Group items tagged

Tanzania alone sits on an estimated 2,222 metric tons of gold and boasts the third-highest reserves of the metal in Africa. But while the failure of these reserves to translate into wealth for ordinary people has led to populist moves – Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has demanded foreign mining firms pay higher taxes if they want to continue exporting — the problem may lie, in part, elsewhere. While women account for about 40 to 50 percent of Africa’s 8 million artisanal miners, their average income is significantly lower than that of their male counterparts, according to the African Center for Economic Transformation.

That has a spillover effect on communities. An established body of economic research, including by organizations like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has shown that economic empowerment of women translates into greater benefits for their families and communities than similar levels of earnings for men. That’s a phenomenon that groups working with gold miners in East Africa are witnessing also.

Not surprisingly, the research team led by Hunter Gehlbach of the University of California–Santa Barbara found that belief in science was higher than belief in climate science, and that this gap was widest among political conservatives.

"Climate change skeptics and believers are both motivated to hold attitudes that cohere with the social groups to which they belong, (such as) their political party," the researchers note. This social pressure could be counteracted by our strong desire to be internally consistent.

With such ubiquity comes power and influence. And along with the technology’s benefits come worries over privacy and personal freedom. Yes, AI can take some of the time and effort out of decision-making. But if you are a woman, a person of color, or a member of some other unlucky marginalized group, it has the ability to codify and worsen the inequalities you already face. This darker side of AI has led policymakers such as U.S. Senator Kamala Harris to advocate for more careful consideration of the technology’s risks.

Today, we can see a similar pattern emerging with the deployment of AI. Good intentions are nice, but they must account for and accommodate a true diversity of perspectives. How can we trust the ethics panels of AI companies to take adequate care of the needs of people of color, queer people, and other marginalized communities if we don’t even know who is making the decisions? It’s simple: we can’t and we shouldn’t.

Let's start with the basics. When people talk about alt-labor groups, what kinds of groups are they referring to?They're talking about organizing groups that don't do collective bargaining, so they're a little bit different from the way people generally think about labor unions that enter into negotiations with employers, that have a contract with employers that gets re-opened every few years and negotiated, that have a standardized way of operating, a standard structure of local organization, and members who pay dues and then are represented at their workplace.They're talking about worker centers—which are community-based worker organizations that are led by workers that do a combination of service, advocacy, and organizing. Or we're talking about unions that don't have traditional collective bargaining structures but work in a slightly different way.

At least a dozen local, regional, and global analyses published in the last five years provide credible evidence that refugees and migrants offer long-term economic benefits for their new communities. J. Edward Taylor, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, and director of the Rural Economies of the Americas and Pacific Rim Program, led two such studies, from Rwanda and Uganda, finding that every dollar spent by governments and organizations on refugee aid is multiplied as added income.

This “spillover,” as economists call it, accrues when refugees buy goods and services from local vendors and producers. In Rwanda, each additional refugee resulted in an added $205 to $253 to the economy each year. In Uganda, each refugee dollar spent generated an additional $1 to $1.50 in local income. Spillover benefits are higher when refugees receive cash transfers instead of food aid. In fact, the World Food Program promotes a program doing just this in part because it also allows refugees to make their own market choices.

But the overall finding offered a powerful message, Parsons said: “It implies that we have nothing to fear from accepting refugees, as long as appropriate mechanisms and support programs are in place to help people resettle and integrate.”

He’s a man with a history but without a sense of history, a man for whom anything is imaginable and everything is mutable, including the past.  In this, too, he's symptomatic of the nation he now “leads.”  Who among us even remembers the set of Washington officials who, only a decade and a half ago, had such glorious dreams about establishing a global Pax Americana and who led us so unerringly into an unending hell in the Greater Middle East?  Who remembers that those officials of the George W. Bush administration had another dream as well -- of a Pax Republicana, a one-party imperial state that would stretch across the American South deep into the Midwest, Southwest, and parts of the West, kneecapping the Democratic Party for an eternity and leaving that artifact of a two-party past confined to the country’s coastal areas.  Their dream -- and it couldn’t have been more immodest -- was to rule the world and its great remaining superpower for... well... more or less ever.