This week’s PhotoMash comes courtesy of the Guardian online news site. It’s front page carried a photo of George Osborne, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury Secretary) wondering how to cut tax credits next to a story concluding that robots will take over a third of all UK manual jobs by 2030.
I dare you to find the real human above.
Images courtesy of the Guardian.
The heavy hand of the Soviet Union left untold scars on the populations of many Eastern European nations. Millions of citizens were repressed, harmed, spied-upon and countless disappeared. The Soviets and their socialist puppet governments also fostered many decades of centrally-planed austerity that created generations of impoverished — though not the ruling elites, of course. Nonetheless independent shopkeepers would try to put a brave face on their lack of a market for most goods and services — little supply and limited demand.
Photographer David Hlynsky spend several years in Eastern Europe, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, documenting the waning of the Soviet era. His book, Window-Shopping Through the Iron Curtain, featuring many absurdly bleak views of consumer-minimalism [not necessarily a bad thing], was published in February 2015.
Read more from The Guardian’s article here.
Image: Three Loaves of Bread, Krakow, Poland, 1988. Courtesy of David Hlynsky.
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This is the fascinating story of Petri Luukkainen, a documentary film-maker from Helsinki, Finland. One day he decided to give up all his possessions — everything. He put all his stuff in storage for a year, carefully removing only one item each day. His reasoning: to determine what was really necessary to his daily needs, and what wasn’t.
From the Telegraph:
Like many of us, Petri Luukkainen felt he had too much stuff. Unlike many of us, he decided to put it all in storage for a year, removing one item per day in order to discover what he really needed to live comfortably. The result is the documentary My Stuff, released in Luukkainen’s native Finland two years ago and in the UK this weekend.
The film, an experimental documentary in the style of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, begins with the 29-year-old naked in his empty Helsinki flat. From there he runs across icy streets to the depot where his belongings are stored, the first of which he takes being a long coat – preserving his modesty and providing a makeshift sleeping bag for the first night. On the second day he takes shoes, on the third a blanket and on the fourth jeans.
Half way through the year he falls in love, leading to a dilemma over whether he should replace his new girlfriend’s fridge – another rule of the project is that he’s not allowed to buy anything new – or to fix it at greater expense. Later, Luukkainen’s grandmother is taken ill and has to move into a care home, meaning he has to go to her old flat to sort through her stuff. The events provide the documentary with such a satisfying narrative that some critics have suggested the film is semi-scripted, though Luukkainen insists it is all real.
The conclusion he comes to at the end of the year is probably what he suspected at the beginning: that possession is a responsibility and “stuff” is a burden. He does, however, provide a couple of figures which may be of help for anyone thinking about decluttering. Luukkainen found he could get by with 100 things (including swimming trunks, trainers, a debit card and a phone) but needed 200 to live with some “joy and comfort” (a third spoon, an electric kettle and a painting).
Speaking from Helsinki ahead of his film’s UK release, the documentary-maker claims the project itself was not something he was particularly proud of. “My problem was that I had too much of everything. It’s not the worst problem and it’s not being noble to give some of it up for a time.”
Whatever the seriousness of the problem, the international interest in the film suggests it is one many of us in the West face, and Luukkainen says he has been contacted by people across Europe who have been inspired to take on similar experiments. “I’d love to be part of a movement but I’m not sure My Stuff is,” he says. “All I want to do is get people to think about what they have and what they need, because it’s not something I thought about at all before I did this film.”
For those who feel like they might have too much stuff, Luukkainen suggests spending some time apart from it, though doesn’t advise going to the extreme of putting it all in storage. Put it in a cupboard, and if its appeal fades with absence, give it away.
Read the entire story here.
Video: My Stuff by Petri Luukkainen.
If you are an IT or knowledge-worker, computer engineer, software developer or just use a computer for the majority of your working day, keep the following in mind the next time you negotiate benefits with your supervisor.
In Greece, computer-using public sector employees get 6 extra days-off per year because they use a computer. But austerity is now taking its ugly toll as the Greek government works to scrap this privilege — it already eliminated benefits to workers who show up at the office on time.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Greek civil servants stand to lose the six extra days of paid vacation they get each year—just for using a computer—after the government moved Friday to rescind a privilege that has been around for more than two decades.
The bonus, known as “computer leave,” applied to workers whose job involved sitting in front of a computer for more than five hours a day—basically most of the staff working in ministries and public services.
“It belongs to another era,” Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the administrative reform minister, said. “Today, in the era of crisis, we cannot maintain anachronistic privileges.”
Doing away with this bonus, which dates to 1989, represents “a small, yet symbolic, step in modernizing public administration,” he said.
But the public-sector union Adedy said it would fight the decision in court.
“According to the European regulation, those using a computer should take a 15-minute break every two hours,” the general secretary Ermolaos Kasses said. “It is not easy to have all those breaks during the day, so it was decided back then that it should be given as a day off every two months.”
Inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank are expected in Athens later this month to review Greece’s performance in meeting the terms of its second bailout.
Apart from shrinking the public sector, raising taxes and cutting wages and pensions, the government wants to show that it is moving forward with abolishing costly perks.
It has already limited the pensions that unmarried daughters are allowed to collect when their father dies, and scrapped a bonus for showing up to work on time. It has also extended the work week for teachers.
Read the entire article here.
Image: City of Oia, Santorini. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
It’s long been known that Microsoft Powerpoint fuels corporate mediocrity and causes brain atrophy if used by creative individuals. Now we discover that another flashship product from the Seattle software maker, this time Excel, is to blame for some significant stresses on the global financial system.
From ars technica:
An economics paper claiming that high levels of national debt led to low or negative economic growth could turn out to be deeply flawed as a result of, among other things, an incorrect formula in an Excel spreadsheet. Microsoft’s PowerPoint has been considered evil thanks to the proliferation of poorly presented data and dull slides that are created with it. Might Excel also deserve such hyperbolic censure?
The paper, Growth in a Time of Debt, was written by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and published in 2010. Since publication, it has been cited abundantly by the world’s press politicians, including one-time vice president nominee Paul Ryan (R-WI). The link it draws between high levels of debt and negative average economic growth has been used by right-leaning politicians to justify austerity budgets: slashing government expenditure and reducing budget deficits in a bid to curtail the growth of debt.
This link was always controversial, with many economists proposing that the correlation between high debt and low growth was just as likely to have a causal link in the other direction to that proposed by Reinhart and Rogoff: it’s not that high debt causes low growth, but rather that low growth leads to high debt.
However, the underlying numbers and the existence of the correlation was broadly accepted, due in part to Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper not including the source data they used to draw their inferences.
A new paper, however, suggests that the data itself is in error. Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, tried to reproduce the Reinhart and Rogoff result with their own data, but they couldn’t. So they asked for the original spreadsheets that Reinhart and Rogoff used to better understand what they were doing. Their results, published as “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” suggest that the pro-austerity paper was flawed. A comprehensive assessment of the new paper can be found at the Rortybomb economics blog.
It turns out that the Reinhart and Rogoff spreadsheet contained a simple coding error. The spreadsheet was supposed to calculate average values across twenty countries in rows 30 to 49, but in fact it only calculated values in 15 countries in rows 30 to 44. Instead of the correct formula AVERAGE(L30:L49), the incorrect AVERAGE(L30:L44) was used.
There was also a pair of important, but arguably more subjective, errors in the way the data was processed. Reinhart and Rogoff excluded data for some countries in the years immediately after World War II. There might be a reason for this; there might not. The original paper doesn’t justify the exclusion.
The original paper also used an unusual scheme for weighting data. The UK’s 19-year stretch of high debt and moderate growth (during the period between 1946 and 1964, the debt-to-GDP ratio was above 90 percent, and growth averaged 2.4 percent) is conflated into a single data point and treated as equivalent to New Zealand’s single year of debt above 90 percent, during which it experienced growth of -7.6. Some kind of weighting system might be justified, with Herndon, Ash, and Pollin speculating that there is a serial correlation between years.
Recalculating the data to remove these three issues turns out to provide much weaker evidence for austerity. Although growth is higher in countries with a debt ratio of less than 30 percent (averaging 4.2 percent), there’s no point at which it falls off a cliff and inevitably turns negative. For countries with a debt of between 30 and 60 percent, average growth was 3.1 percent, between 60 and 90 it was 3.2 percent, and above 90 percent it was 2.2 percent. Lower than the low debt growth, but far from the -0.1 percent growth the original paper claimed.
As such, the argument that high levels of debt should be avoided and the justification for austerity budgets substantially evaporates. Whether politicians actually used this paper to shape their beliefs or merely used its findings to give cover for their own pre-existing beliefs is hard to judge.
Excel, of course, isn’t the only thing to blame here. But it played a role. Excel is used extensively in fields such as economics and finance, because it’s an extremely useful tool that can be deceptively simple to use, making it apparently perfect for ad hoc calculations. However, spreadsheet formulae are notoriously fiddly to work with and debug, and Excel has long-standing deficiencies when it comes to certain kinds of statistical analysis.
It’s unlikely that this is the only occasion on which improper use of Excel has produced a bad result with far-reaching consequences. Bruno Iksil, better known as the “London Whale,” racked up billions of dollars of losses for bank JPMorgan. The post mortem of his trades revealed extensive use of Excel, including manual copying and pasting between workbooks and a number of formula errors that resulted in underestimation of risk.
Read the entire article following the jump.
Image: Default Screen of Microsoft Excel 2013, component of Microsoft Office 2013. Courtesy of Microsoft / Wikipedia.