This week, I have given up on education and resumed reading. Yay!:

• The reporting of market ups and downs is not really a joke — Simon Wren-Lewis: Companies pay market researchers tons of money to find out why people do or do not buy their products, so the idea that an individual can know why the market moves within hours of it moving is just nonsense. Yet day after day we see City economists telling us just this. They hardly ever express any doubt or uncertainty. They know if they did the media would regard that as boring, and choose someone else next time.
• Victoria’s poor quality houses could become solar ovens ‘cooking’ people inside — Kirsten Robb in Domain on the kind of crappy housing I've been living in for the last twenty years: The problem is the industry is geared towards a developer’s bottom line, experts such as RMIT planning professor Michael Buxton and the Alternative Technology Association’s Damien Moyse say. Many new builds did not consider sun orientation, eaves or shading, and featured large amounts of glass and energy-guzzling appliances. Basic insulation, a concrete slab and double glazing had been enough to get most designs over the line, RMIT adjunct professor Alan Pears said. “You get a situation where a house with unshaded glass, facing a silly directions can qualify for six stars … but when the sun shines in, the insulation traps the heat,” Professor Pears said. “Over a series of hot days, it builds up. What you create is a solar oven, with people cooking inside.”
• FIRE sector vampire continues to suck economy dry — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness provides your chart porn for the week: Since financial markets were first deregulated in the mid-1980s, the FIRE sector has grown at roughly twice the pace of the rest of the economy, sucking the life out of the productive sector:
  
• Advocating for CC BY — David Wiley: No one knows what the NC license condition means, including Creative Commons. The license language is so vague that the only way to determine definitively whether a use is commercial or not is to go to court and have a judge decide. For would-be users of NC content, this means never knowing what you can and can’t do. Example – I want to use some NC-licensed content in my course, but students can only attend my course if they pay tuition. Is that a commercial use? Some people think it is. Who knows?
• Austerity is the enemy of our grandchildren as public infrastructure degrades — Bill Mitchell: The cuts in growth of public investment will resonate for generations to come and be realised in lower material standards of living and lower productivity growth. We really are a stupid people for tolerating this idiocy. And before I stop – I don’t want to ever hear the argument again – that governments should borrow now because “debt is also still very cheap” or that “the credit ratings agencies may not downgrade the government’s rating if the extra debt is being used for productive infrastructure, as opposed to recurrent spending on social welfare or public sector wages.” Please. On both counts. What the credit rating agencies do is irrelevant to the Australian government. In fact, I would just outlaw their operations within our national borders and clear up office space for more useful activities. What is not irrelevant is the growth in public infrastructure. It is our legacy to our grandchildren.