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Javier E

The unhappy states of America: Despite an improving economy, Americans are glum - The W... - 0 views

  • Americans are more glum now than they were during the Great Recession
  • 2017 turned out to be the worst year for well-being on record. The overall index score was even lower than during the financial crisis, and, for the first time in the decade that Gallup has done this poll, no state in the country showed a statistically significant increase in well-being.
  • In 2009, a year when 15 states showed declines in well-being, money and financial worries were at the top of the list. Today, emotional and psychological factors dominate. People are not content in their jobs and relationships, and depression diagnoses are at an all-time high in the United States.
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  • Some blame politics and polarization for causing people to feel more anxiety and bitterness toward work colleagues and family. There's a constant narrative of division in the country between Republicans and Democrats, gun-rights supporters and gun-control advocates, the religious and the nonreligious, and so on. And there are near daily headlines about chaos in the White House.
  • “We don’t know what is going to happen next. There’s no clear path toward stabilizing either the country or the world.”
  • Almost every demographic group dropped in well-being in 2017 — except for wealthy white men. Women, African Americans, Hispanics and lower-income households (those earning less than $48,000 a year) all saw substantial drops in their perception of their well-being.
  • Democrats also showed far bigger declines than Republicans or independents. “Switching out the person in the Oval Office can and does have an effect on well-being,”
  • While consumer confidence is at the highest level since 2004, polls that look at broader issues than income and spending power don't appear as rosy.
  • Forty percent of American adults now say they are lonely, double the share of people who said that in the 1980s, according to AARP. Some people are even struggling to feel connected to their work colleagues
  • In 2017, the No. 1 fear was corrupt government officials followed by the overall state of health care and worries about pollution. There was also a significant jump last year in fears about the United States getting into another world war.
  • In 2017, half of Americans said one of their top fears was “not having enough money for the future,” a reminder that even if people have jobs now, they remain anxious because they aren't sure how long that will last.
  • “People are feeling more economically insecure, even if they have a job and a salary,” said Rachel Schneider, co-author of “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty.” “I think it's a combination of knowing you're responsible for your own retirement, knowing you're responsible for your own health care and knowing that you don't have any significant job security.”
  • There's a growing push from academics and even Wall Street bankers, such as hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, to get politicians to look beyond the national statistics on jobs and economic. Those numbers aren't painting the full picture of how Americans are doing, let alone feeling, experts say.
  • Despite the improving economy, the fear of running out of money down the road jumped nearly 10 points from the year before, and it was followed closely by fears of “high medical bills.”
manhefnawi

Russia Tries to Catch 'Criminals' by Abusing Interpol - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now.”
  • Bill Browder, the hedge-fund manager and Putin fan turned human-rights activist and anti-Putin crusader, was in Spain to give evidence in anti-corruption proceedings implicating the Russian government
  • It can effectively be a “crime” in member states like Russia, Iran, or Venezuela, to engage in anti-government activism or even run-of-the-mill journalism—activities that, in other member countries including most Western democracies, are protected by law.
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  • Interpol’s constitution tries to guard against this by forbidding “any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character.”
  • Among other things, the act sanctions wealthy associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and is by many accounts uniquely enraging to the Russian government.)
  • A Spanish court ultimately rejected Russia’s extradition request, but not until after Silaev had spent eight days in prison and six months fighting a legal battle in Spain.
  • But ultimately the international justice system is only as good as the countries writing and enforcing the laws—and some notions of “justice” are not fit for export overseas.
Javier E

Jeffrey Epstein Indictment: He's Out of Luck - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Why did the Department of Justice cut such a deal? Acosta claimed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office worried it would have trouble proving federal charges against Epstein. With all respect to Acosta—who, in full disclosure, was a law-school classmate—that explanation is not credible. Federal prosecutors are famously reluctant to bring hard-to-prove cases, unlike district attorneys, who are generally eager to roll the dice. But no federal prosecutor would hesitate to pursue allegations of pervasive, organized child-sex abuse, backed by firsthand witnesses. It is more plausible that Epstein successfully wielded his nearly incomprehensible money and power to influence the decision at the highest levels. The personal attacks on the prosecution likely helped too: Federal prosecutors aren’t used to being on the defensive.
andrespardo

'I don't like rich guys...but I like him': who supports billionaire Tom Steyer? | US ne... - 0 views

  • someone run down the field and kick my teammate in the face,” a billionaire former-hedge fund manager and Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer told the crowd of voters in Clinton, Iowa, on Friday.
  • Steyer appeared to have won the support of the anti-face kicking wing of the Democratic party. If he is to win the Democratic nomination, however, Steyer will have to build a broader coalition. His strategy so far has mostly involved spending lots and lots of money ($201m in 2019), but having just watched one billionaire become president, can Democrats really stomach another?
  • Still, it’s easy to see how that background might not go over very well in somewhere like Clinton, where the high street is lined with shuttered businesses and the median household income is $34,000, well below the state average.
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  • Steyer hates the comparison
  • a 77-year-old who used to work at the sprawling dog food factory that greets visitors to Clinton, pumping out both steam and a vague smell of meat.
  • Nevertheless, there have been grumblings, about Steyer’s campaigning methods. By 13 January he had spent $123m on tv and digital advertising, according to NPR. Not including fellow Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who is even wealthier than Steyer, that is more than all the other Democratic candidates combined.
  • ettner was open to voting for Steyer, potentially, but preferred the more progressive candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Indeed, for all the goodwill Steyer received in Clinton, none of the people the Guardian spoke to actually planned to vote for him, and it was a similar story in Dubuque. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it vote for you.
  • “There’s no way that anybody, including Mike Bloomberg, can buy an election, the only thing you can do is see if Americans respond to what you have to say, and who you are, and what you’ve done in the past.
  • On Monday, when Iowans go to the caucuses, we’ll find out if that is, actually, how Americans see it.
maxwellokolo

Opinion | The Cost of Barack Obama's Speech - 0 views

  •  
    "I found myself spending time with people of means - law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists," Senator Barack Obama wrote in his book "The Audacity of Hope." "As a rule, they were smart, interesting people.
anonymous

Georgia's election law: How the Supreme Court laid the path - CNNPolitics - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Georgia's voter restrictions were dashed into law Thursday by Republicans shaken over recent election losses and lies about fraud from former President Donald Trump, yet the measures also developed against a backdrop of US Supreme Court decisions hollowing out federal voting rights protection.
  • In another world, before the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, Georgia would have had to obtain federal approval for new election practices to ensure they did not harm Blacks and other minority voters.
  • And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines. But the conservative court has increasingly granted states leeway over how they run elections.
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  • As the justices have turned away challenges to state policies, they have expressed sympathy for local officials who face potentially intrusive federal regulation and protracted litigation. Led by Roberts, the court has also dismissed concerns about the consequences for minority voters as it has curtailed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
  • That case from Shelby County, Alabama, centered on a provision of the 1965 act that required states with a history of discrimination to seek approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing electoral policy. By a 5-4 vote, the court invalidated the provision that still covered nine states, including Georgia.
  • The justices are now considering, in a recently argued Arizona case, the strength of a separate Voting Rights Act provision that prohibits any measure that denies someone the right to vote because of race. Unlike the "pre-clearance" provision previously in dispute, this section of the law comes into play after legislation has taken effect and puts the burden on those protesting the law to initiate a lawsuit.
  • Resolution of that Arizona case, known as Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, will have repercussions for controversy over laws like Georgia's, which were immediately challenged Thursday night by advocates who say they will disproportionately hurt Blacks.
  • Across the country, Republican legislators have proposed voting changes that would reverse the pandemic-era steps that made it easier for people to vote last November, especially by mail, and led to record numbers of votes cast.
  • Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act soon after the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama. The law reflected the reality of the time that although the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial bias in voting, Blacks were still deterred from casting ballots through poll taxes, literacy tests and other rules.
  • Roberts has also made clear that he abhors remedies tied to race, saying in a 2006 voting-rights case: "It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." Yet in the aftermath of the polarizing 2020 election, the country and the high court may be headed for a new chapter of voting-rights cases of a deeper partisan character, intensifying concerns about the future of the Voting Rights Act, as well as First Amendment guarantees of free speech and association.
  • Georgia's law, signed by Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday, emerges from Republican efforts nationwide, particularly in battleground states that experienced record turnout and Democratic victories last November. Among its myriad provisions, the Georgia law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots and empowers state officials to take over local election boards.
  • The three voting rights groups that sued - the New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund and Rise Inc. -- grounded their complaint in the Voting Rights Act and in the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
  • The challengers emphasized Georgia's history of racial discrimination. "(V)oting in Georgia is highly polarized, and the shameful legacy of racial discrimination is visible today in Georgia's housing, economic, and health disparities," they wrote, adding that the new law "interacts with these vestiges of discrimination" to deny equal opportunity in the political process. Lower federal court judges have struggled over the standard for assessing the denial of voting rights, and that dilemma is at the heart of the Supreme Court's new Arizona controversy.
  • In dispute are laws require ballots cast by people at the wrong precinct to be discarded and bar most third parties -- beyond a relative or mail carrier -- from collecting absentee ballots, for example, at a nursing home.
  • During oral arguments, Roberts and fellow conservatives focused on potential voter fraud and highlighted state authority for overseeing elections. Arizona officials argued that the measures would help prevent voter coercion and other irregularities, as the challengers contended that the new requirements would especially disenfranchise Native Americans and other minorities.
  • The high court's resolution of the Arizona controversy could have a dramatic impact on the raft of new legislation and ultimately how easy it is for minorities to register and vote. Resolution is expected by the end of June.
Javier E

The GameStop Reckoning Was a Long Time Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In any reading, the most unusual thing about Wall Street’s being challenged by a rowdy band of Redditors is that it took so long to happen. This kind of populist revolt — internet-based insurgents gleefully pulling down the pants of the unsuspecting establishment — has been happening for years, to many powerful institutions.
  • Book publishers, movie studios, restaurant chains — all of them have, in some way, been forced to cede power to their online critics. Our politics, too, have been transformed by internet activists, with TikTok teens disrupting presidential rallies and Twitch-streaming memelords storming the Capitol.
  • these internet-based insurgencies tend to follow a similar pattern. One day, a group decides to take action against a system it feels is immoral or corrupt. Members identify structural weak points (a vulnerable political party, a risk-averse studio head, an overexposed short position) and figure out creative ways to exploit them, using social media for leverage and visibility. With enough highly motivated people pushing in the same direction, they eventually prevail, or get enough attention that it feels like they did.
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  • These online crusades can be waged in good faith or in bad faith, and some can become deeply destructive. (The classic example of a bad-faith battle is Gamergate, a 2014 culture war that started as a feud over video game journalism but morphed into a toxic campaign of violent misogyny and racism that paved the way for the alt-right.)
  • because trading stocks costs money — and required some level of expertise and time commitment — it was mostly left to professionals.
  • Smartphone-based trading apps like Robinhood changed that, by introducing commission-free trades and an interface that made executing a gamma squeeze as straightforward as ordering a burrito from Uber Eats. Suddenly, millions of amateurs could organize themselves, generate their own market research and investment theses, drum up excitement in Reddit threads and TikTok videos, and enter the casino with the big boys
  • author Martin Gurri calls “the revolt of the public.” Mr. Gurri writes that the internet has empowered ordinary citizens by giving them new information and tools, which they then use to discover the flaws in the systems and institutions that govern their lives. Once they’ve discovered these shortcomings, he writes, these citizens often rebel, tearing down elites and dominant institutions out of anger at having been lied to and withheld from.
  • Big banks and hedge funds really do play by different rules than retail investors. Wall Street banks really did get bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis while Main Street homeowners suffered. M.B.A.s in fancy suits are probably no more likely to give you good investing advice than guys on YouTube with names like “RoaringKitty.”
  • If you can get past the all-caps lunacy and strange inside jargon, the Redditors make some good points
  • The result, Mr. Gurri writes, is a kind of vengeful nihilism, an urge to burn down the establishment without a clear sense of what’s supposed to replace it.
  • Retail investors, armed with new kinds of tools and information that allow them to compete on equal footing with professionals, are looking at the Masters of the Universe and going: Really? Those guys run the market?
  • this is not just a speculative bubble or a stupid prank. It’s an authority crisis. And even if GameStop stock crashes or regulators step in and call off the party, these disillusioned day traders will keep trying to create chaos for the elites they feel have spent decades profiting at their expense.
  • for the Reddit day traders, the important victory was always the symbolic one. They might lose their shirts, but they’ve sent the message that with enough passion and rocket-ship emojis, a crowd of profane, irreverent degenerates — again, their words, not mine — can turn the stock market on its head.
Javier E

Opinion | Who Killed the Knapp Family? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him.
  • Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.
  • We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation.
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  • Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.
  • “The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.”
  • Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”
  • Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class
  • The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them
  • The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays.
  • If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.
  • we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.
  • “I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.
  • One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness
  • we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school.
  • “We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,”
  • We have to treat America’s cancer.
  • the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances
  • In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.
  • A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.
  • Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable.
  • Family structure collapsed.
  • The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years
  • The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.
  • The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did.
  • Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor.
  • It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors.
  • But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making.
  • If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.
  • Why did deaths of despair claim Farlan, Zealan, Nathan, Rogena and so many others?
  • First, well-paying jobs disappeared
  • Second, there was an explosion of drugs
  • Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families.
  • Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools
  • Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.
  • Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending,
  • ob training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.
  • For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario. As the scholar Victor Tan Chen has showed, the two countries responded differently
  • The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.
  • The focus on job placement meant that Canadian workers were ushered more quickly back into workaday society and thus today seem less entangled in drugs and family breakdown.
  • Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.
  • We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery.
  • The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs
  • Yet it’s not hopeless. America is polarized with ferocious arguments about social issues, but we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children. Here’s what does work.
  • Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money.
  • For individuals trying to break an addiction, a first step is to face up to the problem — and that’s what America should do as well
Javier E

How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk's Number - The New York Times - 0 views

  • a Scottish moral philosopher.The philosopher, William MacAskill,
  • his latest book, “What We Owe the Future,” became a best seller after it was published in August.
  • His rising profile parallels the worldwide growth of the giving community he helped found, effective altruism. Once a niche pursuit for earnest vegans and volunteer kidney donors who lived frugally so that they would have more money to give away for cheap medical interventions in developing countries, it has emerged as a significant force in philanthropy, especially in millennial and Gen-Z giving.
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  • In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.
  • “If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do,” Mr. MacAskill said.
  • Mr. Musk has not officially joined the movement but he and Mr. MacAskill have known each other since 2015, when they met at an effective altruism conference. Mr. Musk has also said on Twitter that Mr. MacAskill’s giving philosophy is similar to his own.
  • Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.
  • If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades,
  • Traditionally, effective altruism was focused on finding the lowest-cost interventions that did the most good. The classic example is insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent mosquitoes from giving people malaria.
  • Mr. MacAskill argues that people living today have a responsibility not just to people halfway around the world but also those in future generations.
  • The rise of this kind of thinking, known as longtermism, has meant the Effective Altruists are increasingly associated with causes that have the ring of science fiction to them — like preventing artificial intelligence from running amok or sending people to distant planets to increase our chances of survival as a species
  • The two men first met in 2012, when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at M.I.T. with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
  • Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. MacAskill suggested that he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly.
  • Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.
  • Bloomberg recently estimated that Mr. Bankman-Fried was worth $10.5 billion, even after the recent crash in crypto prices. That puts Mr. Bankman-Fried in the unusual position of having earned his enormous fortune on behalf of the effective altruism cause, rather than making the money and then searching for a sense of purpose in donating it.
  • Mr. Bankman-Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years.
  • Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion in donations
  • Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.
  • Mr. MacAskill said that he got to know Mr. Musk better through Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player and effective altruist, who briefly advised Mr. Musk on philanthropy.
  • In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)
  • Mr. MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misconceptions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”
Javier E

How Sam Bankman-Fried Put Effective Altruism on the Defensive - The New York Times - 0 views

  • To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.
  • ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.
  • Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”
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  • To the uninitiated, the fact that Bankman-Fried saw a special urgency in preventing killer robots from taking over the world might sound too outlandish to seem particularly effective or altruistic. But it turns out that some of the most influential E.A. literature happens to be preoccupied with killer robots too.
  • Holden Karnofsky, a former hedge funder and a founder of GiveWell, an organization that assesses the cost-effectiveness of charities, has spoken about the need for “worldview diversification” — recognizing that there might be multiple ways of doing measurable good in a world filled with suffering and uncertainty
  • The books, however, are another matter. Considerations of immediate need pale next to speculations about existential risk — not just earthly concerns about climate change and pandemics but also (and perhaps most appealingly for some tech entrepreneurs) more extravagant theorizing about space colonization and A.I.
  • there’s a remarkable intellectual homogeneity; the dominant voices belong to white male philosophers at Oxford.
  • Among his E.A. innovations has been the career research organization known as 80,000 Hours, which promotes “earning to give” — the idea that altruistic people should pursue careers that will earn them oodles of money, which they can then donate to E.A. causes.
  • each of those terse sentences glosses over a host of additional questions, and it takes MacAskill an entire book to address them. Take the notion that “future people count.” Leaving aside the possibility that the very contemplation of a hypothetical person may not, for some real people, be “intuitive” at all, another question remains: Do future people count for more or less than existing people count for right now?
  • MacAskill cites the philosopher Derek Parfit, whose ideas about population ethics in his 1984 book “Reasons and Persons” have been influential in E.A. Parfit argued that an extinction-level event that destroyed 100 percent of the population should worry us much more than a near-extinction event that spared a minuscule population (which would presumably go on to procreate), because the number of potential lives dwarfs the number of existing ones.
  • If you’re a utilitarian committed to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the arithmetic looks irrefutable. The Times’s Ezra Klein has written about his support for effective altruism while also thoughtfully critiquing longtermism’s more fanatical expressions of “mathematical blackmail.”
  • In 2015, MacAskill published “Doing Good Better,” which is also about the virtues of effective altruism. His concerns in that book (blindness, deworming) seem downright quaint when compared with the astral-plane conjectures (A.I., building an “interstellar civilization”) that he would go on to pursue in “What We Owe the Future.”
  • In both books he emphasizes the desirability of seeking out “neglectedness” — problems that haven’t attracted enough attention so that you, as an effective altruist, can be more “impactful.” So climate change, MacAskill says, isn’t really where it’s at anymore; readers would do better to focus on “the issues around A.I. development,” which are “radically more neglected.
  • In his recent best seller, “What We Owe the Future” (2022), MacAskill says that the case for effective altruism giving priority to the longtermist view can be distilled into three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.”
  • “Earning to give” has its roots in the work of the radical utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” has been a foundational E.A. text. It contains his parable of the drowning child: If you’re walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, you should wade in and save the child, even if it means muddying your clothes
  • Extrapolating from that principle suggests that if you can save a life by donating an amount of money that won’t pose any significant problems for you, a decision not to donate that money would be not only uncharitable or ungenerous but morally wrong.
  • Singer has also written his own book about effective altruism, “The Most Good You Can Do” (2015), in which he argues that going into finance would be an excellent career choice for the aspiring effective altruist. He acknowledges the risks for harm, but he deems them worth it
  • Chances are, if you don’t become a charity worker, someone else will ably do the job; whereas if you don’t become a financier who gives his money away, who’s to say that the person who does become a financier won’t hoard all his riches for himself?
  • On Nov. 11, when FTX filed for bankruptcy amid allegations of financial impropriety, MacAskill wrote a long Twitter thread expressing his shock and his anguish, as he wrestled in real time with what Bankman-Fried had wrought.
  • “If those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community,” MacAskill wrote in a Tweet, followed by screenshots from “What We Owe the Future” and Ord’s “The Precipice” that emphasized the importance of honesty and integrity.
  • I’m guessing that Bankman-Fried may not have read the pertinent parts of those books — if, that is, he read any parts of those books at all. “I would never read a book,” Bankman-Fried said earlier this year. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
  • Avoiding books is an efficient method for absorbing the crudest version of effective altruism while gliding past the caveats
  • For all of MacAskill’s galaxy-brain disquisitions on “A.I. takeover” and the “moral case for space settlement,” perhaps the E.A. fixation on “neglectedness” and existential risks made him less attentive to more familiar risks — human, banal and closer to home.
Javier E

As Putin Threatens, Despair and Hedging in Europe - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they’ve done so far — sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment — would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.
  • In Munich, the mood was both anxious and unmoored, as leaders faced confrontations they had not anticipated. Warnings about Mr. Putin’s possible next moves were mixed with Europe’s growing worries that it could soon be abandoned by the United States, the one power that has been at the core of its defense strategy for 75 years.
  • Barely an hour went by at the Munich Security Conference in which the conversation did not turn to the question of whether Congress would fail to find a way to fund new arms for Ukraine, and if so, how long the Ukrainians could hold out. And while Donald Trump’s name was rarely mentioned, the prospect of whether he would make good on his threats to pull out of NATO and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” with allies he judged insufficient hung over much of the dialogue.
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  • The dourness of the mood contrasted sharply with just a year ago, when many of the same participants — intelligence chiefs and diplomats, oligarchs and analysts — thought Russia might be on the verge of strategic defeat in Ukraine. There was talk of how many months it might take to drive the Russians back to the borders that existed before their invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Now that optimism appeared premature at best, faintly delusional at worst.
  • Nikolai Denkov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, argued that Europeans should draw three lessons from the cascade of troubles. The war in Ukraine was not just about gray zones between Europe and Russia, he argued, but “whether the democratic world we value can be beaten, and this is now well understood in Europe.”
  • “European defense was a possibility before, but now it’s a necessity,” said Claudio Graziano, a retired general from Italy and former chairman of the European Union Military Committee. But saying the right words is not the same as doing what they demand.
  • third, they needed to separate Ukraine’s urgent needs for ammunition and air defense from longer-term strategic goals.
  • Some attendees found the commitments made by the leaders who showed up uninspiring, said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs. “Kamala Harris empty, Scholz mushy, Zelensky tired,
  • Second, European nations have realized that they must combine their forces in military, not just economic endeavors, to build up their own deterrence
  • “I feel underwhelmed and somewhat disappointed” by the debate here, said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “There was a lack of urgency and a lack of clarity about the path forward, and I did not see a strong show of European solidarity.
  • now two-thirds of the alliance members have met the goal of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense — up from just a handful of nations 10 years ago. But a few acknowledged that goal is now badly outdated, and they talked immediately about the political barriers to spending more.
  • the prospect of less American commitment to NATO, as the United States turned to other challenges from China or in the Middle East, was concentrating minds.
  • the fundamental disconnect was still on display: When Europeans thought Russia would integrate into European institutions, they stopped planning and spending for the possibility they might be wrong. And when Russia’s attitude changed, they underreacted.
  • “This is 30 years of underinvestment coming home,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, who called them “les trente paresseuses” — the 30 lazy years of post Cold-War peace dividends, in contrast to the 30 glorious years that followed World War II.
  • What was important for Europeans to remember was that this hot war in Ukraine was close and could spread quickly, Ms. Kallas said. “So if you think that you are far away, you’re not far away. It can go very, very fast.”
  • Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister of embattled Ukraine, was blunter. “I think our friends and partners were too late in waking up their own defense industries,” he said. “And we will pay with our lives throughout 2024 to give your defense industries time to ramp up production.”
Javier E

Opinion | A Titanic Geopolitical Struggle Is Underway - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There are many ways to explain the two biggest conflicts in the world today, but my own shorthand has been that Ukraine wants to join the West and Israel wants to join the Arab East — and Russia, with Iran’s help, is trying to stop the first, and Iran and Hamas are trying to stop the second.
  • They reflect a titanic geopolitical struggle between two opposing networks of nations and nonstate actors over whose values and interests will dominate our post-post-Cold War world — following the relatively stable Pax Americana/globalization era that was ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, America’s chief Cold War rival.
  • On one side is the Resistance Network, dedicated to preserving closed, autocratic systems where the past buries the future. On the other side is the Inclusion Network, trying to forge more open, connected, pluralizing systems where the future buries the past.
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  • “What Putin wants is to transform the world order” that evolved since World War II and the post-Cold War — where “the competition between nations was about who can be richer and who can help their people prosper the most . … Putin hates that world because he loses in that world — his system is a loser in a peaceful, global, wealth-enhancing paradigm. And so what he wants is to move us back to dog-eat-dog, to a 19th-century, great power competition, because he thinks he can, if not win, be more effective there. … Let’s not think that this is a Ukrainian problem; this is a problem for us all.”
  • These wars very much are our business — and now clearly inescapable, since we’re deeply entwined in both conflicts. What’s crucial to keep in mind about America — as the leader of the Inclusion Network — is that right now we’re fighting the war in Ukraine on our terms, but we’re fighting the war in the Middle East on Iran’s terms.
  • CNN recently described, per a source familiar with it, a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment provided to Congress saying that Russia had lost 87 percent of its preinvasion active-duty ground troops and two-thirds of its tanks that it had prior to its invasion of Ukraine. Putin can still inflict a lot of damage on Ukraine with missiles, but his dream of occupying the whole country and using it as a launching pad to threaten the Inclusion Network — particularly the NATO-protected European Union — is now out of reach. Thank you, Kyiv.
  • At a breakfast with NATO leaders devoted to the Ukraine issue at Davos this year, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, noted that it is we, the West, who should be thanking the Ukrainians, not forcing them to beg us for more weapons.
  • China under President Xi Jinping straddles the two networks, along with much of what’s come to be called the global south. Their hearts, and often pocketbooks, are with the Resistors but their heads are with the Includers
  • the Resistance Network “is orchestrated by Iran, Islamists and jihadists” in a process they refer to as the “unity of battlefields.” This network, he noted, “seeks to bridge militias, rejectionists, religious sects and sectarian leaders,” creating an anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western axis that can simultaneously pressure Israel in Gaza, in the West Bank and on the Lebanon border — as well as America in the Red Sea, in Syria and in Iraq and Saudi Arabia from all directions.
  • In stark contrast, Koteich said, stands the Inclusion Network, one that’s focused on “weaving together” global and regional markets instead of battlefronts, business conferences, news organizations, elites, hedge funds, tech incubators and major trade routes. This inclusion network, he added, “transcends traditional boundaries, creating a web of economic and technological interdependence that has the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.”
  • things are different in the Middle East. There, it is Iran that is sitting back comfortably — indirectly at war with Israel and America, and sometimes Saudi Arabia, by fighting through Tehran’s proxies: Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and Shiite militias in Iraq.
  • Iran is reaping all the benefits and paying virtually no cost for the work of its proxies, and the U.S., Israel and their tacit Arab allies have not yet manifested the will or the way to pressure Iran back — without getting into a hot war, which they all want to avoid.
  • The members of the Resistance Network are great at tearing down and breaking stuff, but, unlike the Inclusion Network, they have shown no capacity to build any government or society to which anyone would want to emigrate, let alone emulate
  • For all of these reasons, this is a moment of great peril as well as great opportunity — especially for Israel. The competition between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network means that the region has never been more hostile or more hospitable to accepting a Jewish state.
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