Under-30s in Europe are more disposed than their parents are to view poverty as a result of an individual’s choice.
In public perception, age is often related to political views. “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head,” the 19th-century French monarchist François Guizot is supposed to have said. King Louis Philippe’s prime minister was swept from power by the 1848 revolution, presumably by a combination of republican under-30s and older Frenchmen who had lost their heads. Since then, Guizot’s famous one-liner has often been updated.
A growing number of commuters have found that the fastest way to between Point A and Point B is if Point A is Point B.
More than 1 in 20 Americans now usually work from home, new 2018 data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows. Telework has recently overtaken public transit as the third-most-popular commuting method in the country.
It remains nowhere near the most popular American commute, however. Three in 4 workers, or more than 111 million people, still drive alone to the office or factory each day.
Carpooling comes in second, well above working from home. The share of Americans who carpool has lost ground since the Great Recession, though it remains far more popular than other methods, such as walking, biking or taking a cab.
If automation drives down prices, the result could be a net increase in jobs.
Ever since Homo erectus carved a piece of stone into a tool, the welfare of humanity has been on the increase. This technological breakthrough led first to the hand axe, and eventually to the iPhone. We have found it convenient to organize the most dramatic period of change between these two inventions – beginning roughly in the year 1760 – into four industrial revolutions.
As each revolution unfolded, dire predictions of massive job losses ensued, increasing each time. The first three are over, and these concerns were clearly misplaced. The number of jobs increased each time, as did living standards and every other social indicator.
McKinsey predicts that 800 million workers could be displaced in 42 countries, or a third of the workforce, because of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). When reminded of the experience with the previous revolutions, the comeback is often that this one is different. Although this has been said at the onset of each revolution, could there be something more to it this time?
KIRKLAND, Wash., Sept. 9, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Micromobility (defined as shared bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters) has the potential to deliver substantial benefits to consumers and businesses around the world, including efficient and cost-effective travel, reduced traffic congestion, decreased emissions and a boost to the local economy.
We simply don’t know what sort of jobs will be available in the future. After all, imagine yourself in the year 1900 peering into the future. How could you know then that the proportion of people employed in agriculture in the USA would fall to a twentieth of what it was then?
Or that there would now be more people employed as mental health nurses in the NHS than there are sailors serving in the Royal Navy? Or that large numbers of people would pay good money to personal trainers to put them through their paces and ensure that they suffered the requisite amount of agony?
History is full of people who have made long-term predictions and who have been proved utterly wrong. Among economists one of my favourites is the great William Stanley Jevons, one of the most distinguished economists of the nineteenth century. In 1865 he predicted that industrial expansion would soon come to a halt due to a shortage of coal. Poor old Jevons.
So we must tread warily. Having said that, and having dosed ourselves with lashings of humility, and drunk deep from the well of scepticism, there is a lot that we can say about the future of employment in the new robot- and AI-dominated future.
One of the most widely talked about categories of jobs supposedly at risk is drivers: bus drivers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs, delivery drivers, and many more. A 2017 trucking industry report predicted that by 2030, out of 6.4m trucking jobs in America and Europe, about 4.4m of them could have disappeared as “robots” do the driving.
The history of the Universe and the arrow of time, which always flows forward in the same direction and at the same rate for any observer.(NASA / GSFC)
The past is gone, the future not yet here, only the present is now. But why does it always flow the way it does for us?
Every moment that passes finds us traveling from the past to the present and into the future, with time always flowing in the same direction. At no point does it ever appear to either stand still or reverse; the “arrow of time” always points forwards for us. But if we look at the laws of physics — from Newton to Einstein, from Maxwell to Bohr, from Dirac to Feynman — they appear to be time-symmetric. In other words, the equations that govern reality don’t have a preference for which way time flows. The solutions that describe the behavior of any system obeying the laws of physics, as we understand them, are just as valid for time flowing into the past as they are for time flowing into the future. Yet we know from experience that time only flows one way: forwards. So where does the arrow of time come from?
The hugely popular sweetener aspartame – also known as Nutrasweet – has been taken to task by researchers for not being sufficiently proven to be safe for consumption. Aspartame has been a controversial ingredient for decades.
According to a new study by Professor Erik Millstone, a University of Sussex expert on food chemical safety policy, and Dr. Elisabeth Dawson, the 2013 appraisal by the European Food Safety Authority that aspartame is safe is flawed. The study finds that the EFSA disregarded the results of every one of the 73 studies that indicated that aspartame could be deleterious to health while accepting as reliable 84% of studies that concluded that aspartame was safe.
The world’s GDP still grew a healthy 6.9% in 2018, up from $80.2 trillion in 2017 to $85.8 trillion. Nearly half of this growth came from the world’s two largest economies: the United States, at $20.5 trillion (up 5.4% from 2017), and China, at $13.6 trillion (up 10%). However, fear of a global recession are mounting — much of it related to growing economic tension between the two leading economies.
A look at the full lifetime emissions of the vehicles call into question the ecological assumptions around “micromobility.”
Bird boasts that its dockless electric scooters allow customers to “cruise past traffic and cut back on CO2 emissions—one ride at a time.”
Its rival Lime claims the vehicles “reduce dependence on personal automobiles for short distance transportation and leave future generations with a cleaner, healthier planet.”
But the mere fact that battery-powered scooters don’t belch pollution out of a tailpipe doesn’t mean they’re “emissions free,” or as “eco-friendly” as some have assumed. The actual climate impact of the vehicles depends heavily on how they’re made, what they’re replacing, and how long they last.
The data in the DEA database tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States, including oxycodone, above.
America’s largest drug companies saturated the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012 as the nation’s deadliest drug epidemic spun out of control, according to previously undisclosed company data released as part of the largest civil action in U.S. history.
The information comes from a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States — from manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city. The data provides an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which has resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012.
Just six companies distributed 75 percent of the pills during this period: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart, according to an analysis of the database by The Washington Post. Three companies manufactured 88 percent of the opioids: SpecGx, a subsidiary of Mallinckrodt; Actavis Pharma; and Par Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Endo Pharmaceuticals.
The protein, captured in an extremely thin piece of glass — around 50 nanometres in diameter, is sliced up, atom by atom, with the help of an electrical field. It is then analysed through Atom Probe Tomography, and the 3D structure is recreated on a computer. Credit: Small: Volume 15, Issue 24, Atom Probe Tomography for 3D Structural and Chemical Analysis of Individual Proteins Gustav Sundell, Mats Hulander, Astrid Pihl, Martin Andersson Copyright Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. Reproduced with permission.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a unique method for studying proteins which could open new doors for medicinal research. Through capturing proteins in a nano-capsule made of glass, the researchers have been able to create a unique model of proteins in natural environments. The results are published in the scientific journal, Small.
The health of local economies today will affect their ability to adapt and thrive in the automation age.
The US labor market looks markedly different today than it did two decades ago. It has been reshaped by dramatic events like the Great Recession but also by a quieter ongoing evolution in the mix and location of jobs. In the decade ahead, the next wave of automation technologies may accelerate the pace of change. Millions of jobs could be phased out even as new ones are created. More broadly, the day-to-day nature of work could change for nearly everyone as intelligent machines become fixtures in the American workplace.
Until recently, most research on the potential effects of automation, including our own, has focused on the national-level effects. Our previous work ran multiple scenarios regarding the pace and extent of adoption. In the midpoint case, our modeling shows some jobs being phased out but sufficient numbers being added at the same time to produce net positive job growth for the United States as a whole through 2030.
