【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障8系列】【8-14】经管

bank11

【速度】
Facebook
With a little help from a billion friends
Oct 5th 2012, 9:23 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO [attachimg]107430[/attachimg]
【计时一】
SINCE its stockmarket flotation in America earlier this year, Facebook has seen its share price plunge as sceptical investors have dumped its stock. But at least one thing has continued to rise: on October 4th the giant social network revealed it now has one billion active monthly users, twice as many as in July 2010. Mark Zuckerberg, the firm’s boss, crowed that this puts it in the same pantheon as firms such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, which also have vast, global audiences.
Indeed it does. But Facebook still faces big questions that need to be answered more clearly for its share price to start heading in the same direction as its membership numbers. One is how it intends to earn more money from advertising in the mobile arena. The company revealed that it now has some 600m mobile users, which is another impressive number, and its acquisition this year of Instagram, a picture-sharing service for smartphones, has beefed up its capabilities in the fast-growing mobile market. But it is still casting around for effective advertising formats.
Another important question is whether the company can find new ways to share even more data about users’ online lives with advertisers without prompting a massive backlash over privacy issues. Facebook is already under intense scrutiny from regulators in America and Europe over things such as its use of facial recognition software. It also needs to show that it can diversify its sources of revenue. This is why it is experimenting with things such as allowing users to buy and send physical gifts via its service.
The social network will need to tackle these and other challenges if it is to keep growing steadily and profitably—and get its share price back up. But it can certainly be forgiven for taking time out to boast about some impressive numbers, which show that it is still a remarkable company. Its more than one billion users have uploaded almost 220 billion photos. And they have clicked the “like” button more than a trillion times since it was introduced in 2009. It is now up to Mr Zuckerberg and his team to get investors to like Facebook as much again.
【364】
Viewpoint: Steve Jobs is missed by Silicon Valley
[attachimg]107427[/attachimg]
【计时二】
Steve Jobs is still missed.
You hear it on stages, like when Marc Benioff, chief executive and co-founder of Salesforce, urged 90,000 attendees at the firm's Dreamforce conference to fill in the visionary hole that Steve Jobs left.
You hear it at cocktail parties. At one by Morgenthaler Ventures, for instance, Apple team members who worked on Siri talked about how they missed Steve Jobs yelling at people.
You hear it on the streets. While standing in line for the newest iPhone - which included one of eBay's top search experts, Andy Edmonds - people noted that the industry was a bit more boring without Jobs.
It's a year after Steve Jobs died. So, what has changed?
?    We haven't seen a shocking new product or rethink of something that exists, like when the iPhone came out of Steve Jobs' pocket.
?    Apple press conferences aren't quite as interesting.
?    The tech press is looking for signs of vision from other companies, including Microsoft.
?    I hear from Apple team members that working at Apple is a bit easier, but also that they miss the chaos and excitement that Steve Jobs could cause.
?    Apple has gotten even more profitable, but those profits raise new questions because they were built on top of work that Jobs did. Can Tim Cook capture new markets the way Jobs did?
【227】

【计时三】
After Jobs' death last year I wrote that Apple would be fine.
I still think it'll be fine. Great companies don't just disappear and Apple is still benefiting from momentum put in place by Jobs and his teams.
What are Apple's still existing advantages?
?    It has the best supply chain in the business. We see the power of that supply chain this month as the new iPhone has gotten top reviews on sites like gdgt.com.
?    It has the best design team in the business.
?    It has the best PR team in the business. At Apple's latest press conference it had six times more satellite trucks outside than when Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, spoke.
?    It has the best retail channel in the business.
What is missing now that Jobs is gone?
?    The salesmanship. He goaded the industry to move to higher things and he convinced us that the future was here and that it was important to pay attention.
?    His ability to say no and keep things from shipping. Andy Grignon, who worked on the first iPhone, tells me all the time about how Jobs would kill a project or send it back for more work. He tells about how the original iPhone looked nothing like the shipping product. Jobs kept saying "no" until it was perfect.
?    His ability to get us to appreciate seemingly unimportant details. I still remember when he told me to look at how beautiful the back of an iMac was. Mr Cook tries to pull this off, but it doesn't sound the same coming from him.
Silicon Valley still hasn't recovered from this loss.
【276】

【计时四】
Yeah, it's trying. Larry Page and Sergey Brin over at Google are building self-driving cars and fantastic new wearable computers, but I'm left wondering how Jobs would look at those efforts and find a way to improve them.
Yes, I do wonder if Apple would have released its maps feature in such an early state.
Or, if he had released it, would he have explained to us why he is doing his own maps in a much better way than Mr Cook did. There are good reasons, after all, for Apple to head its own way and build its own mapping technology.
See, Apple and Google are on a collision course around contextual applications and operating systems.
Siri today is a bit stupid. She gives you the same answer she gives me. That's not contextual, or, personalised.
In the future Siri will give us answers based on who we are, the experiences we've had with our devices and the world of the internet, and, even what we're doing.
Our wearable computers, in the future, will be able to know that we're walking, driving, skiing, or shopping. Siri, in the future, will be contextual.
Why do we know that? Because Jobs told the team just that as he convinced them to bring Siri to Apple.
It is here that we are missing Steve Jobs's instincts.
【224】

【计时五】
We know a new contextual age is coming where our mobile devices will serve us, but we don't have someone like Jobs who is telling us how we'll get over the uncomfortable feeling that we're being stalked by the technology we're carrying around.
Jobs would have found a way. I'm not so sure that Page and Brin can do the same.
That is why Silicon Valley continues to miss Jobs and it'll be interesting to see if someone or - as Benioff urged - a group of people can fill those shoes.
That continues to be Silicon Valley and Apple's biggest question a year later.
【106】

【越障】
The next crisis
Sponging boomers
The economic legacy left by the baby-boomers is leading to a battle between the generations
[attachimg]107429[/attachimg]

ANOTHER economic mess looms on the horizon—one with a great wrinkled visage. The struggle to digest the swollen generation of ageing baby-boomers threatens to strangle economic growth. As the nature and scale of the problem become clear, a showdown between the generations may be inevitable.

After the end of the second world war births surged across the rich world. Britain, Germany and Japan all enjoyed a baby boom, although it peaked in different years. America’s was most pronounced. By 1964 individuals born after the war accounted for 41% of the total population, forming a generation large enough to exert its own political and economic gravity.

These boomers have lived a charmed life, easily topping previous generations in income earned at every age. The sheer heft of the generation created a demographic dividend: a rise in labour supply, reinforced by a surge in the number of working women. Social change favoured it too. Households became smaller, populated with more earners and fewer children. And boomers enjoyed the distinction of being among the best-educated of American generations at a time when the return on education was soaring.

Yet these gains were one-offs. Retirements will reverse the earlier labour-force surge, and younger generations cannot benefit from more women working. There is room to raise educational levels, but it is harder and less lucrative to improve the lot of disadvantaged students than to establish a university degree as the norm for good ones, as was the case after the war. In short, boomer income growth relied on a number of one-off gains.

Young workers also cannot expect decades of rising asset prices like those that enriched the boomers. Zheng Liu and Mark Spiegel, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, found in 2011 that movements in the price-earnings ratio of equities closely track changes in the ratio of middle-aged to old workers, meaning that the p/e ratio is likely to fall. Having lived through a spectacular bull market, boomers now sell off assets to finance retirement, putting pressure on equity prices and denying young workers an easy route to wealth. Boomers have weathered the economic crisis reasonably well. Thanks largely to the rapid recovery in stockmarkets, those aged between 53 and 58 saw a net decline in wealth of just 2.8% between 2006 and 2010.

More worrying is that this generation seems to be able to leverage its size into favourable policy. Governments slashed tax rates in the 1980s to revitalise lagging economies, just as boomers approached their prime earning years. The average federal tax rate for a median American household, including income and payroll taxes, dropped from more than 18% in 1981 to just over 11% in 2011. Yet sensible tax reforms left less revenue for the generous benefits boomers have continued to vote themselves, such as a prescription-drug benefit paired with inadequate premiums. Deficits exploded. Erick Eschker, an economist at Humboldt State University, reckons that each American born in 1945 can expect nearly $2.2m in lifetime net transfers from the state—more than any previous cohort.


Boomers’ sponging may well outstrip that of younger generations as well. A study by the International Monetary Fund in 2011 compared the tax bills of a cohort’s members over their lifetime with the value of the benefits that they are forecast to receive. The boomers are leaving a huge bill. Those aged 65 in 2010 may receive $333 billion more in benefits than they pay in taxes (see chart), an obligation 17 times larger than that likely to be left by those aged 25.


[attachimg]107428[/attachimg]
Sadly, arithmetic leaves but a few ways out of the mess. Faster growth would help. But the debt left by the boomers adds to the drag of slower labour-force growth. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two Harvard economists, estimate that public debt above 90% of GDP can reduce average growth rates by more than 1%. Meanwhile, the boomer era has seen falling levels of public investment in America. Annual spending on infrastructure as a share of GDP dropped from more than 3% in the early 1960s to roughly 1% in 2007.

Austerity is another option, but the consolidation needed would be large. The IMF estimates that fixing America’s fiscal imbalance would require a 35% cut in all transfer payments and a 35% rise in all taxes—too big a pill for a creaky political system to swallow. Fiscal imbalances rise with the share of population over 65 and with partisan gridlock, according to other research by Mr Eschker. This is troubling news for America, where the over-65 share of the voting-age population will rise from 17% now to 26% in 2030.

That leaves a third possibility: inflation. Post-war inflation helped shrink America’s debt as a share of GDP by 35 percentage points (see article). More inflation might prove salutary for other reasons as well. Mr Rogoff has suggested that a few years of 5% price rises could have helped households reduce their debts faster. Other economists, including two members of the Federal Reserve’s policymaking committee, now argue that with interest rates near zero, the Fed should tolerate a higher rate of inflation to speed up recovery.

The generational divide makes this plan a hard sell. Younger workers are typically debtors, who benefit from inflation reducing real interest rates. Older cohorts with large savings dislike it for the same reason. A recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis suggests that as a country ages, its tolerance for inflation falls. Its authors theorise that a central bank could use inflation to achieve some generational redistribution. Yet pressure on the Fed to cease its expansionary actions has been intense, and led by a Republican Party increasingly driven by boomer preferences.

The political power of the boomers is formidable. But sooner or later, it cannot escape the maths.
【988】

fightfor700

谢谢bank分享，今天补了2期的小分队阅读，明天读。

晚了一天，现在补上。速度部分：2:39、1:31、1:47、1:33、0:32
越障，未计时，边读边记的。


baby boomers at the beginning, demographic dividend,
yet gains one-offs, retirement, asset prices no more rise (quotes ZL and MS research ),
boomers leverage its size into favorable policy, receive more benefits than the taxes they should pay,
怎么办？
1, faster growth would help, however, huge debt by boomers drag,
2, austerity, another opinion, fixing fiscal imbalance hard,
3, inflation, younger & old like & dislike, recent paper suggested central bank could use inflation to achieve some generational redistribution.

peill

time speed comprehension
2'11 165 5
-Facebook is facing the challege to find more profit from it's billions of active user.
1'16 180 5
1'27 184 5
1'15 180 5
28"   212 5
- Jobs is missed by silicon Valley. Apple is still advantageous in a lot of ways.
And silicon valley is trying to recover from the loss.


7'00  141 4
- the babies-bloom post WWII helped boost the economics in the past. the generation of the bloomers enjoyed an enriched life.
- but as the bloomers aged, economic are facing problems.bloomers voted to give themselves better wellfare. bloomers generally expect more benefit than they contribute to the tax.
-One option is austerity. but to pay back the debt is overwhelming for youngers.
-Inflation is another option. but it will reduce the value of the olders savings
And bloomers are taking a big portion of the constitutions.

"found in 2011 that movements in the price-earnings ratio of equities closely track changes in the ratio of middle-aged to old workers, meaning that the p/e ratio is likely to fall. "这句当时没看明白，导致从这句开始以后的理解不是很顺畅。要练习关键地方能慢下来，简单地方要快起来。Active reading.

jolene91

1.46
1.03
1.14
1.06
0.28
6.14好文章啊~~补补经济学~

miffyhui

1’34”
1’09”
1’27”
1’02”
29”
5’24”
The babyboom’s benefits are one-off. Later, boomers faced many problems and leaves ahuge bills
3 ways tosolve it:
1. Faster growth: the debt above the90% GDP will hinder the growth rate.
2. Austerity: increasing 35% taxesand cutting 35% transfer payments
3. Inflation
Results: the younger workers, who arethe debtor, will benefit from the inflation, and the older who has largesavings will suffering a loss

angela不怕孤单

thanks~
speed
1 03:41
2 01:42
3 02:23
4 01:56
5 00:35
obstacle
10:00
回归小分队啦！感觉好像读得没有以前快了~
逻辑闹得我心烦，唉，加油！

ENJ0Y

谢谢LZ...

点错第一个
1.08
1.23
1.11
0.23
4.36

莽莽要上7

speed:2'12
1'22
1'37
1'14
0'30


Obstacle:5'43


Thanks for posting!^^

朝朝Joy

1.44
0.54
1.04
0.52
0.13
4.15
谢谢lz的用心筛选

映雪瑶渊

速度1    364    1:48
速度2    277    1:00
速度3    276    1:13
速度4    224    1:03
速度5    106    0:23
越障1    988    5:36