The hostility to certain countries reflects both cultural and economic concerns. Of the countries listed, Britons are most happy with migration from advanced economies, particularly those with English-speaking populations. And when looking at what factors should determine whether or not a migrant is allowed to enter the UK, the results show a public that is keen to ensure their jobs and safety are not disrupted.

Criminality is the top of the public’s list of concerns. More than eight in ten (83%) of people said that whether a migrant had a record of violent crimes was “very important”, as did 62% for minor or non-violent crimes, making them by far the two highest responses in this category (a further 8% and 20% respectively said these factors were “fairly important”).

Spoiler

The vast majority of people think that whether a person has skills in short supply is important (84% for blue collar jobs and 80% for white collar jobs), but this drops to just over half for people with skills that are not in short supply (57% for blue collar jobs and 54% for white collar jobs). Three quarters (76%) of people are also keen to ensure that a migrant already has a job lined up.

English proficiency was important for 84% of people, whilst a migrant’s education level was important to 81% of people. It is clear that the public are keen to scrutinise most areas of a migrant’s life – majorities of people thought it was important to factor in whether a migrant wanted to bring their family (73%), their existing wealth (60%), their age (53%) and even their IQ (53%). In fact, the only area that the majority of people didn’t think was important was a migrant’s religion (31%).

Spoiler

Unsurprisingly, Remain voters take a much more laissez-faire approach to what type of migrants the UK admits than their Leave-voting counterparts. There are some areas of consensus though – around skills and education. This could be a potential area of emphasis for the government, allowing them to mimic the much-cited "Australian points system".

Spoiler

There are wide variations between voters of different parties on whether certain migrant characteristics are important as to whether they should be allowed in the UK. Whilst people intending to vote UKIP and Conservatives are more likely to consider most migrant characteristics to be important, UKIP voters are comparatively less concerned about the migrants' skills, but much more concerned about their religion. This could reflect that UKIP voters are more animated by cultural, rather than economic, considerations than Conservatives.

Intriguingly, for a party that was developed to represent the working class – a working class that voted Leave by 65% and which thinks immigration has been much too high by 75% – people who are currently intending to vote Labour are the least likely to think any migrant characteristic is important.

The research underlines the challenge facing the government, as they seek to chart a line between the stark and politically challenging views of most voters on immigration, and the need to retain good trading and diplomatic relations with the developing world.

So British people want:

• from culturally and economically similar countries
• who speak English
• who have in demand skills
• who have a job lined up before entry
• who have a clean criminal record

As in, do you deliberately inflate/exaggerate aspects to your personality, or just flat-out make them up?

Obviously we pretty much all do this to some degree; we're always filtering information about ourselves, but I mean do you make a sustained and conscious effort?

im so proud

wow really
thank u so much
i had no idea
bless your soul

wtf is wrong with my country

GEE I WONDER WHY WE VOTED TO LEAVE LADS

Report warns.

Political correctness in prisons is allowing extremism to flourish because guards are too afraid of confronting Muslims, a report has found.

A review into Islamist extremism in the British justice system has found that “cultural sensitivity” towards Muslim prisoners is preventing staff “challenging unacceptable extremist behaviour and views”.

The report, by Ian Acheson, a former prison governor, warns that supervising staff are being “pressured” to leave prayer rooms during collective worship.

Islamist prisoners are also attempting to prevent searches by “claiming dress is religious” and are also getting access to extremist literature that is available in chaplaincy libraries or from individual prisoners.

Mr Acheson’s report concluded that extremists are “exploiting…staff fear of being labelled racist”.

It also warned that “charismatic Islamist extremist prisoners [are] acting as self-styled ‘emirs’ and exerting a controlling and radicalising influence of the wider Muslim prison population”.

The Government has said that it will implement a number of the report’s recommendations.

Liz Truss, the Justice Secretary, has already announced that the most dangerous extremists will be locked up in isolated high-security prisons within prisons to prevent them from radicalising other inmates.

On Monday, she will also announce that governors and prison officers will be given new training to “prevent influential extremist prisoners exerting control and radicalising others”.

Reuters

An independent review of draft British security legislation said bulk interception and collection of citizens' personal data was vital for the intelligence agencies to prevent attacks, a position welcomed by Prime Minister Theresa May.

Last November, Britain unveiled a draft of the law that would give police and spies broad snooping powers they say are vital to protecting the public from criminals, paedophiles and terrorism.

David Anderson, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said in a report that bulk interception was of “vital utility” to the security services while there was no alternative to collecting large amounts of data on people unlikely to be under suspicion, known as bulk personal datasets.

"Anderson’s report demonstrates how the bulk powers contained in the Investigatory Powers Bill are of crucial importance to our security and intelligence agencies," May said in a statement.

"These powers often provide the only means by which our Agencies are able to protect the British public from the most serious threats that we face," May said.

who's the braindead fucktard at bioware who thought mapping the sprint/use/cover functions all onto the same key would be a good idea

also fuck bioware for making me go through the trouble of altering their sensitivity settings and turning off mouse acceleration/dampening in a fucking .ini folder.

Still a great game though.

kill me