Opinion | Ahead of Elections, the Specter of Nazism Is Haunting Germany - The New York ... - 0 views
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In truth, there isn’t much difference between the AfD and the other right-wing populist parties that have spread across Europe in recent years. Like Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece, the AfD relies on a toxic combination of xenophobia, militarism and nostalgia to win votes.
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But this is Germany, the last country anyone wants to make great again.
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Even now, the amount of concrete political power the AfD stands to gain next month is unclear. A shift of a few percentage points in the results could well make the difference between another coalition of established centrist parties and a state government led by far-right extremists.
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Covid Normalcy: No Tests, Isolation or Masks - The New York Times - 0 views
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Epidemiologists said in interviews that they do not endorse a lackadaisical approach, particularly for those spending time around older people and those who are immunocompromised. They still recommend staying home for a couple of days after an exposure and getting the newly authorized boosters soon to become available
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But they said that some elements of this newfound laissez faire attitude were warranted. While Covid cases are high, fewer hospitalizations and deaths during the surges are signs of increasing immunity — evidence that a combination of mild infections and vaccine boosters are ushering in a new era: not a post-Covid world, but a post-crisis one.
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Epidemiologists have long predicted that Covid would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,
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Opinion | Kamala Harris's DNC was a master class in coalition building - The Washington... - 0 views
'Never summon a power you can't control': Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten de... - 0 views
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The Phaethon myth and Goethe’s poem fail to provide useful advice because they misconstrue the way humans gain power. In both fables, a single human acquires enormous power, but is then corrupted by hubris and greed. The conclusion is that our flawed individual psychology makes us abuse power.
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What this crude analysis misses is that human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans. Accordingly, it isn’t our individual psychology that causes us to abuse power.
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Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. Humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way our networks are built predisposes us to use power unwisely
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Antitrust Enforcers: "The Rent Is Too Damn High!" - 0 views
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The story was explosive, explaining that, in fact, there was no mystery behind the inflation that Americans were experiencing, inflation in everyday items paired with skyrocketing corporate profits. There was a conspiracy, orchestrated by some of the richest men in the country.
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Median asking rents had spiked by as much as 18% in the spring of 2022, and that was outrageous. Moreover, rents are just out of control more broadly. As the Antitrust Division notes, "the percentage of income spent on rent for Americans without a college degree increased from 30% in 2000 to 42% in 2017."
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Policymakers also responded. Seventeen members of Congress, and multiple Democratic Senators, such as Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Amy Klobuchar, asked government enforcers to look into the allegations. Senator Ron Wyden introduced Federal legislation to ban the use of RealPage to set rents, which the Kamala Harris Presidential campaign recently endorsed. At a local level, San Fransisco just prohibited collusive algorithmic rent-setting, and similar legislation is being considered in a bunch of states and cities.
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TV Still Runs Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The combination of old and new media worked in concert to raise their profiles, certifying them as plausible choices. “It’s not cable TV per se” that matters, Socolow said, but the meme culture that it feeds. Television’s future “is through viral-meme creation and social-media circulation.”
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Instead of being rendered obsolete by social media, TV news has achieved a sort of symbiosis with it, in which television is the dominant species.
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The upshot is that new-media sources appear more likely to take their place alongside television than to replace it. If that’s the case, it rebukes the long-standing conventional wisdom that TV news was doomed by senescence and technology.
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Opinion | Kamala Harris Isn't Bluffing - The New York Times - 0 views
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a community of like-minded thinkers who take calculated risks for a living. These people, from poker players to venture capitalists — I call them the River, and they are from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sports betting, crypto — make decisions based not on what they know at the moment but on expected value
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For them, when it is time to make a decision, the question is: Do the risks outweigh the rewards?
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The River is the rival of the group of academics, journalists and policy wonks that I call the Village. This term might be more familiar: It’s the East Coast expert class. Harvard and Yale. The New York Times and The Washington Post. Together, these communities make up only a small percent of the population — in short, they are elites.
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Climate: Can Democrats make the case to climate voters? - 0 views
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Most voters say they have not heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the Yale data, and fewer than half believe it will help them or the country.
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“I definitely wish Taylor Swift was calling this the ‘Climate Kick Ass Act’ or something like that,” said Chakraborty. “That would just reach everybody and resonate with everybody.”
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“We have to be really smart about explaining the really wonky, long-term, monumental policy legacy that Biden left behind, which has actually really created jobs and really created a more breathable future,” Chakraborty said.
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Opinion | The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses - The... - 0 views
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“The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical,” he told the crowd. “They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.”
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The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.
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America’s leaders — from both parties — have long been guided by what’s often called the neoliberal consensus: the idea that “barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation and empowered citizen-consumers would be the keys to prosperity, happiness and strong democracy,” as Mr. Murphy put it. More simply, it’s a shared assumption that what’s good for markets is good for society.
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The economic commitment of climate change | Nature - 0 views
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Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,
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Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty)
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These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices
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'Our house is on fire': Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate | Greta Thu... - 0 views
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And since the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences on our everyday life. People are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget, and just how incredibly small that remaining carbon budget is. That needs to change today.
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No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and present economics.
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We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility.
Trump and Harris Duke It Out on Social Media - WSJ - 0 views
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Harris’s TikTok account, created in late July, gained two million followers in the first 24 hours and now has around 4.5 million followers. The team’s @KamalaHQ TikTok account has grown more than eightfold since being rebranded from @BidenHQ,
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The Trump campaign has highlighted the June launch of the former president’s TikTok account, which gained some 2.7 million followers within its first 24 hours and now has more than 10 million followers
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Platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as X have reinstated Trump, after previously kicking him off following the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. Those moves restored his reach to now roughly 150 million followers across those three platforms.
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Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants ... - 0 views
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In his first term in office, Mr. Trump never realized his expansive vision of using troops to enforce the law on U.S. soil. But as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats.
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“In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order — and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops,” Mr. Trump said at a conservative conference in Dallas in August 2022, shortly before announcing that he was running to be that next president.
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While governors have latitude to use their states’ National Guards to respond to civil disorder or major disasters, a post-Civil War law called the Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime to use regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.
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