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Steve Bosserman

Paying for Health Care With Trees: A Win-Win for Orangutans and Communities - 0 views

  • Today, the clinic not only provides high-quality health care that is affordable to all, but actively rewards communities that reduce logging, or stop altogether, with further reductions on the cost of treatment. Forest guardians, recruited in every village, encourage others in their community to reduce logging. The guardians also monitor illegal activity and reforestation efforts, and offer training in organic farming techniques.
  • Today, the clinic not only provides high-quality health care that is affordable to all, but actively rewards communities that reduce logging, or stop altogether, with further reductions on the cost of treatment. Forest guardians, recruited in every village, encourage others in their community to reduce logging. The guardians also monitor illegal activity and reforestation efforts, and offer training in organic farming techniques.
Steve Bosserman

Why Didn't America Become Part of the Modern World? - 0 views

  • Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.
  • So in America, poverty wasn’t seen as a social bad or ill — it was seen as a necessary way to discipline, punish, and control those with a lack of virtue, a deficit of strength, to, by hitting them with its stick, to inculcate the virtues of hard work, temperance, industriousness, and above all, self-reliance. The problem, of course, was that the great lesson of history was that none of this was true — poverty didn’t lead to virtue. It only led to ruin.
  • So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.
Steve Bosserman

Can Sustainable Agriculture Survive Under Capitalism? - 0 views

  • One problem is the price of the produce. Many of us have had the experience of turning up at our local farmers' market, armed with tote bags, only to slink back to the supermarket after seeing the prices of the vegetables on offer. This is hardly the fault of the individual farmers. Still, as Pilgeram points out in a paper that she published in 2011, the costs involved with running such an operation mean that the benefits are inevitably affordable only to a small (generally white and middle-class) portion of society.
  • But it's a limited victory, Pilgeram writes in her most recent paper, published in November of 2018, and empowers only a certain class of women "while leaving [the capitalist] system basically entirely unaffected"—and which also risks gentrifying the towns to which these farmers move, further entrenching the country's class divide.
  • "The economic system that we have in place makes it impossible, really, to create a socially just food system. It's not possible under capitalism," Pilgeram says. Without a drastic change to this system, sustainable agriculture risks becoming an "esoteric side note" to conventional agriculture, she adds—or simply another way for those with money to live healthier lives than those without.
Bill Fulkerson

Universal Basic Income. - 0 views

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 22 Mar 18 - No Cached
Steve Bosserman

60 Minutes: Facial and emotional recognition; how one man is advancing artificial intel... - 0 views

  • Basically chauffeurs, truck drivers anyone who does driving for a living their jobs will be disrupted more in the 15 to 20 year time frame and many jobs that seem a little bit complex, chef, waiter, a lot of things will become automated we'll have automated stores, automated restaurants, and all together in 15 years, that's going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.
  • Because I believe in the sanctity of our soul. I believe there is a lot of things about us that we don't understand. I believe there's a lot of love and compassion that is not explainable in terms of neural networks and computation algorithms. And I currently see no way of solving them. Obviously, unsolved problems have been solved in the past. But it would be irresponsible for me to predict that these will be solved by a certain timeframe.
Steve Bosserman

The 'Neo-Banks' Are Finally Having Their Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Venture capitalists are pouring money into American start-ups that are offering basic banking services — known as neo-banks or challenger banks. In 2018 so far, American neo-banks have gotten four times as much funding as they did last year, and 10 times as much funding as they did in 2015, according to data from CB Insights.
  • The new financial outfits are trying to replace the old, branch-based way of banking with a mobile phone-friendly account that does away with the fees that have made banking giants so unpopular.
  • “If you look ahead five years, there’s no way there will be a financial services industry that is charging consumers $30 billion a year in overdraft fees,” said Chris Britt, the chief executive of Chime. “We aim to shake that up, and I think a lot of other consumer companies will be doing the same thing.”
Steve Bosserman

The wealth of our collective data should belong to all of us | Chris Hughes - 0 views

  • Nearly every moment of our lives, we’re producing data about ourselves that companies profit from. Our smartwatches know when we wake up, Alexa listens to our private conversations, our phones track where we go, Google knows what we email and search, Facebook knows what we share with friends, and our loyalty cards remember what we buy. We share all this data about ourselves because we like the services these companies provide, and business leaders tell us we must to make it possible for those services to be cheap or free.
  • We should not only expect that these companies better protect our data – we should also ensure that everyone creating it shares in the economic value it generates. One person’s data is worth little, but the collection of lots of people’s data is what fuels the insights that companies use to make more money or networks, like Facebook, that marketers are so attracted to. Data isn’t the “new oil”, as some have claimed: it isn’t a non-renewable natural resource that comes from a piece of earth that a lucky property owner controls. We have all pitched in to create a new commonwealth of information about ourselves that is bigger than any single participant, and we should all benefit from it.
  • The value of our data has a lot in common with the value of our labor: a single individual worker, outside of the rarest professions, can be replaced by another with similar skills. But when workers organize to withhold their labor, they have much more power to ensure employers more fairly value it. Just as one worker is an island but organized workers are a force to be reckoned with, the users of digital platforms should organize not only for better protection of our data, but for a new contract that ensures everyone shares in the historic profits we make possible.
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  • A data dividend would be a powerful way to rebalance the American economy, which currently makes it possible for a very small number of people to get rich while everyone else struggles to make ends meet.
  • A data dividend on its own would not be enough to stem growing income inequality, but it would create a universal benefit that would guarantee people benefit from the collective wealth our economy is creating more than they do today. If paired with fairer wages, more progressive taxation, and stricter enforcement of monopoly and monopsony power, it could help us turn the corner and create a country where we take care of one another and ensure that everyone has basic economic security.
Steve Bosserman

Can the Alt-Labor Movement Improve Conditions for American Workers? - 0 views

  • 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.
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