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" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

"How the 'emotional contagion' of memes makes them the internet's moral conscience By Allie Volpe Aug 27, 2018, 11:30am EDT Illustration by Alex Castro & Keegan Larwin SHARE Newly single, Jason Donahoe was perusing Tinder for the first time since it started integrating users' Instagram feeds. Suddenly, he had an idea: follow the Instagram accounts of some of the women he'd been interested in but didn't match with on the dating service. A few days later, he considered taking it a step further and direct messaging one of the women on Instagram. After all, the new interface of the dating app seemed to encourage users to explore other areas of potential matches' online lives, so why not take the initiative to reach out? Before he had a chance, however, he came across the profile of another woman whose Tinder photo spread featured a meme with Parks and Recreation character Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Ben Schwartz) leaning into the face of Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) with the caption: hey I saw you on Tinder but we didn't match so I found your Instagram you're so beautiful you don't need to wear all that makeup ahah I bet you get a lot of creepy dm's but I'm not like all those other guys message me back beautiful btw what's your snap "I was like, 'Oh shit, wow,'" Donahoe says. Seeing his potential jerk move laid out so plainly as a neatly generalized joke, he saw it in a new light. "I knew a) to be aware of that, and b) to cut that shit out … It prompted self-reflection on my part." THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MEMES STRIKE A CULTURAL CHORD AND CAN GUIDE AND EVEN INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR Donahoe says memes have resonated with him particularly when they depict a "worse, extreme version" of himself. For Donahoe, the most successful memes are more than just jokes. They "strike a societal, cultural chord" and can be a potent cocktail for self-reflection as tools that can guide and even influence behavior. In the months leading up to the 2016 US

Human networks are not random. We connect to others who're like us in some way; social scientists call this homophily. A point of similarity might be something as fundamental to our identity as gender, religion, ethnicity, age, values, or beliefs. Or it could be, and often is, socioeconomic status. Or geographic-say, a neighborhood, city, or region where you grew up. Or an enthusiasm-football, a popular video game, or a breed of dog. When we meet someone at a party, we quickly try to find out if our networks connect in some way. Where are you from? What do you do? How do you know the host? Homophily is a human universal and an essential piece of our mental equipment for sustaining cooperation.

"Realignment and Legitimacy "The Constitutional Crisis Is Now" [Robert Reich, The American Prospect]. "If [Trump] refuses to accept the results [the 2020] election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016 election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office." This is lunacy. In 2016, liberal Democrats floated the idea that "faithless electors" in the Electoral College should not appoint Trump - based on information from the "intelligence community" that the public was not allowed to see. From that day to this, liberal Democrats haven't accepted the results of 2016, which is what the "Clinton won the popular vote" amounts to. Is the inability to look in the mirror a 10%-er deformation professionnelle? "The Democratic Party unraveling is not good for America" [Ed Rogers, WaPo]. "The Democratic Party is not functioning as an umbrella organization or even a coalition. Instead, activists from Tom Steyer to George Soros to Planned Parenthood are operating independently*, doing things a political party otherwise would. These independent actors are pushing pet causes. Traditional party building isn't one of them. Campaign finance reform and communication technologies have empowered wealthy individuals and collateral groups while at the same time inhibiting parties and individual campaigns. I say this not to kick the Democratic Party while it is down but because I believe in the two-party system…. We need reforms that empower parties and candidates and diminish the influence of deep-pocketed plutocrats and narrowly focused interest groups." Rogers is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush White Houses, but he's not wrong. NOTE * Maybe. When you start thinking, it's hard to know where the boundaries of the Democrat Party really are. For example, are journalists who propagate Brock talking points in the party, or not? My instinct is to say that they are, but how is an institution with fluid boundaries like that to be named and cate

"The term 'loneliness' first crops up in English around 1800. Before then, the closest word was 'oneliness', simply the state of being alone. As with solitude - from the Latin 'solus' which meant 'alone' - 'oneliness' was not coloured by any suggestion of emotional lack. Solitude or oneliness was not unhealthy or undesirable, but rather a necessary space for reflection with God, or with one's deepest thoughts. Since God was always nearby, a person was never truly alone. Skip forward a century or two, however, and the use of 'loneliness' - burdened with associations of emptiness and the absence of social connection - has well and truly surpassed oneliness. What happened?"

"My colleague Jamie Robins and I are working on a book that provides a cohesive presentation of concepts of, and methods for, causal inference. Much of this material is currently scattered across journals in several disciplines or confined to technical articles. We expect that the book will be of interest to anyone interested in causal inference, e.g., epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, computer scientists… The book is divided in 3 parts of increasing difficulty: causal inference without models, causal inference with models, and causal inference from complex longitudinal data. We are making drafts of selected book sections available on this website. The idea is that interested readers can submit suggestions or criticisms before the book is published. To share any comments, please email me or visit @causalinference on Facebook. To cite the book, please use "Hernán MA, Robins JM (2018). Causal Inference. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC, forthcoming.""

"We use the word "authority" to mean lots of things - police and state actors are "the authorities", an expert may be "an authority on the matter, etc. But I want to suggest that it is very useful to think of authority as a characteristic of information in a social context. In particular, information is "authoritative" when some community of people to coordinate upon it and behave as if it were true, regardless of whether or not the information is in fact true, or even of whether the individuals doing the behaving personally believe it to be true. If information is authoritative, members of the community behave as if the information is true even despite strong, often opposing interests in the question. When we claim that someone "is an authority", we are claiming that the information they produce will (or should) alter behavior within some human community. Authority subsists in the relationship between information and behavior in a social context."

But when cognitive science turned its back on behaviourism more than 50 years ago and began dealing with signals and internal maps, goals and expectations, beliefs and desires, biologists were torn. All right, they conceded, people and some animals have minds; their brains are physical minds - not mysterious dualistic minds - processing information and guiding purposeful behaviour; animals without brains, such as sea squirts, don't have minds, nor do plants or fungi or microbes. They resisted introducing intentional idioms into their theoretical work, except as useful metaphors when teaching or explaining to lay audiences. Genes weren't really selfish, antibodies weren't really seeking, cells weren't really figuring out where they were. These little biological mechanisms weren't really agents with agendas, even though thinking of them as if they were often led to insights.

Land use change-for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems-is widely recognized to influence the risk and emergence of zoonotic disease in humans1,2. However, whether such changes in risk are underpinned by predictable ecological changes remains unclear. It has been suggested that habitat disturbance might cause predictable changes in the local diversity and taxonomic composition of potential reservoir hosts, owing to systematic, trait-mediated differences in species resilience to human pressures3,4. Here we analyse 6,801 ecological assemblages and 376 host species worldwide, controlling for research effort, and show that land use has global and systematic effects on local zoonotic host communities. Known wildlife hosts of human-shared pathogens and parasites overall comprise a greater proportion of local species richness (18-72% higher) and total abundance (21-144% higher) in sites under substantial human use (secondary, agricultural and urban ecosystems) compared with nearby undisturbed habitats. The magnitude of this effect varies taxonomically and is strongest for rodent, bat and passerine bird zoonotic host species, which may be one factor that underpins the global importance of these taxa as zoonotic reservoirs. We further show that mammal species that harbour more pathogens overall (either human-shared or non-human-shared) are more likely to occur in human-managed ecosystems, suggesting that these trends may be mediated by ecological or life-history traits that influence both host status and tolerance to human disturbance5,6. Our results suggest that global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.

A long-held view of mine-based on solid economic theory and much empirical evidence-is that a global monetary and financial system conducive to a stable global order has three attributes: (1) open capital markets, (2) flexible exchange rates between countries or blocs and (3) a predictable and transparent, or rules-based, monetary policy.

"Drones' greatest attraction for the national security world is that they create options where there were none - or none at a cost policymakers feel comfortable with. With a public tired of large scale military interventions, drones and other approaches that gave the U.S. options to study or intervene against security challenges in a low profile, low risk way fit perfectly into the Obama administration's comfort zone. These platforms came to symbolize and enable much of the Obama national security team's approach. But the enthusiastic embrace of drone technology, particularly in counterterrorism, left some former Obama officials questioning whether they'd been clutching a Pandora's box they should have opened more deliberately. Overall, such "light footprint" strategies generate enduring disagreements about their efficacy, risk, and oversight. Unlike any other recent military platform, drones in particular engender strong emotion - hope, revulsion, overconfidence, demonization - and magical thinking, even among those who know them best. And the attributes that make them so compelling - that they are precise, remote, sensing, and unmanned - may sometimes be too reassuring."

"The idea that all humanity is equally and collectively responsible for climate change - or any other environmental or social problem - is extremely weak. In a basic and easily calculable way, not everyone is responsible for the same quantity of greenhouse gasses. People in the world's poorest countries produce roughly one hundredth of the emissions of the richest people in the richest countries. Through the chance of our births, and the lifestyle we choose we are not all equally responsible for climate change."