Mike Norman Economics

Chinese authorities said it’s illegal for companies to make employees work extended hours and terminate their contracts for not following excruciating work schedules commonly known as “996” — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Supreme People’s Court jointly published several real-life scenarios on Thursday to clarify the country’s legal standards on working hours and overtime wages. The 10 cases are meant as a reference for local...

You can't tell the players without a score card.The ConversationWhat is ISIS-K? Two terrorism experts on the group behind the deadly Kabul airport attack and its rivalry with the Taliban Amira Jadoon, United States Military Academy West Point, and Andrew Mines, George Washington University

Short backgrounder on the origin, development and state of shariah law and how the Taliban may implement it this time.The ConversationExplainer: what is shariah law and what version of it is the Taliban likely to implement?Zuleyha Keskin, Associate Professor, Charles Sturt University and Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University (Australia)

Though we live in a highly complex, networked world, the paradigm that guides policymaking is largely linear, mechanical, and “rational.” This leaves us blind to the obvious – including our own blindness – and vulnerable to conceptual traps and collective-action problems....Must-read.  It's short and to the point. The main point is that societies are complex adaptive systems that are more suitably represented in terms of organic models than mechanical models. The Western tradition focuses on...

[embedded content]John Harris - The Taliban is Lying, Don't Believe Them

Hard to talk about markets when our soldiers are dying.

MMT is not and has never been about getting central banks to "print money" for the governmentThe LensMMT ≠ QEStephanie Kelton | Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University, formerly Democrats' chief economist on the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and an economic adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders

 Before vaccines were introduced in Iceland there were 30 deaths, but none since.[embedded content] Clarisa Diaz - What Iceland’s rising Covid-19 case count tells us about vaccine efficacyIceland provides a case study for how an effective vaccine rollout perhaps doesn’t guarantee herd immunity but prevents hospitalizations and deaths Quartz What Iceland’s rising Covid-19 case count tells us about vaccine efficacy

Antivaxxers are using similar techniques as climate change deniers to misrepresent data. I recently saw a misleading presentation of COVID data pertaining to Israel. In this post I’m sharing several graphs that I made to counter this misleading image.Israel is currently a popular object of those committed to an anti-vax narrative because a high proportion of the population is fully vaccinated and cases there are currently spiking. The situation is obviously concerning. However, it is being...

This video explains the probability of a Black Swan event, and how governments aren't preparing for the high probability a Carrington Event which could damage the national grid and telecoms systems. [embedded content]The Black Swan TheoryThe threat from the Sun: should we be worrying about coronal mass ejections?Scientists have real concerns that extreme weather on the Sun’s surface could unleash a catastrophe on humanity2019 study in the journal Scientific Reports found a 0.5-1.9% chance of...