1. Height (or panoramic view) premium associated with residential units overlooking Central Park in New York City,
A 95th floor condominium at 432 Park Avenue sold in December for $30.7 million, or about $7,592 a square foot. That same month, a unit about halfway down the building sold for $4,216 a square foot.
When such premiums exist, developers find a way, as with 432 Park Avenue,
The building and nearby towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city’s labyrinthine zoning laws. Floors reserved for structural and mechanical equipment, no matter how much, do not count against a building’s maximum size under the laws, so developers explicitly use them to make buildings far higher than would otherwise be permitted.
2. Some achievements of technology enabled transformations in service delivery in India,
Getting or renewing a passport used to be a total nightmare a decade back. Enter private sector plus technology and the average time it takes for the passport application process is 30 minutes to under 4 hours. The passport reaches home by courier in a couple of days. At every stage, you get an SMS informing you what will happen next. In a country this large, there will be anecdotes of mis-service, but the average experience is now ahead of global standards. Take another area full of rent-seeking, long waits, harassment and bribes—getting a driving licence. At least in Delhi, the process is mostly painless—online form filling, and 30 minutes to three hours of time in the local office. The licence reaches home in just a few days. Property registration used to be a nightmare. That again is a breeze. Again a mix of technology and processes has reduced transaction time and pain hugely.
And this in banking,
Mr Puri says HDFC can now process a personal loan and put money in an account in 11 seconds.
3. The much-awaited IPO season has kicked-off with a whimper, as Lyft has tanked nearly a quarter from its listing price. An even bigger story, one much more disturbing but perfectly in line with what to expect from Wall Street, is Lyft's accusation that the lead underwriter of its IPO, Morgan Stanley, supported short-selling of Lyft shares. Lyft has formally written to Morgan Stanley questioning it about sale of certain short-selling products to Lyft's pre-IPO investors which would allow them to hedge against price falls by short-selling Lyft shares in violation of lock-up agreements.
If true, this may well turn out to be Morgan Stanley's Abacus moment!
4. A very detailed explanation of Modern Monetary Theory.
5. Pitfalls of relying excessively on experts in legal matters. Upshot writes,
Another prominent factor in wrongful convictions across the country was misleading forensic evidence. A close look at these cases reveals how experts in fields like hair analysis, bite marks and DNA analysis have used exaggerated statistical claims to bolster unscientific assertions... “A lot of the problem with forensic testimony is that the diagnosticity is overstated,” said Barbara O’Brien, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law and author of the report. A hair sample at the crime scene that resembles a suspect’s hair “gets dressed up with this scientific certainty that isn’t justified,” she said.
6. Times points to a new study which highlights the striking concentration of land ownership in England,
Less than 1 percent of the population — including aristocrats, royals and wealthy investors — owns about half of the land, according to “Who Owns England,” a book that is to be published in May. And many of them inherited the property as members of families that have held it for generations — even centuries. In the book, the author, Guy Shrubsole, an environmental activist and writer, identifies many of the owners and compiles data gathered by peppering public bodies with freedom of information requests and combing through the 25 million title records in the government’s Land Registry. He reached a striking conclusion — that in England, home to about 56 million people, half the country belongs to just 25,000 landowners, some of them corporations... Real estate prices in England are among the highest in Europe and have soared over the last generation. Mr. Shrubsole’s book documents ownership, maps unregistered land and argues that the concentration of ownership helps keep available land scarce and expensive. Houses, stores, office buildings, schools and farms are often held under long-term leases, paying a steady stream of rents — directly or through intermediate leaseholders — to major landowners.
7. The scary world of facial recognition developers, who may well be unbeknownst to you scraping your images and building up databases to fine-tune facial recognition technology,
The biggest technical obstacle to achieving accurate facial recognition thus far has been the inability of machines to identify human faces when they are only partially visible, shrouded in shadow or covered by clothing, as opposed to the high-resolution, front-facing portrait photos the computers were trained on. To teach a machine how to better read and recognise a human face in these conditions, it has to be trained using hundreds of thousands of faces of all shapes, sizes, colours, ages and genders. The more natural, varied and unposed the faces are, the better they simulate real-life scenarios in which surveillance might take place, and the more accurate the resulting models for facial recognition. In order to feed this hungry system, a plethora of face repositories — such as IJB-C — have sprung up, containing images manually culled and bound together from sources as varied as university campuses, town squares, markets, cafés, mugshots and social-media sites such as Flickr, Instagram and YouTube... The images... are used to train and benchmark algorithms that serve a variety of biometric-related purposes — recognising faces at passport control, crowd surveillance, automated driving, robotics, even emotion analysis for advertising.
8. Finally, Ananth points to this interview of the outgoing French Ambassador in Washington, Gerard Araud. It has several refreshingly candid and insightful thoughts. Sample this on the Arab-Israel policy,
The problem is that the disproportion of power is such between the two sides that the strongest may conclude that they have no interest to make concessions. And also the fact that the status quo is extremely comfortable for Israel. Because they [can] have the cake and eat it. They have the West Bank, but at the same time they don’t have to make the painful decision about the Palestinians, really making them really, totally stateless or making them citizens of Israel. They won’t make them citizens of Israel. So they will have to make it official, which is we know the situation, which is an apartheid. There will be officially an apartheid state. They are in fact already.
This on the China relationship and trade,
Let’s look at the dogma of the previous period. For instance, free trade. It’s over. Trump is doing it in his own way. Brutal, a bit primitive, but in a sense he’s right. What he’s doing with China should have been done, maybe in a different way, but should have been done before. Trump has felt Americans’ fatigue, but [Barack] Obama also did. The role of the United States as a policeman of the world, it’s over. Obama started, Trump really pursued it. You saw it in Ukraine. You are seeing it every day in Syria. People here faint when you discuss NATO, but when he said, “Why should we defend Montenegro?,” it’s a genuine question. I know that people at Brookings or the Atlantic Council will faint again, but really yes, why, why should you? These are the questions which are being put on the table in a brutal and a bit primitive way by Trump, but they are real questions.
This on the election of Trump and the attendant reactions is so spot on,
It was so shocking to have Trump elected that basically [Democrats’] conclusion was either the Russians are responsible or she was a very bad candidate. The case of Trump for me, it’s not so much Donald Trump, it’s not so much a person, but it’s a political phenomenon.
And the parallels with France,
The “yellow vest” demonstrations against Macron are basically the demonstrators who, more or less, voted for Trump here. It’s people coming from small cities, from rural areas, lower-middle-class, saying, “We have been left behind.” And, on the right, our conservative party is moving in the same direction as the Republicans are here. Suddenly this party which was traditionally conservative is becoming really protectionist, obsessed by immigration, and obsessed by questions of identity. You know: “France is a Judeo-Christian country,” which means basically anti-Muslim. There is a uniformity in the crisis, and you see it also in Brexit. It’s not by chance that your president has been elected by Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, while our Rust Belt, in the north of France, has elected five or six members of Parliament on the far-right.
This should count as the leader to be the interview of the year!!!
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