Night walk, by Franz Wright

The all-night convenience store's empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to but a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday's newspaper --
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

#poetry

The comprehensive study, conducted by researchers from Linköping University in Sweden, the European University Institute in Italy and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, analyzed data from 59,400 Swedish men who took a military conscription test when they were young adults. The researchers then meticulously tracked their career trajectories, earnings and job prestige for over a decade, from when they were 35 until they turned 45.

The results showed a strong relationship between intelligence and earning potential until the figure exceeded $64,000 a year. Beyond this point, the correlation became almost negligible. And at the highest pay scales, intelligence plateaued, suggesting that other factors, such as socioeconomic background, culture, personality traits and luck, became more significant.

The study also found that job prestige didn't increase with cognitive ability at higher pay scales. In professions such as medicine, law and academia, more prestige didn't seem directly related to more income.

The findings challenge the idea that success and higher levels of income are earned by superior intellect and talent. Instead, the researchers suggest that small initial success differences between individuals can grow into extreme inequalities over time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaires-actually-less-intelligent-lower-162839067.html?guccounter=1

China has installed the equivalent of four times the UK’s entire solar power capacity in the first five months of the year.

China’s solar capacity is now larger than the rest of the world combined, amounting to 228GW, setting it on course to exceed 2030 renewable energy targets by 2025, analysts said.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1019292/china-builds-equivalent-to-four-times-uk-solar-capacity-in-months-1019292.html

"In 2021, China set a goal for renewable capacity — including wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power — to exceed fossil fuel capacity by 2025, a target that it has hit two years ahead of schedule, Reuters reports. Renewable sources, as China defines them, now make up 50.9 percent of the country’s power capacity."

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-zero-carbon-electricity

Highlights:
- The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods.
- Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
- The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
- In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered.
- Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169?fr=RR-1

"In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the evidence."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/02/opinion/half-the-police-force-quit-crime-dropped.html

Capitalism won’t deliver the energy transition fast enough . . . 
There’s too much to do, and given the urgency and the need to get the solution right, this isn’t a task for your favourite ESG-focused portfolio manager or the tech bros. The sheer scale of the physical infrastructure that must be revamped, demolished or replaced is almost beyond comprehension. Governments, not BlackRock, will have to lead this new Marshall Plan. And keep doing it. The western nations that did so much of the damage will have to finance the transition in the developing world — it is astonishing that this idea is still debated. Massive deficit spending will be necessary, not a new ETF. For all the cleantech advances and renewable deployment in recent decades, fossil fuels’ share of total global energy use was 86 per cent in 2000 and 82 per cent last year.

https://archive.ph/xF9SE#selection-2293.0-2297.781