Welcome to the weekend! Pour yourself a mug of slow brewed iced coffee, and settle in for our longer form weekend reads:
• The invention that could revolutionize batteries—and maybe American manufacturing too (Quartz)
• The Datafication of Business and Society (Pieria)
• Biotech’s Coming Cancer Cure: Supercharge your immune cells to defeat cancer? Juno Therapeutics believes its treatments can do exactly that. (MIT Technology Review)
• A World Without Work: For centuries, experts have predicted that machines would make workers obsolete. That moment may finally be arriving. Could that be a good thing? (The Atlantic) see also What Makes Work Meaningful? Ask a Zookeeper (JSTOR Daily)
• The Rise of the Compliance Guru—and Banker Ire: The real growth area in U.S. finance is compliance. That’s definitely a bummer for people trying to make money. Is it also bad for the economy? (Bloomberg)
• The $80 Million Fake Bomb-Detector Scam—and the People Behind It (Vanity Fair)
• The Chemistry and Psychology of Turning Water Into Wine (Nautilus) see also A Deep Dive Into The World’s Most Prestigious Water-Tasting Competition (Buzzfeed)
• College athletes at major programs benefit from confluence of factors to sometimes avoid criminal charges (ESPN)
• Documenting Evil: Inside Assad’s Hospitals of Horror (Vanity Fair)
• L.A. to Nepal: America’s first responders, California Task Force Two follows disaster around the world. (California Sunday)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Evercore ISI’s Ed Hyman.
Source: Bloomberg
The world without work – a social nightmare. Will the 1% support “loafers” on welfare? Will the 99% starve quietly? What should be a boon will be disaster because the survival of billions is at stake.
the real issue of a world without work, is not just what we humans will do, but in a society that the only way one can survive, is by earning income, how does one do that if their are no jobs? and why would there be no businesses since they would have few customers?
Exactly! It would have to be some sort of Communism. OMIGOD! I said the “C” word!
More likely the 1% will employ goons to hold the riffraff down and when they are all dead the 1% can proceed to become Eloi.
Actually, Congress and the conservative think tanks have been espousing tax policies to encourage a world without work for years. Going by the theory that you tax what you don’t want and reduce taxes on what you do want, the push to eliminate capital gains, dividends, corporate, and estate taxes is clearly to encourage people to simply invest and not work.
Meanwhile, ordinary income from wages and salaries are double taxed at higher marginal tax rates and by payroll taxes that are not even deductible from income taxes. The payroll taxes are clearly designated to pay for Social Security and Medicare, so they are effectively a government-run annuity and health insurance plan for the elderly and disabled. However, tax credits for investing in businesses could similarly be viewed since they eventual income would be taxed at much lower rates as well as getting a bunch of your initial investment back from the government.
So it appears that the radical conservatives have been waging a war on jobs for years attempting to discourage actual work and just assume that everybody will be in a position to invest money so that they can live off the income in the future.
Exactly.
Neither article addressed how you can live a middle class life doing what you what, doing what gives your life meaning.
“In general, though, it seems like a few basic building blocks of meaning are the ability to use skills we can be proud of, pay and working conditions that feel halfway fair, and work that is useful—or at least not actively immoral. If these aren’t part of a job, the employer is likely to be hard-pressed to bring meaning to the workplace.”
You can’t live on half way fair.
Columbus Idea Factory sounds awesome but you have to pay to play.
Where do you get the $ to pay to play?
What if what you create doesn’t have a market?
Who does the marketing? Does everyone have to be their own sales and marketing department?
I enjoy crosswords. Doing crosswords is not going to earn me a living wage.
To each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs? Hmmm. That’s been tried and didn’t work out.
Interesting conundrum that was not answered.
What really makes a good place to run a business? Minnesota, no way.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-state-for-business-in-the-country-has-high-taxes-high-wages-and-is-union-friendly-2015-6
another of those fly by night organizations thats found a way to get hydrogen ?
http://www.egmcartech.com/2015/06/26/report-stanford-university-reveals-new-method-of-extracting-hydrogen-from-water-w-video/
guess the banksters and wall street dont like having to actually follow laws, which is what those compliance people are trying to get them to do. now if we started throwing folks in jail for non compliance they might actually think differently. but we cant do that. so they complain about it. i suppose if instead of going to jail, they lost the money paid to the business instead, plus a penalty for every transgression they might feel different. course they are the same bunch who are devout Christians. how would they fell if they actually had to follow all of Leviticus as opposed to just the parts they want too?
What happened this week
http://www.caglecartoons.com/viewimage.asp?ID={CFB7B060-3181-4E98-AE8E-93F3137207D0}
Compliance pays for itself.
Perhaps we should un-regulate the federal reserve window where Mr. Dimon gets his cheap cash.
An example of how compliance could have paid for itself many times over: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-iraq. Compliance is everywhere. Or it should be – starting with the most important stuff like keeping all your body parts attached…