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anonymous

Russia's Shifting Political Landscape, Part 1: An Overview of Political Changes - 6 views

stratfor.com/...t-1-overview-political-changes

shared by anonymous on 01 Feb 12 - Cached
  • When Putin came to power in 1999, he ruled a country that was in utter political disarray, economically broken and threatened by internal and external forces. He aggressively consolidated the country politically, economically and socially and quashed the security threats. The country rallied around him as Russia's "savior," a sentiment that in recent years evolved into a cult based on the belief that Putin is the sole heartbeat of the country.
  • The first shift in Russia's political landscape occurred because Putin's complex network of clans inside the Kremlin has utterly collapsed.
  • Anti-Kremlin sentiment stems from many issues. Years of relative stability have led to a sense of political, social and economic security, which has fostered a belief among some Russians that the country no longer needs a "savior" like Putin. Prolonged periods of high energy prices and a strengthening Russian economy have created a new growing middle class, something not really seen in Russia before. Furthermore, much of the generation now coming of age was not raised under the Soviet Union or during the chaotic years immediately following its collapse. An extremist brand of nationalism has also risen across the country, leading more Russians to have no interest in a balanced government. Putin's government did not anticipate these shifts in recent years, and that failure has fed into dissent from within United Russia and the further rise of anti-Kremlin sentiment.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This kind of adjustment has occurred cyclically throughout Russian history as the country has shifted between stability and chaos.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 Feb 12
       
      See also: Dark horse and light horse concepts.
  • the longer Putin takes to resolve these crises, the weaker he will appear to the rest of the world.
  • Other countries, especially the United States, have taken advantage of the instability inside Russia and are attempting to exploit the image that Moscow is not as strong or powerful as it claims to be. As Russia continues to pressure Central Europe and Washington's interests in the region, Moscow cannot allow internal issues to erode its position.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      No, you are quite right. There is no threat (yet) to Russia's core. But since Russia has such indefensible geography, they extend their reach to create buffer zones. Even with the U.S./Islamic world diversion, the U.S. is still aggressively planting itself in Central Asia. Russia wants the U.S. and the rest of Europe to concede that *Eastern* Europe be considered their playground. With that recognized - the thinking goes - Russia will breathe easier.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      Oh yes, geography is still quite relevant. In order to fly planes over a place, you have to have supply lines and obey flight range constraints. One aspect of geography that is perennially overlooked is: rivers. Russia's one of the best examples. Look at the major river systems of the U.S. and Russia and two things become quite clear: 1) Russia has only one navigable river and it doesn't empty to the ocean, but rather a mostly landlocked sea. 2) America has a complex, navigable river system that meanders through the center of the land mass. We couldn't ask for better rivers. Using those rivers, as we do, we are able to save substantially on shipping costs. Russia, by contrast, has a sparsely populated interior precisely because there are no river systems that can be used in such a manner. Everything's imported over rail and truck. I need to find a graphic, but there's a great one which highlights why Russia wants to keep, say, Ukraine in its sphere of influence. Basically, you could position tons of short range missiles to threaten Moscow quite easily. I would pose that the only reason that we can't imagine that large-scale combat is a thing anymore (I share a bit of that in my gut) is simply because we have not lived through a conflict with anything near the scope of World War II. But just because it hasn't happened, doesn't mean it won't.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 07 Feb 12
       
      I'm saying that were such a thing to happen, the only tactical elements of geography would be range and infrastructure. It's no longer important to hold the high ground or worry about "defensible positions" unless you're taking to bunkers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      Ah. I got you. Yes. I'd agree with that. Russian planners' fear has to do with American troops stationed in a nation, not necessarily what hill they're on. :)
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 12
     
    Russia's political landscape has been relatively calm and consolidated for the past decade under former President and current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. However, recent months have seen instability rise sharply, with a purge in the government, a shift in parliamentary election results and large protests in the streets. None of these is new to Russia, but these and other factors are converging and creating changes in Russia's political landscape.
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Feb 12
     
    I know that Russia was threatened internally when Putin came to power, but I feel that the "external" threats were more threats on Russia's external claims. Am I missing something?
  • Erik Hanson on 07 Feb 12
     
    Is defensibility of terrain really that important anymore? It seems that beyond small-scale, local-level action, most geography is flown over or sailed around these days, and Russia has plenty of space between where they'd be able to pick up a threat and where that threat could actually do damage. Seriously. Are large-scale land (vs. marine/air) invasions even a thing anymore?
anonymous

Huntington on Upheaval - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...huntington-upheaval

shared by anonymous on 31 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The very first sentences of Political Order have elicited anger from Washington policy elites for decades now -- precisely because they are so undeniable. "The most important political distinction among countries," Huntington writes, "concerns not their form of government but their degree of government." In other words, strong democracies and strong dictatorships have more in common than strong democracies and weak democracies.
  • hus, the United States always had more in common with the Soviet Union than with any fragile, tottering democracy in the Third World. This, in turn, is because order usually comes before freedom -- for without a reasonable degree of administrative order, freedom can have little value.
  • Huntington quotes the mid-20th century American journalist, Walter Lippmann: "There is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed."
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  • Huntington, who died in 2008, asserts that America has little to teach a tumultuous world in transition because Americans are compromised by their own "happy history."
  • Americans assume a "unity of goodness": that all good things like democracy, economic development, social justice and so on go together. But for many places with different historical experiences based on different geographies and circumstances that isn't always the case.
  • many countries in the developing world are saddled either with few institutions or illegitimate ones at that: so that they have to build an administrative order from scratch. Quite a few of the countries affected by the Arab Spring are in this category. So American advice is more dubious than supposed, because America's experience is the opposite of the rest of the world.
  • For the more complex a society is, the more that institutions are required. The so-called public interest is really the interest in institutions. In modern states, loyalty is to institutions. To wit, Americans voluntarily pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and lose respect for those who are exposed as tax cheaters.
  • For without institutions like a judiciary, what and who is there to determine what exactly is right and wrong, and to enforce such distinctions?
  • What individual Arabs and Chinese really want is justice. And justice is ultimately the fruit of enlightened administration.
  • How do you know if a society has effective institutions? Huntington writes that one way is to see how good their militaries are. Because societies that have made war well -- Sparta, Rome, Great Britain, America -- have also been well-governed. For effective war-making requires deep organizations, which, in turn, requires trust and predictability.
  • The ability to fight in large numbers is by itself a sign of civilization. Arab states whose regimes have fallen -- Egypt, Libya, Syria -- never had very good state armies. But sub-state armies in the Middle East -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mehdi Army in Iraq, the various rebel groups in Syria and militias in Libya -- have often fought impressively. Huntington might postulate that this is an indication of new political formations that will eventually replace post-colonial states.
  • Huntington implies that today's instability -- the riotous formation of new institutional orders -- is caused by urbanization and enlightenment. As societies become more urbanized, people come into close contact with strangers beyond their family groups, requiring the intense organization of police forces, sewage, street lighting, traffic and so forth.
  • The main drama of the Middle East and China over the past half-century, remember, has been urbanization, which has affected religion, morals and much else. State autocrats have simply been unable to keep up with dynamic social change.
  • He writes that large numbers of illiterate people in a democracy such as India's can actually be stabilizing, since illiterates have relatively few demands; but as literacy increase, voters become more demanding, and their participation in democratic groupings like labor unions goes up, leading to instability. An India of more and more literate voters may experience more unrest.
  • As for corruption, rather than something to be reviled, it can be a sign of modernization, in which new sources of wealth and power are being created even as institutions cannot keep up. Corruption can also be a replacement for revolution. "He who corrupts a system's police officers is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the system's police stations."
  • In Huntington's minds, monarchies, rather than reactionary, can often be more dedicated to real reform than modernizing dictatorships. For the monarch has historical legitimacy, even as he feels the need to prove himself through good works; while the secular dictator sees himself as the vanquisher of colonialism, and thus entitled to the spoils of power.
  • Huntington thus helps a little to explain why monarchs such as those in Morocco, Jordan and Oman have been more humane than dictators such as those in Libya, Syria and Iraq.
  • As for military dictatorships, Huntington adds several twists.
  • He writes, "In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the middle-class world he is a participant and arbiter; as the mass society looms on the horizon he becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order.
  • Thus, paradoxically but understandably," he goes on, "the more backward a society is, the more progressive the role of its military..." And so he explains why Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa underwent a plethora of military coups during the middle decades of the Cold War: The officer corps often represented the most enlightened branch of society at the time.
  • Americans see the military as conservative only because of our own particular stage of development as a mass society.
  • The logic behind much of Huntington's narrative is that the creation of order -- not the mere holding of elections -- is progressive.
  • Only once order is established can popular pressure be constructively asserted to make such order less coercive and more institutionally subtle.
  • Precisely because we inhabit an era of immense social change, there will be continual political upheaval, as human populations seek to live under more receptive institutional orders. To better navigate the ensuing crises, American leaders would do well to read Huntington, so as to nuance their often stuffy lectures to foreigners about how to reform.
  • anonymous on 31 Jul 13
     
    "In 1968, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies. Forty-five years later, the book remains without question the greatest guide to today's current events. Forget the libraries of books on globalization, Political Order reigns supreme: arguably the most incisive, albeit impolite, work produced by a political scientist in the 20th century. If you want to understand the Arab Spring, the economic and social transition in China, or much else, ignore newspaper opinion pages and read Huntington."
anonymous

Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-itself-how-science-goes-wrong

shared by anonymous on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article).
  • A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic.
  • Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds.
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  • In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime.
  • Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
  • In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page.
  • And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise.
  • “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990.
  • The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
  • When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
  • What might be done to shore it up?
  • One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns.
  • Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones.
  • Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are.
  • (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
  • Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication.
  • Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting” work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it.
  • Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
  • Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong.
  • anonymous on 19 Oct 13
     
    "A SIMPLE idea underpins science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better."
anonymous

China's Inevitable Changes - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-inevitable-changes

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • China's current economic model, and by extension its political and social model, is reaching its limits just as it had prior to Deng's administration.
  • It is worth recalling just how extraordinary Deng's 1978 meeting was. Mao Zedong had died only two years earlier, taking with him what little remained of the old pillars of Communist Party legitimacy. China was a mess, ravaged by years of economic mismanagement and uncontrolled population growth and only beginning to recover from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution.
  • Had the People's Republic fallen in 1978 or shortly thereafter, few would have been truly surprised. Of course, in those tense early post-Mao years hardly anyone could foresee just how rapid China's transformation would be.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Nonetheless, battling enormous institutional constraints, Deng and his colleagues quickly set up new pillars of social, political and economic stability that guided China through the fall of the Soviet Union and into the 21st century.
  • Jiang, emerging as a post-Tiananmen Square leader, was faced with a situation where the Party was rapidly losing its legitimacy and where state-owned enterprises were encumbering China's economic opening and reform.
  • by the time he took on the additional role of president in 1993, the decline of the Japanese economy and the boom in the United States and the rest of Asia left an opening for China's economy to resurge.
  • When Hu succeeded Jiang in 2002-2003, China's economic growth was seemingly unstoppable, perhaps even gaining steam from the Asian economic crisis.
  • As Xi prepares his 10-year plan, China has reached the end of the economic supercycle set in motion by Deng. Public criticism of officials and thus of the Party is rampant, and China's military appears much more capable than it actually is, putting China is a potentially dangerous situation.
  • Once again the United States is looking at China as a power perhaps to contain or at least constrain. China's neighbors seem eager for Washington's assistance to counterbalance Beijing's influence, and long-dormant Japan is awakening once again.
  • Xi may not have to rebuild a fractured Party or state as Deng did, but in some ways he faces the same fundamental challenge: redirecting and redefining China.
  • Deng emerged as China's paramount leader out of the struggles and chaos of the Gang of Four era and the Cultural Revolution. He redefined what China was and where China was going, not out of a desire to try something different or an infatuation with "Western" economic models but out of a fundamental need to change course.
  • Reform, with "Chinese characteristics," is not about Westernizing the Chinese model. Rather, it is about reshaping the relationship between the Party, the economy and the people in a way that will maintain the centrality of the Party.
  • while this will likely entail selectively scaling back the Party's power in certain areas, it does not mean the overall reduction of Party power.
  • The consolidation of Party and political leadership was made clear in the formula. It is matched by the general secretary and president also holding the dual roles of chairman on the two parallel Central Military Commissions, one under the Party and the other under the state.
  • Jiang's accession to the presidency formalized Party-government leadership, but consensus leadership constrained his power. Jiang may have technically held all the key posts of power, but other power brokers in the Politburo could counterbalance him.
  • The system ensured that the paramount leader remained constrained.
  • Ensuring the right web of connections often became more important than fulfilling the responsibilities of the Party or the state.
  • The intertwining threads were just too complex. Rapid policy swings were impossible and factional battles that threatened the fabric of the state were effectively eliminated, but the cost was a decision-making process that was increasingly cumbersome and timid.
  • This worked well during China's boom.
  • Though China was corrupt, beset with a cumbersome regulatory environment and prone to violations of intellectual property rights, it was fairly predictable overall, unlike so many other developing economies.
  • But when the foundation of China's economy began to shake after 2008, when China's very success drove up wages and prices as its biggest consumers faced serious economic problems of their own, China's consensus leadership proved unequal to the task.
  • During China's rise, Beijing needed only minor adjustments to maintain stability and growth. But now that the country is in a far different set of circumstances, Beijing needs a major course correction. The problem is that consensus rarely allows for the often radical but necessary response. And for good reason: The success of radical change is not guaranteed. In fact, history suggests otherwise, as it did notably with the case of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.
  • To overcome the limitations of consensus leadership, Xi apparently is trying to strengthen the role of president.
  • He wants to redefine the presidency so that it is not merely the concomitant title for the Party leader but also a post with a real leadership role, similar to the presidencies of other major countries.
  • This is a way to compromise somewhere between consensus and strongman.
  • The first target is the bloated bureaucracy.
  • This should add efficiency to the system (its stated goal), but it may also confer greater central oversight and control by cutting through the webs of vested interests that have taken hold in many of China's most powerful institutions.
  • The reforms slated for the economic sector are similar.
  • They will introduce more market and competitive mechanisms while giving Beijing greater control over the overall structure.
  • Consolidation, efficiency, transparency, reform and restructuring are all words that possess dual meanings -- one regarding more efficient and more flexible systems, the other regarding systems that the center is better able to direct.
  • to create a more nimble and adaptive government, Xi is seeking to harness the people in a slight reversal, using his role as president to rebuild the legitimacy of the Party
  • But China is at a turning point, and without nimble leadership, a system as large and complex as China can move very rapidly down an unpredictable and uncontrollable path.
  • anonymous on 05 Nov 13
     
    "The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China will convene its Third Plenum meeting Nov. 9. During the three-day session, President Xi Jinping's administration will outline core reforms to guide its policymaking for the next decade. The Chinese government would have the world believe that Xi's will be the most momentous Third Plenary Session since December 1978, when former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping first put China on the path of economic reform and opening."
anonymous

Pandora's Seed - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...pandoras_seed

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • From obesity to chronique fatigue syndrome, jihadism to urban ennui, the costs of civilization are becoming ever more apparent. Spencer Wells explores adapting to a world where accelerating change is the new status quo.
  • Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations.
  • Trying to imagine what the world will be like at the close of the 21st century is nearly impossible.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Is there some sort of fatal mismatch between western culture and our biology that is making us ill? And if there is such a mismatch, how did our present culture come to dominate? Surely we are the masters of our own fate, and we created the culture that is best suited to us, rather than the other way around?
  • It turns out that early farmers were actually less healthy than the surrounding hunter-gatherer populations. So why did the farmers ‘win’ so resoundingly, to the extent that virtually no one on Earth today lives as a hunter-gatherer?
  • necessity is the mother of invention.
  • It is likely that we have changed more at the DNA level in the past 10,000 years than we did in the previous 100,000.
  • As we settled down into farming villages, and then towns and cities, society became more complicated. Hunter-gatherers, having fewer people in their groups, tend to have fairly simple and egalitarian social structures. A chief perhaps, but certainly not a specialized bureaucracy, a professional army, a priesthood and other trappings of what we call civilization.
  • The existence of these things is a direct outcome of the decision to settle down and start growing food.
  • ow can a species that spent almost all of its evolutionary history adapting to hunting and gathering in small, fairly dispersed groups learn to cope with the challenges posed by this relatively new culture?
  • The first is the growing power of genetic engineering.
  • unlike other technologies that have witnessed explosive growth over the past couple of decades, from computers to nanotechnology, the applications of genetics have the potential to affect the biological identity of future generations, through our ability to choose the traits our children – and all subsequent generations – will carry.
  • The second enormous challenge that we need to face as a result of the events set in motion 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture is climate change.
  • The final significant challenge, unlike the other two, is not fundamentally technological in nature, though some of the solutions will likely involve the application of technology. We have now evolved culturally to the point where the entire world is connected in a way it has never been before.
  • For secular rationality, read loss of faith and certainty. For improving living standards, read increased consumption. For increased social mobility, read loss of traditional roles and threats to vested interests.
  • The rise of fundamentalism in the latter half of the 20th century reflects the very real loss of the traditions that guided much of humanity over the past several thousand years.
  • Providing an inclusive mythos for the modern age will be a significant challenge of the next century.
  • The biggest revolution of the past 50,000 years was not the advent of the Internet, the growth of the industrial age out of the seeds of the Enlightenment, or the development of modern methods of long-distance navigation. Rather, it was a seemingly trivial event that happened rather quickly around 10,000 years ago – the dawn of the age of agriculture, when a few people living in several locations around the world decided to stop gathering their food from the land, abiding by limits set in place by nature, and grow their food.
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 10
     
    A guest essay by Spencer Wells at Seed Magazine on June 7, 2010.
anonymous

Russian Modernization, Part 2: The Kremlin's Balancing Act | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ting_assistance_careful_change

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The Kremlin has already struck many deals with foreign businesses — especially U.S. and European firms — and set out the first steps to make Russia appear more attractive to investors. But the necessary deals and investments will have to be on Russia’s terms, making this modernization program very different from previous efforts in an attempt to prevent the errors of the past from being repeated.
  • In centralizing Russia’s economy, the Kremlin changed the laws, limiting how much a foreign business or citizen can own in Russia’s strategic sectors and nationalizing many assets owned by foreigners. This, along with shifts in Russia’s foreign policy, made Russia’s anti-Western sentiments very clear. Russia, with its oligarchs and organized crime, was already a risky market to invest in, but the legal changes made it even more difficult for foreign groups to work inside the country.
  • Typically, the Kremlin has thought that as long as it had energy wealth it did not need a diverse or modern economy, let alone foreign investments. But over the past two years, a series of events has made the Kremlin reassess Russia’s long-term economic capabilities.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • First was a tumble in global energy prices.
  • That resurgence led to a second issue: international reaction to Russia’s war with Georgia in August 2008. Russia’s confidence in starting a war with one of its neighbors made the West nervous and led many Western states to cease investing in Russia.
  • This, along with reaction to the Russo-Georgian war, led investors to take more than $130 billion — nearly 11 percent of Russia’s foreign investment stock — out of Russia in the last quarter of 2008.
  • These tremors in the Russian economy undermined the Kremlin’s confidence in its ability to hold its consolidated state and periphery in the long term.
  • Russia cannot modernize its economy by itself because it lacks the necessary capital, experience and technology.
  • in the late 1980s, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced Perestroika, which allowed Western influence and technology to flood the country. This was a major component of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
  • In order to entice foreign businesses and money back into the country — especially those with modern technology — Russia has had to do some restructuring to make itself more attractive for investors, yet it must stand its ground in certain areas to prevent a flood of foreign influence.
  • The Kremlin is also softening the strict laws on capping a foreign firm’s stake in Russia’s strategic assets and sectors.
  • The Kremlin’s first move was to give investors a certain amount of protection.
  • Additionally, the Kremlin has drafted new laws on the legal status of foreign workers in Russia.
  • The last step Russia needed to take was to appear more pragmatic in its relations with the West.
  • To do business in Russia, one still has to be on the Kremlin’s good side. The political, regulatory and judicial environments in Russia remain restrictive, and the regulations are still convoluted to the extent that the Kremlin, regional or local governments decide what to enforce and how. The changes are intended more as confidence-building measures aimed at firms who want to enter (or return to) Russia. The legal shifts also make it easier for foreign firms and investors to comply with domestic and international laws on investing abroad.
  • For the Kremlin, this is not just about controlling business and investments — it is about controlling influence and power inside the country.
  • anonymous on 27 Jul 10
     
    "Russia is undertaking an ambitious modernization program in order to ensure its strength in the long term. However, it lacks the expertise, capital and technology to accomplish its goals on its own and must appeal to foreign firms and investors. The Kremlin is making changes to Russia's strict laws concerning foreign businesses and investment, but is taking care to maintain control and avoid importing potentially dangerous levels of foreign influence along with foreign business." At StratFor on July 27, 2010.
anonymous

Wikileaks and the Long Haul - 0 views

www.shirky.com/...wikileaks-and-the-long-haul

society

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 10
     
    "Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks. Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls "counter-democracy"*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities. On the other hand, human systems can't stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people's stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to speak frankly, and to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady's analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)"
anonymous

The Moral Dimension of Things: Why are Political Leaders Lying Most of the Time? - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php

geopolitics ethics

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • We are presently living in one of those times, characterized by deep and entrenched political corruption, by routine abuse of power and disregard for the rule of law in high places, and by unchecked greed, fraud and deception in the economic sphere. The results are all there to see: Severe and prolonged economic and financial crises, rising social inequalities and social injustice, increasing intolerance toward individual choices, the disregard for environmental decay, the rise of religious absolutism, a return to whimsical wars of aggression (or of pre-emptive wars), to blind terrorism and to the repugnant use of torture, and even to genocide and to blatant war crimes. These are all indicators that our civilization has lost its moral compass.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Mar 10
       
      We are "presently" living in this time? How about "eternally"? And even with this eternity of sin, we are still making incremental progress toward more universal ethics. It's just that the world must become even smaller and closer than it already is. Anyone want to study the warfare of the classical ages and say that we moderns are the only evil incarnate?
  • Indeed, humans' vision of themselves in the Universe has been forever altered by three fundamental scientific breakthroughs: - Galileo's proof, in 1632, that the Earth and humans were not the center of the Universe, as suppposed holy books have proclaimed. - Darwin's discovery, in 1859, (“On the Origin of Species”) that humans are not some god-like creatures unique among all species, destined to live forever, but are rather the outcome of a very long natural biological evolution. - And, the Watson-Crick-Wilkins-Franklin's discovery, in 1953, of the structure of the double helix DNA molecule (Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid) in each of the 46 chromosomes in human cells, and the devastating knowledge that humans share more than 95 percent of the same genes with chimpanzees.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 10
     
    GlobalResearch.ca doesn't offer much in the way of hard-nosed geopolitical inquiry. Indeed, I find them quite a complementary source because they are very much at odds with the predictable nature of our wicked world. I can deeply appreciate that. This article asks a question most of us have wondered for quite a while: Why do politicians lie? Why is the world the way it is? Good questions, but I would submit that the pace of cultural change is s-l-o-w, even in spite of the noted changes to our global understanding.
anonymous

The Egyptian Military's Defining Moment - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...tian-militarys-defining-moment

egypt geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 11 Feb 11 - Cached
  • By the time the Egyptian ambassador to the United States cleared up the matter on CNN, the crowd felt betrayed and seemed no longer to care about the significant distinction. They did not want power to be ceded. They wanted Mubarak gone and they wanted the military to take care of the matter.
  • The fact that Mubarak was clinging to the constitution and the crowds were in effect calling for a coup represented a kind of irony, but ultimately not much of one.
  • There is a constitution and Mubarak is the president. If he is simply forced out, the status of the constitution is in doubt and with it, the regime that the military founded under Nasser. Mubarak wanted to serve out his term, but was prepared to cede practical power. That, from their point of view, should have been enough.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The other argument was that at this point the crowds were not asking for regime change, remaining focused on Mubarak. If the military resisted and the crowds turned on them, they would be calling for regime change and with it, everything would be up in the air. Far better to violate the letter of the constitution and depose Mubarak, then risk destroying it all by protecting Mubarak; far better to capitulate to the crowds than to fire on them.
  • Both sides had the same fear — regime change.
  • The choices involved the fate of the nation and the military and one can imagine the arguments, people changing sides, decisions quickly reversed. The players were as confused as the observers.
  • anonymous on 11 Feb 11
     
    "It was a night of watching. What was being watched was the Egyptian military, faced with a defining moment. President Hosni Mubarak was expected to resign today. People ranging from the head of the CIA to Egyptian government officials to the crowds in the streets clearly expected it to happen. Obviously, word had leaked out from sources close to Mubarak that he had made the decision to go. Yet when he made his speech today, he did not resign. "
anonymous

Egypt's Protests and the Significance of Cairo's Stability - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-significance-cairos-stability

geopolitics egypt

shared by anonymous on 31 Jan 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 31 Jan 11
     
    "Protests continued in Egypt on Jan. 26, though there were fewer protesters in the streets than on the previous day. Protests alone will not bring down the Mubarak government, but they create a sense of disorder that the military or opposition groups could use to destabilize Cairo. Such destabilization - especially if it results in regime change, and especially as Cairo is preparing for a leadership change but has no set succession plan - would have implications in the Middle East and beyond."
anonymous

The Evolving Modern Egyptian Republic: A Special Report - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...yptian-republic-special-report

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The modern Egyptian state is a new polity, founded a mere 60 years ago in the wake of a military coup organized by midranking officers under the leadership of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser.
  • The provisional military authority, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, led by the country’s top general, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, will play the pivotal role in the post-Mubarak era. To understand what Egypt’s future holds, one must examine the evolution of the incumbent political arrangement, the central role played by the military in the formation of the state, previous transitions, and the reasons behind the regime’s need to oust one of its own.
  • anonymous on 01 Mar 11
     
    "The Egyptian establishment faced internal strife over the transition of power from President Hosni Mubarak even before massive public unrest demanding regime change erupted in mid-January. With Mubarak now out of office, some hope for democracy while others fear the rise of radical Islamist forces. Though neither outcome appears likely, the Egyptian state plainly is under a great deal of stress and is being forced to make changes to ensure its survival. "
anonymous

In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war - 1 views

www.salon.com/...libya

geopolitics libya

shared by anonymous on 13 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?  Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval?  Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war?  And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?
  • I have two points to make about all this:
  • The reason -- the only reason -- we know about any of this is because WikiLeaks (and, allegedly, Bradley Manning) disclosed to the world the diplomatic cables which detail these conflicts. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Is there anyone -- anywhere -- who actually believes that these aren't the driving considerations in why we're waging this war in Libya?  After almost three months of fighting and bombing -- when we're so far from the original justifications and commitments that they're barely a distant memory -- is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya?
  • Instead, what distinguished Gaddafi and made him a war target was that he had become insufficiently compliant -- an unreliable and unstable servant to the West.
  • Wars are typically caused by the interests of multiple factions and rarely have just one motive.  As Jim Webb explained in arguing that the U.S. has no vital interest in Libya, the French and British are far more reliant on Libyan oil than the U.S. is (and this reader offers a rational dissent and alternative explanation for the war).  But the U.S. has long made clear that it will not tolerate hostile or disobedient rulers in countries where it believes it has vital interests, and that's particularly true in oil rich nations (which is one reason for the American obsession with Iran).
  • anonymous on 13 Jun 11
     
    "When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force. We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West. That's not even a debatable proposition at this point." - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
anonymous

How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8521

politics partisan republican democrat america

shared by anonymous on 24 Jun 11 - Cached
  • When Democrat Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House, the leader of the lawmaking branch of government, she said her priority was to … elect more Democrats. After Republican victories in 2010, the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said his goal was to … prevent the Democratic president’s reelection. With the country at war and the economy in recession, our government leaders’ first thoughts have been of party advantage.
  • Ours is a system focused not on collective problem-solving but on a struggle for power between two private organizations.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      That modern parties vote in party-first ways is not an accident, yes. But, I'm not convinced that the unintended consequences of our political parties was something other than an accident. That point isn't well made enough.
  • What we have today is not a legacy of 1789 but an outdated relic of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Progressives pushed for the adoption of primary elections.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • the primaries, and the nominating conventions, were open only to party members. This reform was supposed to give citizens a bigger role in the election process. Instead, the influence of party leaders has been supplanted by that of a subset of party activists who are often highly ideological and largely uninterested in finding common ground.
  • Americans demand a multiplicity of options in almost every other aspect of our lives. And yet we allow small bands of activists to limit our choices of people to represent us in making the nation’s laws.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      However, *too* many options paralyzes us. This is standard choice/marketing stuff, but I see how, if you tilt your head, something like this would seem inevitable.
  • I am not calling for a magical political “center”
  • Nor am I pleading for consensus
  • And I’m not pushing for harmony
  • The problem is not division but partisanship—advantage-seeking by private clubs whose central goal is to win political power. There are different ways to conduct elections and manage our government—and strengthen the democratic process. Here are some suggestions designed to turn our political system on its head, so that people, not parties, control our government.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      I wonder if, with the best of intentions, partisans slowly conflate the party with the nation until it wouldn't dawn on them to consider themselves seeking party favor first, and nation second.
  • Break the power of partisans to keep candidates off the general-election ballot.
  • Because activists who demand loyalty and see compromising as selling out dominate party primaries and conventions, candidates who seek their permission to be on the November ballot find themselves under great pressure to take hard-line positions. This tendency toward rigidity—and the party system that enables it—is at the root of today’s political dysfunction.
  • As a result, members of Congress would have greater freedom to base their legislative decisions on their constituents’ concerns and on their own independent evaluations of a proposal’s merits. They would be our representatives, not representatives of their political clubs.
  • Turn over the process of redrawing congressional districts to independent, nonpartisan commissions.
  • Although legislative majorities continue to draw district lines in most states, 13 states (most recently, California) have established nonpartisan or bipartisan redistricting commissions, and two additional states have created merely “advisory” commissions. The systems vary—some use commissions to propose plans that legislatures must approve; others strip the legislature of all redistricting authority—but each of the 13 recognizes that the partisan drawing of congressional-district boundaries has hurt the democratic process, leaving elected officials dependent on, and beholden to, the party bosses who draw their districts.
  • Allow members of any party to offer amendments to any House bill and—with rare exceptions—put those amendments to a vote.
  • “closed” rules, preventing members from offering amendments, simply tell citizens their preferences don’t matter.
  • Speaker John Boehner deserves credit for promising greater opportunities for the minority party to have its amendments considered. Under his speakership, the Republican-dominated House has actually accepted some Democratic amendments.
  • The House should adopt rules guaranteeing that any proposal receiving a significant level of support—say, 100 co-sponsors—would automatically be allowed a committee hearing, an up-or-down vote in committee, and then, even if it fails in committee, a vote on the House floor.
  • Change the leadership structure of congressional committees.
  • We should change congressional rules to provide for a chairman from the majority party and a vice chairman from the minority (no such position exists in today’s Congress, except on certain special non-legislating committees); the vice chairman need not ascend to the chairmanship in the chairman’s absence, but each would have the authority to bring a bill forward and to invite expert witnesses to offer testimony. The process might be slower, but consideration of alternatives would be more thorough.
  • The current committee process is transactional, not deliberative.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      Translation: "What can *we* get?"
  • Fill committee vacancies by lot.
  • The derivation of leadership in Congress from an internal version of the party primary or convention is an artificial construct. In every informal congressional subgroup—the Human Rights Caucus, the Rust Belt Caucus, the Flat Tax Caucus—leaders are chosen without regard to party affiliation.
  • Imagine how different the congressional dynamic would be if that practice prevailed in committee assignments.
  • They would be freer to vote as they saw fit.
  • Choose committee staff solely on the basis of professional qualifications.
  • But if the goal is to legislate for the country, not for a party, then committee staff members should be selected by a nonpartisan House or Senate administrator and obligated to serve all members equally without regard to party agenda.
  • The Constitution grants Congress most of the federal government’s real powers—to spend, tax, create federal programs, declare war, approve treaties, confirm federal court appointments.
  • By thinking of the House and Senate in constitutional rather than partisan terms, we would eliminate party-driven links between Congress and the president and avoid the spectacle of legislative leaders acting as though they were either members of the president’s staff or his sworn enemies.
  • Our current political dysfunction is not inevitable; it results from deliberate decisions that have backfired and left us mired in the trenches of hyper-partisan warfare.
  • The goal is not to destroy parties but to transcend them; to welcome their contributions but end their dominance; and to take back from these private clubs control of our own elections and our own Congress.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      This is a really good read. Quite layman-friendly and concise. Without knowing more about the deeper mechanics of the government's procedure, it all (at least) seems quite plausible. When I started reading this, I thought I'd be buried under polemic, but this has almost an engineer's eye. An insider looks at the structure he's been within and thinks, "hmmm, we can fix it. Adjust here, here, and here." Which is not to say that these bullet-point items would be a hard solution, but they could be tweaks that move us in an *improved* direction.
  • anonymous on 24 Jun 11
     
    Thanks to Erik Hanson for the pointer. With a reminder from Ian Dorsch. Wishful thinking? Maybe. But I'd like to try any approach that hastens the departure of the uglier elements of American political shouting. From the Atlantic. "ANGRY AND FRUSTRATED, American voters went to the polls in November 2010 to "take back" their country. Just as they had done in 2008. And 2006. And repeatedly for decades, whether it was Republicans or Democrats from whom they were taking the country back. No matter who was put in charge, things didn't get better. They won't this time, either; spending levels may go down, taxes may go up, budgets will change, but American government will go on the way it has, not as a collective enterprise but as a battle between warring tribes."
anonymous

The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...iddle-class-and-american-power

shared by anonymous on 07 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends.
  • The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.
  • The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000.
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.
  • In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner -- normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker -- and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.
  • Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher.
  • At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.
  • And this is for the median. Those below him -- half of all households -- would be shut out of what is considered middle-class life, with the house, the car and the other associated amenities.
  • I should pause and mention that this was one of the fundamental causes of the 2007-2008 subprime lending crisis. People below the median took out loans with deferred interest with the expectation that their incomes would continue the rise that was traditional since World War II.
  • The caricature of the borrower as irresponsible misses the point. The expectation of rising real incomes was built into the American culture, and many assumed based on that that the rise would resume in five years. When it didn't they were trapped, but given history, they were not making an irresponsible assumption.
  • American history was always filled with the assumption that upward mobility was possible. The Midwest and West opened land that could be exploited, and the massive industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries opened opportunities. There was a systemic expectation of upward mobility built into American culture and reality.
  • The Great Depression was a shock to the system, and it wasn't solved by the New Deal, nor even by World War II alone. The next drive for upward mobility came from post-war programs for veterans, of whom there were more than 10 million. These programs were instrumental in creating post-industrial America, by creating a class of suburban professionals. There were three programs that were critical:
  • The GI Bill, which allowed veterans to go to college after the war, becoming professionals frequently several notches above their parents.
  • The part of the GI Bill that provided federally guaranteed mortgages to veterans, allowing low and no down payment mortgages and low interest rates to graduates of publicly funded universities.
  • The federally funded Interstate Highway System, which made access to land close to but outside of cities easier, enabling both the dispersal of populations on inexpensive land (which made single-family houses possible) and, later, the dispersal of business to the suburbs.
  • There were undoubtedly many other things that contributed to this, but these three not only reshaped America but also created a new dimension to the upward mobility that was built into American life from the beginning.
  • there was consensus around the moral propriety of the programs.
  • The subprime fiasco was rooted in the failure to understand that the foundations of middle class life were not under temporary pressure but something more fundamental.
  • the rise of the double-income family corresponded with the decline of the middle class.
  • But there was, I think, the crisis of the modern corporation.
  • Over the course of time, the culture of the corporation diverged from the realities, as corporate productivity lagged behind costs and the corporations became more and more dysfunctional and ultimately unsupportable.
  • In addition, the corporations ceased focusing on doing one thing well and instead became conglomerates, with a management frequently unable to keep up with the complexity of multiple lines of business.
  • Everything was being reinvented. Huge amounts of money, managed by people whose specialty was re-engineering companies, were deployed. The choice was between total failure and radical change. From the point of view of the individual worker, this frequently meant the same thing: unemployment.
  • From the view of the economy, it meant the creation of value whether through breaking up companies, closing some of them or sending jobs overseas. It was designed to increase the total efficiency, and it worked for the most part.
  • This is where the disjuncture occurred. From the point of view of the investor, they had saved the corporation from total meltdown by redesigning it. From the point of view of the workers, some retained the jobs that they would have lost, while others lost the jobs they would have lost anyway. But the important thing is not the subjective bitterness of those who lost their jobs, but something more complex.
  • As the permanent corporate jobs declined, more people were starting over. Some of them were starting over every few years as the agile corporation grew more efficient and needed fewer employees. That meant that if they got new jobs it would not be at the munificent corporate pay rate but at near entry-level rates in the small companies that were now the growth engine.
  • As these companies failed, were bought or shifted direction, they would lose their jobs and start over again. Wages didn't rise for them and for long periods they might be unemployed, never to get a job again in their now obsolete fields, and certainly not working at a company for the next 20 years.
  • The restructuring of inefficient companies did create substantial value, but that value did not flow to the now laid-off workers. Some might flow to the remaining workers, but much of it went to the engineers who restructured the companies and the investors they represented.
  • Statistics reveal that, since 1947 (when the data was first compiled), corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic product are now at their highest level, while wages as a percentage of GDP are now at their lowest level.
  • It was not a question of making the economy more efficient -- it did do that -- it was a question of where the value accumulated. The upper segment of the wage curve and the investors continued to make money. The middle class divided into a segment that entered the upper-middle class, while another faction sank into the lower-middle class.
  • American society on the whole was never egalitarian. It always accepted that there would be substantial differences in wages and wealth. Indeed, progress was in some ways driven by a desire to emulate the wealthy. There was also the expectation that while others received far more, the entire wealth structure would rise in tandem. It was also understood that, because of skill or luck, others would lose.
  • What we are facing now is a structural shift, in which the middle class' center, not because of laziness or stupidity, is shifting downward in terms of standard of living. It is a structural shift that is rooted in social change (the breakdown of the conventional family) and economic change (the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage).
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      I would revise: "(breakdown of the contentional family) is too unclear. The 'conventional family' that Friedman notes was very much outlier behavior for most Americans. Having enough money for a wife to stay home was an unprecedented situation in American history.
  • The inherent crisis rests in an increasingly efficient economy and a population that can't consume what is produced because it can't afford the products. This has happened numerous times in history, but the United States, excepting the Great Depression, was the counterexample.
  • In political debates, someone must be blamed. In reality, these processes are beyond even the government's ability to control. On one hand, the traditional corporation was beneficial to the workers until it collapsed under the burden of its costs. On the other hand, the efficiencies created threaten to undermine consumption by weakening the effective demand among half of society.
  • The greatest danger is one that will not be faced for decades but that is lurking out there.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      One decade, but not two, if you ask me.
  • The United States was built on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all ships. That has not been the case for the past generation, and there is no indication that this socio-economic reality will change any time soon.
  • That means that a core assumption is at risk. The problem is that social stability has been built around this assumption -- not on the assumption that everyone is owed a living, but the assumption that on the whole, all benefit from growing productivity and efficiency.
  • If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      Which is why this is an effective tactic for linking 'evil Socialist' programs to national security.
  • Other superpowers such as Britain or Rome did not have the idea of a perpetually improving condition of the middle class as a core value. The United States does. If it loses that, it loses one of the pillars of its geopolitical power.
  • The left would argue that the solution is for laws to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class. That would increase consumption but, depending on the scope, would threaten the amount of capital available to investment by the transfer itself and by eliminating incentives to invest. You can't invest what you don't have, and you won't accept the risk of investment if the payoff is transferred away from you.
  • The right will argue that allowing the free market to function will fix the problem.
  • The free market doesn't guarantee social outcomes, merely economic ones.
  • In other words, it may give more efficiency on the whole and grow the economy as a whole, but by itself it doesn't guarantee how wealth is distributed.
  • The left cannot be indifferent to the historical consequences of extreme redistribution of wealth. The right cannot be indifferent to the political consequences of a middle-class life undermined, nor can it be indifferent to half the population's inability to buy the products and services that businesses sell.
  • The most significant actions made by governments tend to be unintentional.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      Unintended consequences: A thing that always happens but which politicians are allergic to.
  • The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates.
  • The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership.
  • The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.
  • The United States has been a fortunate country, with solutions frequently emerging in unexpected ways.
  • It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy. Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again, but it usually gets lucky when it is frightened.
  • And at this point it isn't frightened but angry, believing that if only its own solutions were employed, this problem and all others would go away.
  • I am arguing that the conventional solutions offered by all sides do not yet grasp the magnitude of the problem -- that the foundation of American society is at risk -- and therefore all sides are content to repeat what has been said before.
  • anonymous on 07 Jan 14
     
    "When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might."
anonymous

The Future Is Not Accelerating - 0 views

io9.com/...the-future-is-not-accelerating

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Unlike computers, which we invented, the Earth's processes are something we can only understand through observation. And we need time to do it. Maybe not millions of years, but certainly not just a century either.
  • There is another kind of slow time that we often ignore in our rush to hurtle into tomorrow at light speed. This is called species time. It is the amont of time that a species, like say Homo sapiens, is likely to exist.
  • This is particularly important when you start to think about a reasonable timeframe for the development of space travel and solar system colonization.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What if our space probes and the Curiosity rover are the equivalent of those reed boats thousands of years ago? It's worth pondering. We may be at the start of a long, slow journey whose climactic moment comes thousands of years from now.
  • Let's return to the one timeframe that we can all grasp easily: the length of a human lifespan, which under ideal circumstances is around 75-85 years.
  • I think it's obvious why we want to measure the pace of the future using technology, and make computer scientists our guides. Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe. We want to believe that other scientific and cultural changes can happen in similarly observable way because generally we think in human time, not species or geological time. Put another way: We all live in a hyper-accelerated timeframe. Slow time is essentially inhuman time. It is what exists before and after each of our individual lives.
  • That said, it's undeniable that technological change and fast human time can profoundly affect events unfolding in slow time.
  • Still, we can't expect all the efforts we make in our short lifetimes to pay off in our lifetimes, too. You will not live to be 200 years old. I repeat: You will not live to be 200 years old.
  • Maybe our grandchildren will have a chance to take a life-extension pill. But not us. And that has to be OK. Making scientific promises we can't keep will do a lot of harm. Ultimately it undermines the public's trust in both science and people who prognosticate about it.
  • We need to think about the future as a set of overlapping timelines. Some events take place in human time. Others exist in the slow time of Homo sapiens or the planet's carbon cycle — or even the Milky Way's collision course with Andromeda.
  • In a sense, we are trapped in accelerated time.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 12
     
    "H. sapiens evolved about 200 thousand years ago. So we're pretty early in our species life cycle. I know we like to think of ourselves as special creatures, and to be fair it does seem like we are the only superintelligent life that's ever existed on Earth. But it's worth keeping in mind that despite all our accomplishments, like electric blankets and cities and videogames, that we are still part of a species whose lifespan is measured in tens of thousands of years."
anonymous

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...-up-psychology-economics-53135

shared by anonymous on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.
  • As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.
  • In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • The trio of researchers are young—as professors go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity. They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming outcasts in their own fields.
  • “We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
  • Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.
  • The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
  • Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      I did a shit ton of this. I was very internal, didn't have many friends, and came to identify with 'things' as though they were people.
  • Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”
  • The three insisted that their goal was not to say that one culturally shaped psychology was better or worse than another—only that we’ll never truly understand human behavior and cognition until we expand the sample pool beyond its current small slice of humanity.
  • Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.
  • THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      This is another place where my love of long-term thinking rears its head. So modern as we imagine ourselves, with all our fancy machines, we are still bareinfants when it comes to reckoning about ourselves.
  • Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.
  • Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
  • As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it.
  • The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
  • This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.
  • “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”
  • He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations.
  • If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.
  • almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.
  • HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,” said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”
  • At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.
  • Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.
  • He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      Goodness, though! I'm in TOTAL control of everything! :P
  • The unique trick of human psychology, these researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life’s dance.
  • People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
  • Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily.
  • That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.
  • That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.
  • Shown another way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from the group.
  • Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).
  • These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.
  • And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
  • anonymous on 02 Mar 13
     
    "The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind's capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do-the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like-but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception."
anonymous

Science-Based Medicine » It's a part of my paleo fantasy, it's a part of my p... - 0 views

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...y-its-a-part-of-my-paleo-dream

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 13 - Cached
  • If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it’s natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it’s really old, it must be better).
  • Basically, it’s a rejection of modernity, and from it flow the interest in herbalism, various religious practices rebranded as treatments
  • there is a definite belief underlying much of CAM that technology and pharmaceuticals are automatically bad and that “natural” must be better.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages than is the case today.
  • Even so, an implicit assumption among many CAM advocates is that cardiovascular disease is largely a disease of modern lifestyle and diet and that, if modern humans could somehow mimic preindustrial or, according to some, even preagricultural, lifestyles, that cardiovascular disease could be avoided.
  • Over the last decade, Cordain has become the most prominent promoter of the so-called “Paleo diet,” having written The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat and multiple other books advocating a paleolithic-mimetic diet as the cure for what ails modern humans.
  • But how does one determine what the prevalence of cardiovascular disease was in the ancient past?
  • there have been indications that the idea that ancient humans didn’t suffer from atherosclerosis is a comforting myth, the most recent of which is a study published a week ago online in The Lancet by Prof. Randall C. Thompson of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute and an international team of investigators entitled Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations.
  • Basically, it was a study of 137 different mummies from four different geographic locations spanning 4,000 years.
  • So, although there was a fair amount of evidence from studies of Egyptian mummies that atherosclerosis was not uncommon, in Egypt it was mainly the wealthy and powerful who were mummified after their deaths. Conceivably, they could have lived a very different lifestyle and consumed a very different diet than the average Egyptian living around that time.
  • So the authors obtained whole-body CT scans of the 137 mummies, either pre-existing scans or scans prospectively done, and analyzed them for calcifications.
  • The mummies to be included in the study were chosen primarily based on two factors, being in a good state of preservation with identifiable vascular tissue, and being adults.
  • The authors obtained identifying information from an extensive search of museum and other databases by a team of archeologists and experts in mummy restoration, and sex was determined by either analysis of the genitals and reproductive organs when present and by pelvic morphology when they were not present.
  • Age was estimated by standard analysis of architectural changes in the clavicle, femur, and humerus.
  • Finally, multiple anthropological and archeological sources were used in an attempt to estimate likely risk factors for the mummies.
  • Figure 2 summarizes the findings nicely: There’s also this video featured in a Nature report on the study showing the reconstructed scan of one of the mummies with atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries.
  • As expected, more atherosclerosis correlates with advanced age, and the amount of atherosclerosis in the young and middle-aged (although the times in which the people who became these mummies after death lived age 50 was old) was less.
  • Although the sample number was far too small to draw definitive conclusions (as is often the case in archeological research), the prevalence of atherosclerotic disease in these mummies did not appear to correlate with the cultures in which the mummies lived.
  • As is noted in Thompson’s article, ancient Egyptians and Peruvians were agricultural cultures with farms and domesticated animals, Ancestral Puebloans were forager-farmers, and the Unangans were hunter-gatherers without agriculture. Indeed, the Peruvians and Ancestral Puebloans predated the written word and were thus prehistoric cultures.
  • One notes that no one, including the authors of this study, is saying that lifestyle and diet are not important factors for the development of atherosclerotic heart disease.
  • What they are saying is that atherosclerosis appears to be associated with aging and that the claims that mimicking paleolithic diets (which, one notes, were definitely not vegan) are overblown. In other words, there is a certain inherent risk of atherosclerosis that is related to aging that is likely not possible to lower further
  • I actually think that the authors probably went too far with that last statement in that, while they might be correct that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human aging, it is quite well established that this inherent component of aging can at least be worsened by sedentary lifestyle and probably certain diets.
  • One notes that, although the Paleo Diet is not, strictly speaking, always sold as CAM/IM, the ideas behind it are popular among CAM advocates, and the diet is frequently included as part of “integrative medicine,” for example, here at the University of Connecticut website, where it’s under integrative nutrition.
  • In particular, the appeal to ancient wisdom and ancient civilizations as yet untouched by the evil of modernity is the same sort of arguments that are made in favor of various CAM modalities ranging from herbalism to vegan diets rebranded as being somehow CAM to the appeal to “natural” cures.
  • Indeed, the fetish for the “natural” in CAM is such that even a treatment like Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplaston therapy is represented as “natural” when in fact, if it were ever shown to work against cancer, it would be chemotherapy and has toxicities greater than that of some of our current chemotherapy drugs.
  • The book is by Marlene Zuk and entitled Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. Zuk is an evolutionary biologist, and in particular she points out how the evolutionary arguments favored by advocates of the Paleo diet don’t stand up to scrutiny.
  • The interview begins with Zuk confronting Cordain at a conference on evolution and diseases of modern environments. At his lecture, Cordain pronounced several foods to be the cause of fatal conditions in people carrying certain genes.
  • These foods included, predictably, cultivated foods such as bread (made from grain), rice, and potatoes. Zuk couldn’t resist asking a question, namely why the inability to digest so many common foods would persist in the population, observing, “Surely it would have been selected out of the population.” Cordain’s response? That humans had not had time to adapt to these foods, to which Zuk retorted, “Plenty of time.” Apparently, in her book, Zuk produces numerous examples of evolution in humans occurring in a time frame of less than 10,000 years, including:
  • Blue eyes arose 6,000 to 10,000 years ago
  • Rapid selection for the CCR5-D gene variant that makes some people immune to HIV
  • Lactase persistence (production past the age of weening of the lactase enzyme that digests lactose in milk) probably dates back only around 7,500 to 10,000 years, around the time that cattle were domesticated
  • there is no one diet or climate that predominated among our Paleolithic ancestors:
  • Zuk detects an unspoken, barely formed assumption that humanity essentially stopped evolving in the Stone Age and that our bodies are “stuck” in a state that was perfectly adapted to survive in the paleolithic environment. Sometimes you hear that the intervention of “culture” has halted the process of natural selection. This, “Paleofantasy” points out, flies in the face of facts. Living things are always and continuously in the process of adapting to the changing conditions of their environment, and the emergence of lactase persistence indicates that culture (in this case, the practice of keeping livestock for meat and hides) simply becomes another one of those conditions.
  • For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”
  • Oh, and, as Zuk tells us, paleolithic people got cancer, too.
  • we humans have long been known to abuse and despoil our environment, even back in those “paleo” days. Indeed, when I took a prehistoric archeology course, which was largely dedicated to the period of time of the hunter-gatherers, one thing I remember my professor pointing out, and that was that what he did was largely the study of prehistoric garbage and that humans have always produced a lot of it.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 13
     
    "There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now "integrative medicine," meant to imply the "best of both worlds.""
anonymous

OSU climate researchers discover 1,800-year-old 'Rosetta stone' ice cores - 0 views

www.dispatch.com/...t-rosetta-stone-ice-cores.html

climate ice

shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The Thompsons realized that the Peruvian cores were similar to other ice cores they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. When they found matches in ice cores taken from opposite sides of Earth, they knew they had “Rosetta Stones” with which to compare other climate histories from tropical and subtropical regions.
  • “Looking at ice cores from the tropics has been especially important in allowing us to understand how this very stable climate system has changed over time,” said Daniel Schrag, a Harvard University climatologist.
  • The Quelccaya ice is important because it is perched on a wide flat shelf in a region with clearly defined wet and dry seasons. Each year’s ice is separated by a thin layer of dust, which is blown there during dry months. Researchers can estimate changes in ocean temperature by measuring the ratio of different oxygen isotopes in frozen water molecules. The glacier’s flat perch also keeps each layer straight, which makes it easier to compute annual changes in snowfall, said Ian Howatt, an OSU glaciologist and ice core study co-author.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "Ice cores taken from a remote South American glacier are revealing a year-by-year tropical climate history over nearly two millennia. "
anonymous

Eight Silly Data Things Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired. - 1 views

www.kaushik.net/...data-strategy-metrics-mistakes

analytics google analytics marketing

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • It turns out that Marketers, especially Digital Marketers, make really silly mistakes when it comes to data. Big data. Small data. Any data.
  • two common themes
  • 1. Some absolutely did not use data to do their digital jobs.
  • ...74 more annotations...
  • 2. Many used some data, but they unfortunately used silly data strategies/metrics.
  • Silly not in their eyes, silly in my eyes.
  • A silly metric, I better define it :), is one that distracts you for focusing on business investments that lead to bottom-line impact.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      Within the context of my current project, the bottom-line impact would be increased engagement (in the form of donations, clinical study participation, and blood/fluid donation to scientific research).
  • Eight data things that marketing people believe that get them fired…. 1. Real-time data is life changing. 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate. 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness. 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success. 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!! 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more! 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat! 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • 1. Real-time data is life changing.
  • A lot of people get fired for this. Sadly not right away, because it takes time to realize how spectacular of a waste of money getting to real-time data was.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is some REALLY FUNNY SHIT to me. But I'm a nerd.
  • I want you to say: "I don't want real-time data, I want right-time data. Let's understand the speed of decision making in our company. If we make real-time decisions, let's get real time data. If we make decisions over two days, let's go with that data cycle. If it take ten days to make a decision to change bids on our PPC campaigns, let's go with that data cycle." Right-time.
  • Real-time data is very expensive.
  • It is also very expensive from a decision-making perspective
  • even in the best case scenario of the proverbial pigs flying, they'll obsess about tactical things.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      I get this completely. We get hung up on the tactical and lose sight of the strategic.
  • So shoot for right-time data.
  • That is a cheaper systems/platform/data strategy.
  • (And remember even the most idiotic system in the world now gives you data that is a couple hours old with zero extra investment from you. So when you say real time you are really saying "Nope, two hours is not enough for me!").
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      THIS is probably the best argument for our using Google Analytics and Google Search to collect data instead of paying large costs to firms that will offer questionable results.
  • That is also a way to get people to sync the data analysis (not data puking, sorry I meant data reporting) with the speed at which the company actually makes decisions (data > analyst > manager > director > VP > question back to manager > yells at the analyst > back to director> VP = 6 days).
  • The phrase "real-time data analysis" is an oxymoron.
  • 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate.
  • The difference between a KPI and a metric is that the former has a direct line of sight to your bottom-line, while the latter is helpful in diagnosing tactical challenges.
  • Bounce rate is really useful for finding things you suck at.
  • Along the way you also learn how not to stink. Bounce rate goes from 70% to a manageable 30%. Takes three months.
  • Stop obsessing about bounce rate.
  • From the time people land on your site it might take another 12 – 25 pages for them to buy or submit a lead. Focus on all that stuff. The tough stuff. Then you'll make money.
  • Focus on the actual game. Focus on incredible behavior metrics like Pages/Visit, focus on the Visitor Flow report, obsess about Checkout Abandonment Rate, make love to Average Order Size.
  • 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness.
  • it does not take a very long time for your Senior Management to figure out how lame the Likes metric is and that it drives 1. Zero value on Facebook and 2. Zero squared economic value or cost savings to the business.
  • many spectacular reasons
  • Here's one… We are looking at two consumer product brands, the tiny company Innocent Drinks and the Goliath called Tide Detergent.
  • Even with 10x the number of Likes on Facebook the giant called Tide has 4x fewer people talking about their brand when compared to the David called Innocent.
  • As no less than three comments mention below, Innocent is 90% owned by Coca Cola. Fooled me!
  • In a massively large company they've carved out an identity uniquely their own. They refuse to be corrupted by Coca Cola's own Facebook strategy of constant self-pimping and product ads masquerading as "updates." As a result pound for pound Innocent's fan engagement on its page is multiple time better than Coca Cola's - even if the latter has many more likes.
  • 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success.
  • Not going to happen.
  • as all decent SEOs will tell you, is that search results are no longer standardized. Rather they are personalized. I might even say, hyper-personalized. Regardless of if you are logged in or not.
  • When I search for "avinash" on Google I might rank #1 in the search results because I'm logged into my Google account, the engine has my search history, my computer IP address, it also has searches by others in my vicinity, local stories right now, and so many other signals. But when you search for "avinash" your first search result might be a unicorn. Because the search engine has determined that the perfect search result for you for the keyword avinash is a unicorn.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is crucial to understand. I will be sharing this, at length, with my boss. :)
  • Universal search for example means that personalized results will not only look for information from web pages, they also look for YouTube/Vimoe videos, social listings, images of course, and so on and so forth.
  • Then let's not forget that proportionaly there are very few head searches, your long tail searches will be huge.
  • Oh and remember that no one types a word or two, people use long phrases.
  • There are a ton more reasons obsessing about the rank of a handful of words on the search engine results page (SERP) is a very poor decision.
  • So check your keyword ranking if it pleases you.
  • But don't make it your KPI.
  • For purely SEO, you can use Crawl Rate/Depth, Inbound Links (just good ones) and growth (or lack there of) in your target key phrases as decent starting points.
  • You can graduate to looking at search traffic by site content or types of content you have (it's a great signal your SEO is working).
  • Measuring Visits and Conversions in aggregate first and segmented by keywords (or even key word clusters) will get you on the path to showing real impact.
  • That gives you short term acquisition quality, you can then move to long term quality by focusing on metrics like lifetime value.
  • 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!!
  • You should judge the success of that showing up by measure if you made money! Did you earn any profit?
  • Friends don't let friends use CPC as a KPI. Unless said friends want the friend fired.
  • 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more!
  • Content consumption is a horrible metric. It incentivises sub optimal behavior in your employees/agencies.
  • If you are a news site, you can get millions of page views
  • And it will probably get you transient traffic.
  • And what about business impact from all these one night stands ?
  • If you are in the content only business (say my beloved New York Times) a better metric to focus on is Visitor Loyalty
  • If your are in the lead generation business and do the "OMG let's publish a infographic on dancing monkey tricks which will get us a billion page views, even though we have nothing to do with dancing or monkeys or tricks" thing, measure success on the number of leads received and not how "viral" the infographic went and how many reshares it got on Twitter.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      In other words, use that odd-one-off to redirect attention to the source of that one-off. I'll have to ponder that given our different KPI needs (nonprofit, we don't sell anything).
  • Don't obsess about page views.
  • Then measure the metric closest to that. Hopefully some ideas above will help get you promoted.
  • 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat!
  • My hypothesis is that TV/Radio/Magazines have created this bad habit. We can measure so little, almost next to nothing, that we've brought our immensely shaky GRP metric from TV to digital. Here it's called impressions. Don't buy impressions.
  • Buy engagement. Define what it means first of course .
  • If you are willing to go to clicks, do one better and measure Visits. At least they showed up on your mobile/desktop site.
  • Now if you are a newbie, measure bounce rate. If you have a tiny amount of experience measure Visit Duration. If you are a pro, measure Revenue. If you are an Analysis Ninja, measure Profit.
  • Impressions suck. Profit rocks.
  • If the simple A/B (test/control) experiment demonstrates that delivering display banner ad impressions to the test group delivers increased revenue, buy impressions to your heart's content. I'll only recommend that you repeat the experiment once a quarter.
  • You can buy impressions if you can prove via a simple controlled experiment that when we show impressions we got more engagement/sales and when we don't show impressions we did not get more engagement/sales.
  • But if you won't do the experiment and you use the # of impressions as a measure of success
  • 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • This is not a metric, this is more of a what data you'll use to target your advertising issue.
  • Our primary method of buying advertising and marketing is: "I would like to reach 90 year old grandmas that love knitting, what tv channel should I advertise on." Or they might say: "I would like to reach 18 to 24 year olds with college education who supported Barack Obama for president." And example of demographic and psychographic segments.
  • We use that on very thin ice data, we bought advertising. That was our lot in life.
  • Did you know 50% of of TV viewership is on networks that each have <1% share? Per industry.bnet.com. I dare you to imagine how difficult it is to measure who they are, and how to target them to pimp your shampoo, car, cement.
  • Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always.
  • if you have advertising money to spend, first spend it all on advertising that provides you intent data.
  • Search has a ton of strong intent. It does not matter if you are a grandma or a 18 year old. If you are on Baidu and you search for the HTC One, you are expressing strong intent. Second, content consumption has intent built in. If I'm reading lots of articles about how to get pregnant, you could show me an ad related to that
  • The first intent is strong, the second one is weaker.
  • There is a lot of intent data on the web. That is our key strength.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    This is a really great read by Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor. Volunmuous highlights follow.
anonymous

The Invention of Childhood, or Why It Hurts to Have a Baby [Excerpt] - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

shared by anonymous on 06 May 13 - Cached
  • It’s impossible to overstate the colossal impact this turn of events had on our evolution, but it requires some context to fully appreciate what it means. Our habit of being born early is part of a larger, stranger phenomenon that scientists call neoteny, a term that covers a lot of evolutionary sins at the same time it explains so much of what makes us the unique, even bizarre creatures we are.
  • you might think that neoteny is simply a matter of a species holding on to as many youthful traits of an ancestor as long into adulthood as possible
  • And our brain development is anything but arrested. In fact, just the opposite. As I said, complicated.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The different ways some parts of us seem to accelerate and mature while others bide their time or halt altogether has generated a flock of terms related to neoteny—paedomorphosis, heterochrony, progenesis, hypermorphosis, and recapitulation.
  • In the end, however, it comes down to this—each represents an evolution of evolution itself, an exceptional and rare combination of adaptations that changed our ancestors so fundamentally that it led to an ape (us) capable of changing the very planet that brought it into existence.5 Put another way, it changed everything.
  • Mostly we think of Darwin’s “descent by natural selection” as a chance transformation of newly arrived mutations—usually physical—into an asset rather than a liability, which is then passed along to the next generation.
  • But what neoteny (and paedomorphosis and all the rest) illustrate is that the forces of evolution don’t simply play with physical attributes, they play with time, too, or more accurately they can shift the times when genes are expressed and hormones flow, which not only alters looks but behavior, with fascinating results.
  • By being born “early,” our youth is amplified and elongated, and it continues to stretch out across our lives into the extended childhood that makes us so different from the other primates that preceded us.
  • All of the evidence emphatically points to our direct, gracile ape ancestors steadily extending their youth. They were inventing childhood.
  • Exactly how all of this unfolded on the wild and sprawling plains of Africa isn’t clear precisely, but there can be no doubt that it did. We stand as the indisputable proof.
  • The clustered neurons that together compose the brains of all primates grow at a rate before birth that even the most objective laboratory researcher could only call exuberant, maybe even scary.
  • Within a month of gestation primate brain cells are blooming by the thousands per second.
  • But for most species that growth slows markedly after birth. The brain of a monkey fetus, for example, arrives on its birthday with 70 percent of its cerebral development already behind it, and the remaining 30 percent is finished off in the next six months. A chimpanzee completes all of its brain growth within twelve months of birth.
  • You and I, however, came into the world with a brain that weighed a mere 23 percent of what it would become in adulthood.
  • even arriving in our early, fetal state, with less than a quarter of our brain development under our belts, we are still born with remarkably large brains.
  • this approach to brain development is so extraordinarily strange and rare that it is unique in nature.
  • evolution doesn’t plan. It simply modifies randomly and moves forward. And in this case, remember, remaining in the womb full term was out of the question. For us it was be born early, or don’t be born.
  • we simply haven’t yet gathered enough clues to know precisely when an early birth became unavoidable. There are, however, a few theories.
  • Some scientists believe earlier births would have begun when the adult brain of some predecessor or another reached 850 cc.
  • The lake, the streams and the rivers that fed it, and the variability of the weather made the area a kind of smorgasbord of biomes—grasslands, desert, verdant shorelines, clusters of forest and thick scrub. The bones of the extinct beasts that lie by the millions in the layers of volcanic ash beyond the shores of Lake Turkana today attest to its ancient popularity.
  • In fact it was so well liked that Homo ergaster, Homo habilis, and Homo rudolfensis were all ranging among its eastern and northern shores 1.8 million years ago
  • Viewed from either end of the spectrum, none of the clues about his age have made much sense to the teams of scientists who have labored over them. Each was out of sync with the other. Some life events were happening too soon, some too late, none strictly adhering to the growth schedules of either modern humans or forest apes. Still, the skeleton’s desynchronized features strongly suggested that the relatives of this denizen of Lake Turkana were almost certainly being born “younger,” elongating their childhoods and postponing their adolescence. Apes may be adolescents at age seven and humans at age eleven, but this creature fell somewhere in between.
  • anonymous on 06 May 13
     
    "At least 27 human species have walked the Earth, but only our lineage survived. Our ancestors may have crossed a cerebral Rubicon that led to babies being born "early""
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