How to learn about culture and language. When you live in a foreign culture, you learn how to learn. You learn what vocabulary is important, what language learning techniques work, how to make relationships, what skills are important, what details to pay attention to. These skills will carry over to other languages and other cultures in the future.Read the entire piece here: The Best Defense (be sure to read the wild comments)
Illustration credit here.There are 1.9 billion Internet users worldwide. Wouldn’t you like to add them as customers?
3 good things & 3 bad things
“We’re really wasting time,” says Janet Carmosky (pictured), CEO of the China Business Network. Carmosky knows what it’s like to be busy. When not running the China Business Network, a resource geared towards international professionals doing business with China; advising major corporations on their China strategies; or speaking at conferences, she writes about China for publications like the Economist and the Harvard Business Review.Learn more about what she has to say here:
Environmental models are playing an increasingly important role in most jurisdictions and giving rise to disputes. Despite this fact, lawyers and policy-makers have overlooked models and not engaged critically with them. This is a problematic state of affairs. Modelling is a semi-autonomous, interdisciplinary activity concerned with developing representations of systems and is used to evaluate regulatory behaviour to ensure it is legitimate. Models are thus relevant to lawyers and policy-makers but need to be engaged with critically due to technical, institutional, interdisciplinary, and evaluative complexities in their operation. Lawyers and policy-makers must thus think more carefully about models and in doing so reflect on the nature of their own disciplines and fields.W. Wagner, E. Fischer and P. Pascual, "Misunderstanding Models in Environmental and Public Health Regulation," N.Y.U. Environmental Law Journal 18:293-356 (2010).
Computational models are fundamental to environmental regulation, yet their capabilities tend to be misunderstood by policymakers. Rather than rely on models to illuminate dynamic and uncertain relationships in natural settings, policymakers too often use models as "answer machines." This fundamental misperception that models can generate decisive facts leads to a perverse negative feedback loop that begins with policymaking itself and radiates into the science of modeling and into regulatory deliberations where participants can exploit the misunderstanding in strategic ways. This paper documents the pervasive misperception of models as truth machines in U.S. regulation and the multi-layered problems that result from this misunderstanding. The paper concludes with a series of proposals for making better use of models in environmental policy analysis.These two excellent articles underscore a point that I have been arguing for a long time: legal scholars and lawyers must approach law-making and law-enforcement processes more like social scientists. This is true not only for administrative processes, such as environmental law-making, but for constitutional interpretation and common-law judging as well. Judges (as judges) rarely, if ever, engage in formal model-building as they seek to "discover" common-law rules and decide cases, but that hardly means they work without models, which, sometimes at least, can be inferred from their decisions. Ultimately, to understand the law, one must try, at least, to understand the models (formal or informal, shared or idiosyncratic) of the participants in law-making and law-enforcement processes.
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| Michael Blake |
The only legal requisites to opening an import business are having an importer of record number, which is usually just the business's tax-identification number, and a surety bond to protect the U.S. government if you can't pay your duties, taxes and other fees. Surety bonds are required for all so-called formal entries where the shipment is valued at more than $2,000, but many importers use them on smaller shipments as well. They can be purchased ...Read the entire answer: Opening a Small Import Business
"More and more of our exports have started going to the faster-growing regions in Asia, Latin America and Canada," said Morgan Stanley economist Ted Wieseman. "It highlights that the emerging markets never really had much of a slowdown at all. They've continued to outperform throughout the crisis."Read the entire article here.
Exports of industrial supplies were particularly strong, rising 8%, driven by chemicals and plastics. Food exports also surged. Among the big gains: Soybean exports jumped to almost $2.4 billion, an all-time high, from $1.8 billion in September.
As a default position, OMB Circular A-94 states that a real discount rate of 7 percent should be used as a base-case for regulatory analysis. The 7 percent rate is an estimate of the average before-tax rate of return to private capital in the U.S. economy. It is a broad measure that reflects the returns to real estate and small business capital as well as corporate capital. It approximates the opportunity cost of capital, and it is the appropriate discount rate whenever the main effect of a regulation is to displace or alter the use of capital in the private sector. OMB revised Circular A-94 in 1992 after extensive internal review and public comment. In a recent analysis, OMB found that the average rate of return to capital remains near the 7 percent rate estimated in 1992. Circular A-94 also recommends using other discount rates to show the sensitivity of the estimates to the discount rate assumption.New recommendations (here) from the Benefit-Cost Analysis Center at the University of Washington, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and authored by Professor Richard Zerbe, make the requirements of Circular A-4 seem almost liberal (something OMB critics could hardly imagine). Professor Zerbe validates OMB's 7% base discount rate; as noted in a previous blog post (here), he recommends a range of discount rates from 6% to 9% (coming close to OMB's old baseline discount rate of 10%). However, Professor Zerbe recommends using only a single discount rate in any BCA, without the flexibility currently provided in Circular A-4 for alternative calculations using 3% discount rates in cases where the opportunity-cost of capital is less of an issue than present-versus-future rates of consumption.
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The effects of regulation do not always fall exclusively or primarily on the allocation of capital. When regulation primarily and directly affects private consumption (e.g., through higher consumer prices for goods and services), a lower discount rate is appropriate. The alternative most often used is sometimes called the "social rate of time preference." This simply means the rate at which "society" discounts future consumption flows to their present value. If we take the rate that the average saver uses to discount future consumption as our measure of the social rate of time preference, then the real rate of return on long-term government debt may provide a fair approximation. Over the last thirty years, this rate has averaged around 3 percent in real terms on a pre-tax basis. For example, the yield on 10-year Treasury notes has averaged 8.1 percent since 1973 while the average annual rate of change in the CPI over this period has been 5.0 percent, implying a real 10-year rate of 3.1 percent.
For regulatory analysis, you should provide estimates of net benefits using both 3 percent and 7 percent.
