The Guardian: More than a third of UK graduates regret attending university

It found that 37% of those who went to university regret doing so given the amount of debt they now have. A total of 49% said they could have got to where they are in life without the benefit of a university degree.

The research was condemned by universities, which pointed to separate data published at the same time showing a high level of satisfaction with university and college courses. The annual National Student Survey, covering responses from 312,000 final-year students, found an overall satisfaction rating of 86% this year, the same as last year. [...]

However, official data shows that graduates are on average more likely to be in employment and earn more than non-graduates. The government’s Graduate Labour Market Statistics: 2015, published in April this year, continue to show that, in general, graduates are more likely to be in work and earn much more than non-graduates over a working lifetime.

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The Guardian: Whether leavers like it or not, Europe has a say on how Brexit will happen

Now that the decision is in, that restraint no longer applies. Via a survey conducted by Bloomberg , the other 27 member states of the EU have been vocal in conveying the terms on which they would allow a post-Brexit Britain privileged, preferential access to the single market. The bottom line is that Britain will have to accept free movement of people: put simply, if the UK wants to sell its goods and services into the single market on favourable terms, our European neighbours will demand we accept unlimited migration of EU citizens.

According to Bloomberg, France will be especially hardline. If Theresa May merely seeks “passporting rights” for UK banks – so that financial services have premium access to the single market, even as the rest of the British economy does not – the price will be free movement. [...]

Back then we blithely talked about the Norway model, sometimes tweaking it as Norway-plus or Norway-minus, as if it were solely up to Britain to decide. We chose to forget that when it comes to our relationship with Europe, there is more than one party. That’s why it’s called a relationship: there are other people involved.

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Business Insider: Norway is threatening to derail Brexit

Prime Minister May has said that she wants to secure a Brexit which will allow Britain to remain part of the EU's single market. Some Brexit supporters have suggested joining the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) — a small group of states which has access the single market despite not being EU members — would be the best way of doing this.

However, the UK's route into the EFTA will not be as straightforward as it perhaps first seemed. "It’s not certain that it would be a good idea to let a big country [the UK] into this organisation," Vik Aspaker told the Aftenposten newspaper. "It would shift the balance, which is not necessarily in Norway’s interests."

She also confirmed that the UK could only join the EFTA if the current members reached a unanimous agreement. The current members are Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. In theory, Norway, or any other EFTA member, could exercise its veto and block UK from pursuing a key element of its Brexit project. 

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Associated Press: Brazilian judge orders Olympics to allow stadium protests

A federal judge in Rio agreed. In a temporary injunction issued late Monday, the judge said that nothing in special legislation passed before the games restricts Brazilians' right to free expression. He threatened to levy fines of up to $3,200 on anyone who removes peaceful protesters from venues.

The Rio organizing committee said it plans to ask the judge to reconsider his ruling and will make a final appeal, if necessary. [...]

To get around the ban on protests inside stadiums, some Brazilians have coordinated with friends each wearing a letter on T-shirts so the message reads "Fora Temer" when they sit in groups. Others carry smaller signs hidden in their belongings, sometimes fashioned with the Olympic rings.

Vinicius Lummertz, president of the government-run tourism board Embratur, said he has no problem with peaceful protests in stadiums as long as the games aren't disturbed.

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Foreign Affairs: Democratizing Europe

Instead, the EU needs to radically reconfigure its whole political structure. One much-discussed option is the creation of a two-speed EU, with the possibility of so-called core states moving toward political union without the periphery states. Yet this solution is likely to be unworkable, as few southern or eastern European states would put up with such treatment, and two supposed core states—France and the Netherlands—have some of the continent’s highest levels of popular hostility toward the EU. If the core is based on the eurozone, moreover, there will be little scope for different levels of integration, given that nearly all member states are either already in the eurozone or have signed up to join.

What the EU needs, rather, is a renaissance, challenging inherited ideas about what cooperation between nations and peoples looks like. This renaissance should move away from a focus on formal, institutional relations between states and toward a more democratic compact based on solidarity between citizens. Without the fuller participation of Europe’s citizens, no new policies will be able to address the current malaise, which is based largely on ordinary people’s distrust of the European project. To address this malaise, European leaders should adopt what I call a Compact of European Citizens, governed by four principles of cooperative decision-making. [...]

Instead of a centralized bureaucracy in Brussels, policy formation could be decentralized to a series of policy communities, which would oversee cooperation in different policy areas and which would be managed by agencies geographically distributed across Europe. National governments, then, would be free to choose which policy communities to join depending on the preferences of their citizens. This principle would give each state an active and positive role in shaping the EU’s future rather than a passive one that must accept undesirable obligations. [...]

As for the practicalities of such an arrangement, European leaders should look to legal pluralism. Legal pluralism explores how different juridical and regulatory norms might coexist within a single political system, and a rich academic literature on the subject offers resources on designing legal systems to accommodate populations with radically different preferences. For instance, there could be a more liberal legal immigration arrangement for Europe’s big multicultural cities and a stricter one for the hinterlands, or some regions of a member state might want to buy in to European cooperation initiatives that other regions of the country oppose.

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Independent: Alien megastructure star’s strange behaviour can’t be understood with traditional explanations, scientists say

Scientists said last year that the star, named KIC 8462852, appeared to be getting darker with no obvious explanation. Some suggested that the flickering and dimming was the result of an alien megastructure being built around it, to harvest energy.

But others said that the behaviour might just be happening as comets or other debris passed around the front of the star and obscured it from our view.

But a new paper looks at those explanations, and concludes that all previous models can’t account for the way that the light coming from the star is behaving. “No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve,” the authors, Caltech’s Ben Montet and the Carnegie Institute’s Joshua Simon, write. [...]

And even if they are able to prove that the star’s behaviour isn’t evidence of alien megastructures, it does appear to suggest that something is happening that hasn’t been seen before. It’s likely that it is a combination of different things – potentially previous explanations – that have added together to create the unusual behaviour. [...]

The alien megastructures explanation was advanced last year, when scientists spotted the strange behaviour and found no easy understanding of what is going on. Some suggested that an easy way of explaining the odd behaviour might be that an alien megastructure was being built.

At the time, astronomer Jason Wright told The Independent: "I can’t figure this thing out and that’s why it’s so interesting, so cool – it just doesn’t seem to make sense."

He told The Atlantic that while aliens should always be the “very last hypothesis you consider”, what he had spotted “looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build”

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The School of Life: How to Improve Capitalism (Jan 12, 2015)

Capitalism doesn't have to be overcome or destroyed. It could just be improved. Here's how.

The School of Life: How to Improve Capitalism (Jan 12, 2015)

Capitalism doesn't have to be overcome or destroyed. It could just be improved. Here's how.

The Atlantic: Is the U.S. Due for Radically Raising Taxes for the Rich?

This idea, that the wealthiest Americans have been helped along financially by their ability to  shortchange the tax system, is a popular view at a time when the divide between the richest and everyone else continues to grow. According to a Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans say the distribution of money and wealth is unfair, and just over half favor higher taxes on the rich. [...]

Compare, for example, taxation in the United States and Denmark in the periods 1975 to 1979 and 2004 to 2008, as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva did in a 2011 paper. In the United States of the 1970s, the top bracket was taxed at a rate of 70 percent, compared to 39.6 percent today. During the latter half of the 1970s, the top 1 percent of earners accounted for around 8 percent of Americans’ total income. Denmark taxed its top earnings similarly, at around 65 percent, and the top 1 percent of earners accounted for about 4 percent of total income. Fast-forward to the 2004 to 2008 period, when the tax rate of top earners in the U.S fell to 35 percent. The share of income accrued by the top 1 percent reached 18 percent. Denmark, which went through a similar period of economic activity and development, according to researchers, kept the tax rate of its highest earners at a comparatively high rate of nearly 60 percent. The result was that the top 1 percent of earners in Denmark still took in around 4 percent of total income by the year 2008. [...]

Things haven’t always been the way they are now. Wealth concentration was high in the beginning of the 20th century, but then dropped from 1929 to around 1978, according to a recent paper by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley. It’s risen steadily since then. [...]

The gap between the wealthiest and everyone else has grown so large that economic experts around the world have listed the issue of one of the main concerns facing the global economy. To reverse the extreme concentration of wealth that has characterized the last few decades, Saez says, changes to the top tax rates would have to be relatively large—bigger than the changes in the Clinton era, which saw the top tax rate grow from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, or those in the Obama era, which saw the top tax rate grow from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. And increases in the top tax rate would have to be accompanied by concrete changes in the tax system so that it’s not as easy for the rich to avoid paying taxes. Saez’s colleague Zucman estimates that 8 percent of the world’s financial wealth is held offshore, costing the US alone $36 billion a year.

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