The FTC bans most non-compete clauses, which keep many workers from jumping to their employers' competitors. Of course this will be fought over in court. I think, though, that employers will have hard time proving that this will hurt them, given that they have never been legal in California or a bunch of other states.
Archaeologists find stone tools, rock art, and other evidence of humans in a lava tube in the Saudi Arabian desert. (NY Times, original article)
What Tyler Cowen is nostaligc about.
Industrialization in Stuart Britain: "The research shows that 17th century Britain saw a steep decline in agricultural peasantry, and a surge in people who manufactured goods."
Kevin Drum reminds us that the number of housing units per household in the US has not changed meaningfully over the past 23 years. We don't have a national housing shortage, just a shortage in certain urban areas where a lot of ambitious young people want to live.
A history of gender in Egypt, which has veered between relative equality and severe patriarchy over the millennia. Text isn't that impressive but it's a remarkable collection of images.
A British critic says classical music is dying because people think it is elitist. Considering how much great stuff is on YouTube with millions of views, I think "dying" is going a bit far. Here is Alexandra Conunova playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons without once glancing at sheet music, great performance. But it is true that classical music no longer has the dominant cultural position it had in my youth.
Anti-communism and the beginnings of Singapore's economic boom.
Impacts of Norway's ban on smart phones in middle schools. Summary at Marginal Revolutions.
Spitalfields Life considers William Kent's Arch, a fascinating little surivival of lost London.
Contents of the amphora found on a Roman shipwreck in Minorca have been analyzed, and of course it was carrying fish sauce. And other stuff, but, inevitably, fish sauce.
Penelope Fitzgerald, who became a major novelist at 62.
Newly discovered Klimt portrait sells for $37 million. (NY Times, Artnet)
Making gold leaf one atom thick.
Watching six people trying to take cell phone photos of an osprey too distant to be more than a dark dot made me wonder how much of global computer memory is devoted to terrible photographs.
Reports that the US has a cruise missile that can destroy electronic components with blasts of microwaves, and has deployed them to the Middle East (news story, wikipedia on the missile, US Air Force on the program, skeptical take here). Nobody knows what to make of this, and some physicists find the claims for this missile absurd.
Video on Twitter/X of a huge smoke screen deployed to protect a Russian advance from dones.
4 comments:
Kevin Drum reminds us that the number of housing units per household in the US has not changed meaningfully over the past 23 years. We don't have a national housing shortage, just a shortage in certain urban areas where a lot of ambitious young people want to live.
The number of units per household hasn't changed in 23 years? Okay - guess what HAS changed in that time!
THE PRICES.
Housing prices have (on average) TRIPLED in the past 23 years. So that raises the question - if the supply of units per household hasn't dropped, then how have the prices skyrocketed?
Demand didn't change (per household). And the physical supply (per household) has remained steady. So what explains the rise in prices? (Aside from simple price gouging, which is absolutely a factor, but which we'll ignore for the moment.)
Well, how about all the OTHER factors of the housing market beyond raw numbers of units that physically exist?
How about the design-price of new constructions? If you look at major housing construction projects throughout the nation (particularly in major cities), the trend for some time now has been to overwhelmingly build units intended for the wealthiest echelons of society - because the economic realities of the housing market right now make it far more profitable to build small numbers of obscenely expensive luxury housing, rather than large numbers of affordable housing. Many of these units are second or even third homes for the rich - and are often marketed to international buyers.
How about the quality of existing housing? The average housing unit is MUCH older today than it was 23 years ago. The median age of owner occupied housing went from 30 years to 40 years - a jump of 33%. A whopping 35% of owner-occupied housing was built in 1969 or earlier. Another 14% was built in the 70s; 13% was built in the 80s (that was forty years ago now, remember); 13% in the 90s; 15% in the 2000s; and only 10% in the 2010s.
Older houses are flatly inferior to newly built ones across the board - we've improved design, we've improved materials, we've improved energy efficiency, etc, etc. Older houses are costlier to live in. Older houses are usually far worse maintained. Older houses were built with different location priorities in mind - people aren't as willing to commute long distances (and often couldn't afford the gas even if they were).
And yet somehow, despite the average house being MUCH older, the prices have all tripled? How odd. You'd think if we've got the same number of houses per household, but they're all older and flatly worse quality than was the average 23 years ago, the prices would have gone DOWN - except for new housing, which would then be in demand?
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How about the prevalence of jobs in given locations, and broader societal trends? A housing unit that was once desirable in 2001 may no longer be so - in the same way that a house built in Detroit in 1965 wasn't anywhere near as desirable a place to live in 1988.
How about the number of units that are actually on the market, rather than just in physical existence? And how about the number of units that are simply being sat on by real estate companies that own hundreds of thousands of units, because keeping them off the market to drive up demand for OTHER units turns out to be more profitable than renting them out?
It's not enough to simply have "enough houses".
You need to have "enough houses", "that people can afford to live in", "where people want to live".
Industrialization in Stuart Britain: "The research shows that 17th century Britain saw a steep decline in agricultural peasantry, and a surge in people who manufactured goods."
Do you mean to tell me that during the Industrial Revolution, Britain became... Industrialized?!? Go on! Tell another!
What's next? Extreme Weather in The Little Ice Age: "The research shows that 13th-17th century Europe saw a steep decline in temperature, and a surge in unseasonable weather."?
The King of Aragon's Stairs.
I was unfamiliar with these. How lovely.
That said, the linked articles description made me snort. "A breathtakingly steep set of stairs is carved directly into the face of the sea cliffs of Bonifacio."
...this said of a set of stairs that is plainly shown to be at about a 45 degree angle / 100 percent grade - which is, it must be noted, a universal standard, and not remotely steep. (Most stairs are between 30 and 50 degrees.)
Reports that the US has a cruise missile that can destroy electronic components with blasts of microwaves, and has deployed them to the Middle East (news story, wikipedia on the missile, US Air Force on the program, skeptical take here). Nobody knows what to make of this, and some physicists find the claims for this missile absurd.
"Some" physicists? I would hope all but the most delusional crackpots in the field would recognize the absurdity of the claims.
For a sense of just how ridiculous the claim is, this is comparable to that time leading up to WW2 when the British military put out requests for designs for a device capable of heating eight pint glasses of water to a temperature of 105 degrees, at long distance, using only radio waves - they wanted to build a death ray which could boil the blood of German aircraft pilots, you see.
A totally insane idea, dreamed up by someone with no grasp of the forces involves and the scale of the energy requirements - but hey, at least it attracted the attention of meteorologist Robert Watson-Watt, who told them flatly how crazy an idea it was, but then proposed (and went on to invent) radar instead.
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