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Reserve Bank economist considered asking private firms to hide data about slumping property prices (abc.net.au)

submitted by marketrent to r/Economics - pinned

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S&P Global Ratings warns Australia’s credit ratings are at risk if disasters persist (17 Jan. 2023) (theaustralian.com.au)

submitted by marketrent to r/Economics - pinned

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Foreign investment in Australia: Australian big business is not Australian at all (apo.org.au)

submitted by marketrent to r/Economics - pinned

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Australia central bank stuck with smaller hike as wary of falling house prices (reuters.com)

submitted by marketrent to r/Economics - pinned

People who appear to be dependent on alcohol at any age from 17 to 22 were more likely than their peers to have depression by their mid-20s by marketrent in science

[–]marketrent[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Findings by Hammerton and Lewis et al. suggest signs that public health interventions could target.1,2

Dr Gemma Hammerton, Research Fellow at Bristol Medical School: Population Health Sciences (PHS) and co-lead author, said: “While we found that alcohol consumption alone did not appear to increase the probability of depression, heavy drinking can be a precursor to dependence, and can have harmful physical health impacts in the longer term as well.

High frequency and quantity of alcohol consumption therefore remain important as targets to prevent or reduce during adolescence.

The study involved 3,902 people who are part of the Children of the 90s birth cohort study (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children - ALSPAC), a longitudinal cohort of parents and their children born in the southwest of England in 1991 and 1992, who have been surveyed at regular intervals.

 

Alcohol dependence signs include an inability to stop drinking, failure to meet normal expectations due to drinking, and feeling a need to drink after a heavy session, as well as harmful effects such as drink-related memory loss.

The researchers found that people who appeared to be dependent on alcohol at age 18 (or at any age from 17 to 22) were more likely than their peers to have depression at age 24.

This relationship remained after they adjusted for potential confounding factors such as substance use and depressive symptoms at age 16, suggesting that there may be a causal relationship between alcohol dependence and subsequent depression that is not explained by poor overall mental health in adolescence.

1 University of Bristol (1 June 2023), Alcohol dependency in adolescence, but not consumption, linked with later depression risk”, https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2023/june/alcohol-and-depression-in-young-adults-study.html

2 Hammerton and Lewis et al. (2023) The association of alcohol dependence and consumption during adolescence with depression in young adulthood, in England: a prospective cohort study. The Lancet Psychiatry. Published online ahead of print: 1 June 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(23)00138-4

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People who appear to be dependent on alcohol at any age from 17 to 22 were more likely than their peers to have depression by their mid-20s (bristol.ac.uk)

submitted by marketrent to r/science

The junkiest junk bonds feel the pain of economic decline — Lowest-rated company debt slumped by the most in eight months by marketrent in finance

[–]marketrent[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

On high-yield corporate bonds:1

Debt from companies rated CCC — the lowest tier of junk — fell by the most in eight months in May, led by a 23% plunge in Chinese bonds.

It’s expected to remain under pressure from rising interest costs, declining earnings and dwindling access to capital as the economies of Europe, China and the US sputter.

For most of this year, the riskiest debt outperformed as investors snapped up the bonds — which tumbled in 2022 — betting that central banks would swiftly win the war on inflation.

But US Federal Reserve and ECB officials maintain rates will stay high for longer, and Friday’s strong US payrolls data support a more hawkish stance.

 

Tighter monetary policy boosts funding costs, which hits the weakest borrowers hardest. It also puts pressure on consumers and the economy at large, undermining revenue across the board.

High-grade investors are also moving to safer bonds, dumping debt rated BBB which is most exposed to rating downgrades.

Bonds in the lowest rating category are most likely to miss debt payments and end up filing for bankruptcy.

Fitch Ratings recently increased its default rate forecast for this year to as high as 5% for US junk, citing tighter lending conditions and reduced access to capital amid banking industry turmoil.

1 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-03/junkiest-junk-bonds-feel-pain-of-economic-decline-credit-weekly

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The junkiest junk bonds feel the pain of economic decline — Lowest-rated company debt slumped by the most in eight months (bloomberg.com)

submitted by marketrent to r/finance

Out of the office, into a financial crisis? — Remote work has left office buildings emptier. What does that mean for the banks that finance them? by marketrent in Economics

[–]marketrent[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Excerpt:1

In surveys, workers place a high value on many aspects of being able to work from home, including escaping the daily commute.

A 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper found that workers saved an average of 72 minutes each day they worked from home by skipping their commutes.

In the tight labor market that followed the initial lockdown period, many employers offered remote work opportunities to attract a larger pool of job applicants.

The persistence of hybrid work has left many wondering about the future of offices. With workers coming in less often, some companies have decided that they need less space than they did before the pandemic.

What this downsizing means for the commercial real estate (CRE) sector as well as the broader financial system has become the focus of market watchers attempting to predict where the next crisis could emerge.

 

As the labor market softens in some sectors, particularly tech, some employers are realizing that jobs that can be done fully remote by Americans could also be filled by remote workers in other countries for less.

Others have started to increase the number of days that employees are expected to appear in person at the office. The Walt Disney Co. is asking its workers to come in four days a week, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. recently told its senior managers that they would need to be in the office all five days.

And some employers, such as New York-based law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, have warned employees who fail to follow in-person requirements that they will see their bonuses cut.

 

In the early stages of the pandemic, some also raised the possibility that abandoned offices could be converted to residential use, helping to solve the long-standing shortage of affordable housing in many cities. (See "Has the Pandemic Changed Cities Forever?" Econ Focus, First Quarter 2021.)

This turns out to be far from straightforward. The layout of the typical office building is very different from the typical apartment when it comes to things like plumbing and window placement.

In many cases, zoning would also need to be changed to allow for residential construction in offices.

And lastly, most commercial properties are significantly more valuable than multifamily apartments, so the price of an office building would need to fall precipitously before such a conversion looked financially attractive.

1 Tim Sablik, “Out of the office, into a financial crisis?”, Econ Focus, Second Quarter 2023, https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2023/q2_feature1

2 Cevat Giray Aksoy et al. Time savings when working from home. NBER Working Paper No. 30866, January 2023. http://www.nber.org/papers/w30866

3 Tim Sablik, “Has the pandemic changed cities forever?”, Econ Focus, First Quarter 2021, https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2021/q1/feature1

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Out of the office, into a financial crisis? — Remote work has left office buildings emptier. What does that mean for the banks that finance them? (richmondfed.org)

submitted by marketrent to r/Economics

AI threat will motivate workers to return to the office, says PwC chair — Kevin Ellis, chairman of PwC, said workers will abandon WFH so they can 'differentiate themselves from a robot' by marketrent in technology

[–]marketrent[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

somthingsomthing9

Boom done.

Telegraph’s Max Stephens is reporting comments made by PwC’s Kevin Ellis during “a livestream event on AI technology for 25,000 of his staff”.

UK lecturers face devastating salary deductions in marking boycott by marketrent in unitedkingdom

[–]marketrent[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

Some universities respond to boycott action by deducting pay.1

University workers who belong to the University and College Union (UCU) started a Marking and Assessment Boycott on 20th April 2023 to protest against “casualisation” in the sector: essentially, jobs becoming far less secure.

This means that all summative marking has stopped in the 145 universities participating across the UK – i.e. the marking that leads to final module grades and, for final year students, the possibility of graduation in September.

In response, some universities have threatened to dock between 20-100% of people’s salaries.

These projected penalties are being applied in different ways across the sector. Some workers face losing as much as a full month of pay, whilst others risk losing a few days or weeks of pay.

 

Dr Ben White, who is on a fixed-term contract, has had over £1,500 docked from his wages for taking part in the marking boycott.

He told Byline Times: “[Managers] have chosen to treat the boycott of marking and assessment, which in most cases constitutes no more than 10-20% of our workload, as though it were all-out strike action, and have deducted 100% of our pay for participation in the marking boycott.

Support has also been forthcoming from student organisations. A member of the student group Liberate KCL told Byline Times: “Management’s threat to steal 50 per cent of our teachers’ wages for taking lawful industrial action is unthinkably cruel during a cost of living crisis.

“Students and staff are at a breaking point; rising fees and rent have gone hand in hand with the decimation of our teachers’ working conditions and wages.”

1 Antonia Dawes (1 June 2023), “UK lecturers face devastating salary deductions in marking boycott”, https://bylinetimes.com/2023/06/01/uk-lecturers-face-devastating-salary-deductions-in-marking-boycott-academics-speak-out/

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UK lecturers face devastating salary deductions in marking boycott (bylinetimes.com)

submitted by marketrent to r/unitedkingdom

AI threat will motivate workers to return to the office, says PwC chair — Kevin Ellis, chairman of PwC, said workers will abandon WFH so they can 'differentiate themselves from a robot' by marketrent in technology

[–]marketrent[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

UK thought leader suggests that people cannot differentiate WFH employees “from a robot”.1

Kevin Ellis, chairman of PwC, said the popularity of AI software will drive employees to abandon working from home as they want to “differentiate themselves from a robot”.

He added: “The latest wave of AI will likely bring people back to the office. People are going to want to learn from others face to face, and the best way a human can differentiate themselves from a robot is in person.”

Analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics has found that more than 40 per cent of civil servants are still working primarily from home, the Times newspaper reported.

Chief executives including leaders at Disney and Apple have cited the creative power of office work when ordering staff back to the office.

While many workers have returned part-time, the average person working in London currently spends just 2.3 days in the office – primarily on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Those following this schedule have been dubbed “TWaTs”, using the first letters of the days of the week for the abbreviation.

1 Max Stephens (29 May 2023), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/29/wfh-artificial-intelligence-motivate-office-return-pwc/

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AI threat will motivate workers to return to the office, says PwC chair — Kevin Ellis, chairman of PwC, said workers will abandon WFH so they can 'differentiate themselves from a robot' (telegraph.co.uk)

submitted by marketrent to r/technology

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ — The visionary author on the limits of AI, the uses of science fiction by marketrent in technology

[–]marketrent[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Especially when a lot of google engineers and officers keep saying that the AI is actually conscious and that the equation for emotions and consciousness is not so complicated to apply with parameters.

Could you cite a source that shows “a lot of google engineers and officers” say this?

Ulysses in 80 days by marketrent in literature

[–]marketrent[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ulysses is not a typical novel; each chapter is representative of a mode (and more) in English literature. It requires a reader to switch bandwidths; I liken it to switching from Richmond Lattimore’s Odyssey of Homer to Cecil Day-Lewis’ Aeneid of Virgil.

I think Ulysses is an uplifting crafting of the English language.

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ — The visionary author on the limits of AI, the uses of science fiction by marketrent in technology

[–]marketrent[S] 90 points91 points  (0 children)

FT’s title truncates an insight infrequently expressed, emphasis mine:1,2,3

“The machines we have now, they’re not conscious,” he says. “When one person teaches another person, that is an interaction between consciousnesses.”

Meanwhile, AI models are trained by toggling so-called “weights” or the strength of connections between different variables in the model, in order to get a desired output.

“It would be a real mistake to think that when you’re teaching a child, all you are doing is adjusting the weights in a network.”

[...]

Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”.

AI-generated text is not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful in those certain areas, he concedes.

“But the fact that LLMs are able to do some of that — that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of their abilities,” he says. “That’s more a statement about how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.”

Chiang outlined his thoughts in a viral essay in The New Yorker, published in February, titled “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”.

He describes language models as blurred imitations of the text they were trained on, rearrangements of word sequences that obey the rules of grammar.

Because the technology is reconstructing material that is slightly different to what already exists, it gives the impression of comprehension.

1 Madhumita Murgia (2 June 2023), “Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’”, https://www.ft.com/content/c1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84

2 Ted Chiang (9 Feb. 2023), “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

3 https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/

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Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ — The visionary author on the limits of AI, the uses of science fiction (ft.com)

submitted by marketrent to r/technology

Time is an object. Not a backdrop, an illusion or an emergent phenomenon, time has a physical size that can be measured in laboratories by marketrent in Physics

[–]marketrent[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

5,100-word essay on assembly theory, “a causal theory of physics.”1

In the history of modern physics, there has never been a widely accepted theory in which a moving, directional sense of time is fundamental. Many of our most basic descriptions of nature – from the laws of movement to the properties of molecules and matter – seem to exist in a universe where time doesn’t really pass.

However, recent research across a variety of fields suggests that the movement of time might be more important than most physicists had once assumed.

A new form of physics called assembly theory suggests that a moving, directional sense of time is real and fundamental. It suggests that the complex objects in our Universe that have been made by life, including microbes, computers and cities, do not exist outside of time: they are impossible without the movement of time.

From this perspective, the passing of time is not only intrinsic to the evolution of life or our experience of the Universe. It is also the ever-moving material fabric of the Universe itself.

Time is an object. It has a physical size, like space. And it can be measured at a molecular level in laboratories.

1 Sara Walker and Lee Cronin (19 May 2023), “Time is an object”, https://aeon.co/essays/time-is-not-an-illusion-its-an-object-with-physical-size

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Time is an object. Not a backdrop, an illusion or an emergent phenomenon, time has a physical size that can be measured in laboratories (aeon.co)

submitted by marketrent to r/Physics

Suspected Russian spy whale is looking for love in all the wrong places by marketrent in europe

[–]marketrent[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Young beluga possibly hungry and thirsty:1

Belugas are very social creatures, and researchers suspect that Hvaldimir has not come into contact with another member of his own species since they began tracking him in 2019.

Most male belugas reach sexual maturity by the time they are 15 years old, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). So Hvalidimir's hormones could be driving him to search for a mate.

Regardless of his motivations, Hvaldimir is traveling in the wrong direction. Beluga whales only live in the high Arctic in areas such as Norway's Svalbard archipelago, Greenland, Canada and Russia.

There are no known beluga populations in the waters around Sweden.

Experts aren’t sure why Hvaldimir is going in the wrong direction, but it could be that he was released into Norwegian waters from his Russian home as part of his mission, so he has no knowledge of this part of the world.

So far, Hvaldimir seems to be in good health and has been seen hunting wild salmon near fish farms along Norway's border with Sweden.

But previous sightings suggest he may have lost some weight, and experts are concerned that he will struggle to find enough food this far south, AFP reported.

1 https://www.livescience.com/animals/whales/suspected-russian-spy-whale-looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places

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Suspected Russian spy whale is looking for love in all the wrong places (livescience.com)

submitted by marketrent to r/europe

Battle of the population forecasters: Yes, size matters by marketrent in Economics

[–]marketrent[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Australia’s Treasury unit forecasts a population increase of 902,000 more people by 2032 compared to U.N. forecasters, by assuming an exuberant increase in overseas migrants.1

The Centre for Population’s annual “Population Statement” (published in January 2023) suggested a much more bullish population forecast for 2032 (29.6 million) than the UN Population Division did last year (28.7 million).

It was, however, surprising just how much more bullish the newest figures are – we are talking about a difference of 902,000 Australians by the year 2032.

That’s no rounding error.

[The] forecasts are almost a million people apart because they assume different migration numbers.

 

The Centre for Population gives us an additional 516,000 people in their 20s by 2032 compared to the UN forecast.

That’s the difference higher levels of migration assumption make.

Suddenly, we have plenty of people to fill the holes in retail, hospitality, and even the care industry.

Adding 186,000 more people aged 18-22 assumes a huge boom in international education — better invest in some student accommodation now.

Having more people in their 20s by 2032 also means more kids in the country by 2042 and more taxpayers in the 2050s.

The Centre for Population is part of the Treasury and publishes, you guessed it, population-related data and research.

Every migrant pushes the GDP upwards and puts money into the Treasury coffers.

Australia’s Bureau of Statistics is using migration assumptions from 2018, a slightly different time:2

Estimates of overseas migration are required less than six months after the reference quarter for the production of quarterly ERP [estimated resident population]. At that time, complete traveller histories for the 16 months following a reference quarter are not available.

To obtain the required estimates in the absence of complete duration information, preliminary overseas migration estimates are initially modelled using past traveller migration propensities.

Due to the disruption to travel patterns during COVID-19, from 1 January 2022 onwards preliminary estimates are modelled on traveller behaviour from the corresponding quarter of 2018.

1 https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2023/01/14/fight-of-the-population-forecasts-size-matters/

2 Australian Bureau of Statistics (16 December 2023), “Overseas Migration methodology — Reference period 2021-22 financial year”, https://www.abs.gov.au/methodologies/overseas-migration-methodology/2021-22-financial-year

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Battle of the population forecasters: Yes, size matters (thenewdaily.com.au)

submitted by marketrent to r/Economics

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