How to Survive Your 40s

If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It’s like a public referendum on your face.

When I moved to Paris in my early 30s, waiters called me “mademoiselle.” It was “Bonjour, mademoiselle” when I walked into a cafe and “Voilà, mademoiselle” as they set down a coffee.

Around the time I turned 40, however, there was a collective switch, and waiters started calling me “madame.” These “madames” were tentative at first, but soon they were coming at me like a hailstorm. Now it’s “Bonjour, madame” when I walk in, “Merci, madame” when I pay my bill and “Au revoir, madame” as I leave. Sometimes several waiters shout this at once.

On one hand, I’m intrigued by this transition. Do these waiters gather after work for Sancerre and a slide show to decide which female customers to downgrade? (Irritatingly, men are “monsieur” forever.)

The worst part is that they’re trying to be polite. They believe I’m old enough that the title can’t possibly wound.

I realize that something has permanently shifted when I walk past a woman begging for money.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she calls out to the young woman in a miniskirt a few steps ahead of me.

“Bonjour, madame,” she says when I pass.

This has all happened too quickly for me to digest. I still have most of the clothes that I wore as a mademoiselle. There are mademoiselle-era cans of food in my pantry.

But the world keeps telling me that I’ve entered a new stage. While studying my face in a well-lit elevator, my daughter describes it bluntly: “Mommy, you’re not old, but you’re definitely not young.”

What exactly is this not-young age? I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to. “How could I possibly have thought of myself as old at 40?” asks Stanley Brandes, an anthropologist who wrote a book in 1985 about turning 40. “I sort of look back and think: God, how lucky I was. I see it as the beginning of life, not the beginning of the end.” (...)

And age 40 still feels pivotal. “The 40s are when you become who you are,” a British author in his 70s tells me, adding ominously, “And if you don’t know by your 40s, you never will.”

I’m starting to see that as a madame, even a newly minted one, I am subject to new rules. When I try to act adorably naïve now, people aren’t charmed — they’re baffled. Cluelessness no longer goes with my face. I’m expected to wait in the correct line at airports and show up on time for my appointments.

And yet brain research shows that in the 40s, some of these tasks are harder: On average we’re more easily distracted than younger people, we digest information more slowly and we’re worse at remembering specific facts. (The ability to remember names peaks in the early 20s.) You know you’re in your 40s when you’ve spent 48 hours trying to think of a word, and that word was “hemorrhoids.”

But there are upsides, too. What we lack in processing power we make up for in maturity, insight and experience. We’re better than younger people at grasping the essence of situations, controlling our emotions and resolving conflicts. We’re more skilled at managing money and explaining why things happen. We’re more considerate than younger people. And, crucially for our happiness, we’re less neurotic.

Indeed, modern neuroscience and psychology confirm what Aristotle said more than 2,000 years ago when he described men in their “primes” as having “neither that excess of confidence which amounts to rashness, nor too much timidity, but the right amount of each. They neither trust everybody nor distrust everybody, but judge people correctly.”

I agree. We’ve actually managed to learn and grow a bit. We see the hidden costs of things. Our parents have stopped trying to change us. We can tell when something is ridiculous. And other minds are finally less opaque. The seminal journey of the 40s is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”

Even so, the decade is confusing. We can finally decode interpersonal dynamics, but we can’t remember a two-digit number. We’re at or approaching our lifetime peak in earnings, but Botox now seems like a reasonable idea. We’re reaching the height of our careers, but we can now see how they will probably end.

And this new age is strangely lacking in milestones. Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver’s license and your diploma. Then in your 20s and 30s you romance potential partners, find jobs and learn to support yourself. There may be promotions, babies and weddings. The pings of adrenaline from all these carry you forward and reassure you that you’re building an adult life.

In the 40s, we might still acquire degrees, jobs, homes and spouses, but these elicit less wonder now. The mentors and parents who used to rejoice in our achievements are preoccupied with their own declines. If we have kids, we’re supposed to marvel at their milestones. (...)

What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.

by Pamela Druckerman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rosalie Stroesser

Gimme Shelter Q1 2018 Update: Rents and House Prices All At or Near New Extremes

This post is a comprehensive update as to the cost of new and existing homes vs. renting, all measured compared with median household income. As such it is epistolary in length. So here is the TL:DR version:

• as a multiple of median household income, new home prices are at an extreme beyond even the peak of the housing bubble, while existing home prices are about 5% under theirs
• but unlike then, when apartment vacancies were high and rents cheap, now rents are *also* at an extreme as compared with median household income
• even with their recent increase, interest rates are still lower now than during the housing bubble, so the median monthly mortgage payment adjusted for median household income is even still about 10% less than it was at the peak of the housing bubble
• if the trends of rising prices and interest rates continue, at some point they will overcome the demographic tailwind of the large Millennial generation having reached typical home-buying age. At that point there may be another deflationary bust

____________________

Half a year ago I wrote a long post discussing “the real cost of shelter,” by which I meant not just the downpayment on a house, but the monthly carrying cost for a mortgage, and comparing both of those with median rent.

That comparison showed that, while the “real” cost of a house downpayment was at a new high, the “real” cost of median asking rent was even higher. By contrast, the monthly carrying cost of a mortgage was quite moderate. This meant that, if a buyer could find a way to put together a downpayment, home-owning was a bargain compared to renting.

As I’ll show below, six months of price and interest rate increases later, there is even more stress on both homebuyers and renters.

By way of a quick recap, I wrote six months ago that I had never seen a discussion of the relationship between the relative cost of homeownership vs. renting, particularly as a function of the household budget. The choice (or ability) to live in the residence one desires isn’t a matter of its cost by itself, but also the relative cost of the type of residence. What is the cost of a house compared with the cost of an apartment? How expensive are each of them compared with a household’s income? If both are too expensive, maybe the choice is made to live with mom and dad as an extended family.

So, here are the three relationships I’ll look at again in this post

1. the “real cost” of a downpayment on a house.
2. the “real cost of renting
3. the “real monthly carrying cost” of a mortgage

The best metric for calculating these “real” costs on a household is median household income.

by NewDealDemocrat, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

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The United States of Japan

Thanks to hip-hop and Hollywood, the United States is still the world’s leading cultural exporter. But, in recent years, American culture has increasingly been following a playbook made in Japan. Consider the fascination with “the Japanese art of decluttering.” Its guru, Marie Kondo, lives in Japan. She generally relies on an interpreter, and it has been four years since she published a book in the U.S. While she has largely fallen off the radar in her home country, her popularity shows no signs of waning among Americans. One video of Kondo folding clothes, dubbed in English, has close to four million views on YouTube. On Valentine’s Day, Netflix sparked joy among fans with an announcement that it had greenlit a Kondo reality show.

Stripped down to its most minimalist outlines (an approach that Kondo would surely approve), a life of uncluttered simplicity represents a fantasy. Why should Americans be so compelled by one from Japan? Close to twenty years ago, the answer would have been “because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,” as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. “The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.” Gibson was referring to a Japan of trendy gadgets and services, such as high-tech cell phones and robot sushi bars, the flashy products of a hyper-consumer metropolis that inspired the creators of such films as “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.” But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the “normal” milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up. We don’t buy into Kondo’s life-changing magic just because we think Japan is cool; we also buy because our country is, in many ways, increasingly like Japan.

A cynic would point out that the life-changing Japanese magic of tidying up is a ploy to divest ourselves of all the Walkmans and Tamagotchis and other tchotchkes that Japan convinced us to buy in the first place. But Kondo didn’t write her books for us; they were the product of a training seminar, a sort of literary incubator, for the Japanese marketplace. And she is only the most internationally successful of many writing on the topic in Japan. Kondo’s first book appeared at the tail end of a fad for things danshari—a Buddhist term for tidying up that is written with the characters for refusal, disposal, and separation—that swept Japan in the aughts. The first salvoes in what might be called Japan’s “war on stuff” date back even earlier, to the first half of the nineteen-nineties. That is when the sudden crash of the Japanese real-estate and stock markets ushered in twenty years of stagnation so severe that the period is now known as the Lost Decades.

Amid the suffering economy and the collapse of social safety nets such as the promise of lifetime employment, younger Japanese lost the ambition for acquiring things that fuelled an earlier, more financially stable generation. Hiroshi Aoi, the president of the Marui Group, which operates Japan’s largest retail chain, was uniquely positioned to see how drastically consumers cut back. In an interview in 2016, he told me that the Lost Decades represented a “turning away from outward expressions of fashion.… The idea of personal fulfillment became the product, with things like foods, dining out, and leisure experiences rising to the forefront.” If this sounds familiar, it is because the same pattern is now repeating among America’s millennials. Some call it the “experience economy.” Others call it “post-materialism.” But this great turning inward in the face of economic uncertainty could just as accurately be called Japanization.

“Japanization” (and the related “Japanification”) is a term as loaded as it is fluid. During the dark colonial period of the nineteen-thirties and forties, it evoked yellow peril, conjuring images of Japanese imperial forces conquering their Asian neighbors and compelling them to adopt Japanese ways. By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Japanization had taken on a wholly different meaning: “the diffusion of Japanese management systems and practices” in non-Japanese organizations, as the researcher Barry Wilkinson put it, in a paper written with Jonathan Morris and Nick Oliver, “Japanizing the World: The Case of Toyota,” from 1992. Two decades later, the word took on a sinister pall once again, at least among economic pundits. “Few words strike greater fear in the hearts of economists and politicians,” William Pesek, the author of the book “Japanization” wrote. In that book, he defines the term as a “a noxious mix of trifling growth, high debt, falling consumer prices, waning confidence, and political dysfunction.” (Paul Krugman, of the Times, is a fan of the term, frequently invoking Japanification in his descriptions of slowing growth and ageing populations in the U.S., the E.U., and China.) (...)

Yet when the bubble burst, in 1990, plunging Japan into its Lost Decades, this marginalized community proved a resilient incubator of trends. Chief among these was the Pokémon video-game series, whose creator, Satoshi Tajiri, is a self-proclaimed otaku. (“Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one thing,” the then thirtysomething told Time in 1999: “Pokémon.”) That the geeky exports dreamed up by people like Tajiri retain their appeal today is a testament to the passions of their creators. But it’s also a testament to the fact that all of us now spend huge amounts of time the way they did: sitting in front of screens, rummaging through our own pop-culture databases, obsessing over our virtual identities while indulging in our own childlike pleasures, which range from the aughts fad for cupcakes to cosplay or the latest Marvel superhero flick. The resounding box office success of Steven Spielberg’s cross-cultural mash-up “Ready Player One” is only the most recent affirmation of a societal trend: we’re all otaku now. Japan was, once again, simply ahead of the curve.

by Matt Alt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Boczarski / Getty

The Magical Mystery Chord

You could call it the magical mystery chord. The opening clang of the Beatles' 1964 hit, "A Hard Day's Night," is one of the most famous and distinctive sounds in rock and roll history, and yet for a long time no one could quite figure out what it was. 

In this fascinating clip from the CBC radio show, Randy's Vinyl Tap, the legendary Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist Randy Bachman unravels the mystery. The segment is from a special live performance, "Guitarology 101," taped in front of an audience at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto back in January, 2010. As journalist Matthew McAndrew wrote, "the two-and-a-half hour event was as much an educational experience as it was a rock'n'roll concert." 

One highlight of the show was Bachman's telling of his visit the previous year with Giles Martin, son of Beatles' producer George Martin, at Abbey Road Studios. The younger Martin, who is now the official custodian of all the Beatles' recordings, told Bachman he could listen to anything he wanted from the massive archive--anything at all. Bachman chose to hear each track from the opening of "A Hard Day's Night." As it turns out, the sound is actually a combination of chords played simultaneously by George Harrison and John Lennon, along with a bass note by Paul McCartney. Bachman breaks it all down in an entertaining way in the audio clip above.

by YouTube

Pirate Radio Stations Explode on YouTube

Luke Pritchard and Jonny Laxton were 13 when they met at a boarding school in Crowthorne, England, in 2011. They bonded over a shared love of underground music and in 2014 started a YouTube channel, College Music, to promote the artists they liked.

At first, the channel grew slowly. Then, in the spring of 2016, Mr. Pritchard discovered 24/7 live-streaming, a feature that allows YouTube’s users to broadcast a single video continuously.

College Music had 794 subscribers in April 2015, a year before Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming. A month after they began, they had more than 18,440. In April 2016, they had 98,110 subscribers and as of last month, with three active live streams, they have more than triple that amount, with 334,000. They make about $5,000 a month from the streams.

The boys stumbled upon a new strategy, one that, in the past two years, has helped a certain kind of YouTube channel achieve widespread popularity. Hundreds of independently run channels have begun to stream music nonstop, with videos that combine playlists with hundreds of songs and short, looped animations, often taken from anime films without copyright permission.

Live streams come in many different genres. Two of College Music’s streams are part of a family of channels that broadcast what the broadcasters call lofi (low-fidelity) hip-hop, mellow music that would sound familiar to fans of J. Dilla and Nujabes.

Such videos, with subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands, are some of most popular continuously streaming music stations on the site. Many are run by young Europeans, who may have only a passing familiarity with the history of the music they are spreading.

And they don’t know why, but their users really do insist on the anime images.

The channels occupy a precarious space between YouTube’s algorithm and its copyright policing, drawing comparisons to the unlicensed pirate radio stations of the 20th century, recreated in the digital sphere. Many of the channels blink in and out of existence within a week, but their presence has become a compelling part of the site’s musical ecosystem. And while competitors like Spotify are gaining, YouTube still dominates the streaming world, according to the latest Music Consumer Insight Reportfrom the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

When Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming, they ran the channel from Mr. Pritchard’s dorm, which was right above the housemaster’s room.

Live streams like theirs succeed in part by exploiting user behavior. According to channel operators, YouTube users often click off a video after several minutes, before the clip has concluded. But users who listen to live streams tend to play them for a half-hour or more, often as background music. That boosts the videos’ retention rates, which compels YouTube to promote them more widely.

by Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:

Video: YouTube

Cable TV Double and Triple-Plays are Becoming Irrelevant

Last week, Comcast decided to exact some vengeance on internet subscribers who have abandoned its cable TV service.

While Comcast is providing significant internet speed boosts to its TV subscribers in certain markets (including Houston, Texas; Portland, Oregon; and southwestern Washington state), customers who have only internet service won’t get those upgrades. Given that Comcast has been raising internet prices with the justification that customers are getting more for their money, cord-cutters are effectively being punished with stagnant speeds.

The move probably won’t stop Comcast from bleeding TV subscribers—it lost 96,000 of them last quarter—but it does underscore how cable providers are becoming desperate to prop up the kind of double- and triple-play deals that were once a cornerstone of their business. While Comcast holds internet speeds for ransom, other companies are creating better service bundles outside the cable system, allowing cord-cutters to save money even after they lose the bundle discounts that cable once provided. [ Further reading: The best TV streaming services ]

Meet the new double play

Now that TV service is uncoupling itself from cable, wireless carriers are starting to step in with bundle deals that cater to cord-cutters.

Last year, for instance, AT&T started providing a $15-per-month discount on DirecTV Now service for customers with certain unlimited wireless data plans, knocking the base price of DirecTV Now down to just $20 per month. When AT&T launches a more limited version of its TV service for $15 per month later this year, wireless subscribers will get it for free. (That service could be more of a PR play by AT&T as it tries to acquire Time Warner, but that’s another story.)

Meanwhile, other wireless carriers have started assembling TV deals of their own. T-Mobile offers free Netflix (an $11-per-month value) for subscribers with unlimited data plans and at least two active lines, and briefly threw in a free year of MLB TV streaming (normally $116) when the baseball season began. Sprint’s unlimited plans include a free subscription to Hulu, which normally costs $8 per month.

Expect to see even more wireless double-play deals in the future, especially as carriers try to market their upcoming 5G wireless networks. T-Mobile has already announced plans to build its own TV service this year, fueled by an acquisition of IPTV startup Layer3 TV. Verizon has also been hinting at a TV offering, which it now says will launch later this year alongside its initial 5G network.

It’d be foolish to view wireless carriers as saviors—they’re often just as underhanded and anti-consumer as wired internet providers—but at least they’ve recognized that bundling their service with TV is a natural fit for a growing audience of cable TV defectors.
New kinds of bundles

Even if you don’t adopt a double play deal from a wireless carrier, there are an increasing number of ways to bundle and save outside of the cable TV world.

by Jared Newman, TechHive |  Read more:

Image: via

You Should Care About the Bank Exactly as Much as It Cares About You

David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years opens with the story of a conversation he had with a wealthy Londoner ostensibly interested in social justice. Graeber tells the Londoner about his work trying to ease the insane debt loads and anti-democratic restrictions that the masters of global finance use to control so-called developing countries and their governments. The Londoner’s response catches him off-guard: “Surely one has to pay one’s debts.”

Doesn’t one? Isn’t repaying your debts, i.e. fulfilling your promises, a basic moral principle? Well, no, not really. Graeber does a thorough takedown of this idea in the arena of sovereign debts, where the debt is often (literally) “owed” by a previously-colonized nation for the privilege of having been colonized. But Graeber shouldn’t have been surprised to hear this, even from someone well-versed in social causes. The idea that we are morally required to pay our debts is ubiquitous. People convicted of crimes have to pay a debt to society. We “owe” people “debts of gratitude.” Sometimes we even “owe” people our lives. Hell, even the Lannisters repay their debts.

And we’ve been judging people for failing to pay their debts probably since debts existed. We have specific words for people who don’t pay: they’re “deadbeats” or they’re “loafers.” Even the word “debtor” feels judgmental. What’s more, debtors’ prisons have a long and storied history, including in the US. And despite debtors’ prisons having been abolished, you can still find people going to jail just because they can’t pay back debt (including student loans). In short, lots of people firmly believe that paying back one’s debts is a moral requirement, and many people who can’t pay back their debts feel like bad people because of it.

We need to cut this out. It’s certainly not a moral failing to be unable to pay back your debts, nor is it a moral failing to choose not to pay back your debts. The people and institutions most responsible for pushing the idea that one must pay back one’s debts are, unsurprisingly, the lenders. And while the lenders are out moralizing about how their customers must pay or else they’re irresponsible deadbeats, corporations, including the lenders themselves, frequently refuse to pay money they owe even when they can afford to do so. That is, they really only fulfill their promises (debts and other contractual promises) when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. If it will cost them more to fulfill a promise than they will get out of it, they just don’t. This is common enough for there to be a term for it: strategic default. (Default is a fancy term for failing to fulfill your end of a contract. It usually applies to loans but really can be any contract.)

This double standard is infuriating but we can find real harm living behind this hypocrisy. Lots of people feel really bad when they can’t afford to pay back debts even though it is in no way their fault. And the shame and anguish associated with finding yourself trapped in debt doesn’t only prevent people from taking actions that are best for them as an individual, it also serves as a barrier to collective action against abusive creditors.

To understand strategic defaults, you need just a little bit of contract theory. I will try to make this painless. (What follows, all of it, is very much not legal advice. That should be obvious.)

The basic principle behind a contract is that some number of people decide to exchange promises. I promise to paint a portrait of your dog in a military uniform and you promise to pay me an exorbitant amount of money. You promise to give me enough money to buy a house and I promise to pay that money back to you over time, plus interest. Quid pro quo. This for that.

If you and I are very close friends and we trust each other then we probably won’t bother writing this down or even thinking about it as a “contract.” Instead, we make contracts because we’re not friends with and don’t trust everyone. Contracts are for if/when we disagree about something. And when we do disagree, what happens will depend on the contract itself, but also on the law surrounding it. No contract is an island. To understand just one contract you have to swallow the world, or at least the world of contract law. Like with laws in general, what’s written down in a contract only means something in the context of contract enforcement. If I don’t live up to my end of the deal, what are you going to do about it? If you go to court, what is the court going to do? This is what the contract is actually about. It’s the agreement, but it’s mostly how we interpret the agreement and what happens when things don’t go as planned. When things go awry, what can you take from me or what can I take from you? (...)

Defaults can happen for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they can’t be helped. If you give me a mortgage but I lose my job and can’t afford the payment, I will probably default. I don’t want to default, but I can’t really help it.

Sometimes, though, defaults are strategic. That is, sometimes I might decide that I’ll be better off by defaulting than I would be by doing what I agreed to do. This is the gist of strategic default, both the totally fine corporate kind and the shockingly immoral individual kind: even considering the worst thing that you can do to me if I default, I’m still better off defaulting. (...)

A particularly Byzantine (but fun!) recent example is the Hovnanian strategic default. Basically, a company called GSO made a bet that another company called Hovnanian would default on some of its debt (the bet took the form of credit default swaps). Rather than waiting around for this to happen, GSO decided to essentially pay Hovnanian to default on that debt. Goldman Sachs, who made the bet with GSO and is now down a lot of money on the deal, is very unhappy about this and of course there’s a lawsuit about it. It’s similar to another strategic default from a few years ago (also involving credit default swaps).

But, again, this is more complicated than it has to be. Companies often have incentives to default on their agreements. Economists think a lot about strategic defaults because economists think a lot about incentives and costs/benefits and effects on behavior. You can find some basically incomprehensible finance papers worrying that strategic defaults are making credit more expensive, and others worrying that companies need to strategically default more than they currently do. (Here’s Bloomberg’s Matt Levine making that latter paper at least a little bit more understandable.) The point is that corporate finance is complicated and everyone is always thinking about how they can squeeze a little more money out of a deal. Sometimes they do that by defaulting on an agreement. It’s just shrewd business, like corporate bankruptcy and tax avoidance. (...)

This morality vs. strategy double standard makes its race preferences particularly clear in bankruptcy. Recent journalism and academic studies show that whether a person gets the benefit of a post-bankruptcy fresh start largely depends on their race. Put simply, many bankruptcy attorneys—the people who are supposed to help their clients get a fresh start—steer black clients into more expensive bankruptcy plans that force them to pay more money to their lenders. ProPublica revealed this trend in a fantastic series on bankruptcy in the south.

There are two types of bankruptcy for most people: Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7 is faster and cheaper and wipes away most debts quickly, but doesn’t help when people have lots of assets or have problems with their mortgage. Chapter 13 takes three or five years and involves paying your lenders on payment plans over time. Chapter 13 only gets you out from under debt if you manage to make your payments for three or five years. Many people fail on these extended payment plans and end up worse off than they were before they filed bankruptcy. Chapter 13 also costs more in attorney fees.

ProPublica found that bankruptcy attorneys nationwide, but especially in the south, were far more likely to put their black clients into Chapter 13 plans and their white clients into Chapter 7 plans. One attorney, who filed mostly Chapter 13 for his mostly black clients but was twice as likely to file Chapter 7 for a white client than for a black client, explained: “A Chapter 13 shows people how to live without buying things for that 60-month plan,” and “[w]ith a Chapter 7, wham bam it’s over, and they’re back to the same old thing, the bad habits that got them in trouble to begin with,” and “[t]hey need to learn how to live not buying things on credit.”

These attitudes from a bankruptcy attorney are not anomalous. A study recounted in a disturbing 2012 paper sent surveys to bankruptcy attorneys across the country. The survey had short descriptions of client situations and asked the attorneys to recommend Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 based on the facts given. The surveys had identical facts, except that some clients were named Todd and Allison and went to United Methodist church (implicit signals that Todd and Allison are white), while others were named Reggie and Latisha and went to African Methodist Episcopal Church (implicit signals that Reggie and Latisha are African American). Despite having identical facts, bankruptcy attorneys recommended Chapter 13 to Reggie and Latisha around half the time (47%), and recommended Chapter 13 to Todd and Allison less than a third of the time (32%). Not only that, the attorneys considered Todd and Allison more competent if they wanted Chapter 7, but considered Reggie and Latisha more competent if they wanted Chapter 13. These results show that even bankruptcy attorneys, who are supposed to help people get the best financial results through a process set up to eliminate debt, nonetheless have implicit or explicit biases that black people ought to pay back more of their debt than white people—that black people should “learn how to live not buying things on credit” while white people should do what’s in their financial best interests. (...)

Contracts for loans are both priced for the risk of default and carry with them enforcement powers in case of default. What happens if I don’t pay is built into the transaction. The lender expects me at the beginning to do what’s best for me and prices my loan accordingly. Any future invocation of morality is, I think, hypocritical at best.

If we can get past the shame of stigma of having debt, and the judgment that comes with not paying it back, we might find some powerful options in terms of collective action. Being an individual debtor isn’t unlike being an individual employee or an individual renter. You yourself may be vulnerable and, to an extent, disposable to your employer or landlord or lender. But if you could unite with others and act as a group you would have more leverage.

This is not a secret in finance. There’s an oft-repeated saying: “If you owe the bank $100k, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100m, you own the bank.” It’s a variant on too-big-to-fail—the more of a lender’s business is tied up in you, the more the lender depends on your success to survive.

We can’t all go get loans big enough to own the bank, so to speak. But you could imagine a large-scale debt strike forcing loan modifications en masse, just like a job strike can force contract renegotiation and a rent strike can force lease modification. Like with employment and rent, the success of a debt strike would depend on what the lenders could do about it, i.e. the enforcement options. It would also need appropriate scale: a lender that deals with 10,000 non-strike defaults per year will not be especially put out by dealing with an additional 100 strikers.

Both enforcement and scale present problems for the recent attempts at federal student loan debt strikes. Federal student loans are about the most enforceable debts in existence—they have no statute of limitations and the feds can garnish your wages without going to court and you usually can’t escape them through bankruptcy. So defaulting doesn’t create as much leverage as it would with other debts where the lender might need to take you to court within a certain amount of time if they want to collect. And scale is also an obvious challenge. There are more than 40 million people with student loans and more than a million default every year. So a few dozen or even a few thousand victimized students refusing to pay their fraud-induced debt won’t create much actual leverage against the federal government. (That’s not to say these strikes are wholly ineffective. They managed to get decent publicity and called attention to the dual problems of for-profit schools peddling worthless degrees, and the federal government lending money to those schools’ victims and then aggressively collecting on it for decades.)

But you could imagine, for example, an online community of people with debt from deferred-interest credit cards. If a large number of customers of the same deferred-interest card decided that they were deceived about how the cards worked and they were going to refuse to pay, that might force the lender to the table. (This would function somewhat similarly to a class action lawsuit but may avoid the card’s inevitable rip-off clause.) If the lender still attempted to confront people individually, they could share information about tactics and offers. It would also create a source of information for regulators or attorneys or researchers who want to find out how the cards were actually sold and marketed. There would be an already-convened group of people willing to share their experiences. (The CFPB’s consumer complaint database serves as a valuable research tool now but it doesn’t connect people with each other and doesn’t provide any identifying information so there’s no organizing potential. And the CFPB’s banker-friendly current leadership wants to close it to the public.)

by K.M. Lautrec, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Can You Overdose on Happiness?

The science and philosophy of deep brain stimulation.

It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy Is Too Happy?”

Yet there it was in a publication from 2012. The article was written by two Germans and an American, and they were grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feeling of happiness through brain stimulation. If you have direct access to the reward system and can turn the feeling of euphoria up or down, who decides what the level should be? The doctors or the person whose brain is on the line?

The authors were asking this question because of a patient who wanted to decide the matter for himself: a 33-year-old German man who had been suffering for many years from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety syndrome. A few years earlier, the doctors had implanted electrodes in a central part of his reward system—namely, the nucleus accumbens. The stimulation had worked rather well on his symptoms, but now it was time to change the stimulator battery. This demanded a small surgical procedure since the stimulator was nestled under the skin just below the clavicle. The bulge in the shape of a small rounded Zippo lighter with the top off had to be opened. The patient went to the emergency room at a hospital in Tübingen to get everything fixed. There, they called in a neurologist named Matthis Synofzik to set the stimulator in a way that optimized its parameters. The two worked keenly on the task, and Synofzik experimented with settings from 1 to 5 volts. At each setting, he asked the patient to describe his feeling of well-being, his anxiety level, and his feeling of inner tension. The patient replied on a scale from 1 to 10.

The two began with a single volt. Not much happened. The patient’s well-being or “happiness level” was around 2, while his anxiety was up at 8. With a single volt more, the happiness level crawled up to 3, and his anxiety fell to 6. That was better but still nothing to write home about. At 4 volts, on the other hand, the picture was entirely different. The patient now described a feeling of happiness all the way up to the maximum of 10 and a total absence of anxiety.

“It’s like being high on drugs,” he told Synofzik, and a huge smile suddenly spread across his face, where before there had been a hangdog look. The neurologist turned up the voltage one more notch for the sake of the experiment, but at 5 volts the patient said that the feeling was “fantastic but a bit too much.” He had a feeling of ecstasy that was almost out of control, which made his sense of anxiety shoot up to 7.

The two agreed to set the stimulator at 3 volts. This seemed to be an acceptable compromise in which the patient was pretty much at the “normal” level with respect to both happiness and anxiety. At the same time, it was a voltage that would not exhaust the $5,000 battery too quickly. All well and good.

But the next day when the patient was to be discharged, he went to Synofzik and asked whether they might not turn the voltage up anyway before he went home. He felt fine, but he also felt that he needed to be a “little happier” in the weeks to come.

The neurologist refused. He gave the patient a little lecture on why it might not be healthy to walk around in a state of permanent rapture. There were indications that a person should leave room for natural mood swings both ways. The positive events you encounter should be able to be experienced as such. The patient finally gave in and went home in his median state with an agreement to return for regular checkups.

“It is clear that doctors are not obligated to set parameters beyond established therapeutic levels just because the patient wants it,” Synofzik and his two colleagues wrote in their article. After all, patients “don’t decide how to calibrate a heart pacemaker.”

That’s true, but there is a difference. Few laymen understand how to regulate heartbeat, but everyone is an expert on his or her own disposition. Why not allow patients to set their own moods to suit their own circumstances and desires?

Yeah, well, the three researchers reflected, it may well come to that—sometime in the future, that is—people will demand deep brain stimulation purely as a means for mental improvement. (...)

Questions of pleasure and desire go right to the core of what being a human in the world is all about. The ability to stimulate selected functional circuits in the brain purposefully and precisely raises some fundamental questions for us.

What is happiness? What is a good life?

Hedonia. There is something about this word. It rolls across the tongue like walking on a red carpet and leaves a pleasant sensation behind. Hedonia might well have been the name of the Garden of Eden before the serpent made its malicious offer of wisdom and insight. And more than anything else, hedonism has become the watchword for how we should live.

The absence of joy and pleasure—anhedonia—has, in its way, become a popular issue in the wake of the disease depression. A quarter of us are affected by it over the course of a lifetime, various studies suggest, and its frequency is increasing in the industrialized world. The treatment of depression has become both a window display and a battleground for deep brain stimulation.

It was with the American neurologist Helen Mayberg and the Canadian surgeon Andres Lozano that the method got its breakthrough in psychiatry. It struck a sweet spot in the media when, in 2005, the two published the first study of deep brain stimulation for the treatment of severe chronic depression—the kind of depression, mind you, that does not respond to anything—not medicine, not combinations of medicine and psychotherapy, not electric shock. Yet suddenly, there were six patients on whom everyone had given up who got better.

At once, Helen Mayberg became a star and was introduced at conferences as “the woman who revived psychosurgery.” Later, others jumped on the bandwagon, and now they are fighting about exactly where in the brain depressed patients should be stimulated. It is not just a skirmish between large egos but a feud about what depression really is. Is it at its core a psychic pain or, rather, an inability to feel pleasure? (...)

Mayberg focused on a little area of the cerebral cortex with a gnarly name, the area subgenualis or Brodmann area 25. It is the size of the outermost joint of an index finger, located near the base of the brain almost exactly behind the eye sockets. Here, it is connected to not only other parts of the cortex but to areas all over the brain—specifically, parts of the reward system and of the limbic system. That system is a collection of structures surrounding the thalamus encompassing such major players as the amygdala and the hippocampus and often referred to as the “emotional brain.” All in all they are brain regions involved with our motivation, our experience of fear, our learning abilities and memory, libido, regulation of sleep, appetite—everything that is a affected when you are clinically depressed.

“Area twenty-five proved to be smaller in depressed patients,” Mayberg relates, adding that it also looked as though it were hyperactive. “At any rate, we could see that a treatment that worked for the depression also diminishes activity in area twenty-five.”

At the same time, it was an area of the brain that we all activated when we thought of something sad, and the feeling that area 25 was a sort of “depression central” grew and grew as the studies multiplied. Mayberg was convinced that this must be the key—not just for understanding depression but also for treating those for whom nothing else worked. This small, tough core of patients who had not only fallen into a deep, black pit but were incapable of getting out again. These were the chronically ill for whom nothing helped, the kind of depressive patients who often wound up taking their own lives; it was this type of patient that, 50 years ago, were warehoused in state hospitals.

If only Mayberg could reach into their area 25!

by Lone Frank, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Pasieka / Getty Images

Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

Amazon.com Inc. is offering to pass along the discounts it gets on credit-card fees to other retailers if they use its online payments service, according to people with knowledge of the matter, in a new threat to PayPal Holdings Inc. and card-issuing banks.

The move shows Amazon is willing to sacrifice the profitability of its payments system to spread its use. Swipe fees are a $90 billion-a-year business for lenders such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., networks including Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., and payment processors like First Data Corp. and Stripe Inc., which pocket a fraction of every sale when shoppers swipe cards or click “buy now.”

The financial industry’s fees amount to about 2 percent of a typical credit-card transaction, or 24 cents for debit. But big stores such as Amazon and Walmart Inc. have long been able to negotiate lower rates for themselves based on their massive sales volume. Now, Amazon is offering to pass its discount along to at least some smaller merchants if they agree to embrace its Amazon Pay service, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to discuss the plan publicly.

Shares of PayPal dropped 4.1 percent Wednesday, the most since Feb. 8. Mobile payments company Square Inc. erased most of its 3.7 percent gain from earlier in the day, leaving the stock up less than 1 percent. Visa fell 0.9 percent. (...)

Previously, online merchants using Amazon’s service have paid about 2.9 percent of each credit-card transaction plus 30 cents, which is divvied up among Amazon, card issuers and payment networks. As part of its experiment, Amazon is offering to negotiate lower fees with merchants making long-term commitments to use the service, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Amazon is able to export the rates it has negotiated with banks and payment networks because, like PayPal, it’s acting as a so-called payments facilitator. That means it aggregates smaller merchants to help them reduce the cost of accepting electronic payments.

Gaining Traction

Amazon Pay, which has attracted more than 30 million users since the company revived it in 2013, lets online shoppers log into their Amazon accounts from other websites, enabling them to complete the transaction using credit cards and delivery addresses already stored rather than having to enter them again. For Amazon, that means drawing additional revenue from e-commerce sales on other sites.

The service mostly appeals to smaller merchants who benefit from the trust shoppers place in Amazon, as well as minimizing the data entry required to complete a mobile transaction. Customers include Gogo Inc., which provides in-flight internet access.

Merchants aren’t eager, however, to share too much information with Amazon, which may compete with them to sell similar products on its own site. Amazon dominates the U.S. e-commerce market, with 43.5 percent of all sales in 2017, according to EMarketer Inc. PayPal has emphasized its status as a non-retail competitor to differentiate itself. (...)

Single Button

Amazon’s move is part of an escalating battle in the U.S. between traditional financial firms and technology giants to develop a dominant digital payments system -- akin to what Jack Ma’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay have achieved in China.

Last month, Visa and Mastercard said they’re teaming up on their own combined online checkout button, abandoning their separate Visa Checkout and Masterpass initiatives. For its part, Visa is betting there will be just one button at the online checkout in the future, Chief Executive Officer Al Kelly said on a conference call with analysts last month.

The networks’ joint effort has been seen as a challenge to Amazon Pay, as well as to PayPal, which is considered the U.S. leader in digital wallets with 237 million global accounts.

“There’s way too much clutter in the e-commerce checkout environment, and it’s just not good for users, and it’s not good for merchants,” Kelly said. The ultimate future, he said, is “a single button, which is much more analogous to the situation that you see in the physical world where there’s a single terminal and all products run through that terminal.”

by Jennifer Surane and Spencer Soper, Bloomberg | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. The Borg just keeps getting bigger. See also: Jeff Bezos doesn’t care if you think Amazon is too powerful. (Recode)]

via:
[ed. See also: Life's Swell]

The Three Stooges
via:

Wall Street's Ridiculous Freakout Over Treasuries

The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries has hit 3 percent. The end is nigh.

When this threshold was crossed Tuesday, the financial world went into paroxysms. Headlines lit up, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged as much as 600 points, before recovering to close down 424 points. "The 3 percent level is a big psychological point for investors and has gained huge focus," the head of equities at London and Capital told CNBC.

But if your own reaction was a mixture of "huh?" and "what?" don't worry: You're the reasonable one. Wall Street's freakout over this is completely uncalled for.

But first, let's back up. What's the yield on a 10-year Treasury anyway?

A Treasury is just a U.S. government bond: You buy it from the government in exchange for interest payments at a set rate over time, and then eventually the bond matures and the government pays you back the principal. Other investors can also buy the bond from you, and then they lay claim to the interest payments and the eventual principal repayment. Different types of bonds mature over various time spans, but the 10-Year Treasury is probably the most widely used in financial markets.

The yield itself is just the return an investor can expect from buying the bond. It's a function of the bond's price and its interest rate. Holding the price constant, the yield goes up when the interest rate goes up, and the yield goes down when the interest rate goes down. Holding the interest rate constant, the price operates inversely: As the price increases, the yield falls. As the price decreases, the yield rises.

A few things can push the yield up.

If the Federal Reserve is worried about inflation, for instance, it may dial up interest rates on borrowing throughout the economy. In that case, the government will need to offer a higher interest rate to keep attracting investors. Slowly but surely, the Fed has been doing just that.

Investors also look to government bonds as safe places to store their cash. But as the economy picks up, and more investment opportunities arise elsewhere, investors' demand for Treasuries falls relative to the supply. That drives the price down and the yield up. Demand could also fall relative to supply if the supply of bonds increases — like when the government decides it's going to ramp up its deficit spending. Which it recently did.

All of this has led to an uptick in Treasury yields.

Now, why is Wall Street's panic overblown?

To begin with, here's the 10-Year Treasury yield since 1990. The recent rise to 3 percent is that little twitch in the bottom right corner.

The last time 10-year Treasury yields were as high as 3 percent was all the way back in ... 2014. Prior to 2008, they were always above 3 percent. The economy has gone through plenty of periods of strong growth before, with bond yields and interest rates in general significantly higher than they are now. The financial industry, and certainly the financial media, seems to just perpetually forget that the economy existed and functioned just fine prior to whatever conditions held over the last few years. Hence the latest panic.

Like I said, rising Treasury yields could also signal rising inflation. That could make investors nervous. But also consider the baseline that inflation would be rising from. We haven't even been able to hit the Fed's 2 percent target, much less exceed it, in years.

A third issue that could be worrying investors is the debt. If the supply of bonds is outpacing demand, does that mean the U.S. government could run out of lenders? Except many people forget the federal government controls the currency and can create all the money it wants to meet its debt obligations. The price of its bonds may fluctuate, but it will never run out of buyers or suffer a debt crisis.

Finally, while the economy can certainly operate at higher interest rates, the other concern could be the Fed: that it will hike interest rates too fast, before the economy is strong enough to shoulder them. Of course, that isn't a fear about economic conditions so much as a fear the Fed will make a bad policy choice. But while I think the Fed is hiking too fast already, it's not going wildly overboard. And its reactions to incoming inflation data seem pretty sober.

But there's one other factor worth mentioning as well.

The post-2008 period was something of a sweet spot for Wall Street. The economy has been sluggish, meaning inflation and interest rates have been low. Yet at the same time, business profits have been exceedingly large. That's a weird combination that textbook economics says isn't supposed to happen. A sluggish economy should deliver poor profits. But high profits combined with low interest rates and low inflation equals an absolute bonanza for the financial industry. And the upward trajectory of Treasury yields may signal the bonanza is coming to an end.

by Jeff Spross, The Week |  Read more:

Image: Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System

Top Colleges Are Teaching Students to Prioritize Happiness - Not Money and Power

It takes a lot of hard work to get into places like Yale and Stanford. But once students make it to the Ivy League, many find that while they’re ready to tackle Shakespeare and comparative political systems, they’re lost when it comes to building emotionally rich, and balanced lives.

To that end, a growing number of top universities are offering courses that aim to put students on the happiness track. A week after Yale opened registration for its debut course “Psychology and the Good Life” this January, a quarter of the undergraduate population—more than 1,180 students—had signed up, making it the most popular course ever at the university. Meanwhile, one in six undergraduates at Stanford take a course that teaches students to apply design thinking to the “wicked problem” of creating fulfilling lives and careers. And at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, students have flocked to “Lessons of Community and Compassion,” a course on social connectedness and belonging—precisely the things they may have sacrificed to get into one of Canada’s top institutions.

“I think students are looking for meaning,” Peter Salovey, president of Yale, told Quartz at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Salovey, an early pioneer in research on emotional intelligence, says that while students today are more sophisticated and worldly than previous generations, they seem to be much less resilient. Their sense of vulnerability is driving them to search for purpose, in academic courses and beyond. (...)

Mental health issues among young adults are on the rise at universities around the world. “I was really surprised at the levels of anxiety and depression students face,” Santos says. A 2013 report by the Yale College Council found that more than half of undergraduates sought mental health services during their time on campus. A 2009 survey of 80,121 students, conducted by the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment, showed that 39% of college students felt hopeless during the school year, and 25% felt so depressed they found it hard to function. Nearly half (47%) reported feeling overwhelming anxiety, and 84% said they felt generally overwhelmed by all they have to do.

Teaching students how to be happier isn’t just about helping them as individuals—it can also be about helping them be better citizens. In the course “Lessons of Community and Compassion: Overcoming Social Isolation and Building Social Connectedness through Policy and Program Development,” McGill University professor of practice Kim Samuel introduces students to some of the most socially isolated people on the planet—refugees and migrants, indigenous communities, families struggling with food insecurity; the displaced, disabled, and disconnected. One of the goals of her course, she says, is to teach students what it feels like to have a sense of safety and community in their own lives, so that they can help build connectedness in more disadvantaged populations. “All students have experienced some degree of social isolation in their lives,” she says, “and that recognition is the royal road to reciprocity.”

“We’re adding the ‘life’ component explicitly back to the college experience.” Many of her students say it’s a life-altering experience. Jeremy Monk, who took Samuel’s course and is now a graduate student at Columbia University, says, “I think a lot of us down the road, when we look back on where we started … this is going to be the place that we started, and where our ideas started to blossom, and where we really were given the chance to feel like we can make a difference and we are the leaders of change.”

Stanford’s “Designing Your Life” course, meanwhile, is taught by Bill Burnett, head of Stanford’s design program, and Dave Evans, who led the design of Apple’s first mouse and co-founded the gaming company Electronic Arts before becoming a lecturer in the design program.

Evans says everyone is trying to answer the question posed by poet Mary Oliver: “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” “None of us got the manual explaining how to figure out the answer,” he adds. Soon-to-be graduates are facing that question with immediacy, and under pressure. “They’ve been wonderfully trained to get into and attend schools for 22 years—but not how to live in the world and to determine what “a life” means to them,” Evans says. He notes that being good at school is not the same thing as being good at life.

The Stanford courses have been such a success that the university’s Life Design Lab, co-founded by Evans and Burnett, now helps other colleges and universities to develop their own versions of the program. Evans says similar courses are now being taught at Northwestern, University of Vermont, Dartmouth, University of Michigan and MIT. “We’re adding the ‘life’ component explicitly back to the college experience,” Evans says. “It’s attractive because the need is great, the priority is high, and there’s little offered to help.”

The pursuit of happiness is, of course, hardly a new development. “Plato was talking about this,” Santo says. Scores of people have bought best-selling books on achieving happiness, from Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project to Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. And as the New York Times notes, courses on positive psychology are a popular draw for college students; 900 students enrolled in a Harvard lecture titled Positive Psychology in 2006.

What’s new is the growing body of scientific research on what actually makes people happy—and a sense from universities that today’s undergraduates are particularly in need of guidance.

by Jenny Anderson, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Jessica Hill

How Much Money Can You Make With Google AdSense?

When you are building a website and want to make money from it, one of the first questions you are likely to ask is "How much money can you make with Google AdSense?" It is a fair question because honestly, that number can change based on a lot of factors.

How much traffic does your site have? What type of ads will Google run on your site? How much money are advertisers willing to pay per click?

It is important that you ask those questions. A lot of people just hear about the success stories of other people making money on the internet and think that it is easy and anybody can do it. The reality is you can make as much money with Google AdSense as you are willing to put effort in. It's not easy money, it takes work and skill, just like anything else in life.

The Key Factors In Making Money With Google AdSense

There are many factors you need to consider when trying to estimate how much money you can make with AdSense. The most obvious factors people look at are traffic and estimated cost per click. What you might not consider is ad placement and ad design/type. Also, you now have to consider your audience's device in your AdSense ad strategy. If you aren't looking at all the factors, you are leaving money on the table.

Website Traffic and Pageviews

The only way you are going to make money with advertising on the internet is if you have an audience. You need people to visit your website and in the case of Google AdSense, some small portion of those people need to click on your ads. If nobody clicks your ads, then you aren't going to make money. That's just the way it is.

On average anywhere from 1-10% of your visitors might click on an ad, so just to be safe assume some low number like 1%. To calculate how much your ads are worth, you can take the cost per click and multiply it by the number of clicks you can expect to get based on your traffic. So, if you have 100 page views and a click through rate of 1%, you will get 1 click on average. If your CPC (cost per click) is $1, then you might make $1 per 100 page views. The same formula is used to determine CPM, which is the cost per 1,000 ad views. In the case of the above estimate, you are looking at a CPM of $10.

Now, given an average CPM, it becomes pretty obvious how traffic impacts how much money you can make with Google AdSense. At $10 CPM, you need 10,000 pageviews to make $100. Next time you see a picture of someone holding up an AdSense check, think about how much traffic they needed to make that money. For many people, it is not possible to get that much traffic.

The question for you is, how much traffic do you think you can get to your website? How much are you already getting? Traffic is going to play a big role in how much money you can make from Google AdSense.

How Much Will Advertisers Pay?

You have to look at the cost per click, or CPC, numbers to get an idea of how much advertisers are willing to pay. It is as simple as that. If you are writing about a topic that advertisers aren't buying ads for, you aren't going to get paid much. For example, say you write a lot about something without a lot of advertisers like "white snow in the north pole". There are no advertisers trying to sell products or services in the north pole really. If there are advertisers, they aren't paying much because there is no competition. That means the CPC will be very low for your ads.

Imagine instead you write a lot about "diamond engagement rings". Guess what? There are a lot of businesses that want to sell diamond engagement rings because they sell for a lot of money and have a good markup. Think about every mall you go shop in or when you watch television for a while. There are tons of jewelry stores that want to sell diamond engagement rings. They all pay a fortune in advertising to get people to buy their products. On the internet, that high level of advertising spend and competition means you are going to see a higher CPC for the ads you run on your site. That means each click is worth more and you will make more.

by Market Interactive |  Read more:

Image:Google
[ed. From 2014, but I'm sure the metrics are about the same. Don't worry, just curious. Duck Soup is ad free and will always stay that way.]

Hog Waste Is Becoming A Streamlined Fuel Source

In late March, a project in eastern North Carolina revealed the potential to turn every hog farm in the state into a source of renewable natural gas, or what's known as swine biogas.

Biogas typically refers to methane created by the breakdown of organic matter. It can be made from food scraps, decomposing plants and animal waste. Swine biogas is methane that comes from hog waste.

Most people think the purpose of biogas is to create green fuel, but that's actually the byproduct. The main purpose of creating biogas is to destroy methane and earn valuable carbon offset credits — methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The Optima KV Project has the potential to do both — destroy methane and create enough renewable natural gas to power the equivalent of 1,000 homes for a year.

Currently, hog farms that make biogas also turn it into electricity onsite using a microturbine — think of a gasoline generator. This means a hog farmer oversees every step of the process.

The Optima KV Project does for swine biogas what Henry Ford did for the auto industry. It streamlines production by getting rid of individual microturbines at each farm. Instead, it funnels the biogas from five Duplin County hog farms into a pipeline that feeds into a nearby Duke Energy power plant. This is what's known in the industry as "directed biogas."

"I just think that makes a lot more sense," said Randy Wheeless, a spokesman for Duke Energy. "That's because the process of turning the gas into electricity will happen at a major power plant with higher efficiency and better emission controls."

Duke Energy is purchasing the Optima project's swine biogas to meet a state-required mandate that 0.2 percent of energy come from hog waste by 2023. This project is getting the state close to meeting that mandate for the first time.

Another biowaste production facility, the Carbon Cycle Project, was slated to come online this summer, but people familiar with the company say it's been delayed. The Denver-based company, Carbon Cycle Energy, expects its project in Duplin County will produce enough electricity to power 32,000 homes annually. About a quarter of that energy will come from swine waste.

Duke University's emissions goal

A 2013 Duke University study found the directed biogas approach could lower the cost of swine biogas to as little as 5 cents a kilowatt hour, which is roughly the same price as solar power.

And there's a reason Duke University is interested in lowering the price of renewable natural gas. It has a goal of bringing all its emissions to zero by 2024. And while solar and wind energy can get Duke most of the way there, it's not enough.

The university still needs a combustible fuel source to turn water into steam in its massive boiler plant. That steam creates heat for buildings on campus year-round. The plan is to convert the boilers from burning natural gas to burning swine biogas.

"That means we would be able to run the campus on a renewable energy source," said Tanja Vujic, director of biogas strategy at Duke University. "And we would get credit for destroying methane that's coming off those lagoons."

In 2010, Duke University partnered with Google to pilot a system for turning hog excrement into electricity. This system is still running at Loyd Ray Farm in Yadkinville, hundreds of miles west of where most of the state's hogs live.

The purpose of the system was for Duke and Google to earn carbon credits to offset their carbon footprint as they transition to more renewable energy sources. The two could have gotten credits for capturing the methane and burning it (known as flaring), but Duke saw potential for swine biogas in a state with roughly 9 million hogs — each producing 10 times as much waste as a human.

by James Morrison, NPR |  Read more:

Image: James Morrison/WUNC

photo: markk

Cakewalk Returns, Now Available for Free

Cakewalk—a music software brand most known for its SONAR DAW—has been reopened by BandLab, a group of Singapore-based music-focused brands. According to a BandLab press release, the software will now be free.

Before it was acquired by Gibson Brands in 2013, Cakewalk had been one of the most enduring DAW—digital audio workstation—developers in the industry. Last November though, Gibson announced that it was closing Cakewalk, and ending the development and production of its products.

Last month, BandLab acquired all of Cakewalk’s IP and certain assets from Gibson Brands. The company said that the relaunched software—now called Cakewalk by BandLab—will include all the core premium features of SONAR Platinum.

The Windows version of Cakewalk by BandLab is available to download now, straight from BandLab's website.

by Guitar World |  Read more:

[ed. But the instruction manual costs $200 bucks. Just kidding.]