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anonymous

What Is Geoengineering and Why Is It Considered a Climate Change Solution? - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

longnow climate

shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Some scientists are calling for more study of technological interventions to forestall catastrophic global warming. Why?
  • When a report on climate change hit the U.S. president's desk, the suggestion was not to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, scientific advisors counseled intervention via technology in the climate system itself—a practice now known as geoengineering. And the president was not Barack Obama, George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton—it was Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
  • Typically what people call geoengineering is divided into two major classes.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 10
     
    From Scientific American on April 6, 2010.
anonymous

Scientists vs. Pulsars - 0 views

blog.longnow.org/...scientists-vs-pulsars

longnow technology pulsars scientists

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 10 - Cached
  • atomic clocks rely on vacuum-sealed chambers full of cesium atoms kept near absolute zero or similarly complicated mechanisms to make their extremely precise measurements.  That kind of hardware requires a significant technological, economic and bureaucratic infrastructure to maintain.  If you can imagine finding an atomic clock after the electricity failed that kept it running, you would have to recreate a lot of knowledge to understand what in fact it was.
  • It’s in this endurance category, however, that pulsars maintain their dominance, as they’re likely to last quite a bit longer than anything humans have been able to build, even Long Now – we’ve been able to observe some that are thought to be around 200 million years old.
  • Today, the best optical lattice neutral atom clocks and trapped ion clocks have a frequency stability approaching one part in 10^17.By contrast, as more pulsars have been discovered, their timing stability has improved by less than an order of magnitude in the last 20 years. The best millisecond pulsars have a stability of only one part in 10^15 at best.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 10
     
    Who will win this epic clock-making competition? The scientists, it turns out. Article by Austin Brown at The Long Now Blog on April 14, 2010.
anonymous

Why the Old Order Crumbles - 0 views

cloudculturecontent.blogspot.com/...why-old-order-crumbles.html

longgame

shared by anonymous on 08 Apr 10 - Cached
  • This is all well and good, but what happens when the situation changes?  Say you suddenly have a widely applicable technology that is halving in price and doubling in power every 18 months and continues to do so for decades.  There will be ramifications to this that the existing institutions will not be prepared to take full advantage of.
  • Walk with me through the following thought experiment: you have a society that faces the same situation for five hundred years.  There are no disruptions through war or political uprising, technology does not improve, and the environment remains, for the most part, the same.
  • We are still living in the very early days of the coupling of the microchip revolution with the internet revolution.
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 10
     
    By Adam Gurri in Cloud Culture on April 7, 2010. About how institutions sometimes *can't* adapt in the face of innovation.
anonymous

Disintermediation: The disruption to come for Education 2.0 - 0 views

radar.oreilly.com/...termediation-risks-trends.html

education technology

shared by anonymous on 17 May 10 - Cached
  • Disintermediation is a process in which a middle player poised between service or product providers and their consumers is weakened or removed from the value chain.
  • An example of what disintermediation looks like is what happened to travel agencies.
  • Disintermediation of travel agencies occurred in two distinct phases: an initial phase in which technology enabled travel agents to do their job better and a “terminal” phase in which these same agencies were disintermediated.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The lessons of this example apply rather directly to Education 2.0. Teachers, schools, and districts occupy ground not too different than the travel agents of 1998. Specifically, the value proposition of the current educational system is that it understands the landscape of human knowledge and that it can plan and enable the exploration of this landscape in a way that is cost and time effective. Learning is educational travel.
  • The student’s experience may be ad hoc and fluid - with constantly shifting and boundary-less “classes.” It may be much more spontaneous and self-organizing - and all the more engaging for its voluntary essence. We may see the emergence of services that check a student’s progress against algorithms of likely educational success - simple AI versions of the 20th century guidance counselor. There may be tests that check for subject progress or mastery that any student is free to take whenever they are ready - no need to wait for “test day.”
  • anonymous on 17 May 10
     
    By Rob Tucker at O'Reilly Radar on May 14, 2010.
anonymous

A New Clue to Explain Human Existence - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18cosmos.html

layscience

shared by anonymous on 19 May 10 - Cached
  • Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter.
  • In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics
  • Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.”
  • anonymous on 19 May 10
     
    By Dennis Overbye at The New York Times on May 17, 2010
anonymous

New Nickelodeon Research Study Finds Generation Gap Closing, Reflecting Changing Attitu... - 0 views

www.redorbit.com/...index.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 20 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 20 Dec 10
     
    "NEW YORK, Nov. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Nickelodeon research study, titled "The Family GPS," reports that the generation gap is a thing of the past as today's increasingly multi-generational American families are united by an expanding set of values and converging tastes. Released today, the Nickelodeon study finds that new cultural attitudes, technology and the current economic climate are drawing today's American families closer together and changing how parents raise, and regard, their children compared to how their parents raised them. Nickelodeon's "The Family GPS" study was conducted as part of an ongoing partnership with Harris Interactive in which the companies will study the changing face and role of the family in the U.S. "As Millennials become parents and Baby Boomers become grandparents, today's families are different from what we've seen and come to expect from previous generations, in that staying together and playing together are the top priorities among everyone in the household," said Ron Geraci, Senior Vice President, Nickelodeon Research. "Instead of being divided by tastes and clashing over values and things like music and entertainment choices, today's parents, kids and grandparents are being drawn closer together by them, as well as embracing new value systems of tolerance and acceptance.""
anonymous

Egypt, Israel and a Strategic Reconsideration - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-and-strategic-reconsideration

geopolitics egypt

shared by anonymous on 08 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • without the foreign military forces along the frontiers, the Palestinians could trouble but not destroy Israel. Israel’s existence was not at stake, nor was it an issue for 33 years.
  • The danger that the Egyptian army posed was that it could close with the Israelis and engage in extended, high-intensity combat that would break the back of Israel Defense Forces by imposing a rate of attrition that Israel could not sustain.
  • It was to the great benefit of Israel that Egyptian forces were generally poorly commanded and trained and that Egyptian war-fighting doctrine, derived from Britain and the Soviet Union, was not suited to the battle problem Israel posed.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • One of Israel’s fundamental assumptions was that Israeli intelligence would provide ample warning of an attack. And one of the fundamental assumptions of Israeli intelligence was that Egypt could not mount an attack while Israel maintained air superiority. Both assumptions were wrong.
  • Egypt had a greater interest in breaking its dependency on the Soviets than in defeating Israel. It could do the former more readily than the latter.
  • in the years after the treaty achieved two things.
  • First, they ended Egypt’s dependency on the Soviets. Second, they further guaranteed Israel’s security by creating an Egyptian army dependent on a steady flow of spare parts and contractors from the United States. Cut the flow and the Egyptian army would be crippled.
  • What is now regarded as corruption was then regarded as just rewards for bleeding in four wars against the Israelis.
  • But now is 33 years later, and the world has changed.
  • For this younger generation, the idea of Gamal Mubarak being allowed to take over the presidency was the last straw. They wanted the elder Mubarak to leave not only because he had ambitions for his son but also because he didn’t want to leave after more than a quarter century of pressure. Mubarak wanted guarantees that, if he left, his possessions, in addition to his honor, would remain intact. If Gamal could not be president, then no one’s promise had value. So Mubarak locked himself into position.
  • The cameras love demonstrations, but they are frequently not the real story.
  • The demonstrators who wanted democracy are a real faction, but they don’t speak for the shopkeepers and peasants more interested in prosperity than wealth.
  • I have laid out the reasons why the 1978 treaty is in Egypt’s national interest. I have left out two pieces.
  • The first is ideology. The ideological tenor of the Middle East prior to 1978 was secular and socialist. Today it is increasingly Islamist.
  • Second, military technology, skills and terrain have made Egypt a defensive power for the past 33 years. But military technology and skills can change, on both sides.
  • As new generations of officers arise, who have heard of war only from their grandfathers, the fear of war declines and the desire for glory grows.
  • Two things from this should strike the Israelis.
  • The first is how badly they need peace with Egypt.
  • The second lesson is that Israel should do everything possible to make certain that the transfer of power in Egypt is from Mubarak to the next generation of military officers and that these officers maintain their credibility in Egypt.
  • Given the strategic and ideological crosscurrents in Egypt, it is in Israel’s national interest to minimize the intensity of the ideological and make certain that Israel is not perceived as a threat.
  • The future of Gaza or the precise borders of a Palestinian state are trivial compared to preserving the treaty with Egypt.
  • There are those in Israel who would argue that any release in pressure on the Palestinians will be met with rejection. If that is true, then, in my view, that is catastrophic news for Israel. In due course, ideological shifts and recalculations of Israeli intentions will cause a change in Egyptian policy.
  • anonymous on 08 Feb 11
     
    "The events in Egypt have sent shock waves through Israel. The 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel have been the bedrock of Israeli national security. In three of the four wars Israel fought before the accords, a catastrophic outcome for Israel was conceivable. In 1948, 1967 and 1973, credible scenarios existed in which the Israelis were defeated and the state of Israel ceased to exist. In 1973, it appeared for several days that one of those scenarios was unfolding."
anonymous

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 11 - Cached
  • A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
  • But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.
  • And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 11
     
    "You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology."
anonymous

Pakistan's Uneasy Relationship with the United States - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...asy-relationship-united-states

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 12 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Pasha’s central demand in the meeting with his American counterpart was reportedly that the United States hand over more responsibility for operations currently carried out by the CIA over Pakistani soil.
  • this point is rendered moot by the fact that Washington would almost certainly never allow the ISI – seen as a hostile intelligence agency – to have access to some of America’s most secret technology.
  • These demands reflect the general Pakistani complaint that it is not seen as an equal by the U.S. government.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The United States knows that Pakistan is a critical ally in the Afghan War due to the intelligence it can provide on the various strands of Taliban operating in the country, but it simply does not trust the Pakistanis enough to hand over UAV technology or control over UAV strikes to Islamabad.
  • The Pakistanis see an opportunity in the current geopolitical environment to garner concessions from Washington that it would otherwise not be able to demand. Washington is distracted by myriad crises in the Arab world at the moment and AfPak is no longer the main course on its plate, as was the case for some time in the earlier days of the Obama presidency.
  • anonymous on 12 Apr 11
     
    "Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha visited Washington on Monday and met with CIA Director Leon Panetta. The trip gave Islamabad a chance to express its anger over the Raymond Davis affair. The CIA contractor's shooting on the streets of Lahore of two Pakistani citizens - followed by his lengthy detention and subsequent release - has generated waves of criticism amid the Pakistani populace, and has plunged the ISI-CIA relationship into a state of tension that surpasses the normal uneasiness that has always plagued the alliance between Washington and Islamabad."
anonymous

Looking Closer » Blog Archive » Give us somebody we can blast into pieces! - 0 views

lookingcloser.org/...ebody-we-can-blast-into-pieces

generations

shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 11 - Cached
  • We’re seeing more and more movies that suggest that the world is in crisis, and that our methods for saving it are failing. We’re looking for hope in all the old familiar places, and those stories are starting to seem unsatisfying.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 11
     
    "We're seeing more and more movies that suggest that the world is in crisis, and that our methods for saving it are failing. We're looking for hope in all the old familiar places, and those stories are starting to seem unsatisfying. It used to be that we could find catharsis by demonizing another culture and making them the enemy. But globalization, technology, and an increasingly multicultural America have brought us into closer relationship with people who are different from us. It's harder for American storytellers to make scapegoats out of people who are different than us. We used to cast Russians and Japanese and Iraqis as "the Enemy." Now, we're more careful. We've learned that it's dangerous and foolish to portray another culture as thoroughly corrupt. And we're coming to see that Americans can be as corrupt as the worst of them."
anonymous

Blogging Is Legacy Technology: The Proof - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...gacy-technology-the-proof.html

shared by anonymous on 14 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • They fall into a few categories.
  • "You're Comparing Apples and Oranges." The blogosphere is intended to be ephemeral, so accept it on its own terms.
  • "So's Your Mother." There's lots of bad stuff in old media, so nyah-nyah.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "You're a Geezer." I don't get it, I'm old fashioned, I don't understand the new media, I don't use the right filter doodads on my thingamajiggy, etc.
  • "Average Quality Doesn't Matter." As long as you and your RSS thingamajiggy can find good stuff in the numerator, it's irrelevant if the denominator gets more and more common.
  • Every time someone who could have done good science does sloppy science, or does worse journalism instead of better journalism, or mediocre writing instead of fine writing, it's a loss. When resources are scarce—and of course human talent is the most scarce and precious resource of all—it matters if blogging is inducing ADD in many of our best writers and thinkers, or driving talent away altogether.
  • anonymous on 14 Jul 11
     
    My doughty, authoritative criticisms (here and here) seem to have just about brought the blogosphere to its knees. Looking over some of the responses, I'd have to say that a lot of people either help make my point or miss it altogether. You can look here, here, here, and here for some of the smarter responses. They fall into a few categories.
anonymous

5 hard truths progressives must face about Obama - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ressives_must_face_about_obama

shared by anonymous on 20 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • We’ve now dodged the bullet of a Mitt Romney White House, so let’s get back to reality. Despite his campaign-trail populism, the president will continue the politics of accommodation to conservatives. Two of the three priorities he has set out for his next term are at the top of the GOP agenda: a “grand bargain” to cut government spending over the next 10 years and corporate tax reform that would cut rates—don’t hold your breath—and close loopholes. The third priority, rationalizing immigration law, is one of the few progressive ideas that also has the support of the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
  • President Obama says his top priority is a deal with House Republicans to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. His “liberal” position starts with a ratio of spending cuts to tax increases of 2.5-to-1. The only real dispute between the president and Republicans is whether the rich will have to give back the tax breaks George W. Bush gave them. So when the eventual deal is struck, the federal government will be taking more out of the economy over the next decade than it is putting in.
  • Off-shoring and automation will continue to shed jobs with no offsetting increase in the demand for labor. Budget cuts—including cuts to Medicare and Medicaid—will widen the holes in the social safety net and further limit investments in education, infrastructure and technology upon which any chance at future prosperity depends.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The president’s Council of Economic Advisers will not admit it, but their default strategy for growth is to let American wages drop far enough to undercut foreign competition.
  • That is the only possible policy rationale for Obama’s enthusiasm for the Trans Pacific Partnership, a further deregulation of trade that will strip away the last protections for American workers against a brutal global marketplace of dog-eat-dog.
  • The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a victory for corporate America. In exchange for giving up their rules against covering pre-existing conditions and agreeing to raise the age limit in which children could be covered under their parents’ policy, the health insurance corporations got the federal government to require every citizen to buy their product and commit to subsidizing those that can’t afford the price.
  • Although it abandoned the public option, the White House whispers to Democrats that Obamacare will pave the way for single-payer. Fat chance. The bill was inspired by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and largely drafted by a former insurance company executive precisely to stop single-payer from ever happening.
  • The largest companies now have a bigger share of the financial markets than they had in 2008 and their “too-big-to-fail safety net” is even more explicit.Perhaps most important, nothing has been done to lengthen the horizons of U.S. investors from short-term, get-rich-quick financial speculation to the long-term investment in producing things and high-value services in America.
  • With the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, the transformation from democracy to plutocracy is virtually complete.
  • The corruption of our governing class goes beyond just campaign contributions. It can include the hint of a future job or lobbyist contract when you leave office, a hedge fund internship for your daughter, a stock market tip. But all this depends on your remaining in power, so nothing matches the importance of raising enough money to get yourself reelected.
  • Democratic leaders’ primary response to Citizens United has been a tepid proposal to require more transparency in campaign contributions.
  • But even areas where the president could act alone—as with an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose political contributions or even filling vacant seats on the Federal Election Commission—Obama took a pass
  • In response to an interviewer’s question in August, he said that “in the longer term” we may need a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United. He is right. But the “longer term” certainly means sometime after he leaves office.
  • Without a radical shift away from the policies of the last four years, living standards of most people in the United States will continue to drop, with potentially ugly social and political consequences.
  • The stakes for Democrats are also high. Obama’s victory has reinforced the widespread notion among pundits that the projected future increase in the non-white voting population and the party’s advantage with women already makes it the favorite for 2016 and beyond. But it is precisely these constituencies that economic stagnation has hit the hardest. Whatever the demographic changes, if the Democratic Party produces another four years like the last four, it can kiss goodbye to the next election and probably several after that.
  • anonymous on 20 Nov 12
     
    "5 hard truths progressives must face about Obama Now that the joy of election night has subsided, it's time for a reality check: The president's still a centrist"
anonymous

Welcome to Peak Capitalism - 0 views

www.macrofugue.com/welcome-to-peak-capitalism

shared by anonymous on 05 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Let’s back pause a minute to define what this means:  Capitalism is the system of relationships between the labour class and the capital class.
  • Individual relationships are really bilateral.  There are two channels:  the wage channel, whereby the capitalist negotiates with the worker for the highest output at the lowest salary, and the price channel, whereby capitalists compete with one another to provide the highest quality products and services for the worker at the lowest prices.
  • This system provides a unique suite of incentives to each class which is responsible for providing the West a previously unimaginably high standard of living, even for the lower classes.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  •  The worker is incentivised to produce more and higher quality goods, thereby increasing his advantage in competing with other labour for higher wages.
  • The capitalist is incentivised to produce higher quality goods at lower prices, thereby increasing her advantage in competing with other companies for sales, and ultimately the capital she can accumulate.
  • The character of change now represents a shift, not from labour to capital, but away from the classical capitalist bilateral relationship between the labour class and the capital class (through wages and prices) to a unilateral one (prices).
  • Thus we get to the fundamental reality:  capitalists have been compensated for serving the poor and the elderly.  The system has worked for everyone.  The government has brokered a deal whereby capitalists accumulate capital by providing the infirm and the retired working class sustenance.  Perhaps you would change the proportions of profit and transfer payments, but the basic system of transactions and incentives has been proved out.
  • When the worker retires, the government subsidises his means of sustenance by crediting new deposits to his bank account.  He uses these credits to purchase sustenance from the capitalist class.  The retired worker has already pre-paid for these newly government-created deposits with the massive productivity gains throughout his career.  As long as the retired worker, and the present labour force, are able to increase productivity at a rate faster than the retiree’s new deposits are created by the government, the capitalist gets paid, her worker is employed, and the retired worker is provided sustenance.
  • At the most basic level, the worker does not pre-pay his retirement through social security and pension fund contributions, but even more so by productivity.
  • The enemy of both capital and labour in the system of capitalism is running out of new markets.
  • Capitalist income has long since maximised consumption, and is now focused on maximising capital accumulation.
  • Since capitalist’s goal is to accumulate more capital, she is going to re-invest when she sees opportunity, and this free cash-flow is exchanged with new labour for more future production.
  • But what happens when the capitalist sees her opportunity set decline?  Her expectation that the payment she makes to the new workers she’d hire would materialise into higher revenue later diminishes, and she decides to book her profit as cash.
  • Who could blame her?  She isn’t going to operate at an anticipated loss.
  • We have previously observed that these variations in investment horizon — and consequently rate of investment — are responsible for most of the economic cyclical variations.
  • The second is a glut of capital relative to the population.  There appear to be two chief reasons for this:  a rapid expansion in technology-driven productivity and demographically-driven declining final sales growth.
  • The way to mitigate the transition pain from capitalism to rentierism is to have the government pay retired workers for years of uncompensated productivity gains.
  • The principal political driving force away from bilateral capitalism to trilateral government-brokered rentierism will, perhaps ironically, be the same force that is trying desperately (and likely with futility) to hang on to more capitalist relationships:  baby boomers.  But even the conservative baby boomers will move to ensure their entitlements are maintained, for they will need more than they anticipated as a result of the 2008 crisis.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Mar 13
       
      This is a fascinating departure from the usual line that Baby Boomers are simply milking capitalist relationships. The suggestion that even *they* will be negatively affected by the economic downturn offers some perverse hope (for me) that a 'shared sense of sacrifice' might actually be possible.
  • We have been shifting at the margins away from bilateral capitalist relationships for decades.  What replaced it has successfully navigated the needs and demands of each class – accumulation to capital for enterprise value, sustenance to workers for labour and sustenance to the retiree for decades of productivity growth.
  • anonymous on 05 Mar 13
     
    "Has the United States of America reached, and perhaps passed, "peak capitalism" - the point where the maximum number of people participate in capitalist relationships? The argument could be made, at least on a relative basis, that it has indeed crested, and we are on the slow, inevitable march away."
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

A New Reality in U.S.-Israeli Relations - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...w-reality-us-israeli-relations

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 19 Mar 13 - Cached
  • In the United States, the political crisis over the federal budget and the struggle to grow the economy and reduce unemployment has dominated the president's and the country's attention.
  • The Israeli elections turned on domestic issues, ranging from whether the ultra-Orthodox would be required to serve in Israel Defense Forces, as other citizens are, to a growing controversy over economic inequality in Israel. 
  • What is interesting is at this point, while Israelis continue to express concern about foreign policy, they are most passionate on divisive internal social issues. Similarly, although there continues to be a war in Afghanistan, the American public is heavily focused on economic issues. Under these circumstances the interesting question is not what Obama and Netanyahu will talk about but whether what they discuss will matter much. 
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • After more than a decade of being focused on the Islamic world and moving aggressively to try to control threats in the region militarily, the United States is moving toward a different stance. The bar for military intervention has been raised.
  • Therefore, the United States has, in spite of recent statements, not militarily committed itself to the Syrian crisis, and when the French intervened in Mali the United States played a supporting role. The intervention in Libya, where France and the United Kingdom drew the United States into the action, was the first manifestation of Washington's strategic re-evaluation.
  • That desire was there from the U.S. experience in Iraq and was the realization that the disposal of an unsavory regime does not necessarily -- or even very often -- result in a better regime.
  • The United States' new stance ought to frighten the Israelis. In Israel's grand strategy, the United States is the ultimate guarantor of its national security and underwrites a portion of its national defense. If the United States becomes less inclined to involve itself in regional adventures, the question is whether the guarantees implicit in the relationship still stand.
  • The issue is not whether the United States would intervene to protect Israel's existence; save from a nuclear-armed Iran, there is no existential threat to Israel's national interest. Rather, the question is whether the United States is prepared to continue shaping the dynamics of the region in areas where Israel lacks political influence and is not able to exert military control.
  • To put it differently, the Israelis' understanding of the American role is to control events that endanger Israel and American interests under the assumption that Israeli and American interests are identical. The idea that they are always identical has never been as true as politicians on both sides have claimed, but more important, the difficulties of controlling the environment have increased dramatically for both sides.
  • The problem for Israel at this point is that it is not able to do very much in the area that is its responsibility.
  • But the most shocking thing to Israel was how little control it actually had over events in Egypt and the future of its ties to Egypt.
  • But the power of the military will not be the sole factor in the long-term sustainability of the treaty. Whether it survives or not ultimately is not a matter that Israel has much control over.
  • The Israelis have always assumed that the United States can control areas where they lack control. And some Israelis have condemned the United States for not doing more to manage events in Egypt. But the fact is that the United States also has few tools to control the evolution of Egypt, apart from some aid to Egypt and its own relationship with the Egyptian military.
  • It may or may not be in the American interest to do something in any particular case, but the problem in this case is that although a hostile Egypt is not in the Americans' interest, there is actually little the United States can do to control events in Egypt.
  • Syrian President Bashar al Assad is a known quantity to Israel. He is by no means a friend, but his actions and his father's have always been in the pursuit of their own interest and therefore have been predictable. The opposition is an amorphous entity whose ability to govern is questionable and that is shot through with Islamists who are at least organized and know what they want.
  • Indeed, the hints of American weapons shipments to the rebels at some point concern Israel as much as no weapons shipments.
  • The Iranian situation is equally complex. It is clear that the Israelis, despite rhetoric to the contrary, will not act unilaterally against Iran's nuclear weapons. The risks of failure are too high, and the consequences of Iranian retaliation against fundamental American interests, such as the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, are too substantial.
  • The American view is that an Iranian nuclear weapon is not imminent and Iran's ultimate ability to build a deliverable weapon is questionable. Therefore, regardless of what Israel wants, and given the American doctrine of military involvement as a last resort when it significantly affects U.S. interests, the Israelis will not be able to move the United States to play its traditional role of assuming military burdens to shape the region.
  • There has therefore been a very real if somewhat subtle shift in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Israel has lost the ability, if it ever had it, to shape the behavior of countries on its frontier. Egypt and Syria will do what they will do. At the same time, the United States has lost the inclination to intervene militarily in the broader regional conflict and has limited political tools. Countries like Saudi Arabia, which might be inclined to align with U.S. strategy, find themselves in a position of creating their own strategy and assuming the risks. 
  • For the United States, there are now more important issues than the Middle East, such as the domestic economy.
  • It will continue to get aid that it no longer needs and will continue to have military relations with the United States, particularly in developing military technology. But for reasons having little to do with Israel, Washington's attention is not focused on the region or at least not as obsessively as it had been since 2001. 
  • Like Israel, the United States has realized the limits and costs of such a strategy, and Israel will not talk the United States out of it, as the case of Iran shows. In addition, there is no immediate threat to Israel that it must respond to. It is, by default, in a position of watching and waiting without being clear as to what it wants to see. Therefore it should be no surprise that Israel, like the United States, is focused on domestic affairs.
  • It also puts Israel in a reactive position. The question of the Palestinians is always there. Israel's policy, like most of its strategic policy, is to watch and wait. It has no inclination to find a political solution because it cannot predict what the consequences of either a solution or an attempt to find one would be.
  •  Israel has lost the initiative and, more important, it now knows it has lost the initiative. It has looked to the United States to take the initiative, but on a much broader scale Washington faces the same reality as Israel with less at stake and therefore less urgency.
  • This is not a strain in the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the sense of anger and resentment, although those exist on both sides. Rather it is like a marriage that continues out of habit but whose foundation has withered.
  • In private I expect a sullen courtesy and in public an enthusiastic friendship, much as an old, bored married couple, not near a divorce, but far from where they were when they were young. Neither party is what it once was; each suspects that it is the other's fault. In the end, each has its own fate, linked by history to each other but no longer united.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Mar 13
       
      What a hell of a closer.
  • anonymous on 19 Mar 13
     
    "Normally, summits between Israel and the United States are filled with foreign policy issues on both sides, and there will be many discussed at this meeting, including Iran, Syria and Egypt. But this summit takes place in an interesting climate, because both the Americans and Israelis are less interested in foreign and security matters than they are in their respective domestic issues."
anonymous

China's Expanding Drone Program | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-expanding-drone-program

geopolitics china drones

shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • In the security sphere, these machines are very useful for patrolling the East and South China seas, allowing Beijing to maintain a presence in the disputed waters, and play a role in China's anti-access/area denial strategy.
  • China's equivalent to a Global Hawk, the Soar Eagle, was introduced at Zhuhai in 2006. China already has drones that are comparable to the U.S. Predator and Reaper known as the Yilong/Wing Loong, or "Pterodactyl," and the CH-4. Like the United States, China also has many smaller drones, the most common being the ASN-15.
  • The United States and Israel are currently the leaders in this technology.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • While China's drones are not as advanced, tested or capable of the same ranges, they do allow Beijing to monitor its borders and waters more effectively due to extended loiter time.
  • They also help China deter countries from intervening in the area by helping detect and target potential violators of the area they are trying to deny. This is at the heart of the anti-access/area denial strategy and China's motivation for devoting resources to the program.
  • Beijing has plans to build 11 coastal drone bases by 2015 to increase its ability to survey the region for possible intrusions or threats.
  • Reports say the Japanese Defense Ministry hopes to introduce Global Hawks near the disputed islands by 2015 in an attempt to counter Beijing's increasingly assertive naval activity in the area.
  • According to some reports, Chinese drones similar to U.S. models are cheaper. China has exported several types to countries including Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, although Pakistan has also purchased some from the United States.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "China is rapidly expanding its research into and production, deployments and sales of unmanned aerial vehicles, colloquially known as drones. The primary role of this growing program is to help Beijing control and monitor disputed territories in the Asia-Pacific region."
anonymous

Cautiously Toward Utopia: Automation and the Absurdity of Capitalism - 2 views

ieet.org/...abbott20130404

shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Solid analyses of the present automation conundrum abound, ranging from Marshall Brain's classic treatment to recent pieces here at IEET by Brian Merchant and Federico Pistono.
  • Contesting the many economists who insist that the market will adapt, Brain and company articulate the straightforward thesis that replacement of human workers by robots will lead to unemployment, particularly for so-called unskilled workers.
  • As Jaron Lanier writes, if artificial general intelligence remains elusive and software resource use continues to bloat, the need for technical support could keep employment high.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • With those caveats, I do consider waxing unemployment precipitated in part by automation an extremely likely near-term future scenario.
  • In rough strokes, the story of machines displacing and immiserating skilled workers reiterates the very genesis of capitalist modernity.
  • In contrast with the Neo-Luddites of today, the nineteenth-century Luddites expressed no desire to terminate civilization but instead fiercely defended their economic interests against capitalist competition that would reduce them dependent wage labor.
  • Despite the lack of even basic computers – much less artificial intelligence – some radicals in the nineteenth century already proposed that necessary labor could be reduced to a few hours per day.
  • The later Technocracy movement made automation the core of their analysis, argued it would cause mass unemployment, and promoted a society of equally distributed abundance managed by technical experts.
  • As concise distillation of the desires described above, the following passage for Oscar Wilde's “The Soul of Man under Socialism” poetically proclaims a techno-utopian position years before the dawn of twentieth century
  • Looking at this corpus of radical discourse on automation and how mechanization has already displaced and impoverished workers provides context for today's debate.
  • Thus far, capitalism has managed to reinvent itself and weather numerous crises. Prophesies that automation would result in total economic collapse and dreams that it could create a post-scarcity paradise to date remain unrealized.
  • Even manufacturing still requires vast human labor at the moment. Living and working conditions for many twenty-first-century factory workers aren't meaningfully better than over a hundred years ago. State-socialist attempts at rationally planned industrial development have had dubious material benefits while inflicting intense environmental damage and human suffering.
  • Our current circumstances suggest automation of at least basic physical tasks will keep advancing; lights-out factories already exist. The prospect of robots replacing humans at the majority of present-day jobs appears genuinely plausible if far from certain.
  • This allows us to imagine the scenario that folks like the Technocrats were ahead of their time, that the robotization of workforce will lead to long-structural unemployment as it becomes cheaper buy and maintain a robot than pay a human employee. If this comes to pass, widespread poverty seems inevitable without significant changes to actually existing capitalism.
  • As Pistono writes, increasing “[c]ivil unrest, riots, police brutality, and general distress of the population” would at least initially define such a future. I see welfare capitalism, old-fashioned dictatorship, corporate feudalism, state socialism, fascism, and/or anarchism emerging from the ashes.
  • I favor the latter.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Apr 13
       
      I find that surely dubious. Perhaps that's because anarchism seems no less a naive idealism than Libertarianism.
  • Social relations would become profoundly altered if – consistent with Wilde's utopian vision – each individual had independent access to basic necessities and comforts without having to toil.
  • When it comes to post-scarcity, the differences between libertarians and anarchists like myself blur.
  • Barring nanotech genies who grant unlimited wishes, I assess community control of the means of production as my desired arrangement. With proper political mobilization, robotization may allow for prosperous self-sufficient or largely self-sufficient communities.
  • Whatever labor machines could not perform could be divided amongst the populace. Given the magical and alien quality of complete automation – a world without drudgery – the conservative communal scenario akin to nineteenth-century radical utopias intuitively feels more creditable to me. But I know better – or worse – than to always trust intuition.
  • Although the life of any single worker means little or nothing to them, they cannot annihilate the working class without doing the same to their own privilege. Robots change this. Human obsolescence could spell doom for the masses. If structural dynamics drive behavior, a powerful enough group of elites might simply liquidate the unruly hordes of no-longer-need labors.
  • More believably, the rich could withdraw to their own well-guarded estates – whether terrestrial, orbital, or beyond – and live decadently off the fruits of their robotic slaves. Those of us without capital would then be at the mercy of automation's aristocracy for our daily survival. This scenario conflicts with dominant notions of modern morality, but I'd rather have class organization on my side than rely on the sentiments of the oppressors.
  • I want to give automated utopia an honest try, but I also desire fertile landbases for my primitivist comrades. As personally enamored as I am with the transhumanist path, I encourage and endeavor to practice a revolutionary pluralism that respects meaningful diversity.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 13
     
    "The longstanding and growing concern over structural unemployment caused by automation highlights the absurdity of capitalism. Like homelessness caused by too many houses, poverty from mechanization looks perverse and nonsensical from a system-optimization standpoint. This article briefly sketches the history of both fears and hopes surrounding automated labor in order to argue against economic status quo of coercion, inequality, and inefficiency."
anonymous

Turkey is ... | Headrush - Ed Webb's Dickinson Blog - 0 views

the-ed-rush.blogspot.com/...turkey-is.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 13 - Cached
  • What strikes me most about analyses I have looked at is the urge to compare. Taksim is or isn't Tahrir. Turkey is or isn't like Egypt/Tunisia/the USA. The protests in Gezi Park and elsewhere are more like #Occupy or more like the Arab uprisings of 2011.
  • Prime Minister Erdogan has little in common with Mubarak, Ben Ali or, even less, Qadhafi. He is a legitimately elected (and re-elected) and popular leader. Turkey is a multiparty democracy in a way that the North African states never were before the uprisings.
  • represent a broad frustration with the Prime Minister and his party (AKP/JDP)
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • That frustration appears to be driven by two key factors:
  • Erdogan's increasingly autocratic, populist governing style
  • pursuit of conservative social policy beyond many Turkish citizens' comfort zones
  • The ballot box is not, therefore, proving sufficiently responsive to that large segment of the population who feel underserved by the present government.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jun 13
       
      Man, that sounds familiar. ;)
  • Where comparative political analysis may be helpful, apart from providing some of the vocabulary to discuss these events, is in drawing attention to international forces that have played roles in the Turkish protests:
  • Demonstration effects
  • information and communications technologies
  • the context of neoliberalizing globalization
  • In Tunisia and Egypt this enabled crony capitalist reforms, enriching a small elite and excluding the vast majority. Social justice and dignity became central demands of the protestors there.
  • The protestors are not, by and large, economic victims of globalization. But the development of Gezi park was symptomatic of runaway gentrification and had the stench of corruption about it:
  • Protestors globally are confronting local interactions of their national political and economic systems with the dominant economic ideology and forces of the post-Cold War world.
  • Turkey is not Tunisia is not Egypt is not the USA. But neoliberal globalization has disrupted societies in all of those places, and some people have pushed back and are pushing back.
  • anonymous on 05 Jun 13
     
    An awesome look at Turkey from Ed Webb: "Students and others have been asking me for my thoughts on the protests in Turkey. There is much reporting and analysis already available, of varying quality, so I will be brief. I encourage those interested to keep an eye on my Twitter stream and my Diigo account where I have been collecting some of the more interesting interventions."
anonymous

Moore's Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...res-law-and-the-origin-of-life

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity–the origin of life?Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. “Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say. And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.
  • Of course, there are many points to debate in this analysis. The nature of evolution is filled with subtleties that most biologists would agree we do not yet fully understand.
  • For example, is it reasonable to think that the complexity of life has increased at the same rate throughout Earth’s history?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • They also point out that astronomers believe that the Sun formed from the remnants of an earlier star, so it would be no surprise that life from this period might be preserved in the gas, dust and ice clouds that remained. By this way of thinking, life on Earth is a continuation of a process that began many billions of years earlier around our star’s forerunner.
  • However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species.
  • There’s no question that this is a controversial idea that will ruffle more than a few feathers amongst evolutionary theorists.But it is also provocative, interesting and exciting. All the more reason to debate it in detail.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore's law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself."
anonymous

The Strategic Implications of Immigration Reform - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...mplications-immigration-reform

geopolitics immigration reform

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • It would make it possible for illegal immigrants currently in the country to seek legal residency and eventually citizenship. Finally, and perhaps most important, the bill would shift the composition of the inflow of legal immigrants, increasing quotas for highly skilled individuals and constraining the number of visas available to people whose family members are U.S. citizens. 
  • The history of U.S. immigration policy is necessarily long and controversial. Not only is the United States the biggest economy in the world, it is also the largest recipient of immigrants.
  • Immigration law has been used to control the legal entry of people based on a wide range of factors.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • These include placing quotas on nationalities and forbidding the entry of polygamists and political extremists. At the same time, U.S. immigration law has been used to encourage the entry of people with specific skill sets.
  • In 1942 the United States negotiated an agreement with Mexico during an agricultural labor shortage. This agreement, known as the Bracero program, allowed millions of Mexican workers to enter the United States between the time the program was implemented and when it ended in 1964.
  • The program opened the door for significant Mexican migration based on family reunification. What appears to be a more contemporary version of that program -- a temporary worker permit specifically designed to integrate migrant agricultural workers -- was included in the bill introduced Wednesday.
  • Though each new wave of immigration brings with it political and social controversy, the United States' ability to integrate new populations gives it a distinct advantage over many other developed countries.
  • In the first place, Latin American immigrant populations tend to have higher fertility rates than the national average. This allows the United States to maintain a population large enough to drive the world’s largest economy -- in stark comparison with Europe, which is set to experience a notable aging and shrinking of its population.
  • Many students from around the world come to study in the United States, but legal restrictions prevent them from staying and working in the country. The proposed system appears designed to help keep more highly educated foreigners in the United States, a country that depends on technological innovation to create high-skilled, high-value jobs.
  • The generation and protection of intellectual property is a strategic national objective amid rising international competition, and if the proposed law successfully increases high-skilled labor immigration, it will contribute significantly to U.S. competitiveness
  • The Mexican government has long made it a priority to find a way to normalize immigrant status. It also has an interest in encouraging population flows that generate billions of dollars worth of remittances annually to Mexico.
  • The fact that immigration reform is attached to the new border security initiative will sweeten the deal for Mexico during negotiations with the United States.
  • For the United States, the big question now is about global competitiveness, and any reform to immigration will seek to address that question.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "A bipartisan group of eight leading U.S. senators on Wednesday officially filed the most comprehensive immigration reform bill since 1990, opening the door for the United States to address an issue that will help to shape the country's economic and demographic future. The bill links the issue of border security with that of immigration and will require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to significantly ramp up its monitoring of the U.S. border over the next 10 years."
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