Theranos, if you haven’t already heard the story, was a biotechnology startup that created a method of performing blood tests faster and cheaper, and using only a small pinprick of blood instead of the traditional injection in the vein. At its height, the company, led by Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes, was worth over $9 billion, had stars like Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis on the board, had partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway, and had significant investments from the Walton family, Rupert Murdoch, and Betsy DeVos.
Tips for planning a simple, inexpensive wedding The hardest, but most important advice: keep your preferences rational. It is easy to think nothing of spending an additional $500 on a $5000 wedding, since it’s only a 10% increase. DO NOT BE FOOLED. Apply the same level of scrutiny to that $500 expenditure as you would in your daily life. Example of the above: My wife bought a white dress for $20.
I learned two things from this book - one from the first half, and one from the second. The first, Robert Sapolsky wanted me to learn. The second - I don’t think so.
But first - a quick introduction. Behave describes “the biology of humans at our best and worst”. More specifically, it investigates the biology of aggression and altruism, from neurons to psychology to culture. Many of the books chapters are laid out like circles surrounding an action - for example, reaching out to touch someone’s shoulder, or pulling a trigger.
Why didn’t GDP double as women entered the workforce? Answer: It did, according to Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair. Half a percentage point (out of 2–5 percentage points) of annual GDP growth for the last several decades was due to women entering the workforce. Surprisingly, a random speech was the only place I could find that mentioned this number, and the source within the speech was from calculations done by the Federal Reserve using BEA data.
(NOTE: After I finished writing this, I realized that most of these ideas are found in the last section of the junior youth text Spirit of Faith. I’m publishing it anyway because I found it helpful even though I’ve studied that book.)
Here is a short snippet from Some Answered Questions, #62:
…[P]arents endure the greatest toil and trouble for their children, and often, by the time the latter have reached the age of maturity, the former have hastened to the world beyond.
(All information is taken from NIPA Handbook: Concepts and Methods of the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts, November 2017, and all in-text citations refer to the same)
GDP is defined as “the market value of the goods, services, and structures produced by the economy in a given period” (Handbook, 2–7). This can be measured three ways:
The sum of all goods and services sold to end users (the expenditures approach) The sum of all costs incurred in producing goods and services (the income approach) The sum of “value-added” from each industry (the production approach).
Reasons to get an arranged marriage You will for sure have the consent of the parents. When someone else makes a decision for you, they are further removed from the situation, which helps avoid some biases in thinking. If your parents have a good relationship, then you know they have a proven ability to choose good spouses. You have no such experience. If things go bad, you have someone else to blame You can tell your kids that arranged marriages are great, and you don’t have to worry about them marrying someone you don’t like.
NEOM is a bold and audacious dream. It is a vision of what a New Future might look like (in fact, NEOM means, “new future”). It’s an attempt to do something that’s never been done before and it comes at a time when the world needs fresh thinking and new solutions.
NEOM is the vision of His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and is a centerpiece of Saudi Arabia’s 2030 Vision plan to grow and diversify the Saudi economy and position the country to play a leading role in global development.
(Guest post from Nabil Kalantar)
Let’s analyze one case of eco-tourism, and make some unsubstantiated assumptions, just to get a sense of the problem.
Absorbed We will look at the rainforests in Costa Rica, a country which receives 1 million visitors from the U.S. each year, and 700,000 not from the U.S.
Assumption: All these tourists are there to visit the rainforest.
28% of the land in Costa Rica is protected.
Objection: Is human rights even a real thing?
Response 1: Human rights are an expression of universal moral principles, which in practice are codified through international agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Response 2: Human rights are a legal construct, and like any legal agreement between different countries, they are decided by the countries with the most power. This is a good thing, because richer and more powerful countries are more likely to have higher standards for human rights.