Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged 2014

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
16More

The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves from the apocalypse | The super-r... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ypse-survival-richest-rushkoff apocalypse prepper rich shelter disaster
shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
  • Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
  • These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
  • What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.
  • Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else
  • Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
  • So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone
  • C is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
  • Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
  • Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.
  • Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.
  • On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.
  • while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.
  • If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.
  • it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?
10More

The Journey of Humanity review - ambitious bid to explain society's economic developmen... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-societys-economic-development economic development history Malthus education culture
shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • ultimately, achieving the dream of explaining everything is too big an ask, even for an economist of Galor’s range. He is so devoted to the hidden long-run pulses that determine our destinies – geography, climate, diversity, the capacity to be future-oriented, the role of education, the rights and wrongs of Malthusian economics – that he neglects what is in full view
  • An account that purports to describe humanity’s journey without getting to grips with why some innovations – such as the three-masted sailing ship, printing press or computer – change civilisation while others are more ordinary, can only be incomplete. These “general-purpose technologies” not only have diverse origins, as he argues, but also require an extraordinary interplay between state funding, large markets, cultural readiness and capitalist organisation to get off the ground
  • Galor devotes little of his book to capitalism, the structure of states and the consequent dynamic interdependence between the public and private sectors, or the importance of Enlightenment values that unleashed notions of the public sphere and rule of law. These are gigantic omissions. His is a technocratic journey full of illuminating graphs, but strangely bloodless and neglectful of political economy in explaining humanity’s journey.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The economist Thomas Malthus, now dismissed by mainstream economics as an interesting crank, is resurrected by Galor as the man who correctly saw that for millennia humanity had been trapped by its own fertility into subsistence, starvation and famine. As soon as material matters improved, the birthrate went up, so did the population, and the pressure on food resources exploded – returning humanity to starvation
  • great sections of Galor’s book are to be applauded
  • What broke the Malthusian armlock on humanity’s destiny, argues Galor, is the gradual quickening in the introduction of technologies that required mass education for their successful implementation. This triggered a virtuous circle of more innovation, more investment in education, more need to invest in the quality of children rather than quantity, so that birthrates declined sufficiently to allow living standards and life expectancy to rise. Because it was now rational to invest in children’s education rather than get them working, child labour and exploitation fell away
  • Above all he shows how cultural attitudes persist long after whatever concatenation of events brought them into being, so that countries and cultures that get ahead tend to stay ahead
  • He is scathing about the shock programmes of market liberalisation that accompanied the “Washington consensus”, ignorant of these persistent traits. Effective market economies can’t be built spontaneously in cultures that are hostile to the very conception.
  • his optimism about humanity shines through – prize its diversity, commit to educate its children and they will find their way to innovate and create a culture of growth
  • It’s a great way to look at the world, but a healthy recognition that power, capitalism, finance, the existence and structure of states and public philosophies – some right, some wrong – are all part of the brew would have made his account more realistic
64More

How Climate Change Is Changing Therapy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-anxiety-therapy.html climate change therapy mental health adaptation role psychology response history
shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”
  • That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption
  • “We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”
  • ...61 more annotations...
  • starting in the mid-2010s, those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers, though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting longer.
  • Sometimes there were weeks when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside. Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to breathe the outside air at all.
  • Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.
  • As a therapist, Bryant found himself unsure how to respond
  • while his clinical education offered lots of training in, say, substance abuse or family therapy, there was nothing about environmental crisis, or how to treat patients whose mental health was affected by it
  • Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists
  • eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.
  • Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment.
  • “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”
  • In many of the messages, people asked Bryant for referrals to climate-focused therapists in Houston or Canada or Taiwan, wherever it was the writer lived.
  • his practice had shifted to reflect a new reality of climate psychology. His clients didn’t just bring up the changing climate incidentally, or during disconcerting local reminders; rather, many were activists or scientists or people who specifically sought out Bryant because of their concerns about the climate crisis.
  • could now turn to resources like the list maintained by the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which contains more than 100 psychotherapists around the country who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”
  • But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth
  • It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful
  • Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
  • In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes
  • All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”
  • Many of these predictions have since been borne out
  • Studies have found rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
  • Climate-driven migration is on the rise, and so are stories of xenophobia and community mistrust.
  • According to a 2022 survey by Yale and George Mason University, a majority of Americans report that they spend time worrying about climate change.
  • Many say it has led to symptoms of depression or anxiety; more than a quarter make an active effort not to think about it.
  • There was little or no attention to the fact that living through, or helping to cause, a collapse of nature can also be mentally harmful.
  • In June, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’” in which “difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself,” but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.
  • Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.”
  • This is not an easy way to live.
  • Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful: “a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate” — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.
  • When Barbara Easterlin first started studying environmental psychology 30 years ago, she told me, the focus of study was on ways in which cultivating a relationship with nature can be good for mental health
  • A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in the same year found that nearly half of Americans think climate change is already harming the nation’s mental health.
  • the field is still so new that it does not yet have evidence-tested treatments or standards of practice. Therapists sometimes feel as if they are finding the path as they go.
  • Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing
  • climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.
  • One of the emerging tenets of climate psychology is that counselors should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as reasonable, not pathological
  • it does mean validating that feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness, but, as Weston put it, “are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people
  • In the words of a handbook on climate psychology, “Paying heed to what is happening in our communities and across the globe is a healthier response than turning away in denial or disavowal.”
  • But this, too, raises difficult questions. “How much do we normalize people to the system we’re in?” Weston asked. “And is that the definition of health?
  • Or is the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”
  • “It seems to shift all the time, the sort of content and material that people are bringing in,” Alexandra Woollacott, a psychotherapist in Seattle, told the group. Sometimes it was a pervasive anxiety about the future, or trauma responses to fires or smoke or heat; other times, clients, especially young ones, wanted to vent their “sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal” at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.
  • “I’m so glad that we have each other to process this,” she said, “because we’re humans living through this, too. I have my own trauma responses to it, I have my own grief process around it, I have my own fury at government and oil companies, and I think I don’t want to burden my clients with my own emotional response to it.”
  • In a field that has long emphasized boundaries, discouraging therapists from bringing their own issues or experiences into the therapy room, climate therapy offers a particular challenge: Separation can be harder when the problems at hand affect therapist and client alike
  • Some therapists I spoke to were worried about navigating the breakdown of barriers, while others had embraced it. “There is no place on the planet that won’t eventually be impacted, where client and therapist won’t be in it together,” a family therapist wrote in a CPA-NA newsletter. “Most therapists I know have become more vulnerable and self-disclosing in their practice.”
  • “If you look at or consider typical theoretical framings of something like post-traumatic growth, which is the understanding of this idea that people can sort of grow and become stronger and better after a traumatic event,” she said, then the climate crisis poses a dilemma because “there is no afterwards, right? There is no resolution anytime in our lifetimes to this crisis that we nonetheless have to build the capacities to face and to endure and to hopefully engage.”
  • many of her patients are also disconnected from the natural world, which means that they struggle to process or even recognize the grief and alienation that comes from living in a society that treats nature as other, a resource to be used and discarded.
  • “How,” she asked, “do you think about resilience apart from resolution?”
  • she believed this framing reflected and reinforced a bias inherent in a field that has long been most accessible to, and practiced by, the privileged. It was hardly new in the world, after all, to face the collapse of your entire way of life and still find ways to keep going.
  • Torres said that she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves “as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.” It was valuable to recognize, she said, that “we are part of the land” and suffer when it suffers.
  • Torres described introducing her clients to methods — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation — to help them manage acute feelings of stress or panic and to avoid the brittleness of burnout.
  • She also encourages them to narrativize the problem, including themselves as agents of change inside stories about how they came to be in this situation, and how they might make it different.
  • then she encourages them to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. As Woollacott said earlier: “People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away.”
  • Dwyer told the group that she had been thinking more about psychological adaptation as a form of climate mitigation
  • Therapy, she said, could be a way to steward human energy and creative capacities at a time when they’re most needed.
  • It was hard, Bryant told me when we first spoke, to do this sort of work without finding yourself asking bigger questions — namely, what was therapy actually about?
  • Many of the therapists I talked to spoke of their role not as “fixing” a patient’s problem or responding to a pathology, but simply giving their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them
  • many of the methods in their traditional tool kits continue to be useful in climate psychology. Anxiety and hopelessness and anger are all familiar territory, after all, with long histories of well-studied treatments.
  • They focused on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.
  • Weston, the therapist in New York, has had patients who struggle to be in a world that surrounds them with waste and trash, who experience panic because they can never find a place free of reminders of their society’s destruction
  • eston said, that she has trouble with the repeated refrain that therapist and patient experiencing the same losses and dreads at the same time constituted a major departure from traditional therapeutic practice
  • “I’m so excited by what you’re bringing in,” Woollacott replied. “I’m doing psychoanalytic training at the moment, and we study attachment theory” — how the stability of early emotional bonds affects future relationships and feelings of well-being. “But nowhere in the literature does it talk about our attachment to the land.”
  • Lately, Bryant told me, he’s been most excited about the work that happens outside the therapy room: places where groups of people gather to talk about their feelings and the future they’re facing
  • It was at such a meeting — a community event where people were brainstorming ways to adapt to climate chaos — that Weston, realizing she had concrete skills to offer, was inspired to rework her practice to focus on the challenge. She remembers finding the gathering empowering and energizing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. In such settings, it was automatic that people would feel embraced instead of isolated, natural that the conversation would start moving away from the individual and toward collective experiences and ideas.
  • There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.
34More

'Childhood has been rewired': Professor Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones are damaging ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...ones-are-damaging-a-generation social media smartphone kids suicide mental health psychology culture crisis policy
shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharpl
  • He is working on a book, due out next year, and is ready to share his thesis.
  • his message is quite horrifying.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • He argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair
  • For girls, the effect is especially acute. ‘What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,’ he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. ‘But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.’
  • boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. ‘If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago
  • But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.’
  • a University of Michigan survey into ‘self-derogation’ – i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are ‘no good’ or ‘can’t do anything right’. Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago – except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.
  • irls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the ‘three great untruths’ of social media
  • The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words.
  • Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality.
  • And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.
  • ‘It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,’
  • So we had playdates in childhood, up until around 2010.’ In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply.
  • Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but ‘performing on a platform’. Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, ‘where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people
  • Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re 18. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.’
  • I ask if he thinks all platforms are equally dangerous
  • ‘TikTok is probably the worst for their intellectual development. I think it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal. Not for truth.’
  • if you get your news from social media (which many people do – in the UK, Instagram has overtaken all newspapers as a news source), this can change your view of the world, especially as the algorithms tend to promote the most provocative views.
  • If asked to choose whether they side more with Israel or Hamas, ‘the great majority of Americans side with Israel, except for Gen Z, which is split 50-50’,
  • ‘There was a Twitter thread recently showing how if you look at what people are saying on TikTok, you can understand why
  • TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’
  • Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?
  • why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14
  • we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’
  • he increased number of suicides since 2010 is so large that I suspect this is among the largest public health threats to children since the major diseases were wiped out
  • In Britain, suicide rates started rising in 2014, up about 20 per cent for boys (to 420 a year) and 60 per cent for girls (to 160 a year).
  • What should parents do? They know that if they try to remove their teenager’s smartphone, their child will accuse them of destroying his or her social life. ‘That’s a perfect statement of what we call a collective action problem,’
  • ‘Any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. But why do we ever let our kids on social media? It’s only down to the dynamic you just said.’ New norms are needed, he says. And his book will suggest four.
  • Rule one, he says: no smartphones before the age of 14.
  • ‘Give them a flip phone. Millennials had flip phones. They texted each other
  • Rule two: no social media before 16
  • His third rule: no phones in schools.
  • finally: more unsupervised play. ‘Both of our countries freaked out in the 1990s, locked up our kids because we lost trust in each other. We thought everyone was a child molester or a rapist.’ Children and teens could do with six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents, he argues. Keeping them inside risks more harm than the outside world would pose.
6More

Foreign Firms Pull Billions in Earnings Out of China - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...earnings-out-of-china-0423b68a china earnings investment
shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Foreign firms yanked more than $160 billion in total earnings from China during six successive quarters through the end of September, according to an analysis of Chinese data, an unusually sustained run of profit outflows that shows how much the country’s appeal is waning for foreign capital.
  • The outflows add to pressure on China’s currency, the yuan, when the country’s central bank is already battling to slow its decline as investors sour on Chinese stocks and bonds and new investment in China is scarce. The yuan has depreciated 5.7% against the U.S. dollar this year and touched its lowest level in more than a decade in September. 
  • A range of factors have contributed to the profit exodus, economists and corporate executives say. Those include a widening gap between China’s interest rates and those in the U.S. and Europe that has made it more attractive to park earnings in the West.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • many foreign firms are looking for better uses for their money, as China’s economy slows and geopolitical tensions rise. Chilly relations between Beijing and the U.S.-led West have pushed global companies to rethink their supply chains and exposure to China.
  • The data show that for all but two quarters between 2014 and the middle of last year, foreign firms were reinvesting more in China than they were transferring abroad. In 2021, for instance, firms reinvested a net $170 billion. 
  • That shifted in the middle of 2022, when China was under sporadic lockdowns and the U.S. Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to combat rocketing inflation. Outflows have continued in each quarter since. 
14More

Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...fired-y-combinator-paul-graham AI founder ethics opportunistic
shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Four years ago, Altman’s mentor, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, flew from the United Kingdom to San Francisco to give his protégé the boot, according to three people familiar with the incident, which has not been previously reported
  • Altman’s clashes, over the course of his career, with allies, mentors and even members of a corporate structure he endorsed, are not uncommon in Silicon Valley, amid a culture that anoints wunderkinds, preaches loyalty and scorns outside oversight.
  • Though a revered tactician and chooser of promising start-ups, Altman had developed a reputation for favoring personal priorities over official duties and for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the start-ups he was supposed to nurture
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The largest of those priorities was his intense focus on growing OpenAI, which he saw as his life’s mission, one person said.
  • A separate concern, unrelated to his initial firing, was that Altman personally invested in start-ups he discovered through the incubator using a fund he created with his brother Jack — a kind of double-dipping for personal enrichment that was practiced by other founders and later limited by the organization.
  • “It was the school of loose management that is all about prioritizing what’s in it for me,” said one of the people.
  • a person familiar with the board’s proceedings said the group’s vote was rooted in worries he was trying to avoid any checks on his power at the company — a trait evidenced by his unwillingness to entertain any board makeup that wasn’t heavily skewed in his favor.
  • Graham had surprised the tech world in 2014 by tapping Altman, then in his 20s, to lead the vaunted Silicon Valley incubator. Five years later, he flew across the Atlantic with concerns that the company’s president put his own interests ahead of the organization — worries that would be echoed by OpenAI’s board
  • The same qualities have made Altman an unparalleled fundraiser, a consummate negotiator, a powerful leader and an unwanted enemy, winning him champions in former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.
  • “Ninety plus percent of the employees of OpenAI are saying they would be willing to move to Microsoft because they feel Sam’s been mistreated by a rogue board of directors,” said Ron Conway, a prominent venture capitalist who became friendly with Altman shortly after he founded Loopt, a location-based social networking start-up, in 2005. “I’ve never seen this kind of loyalty anywhere.”
  • But Altman’s personal traits — in particular, the perception that he was too opportunistic even for the go-getter culture of Silicon Valley — has at times led him to alienate even some of his closest allies, say six people familiar with his time in the tech world.
  • Altman’s career arc speaks to the culture of Silicon Valley, where cults of personality and personal networks often take the place of stronger management guardrails — from Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX to Elon Musk’s Twitter
  • But some of Altman’s former colleagues recount issues that go beyond a founder angling for power. One person who has worked closely with Altman described a pattern of consistent and subtle manipulation that sows division between individuals.
  • AI executives, start-up founders and powerful venture capitalists had become aligned in recent months, concerned that Altman’s negotiations with regulators were dangerous to the advancement of the field. Although Microsoft, which owns a 49 percent stake in OpenAI, has long urged regulators to implement guardrails, investors have fixated on Altman, who has captivated legislators and embraced his regular summons to Capitol Hill.
11More

At Canada's Northern College, Most of the Students are From India - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-college-indian-students.html
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • How a Canadian college — in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic — became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.
  • Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labor shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.
  • The Canadian government said it was on track to host 900,000 foreign students this year, three times as many as a decade ago.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Indians make up the largest group by far, accounting for 40 percent of all international students across the country, according to the Canada Bureau for International Education. China ranks second, at 12 percent.
  • At Northern College, there were 40 international students in 2014 — now it has 6,140. Enrollment got a further boost after Northern, like other remote public colleges, opened a campus by partnering with a private college in a Toronto suburb in 2015. Today, about one-third of Northern’s foreign students are in Timmins and at three other smaller northern campuses, while the rest are on the Toronto campus.
  • Maninderjit Kaur said she would probably not have gone to Timmins if the education consultant in India — who arranged her enrollment at Northern — had told her the school’s exact location.
  • She recalled landing at the airport in Toronto in 2018, and then hopping into an Uber, believing that Northern College was nearby. The eight-hour ride cost 800 Canadian dollars.
  • Now, Ms. Kaur works in marketing at the college and owns a gas station in town with her fiancé, Karanveer Singh, 28, who also came from India to study at Northern.
  • Dr. Penner, the college’s president, believed she held an ace: Graduates of Northern and other public colleges may apply for a post-graduation work permit that could lead to permanent residence and citizenship.
  • Early childhood education is a popular major among international students because of the high demand for related jobs in the region, said Erin Holmes, who oversees the program at Northern. Dozens of international students are immediately hired after graduating, allowing them to apply for permanent residence, Ms. Holmes said.
  • Across Canada, the influx of foreign students has been so great that it is blamed for worsening housing shortages. The Canadian government has recently taken measures to stem the increase, including by doubling the level of savings international students must prove they have
19More

Afghanistan Tries to Stamp Out Opium Again - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...afghanistan-opium-taliban.html
shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • For years, opium has been the monster too big to slay. One Afghan government after another has pledged to stamp out opium production and trafficking, only to prove unable to resist billions of dollars in illicit profits.
  • But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the Taliban’s own 20-year insurgency.
  • The Taliban announced on April 3 that poppy cultivation had been outlawed, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Water pumps powered by cheap and highly efficient solar panels are able to drill deep down into rapidly dwindling desert aquifers. The solar panels have helped generate bumper opium harvests year after year since farmers in southern Afghanistan’s poppy-growing belt began installing them around 2014.
  • The opium trade earned about $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion last year, the United Nations has estimated. Opium sales have provided 9 to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, compared with 9 percent provided by legal exports of goods and services.
  • The solar arrays have been central to ensuring Afghanistan’s status as the global leader in opium.
  • The Taliban, for their part, have condemned opium as anti-Islamic, as Afghanistan’s poppy crop sustains addicts in Europe and the Middle East, as well as a huge number inside Afghanistan. But given their own deep ties to opium smuggling during the insurgency, Taliban leaders are walking a fine line between hypocrisy and holiness.
  • Now, solar power is a defining feature of southern Afghan life. Tiny solar panels power light bulbs in mud huts, and solar-driven pumps irrigate cash crops like wheat and pomegranates, as well as subsistence farmers’ vegetable plots.
  • The panels, which supplanted more expensive and less reliable diesel to run water pumps, have helped turn the desert green.
  • Opium farmers now rely on at least 67,000 solar-power-fed water reservoirs across Afghanistan’s desert southwest, according to a European Union-funded research project by David Mansfield, a consultant who has studied illicit economies and rural livelihoods in Afghanistan for two decades.
  • “For many opium farmers, abundant water is now a given,” he said. “No one perceives it to have a cost.”
  • “Do not destroy the fields, but make the fields dry out,” Gov. Maulave Talib Akhund said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to fulfilling the opium decree.”
  • The opium ban was met with a collective shrug this spring by southern farmers, many of whom were already harvesting their spring crops. Opium prices surged almost immediately, several farmers said, to roughly $180 per kilogram from $60 per kilogram.
  • But the Taliban have vowed to crack down on farmers who try to cultivate any new crops.
  • Dr. Mansfield said that determining how long the aquifers could continue to supply water was uncharted territory because no one had been able to conduct a rigorous scientific study of the desert groundwater.
  • “We have to continue to dig our wells deeper and deeper,” Mr. Armani said.
  • Even when prices are high, many poppy farmers say, they earn only about $2 a day for each family member. They are at the very bottom of a narcotic trafficking system in which profits increase exponentially from growers to middlemen to processing labs to major cross-border traffickers.
  • Farmers whose poppy fields were plowed under by the previous government could send their sons to paying jobs as soldiers or police officers — or to the constellation of unskilled jobs provided by the United States and NATO. But those options are gone, and unemployment has soared under the Taliban.
  • “Growing poppies is the only option to survive right now,” he said.
28More

Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians | Cr... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...fraudsters-corrupt-politicians switzerland bank secrecy corruption tax evasion whistleblower
shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
  • Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.
  • It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.
  • Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.
  • A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.
  • Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulović for running a pump-and-dump scheme.
  • One of Radulović’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šarić.
  • Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.
  • The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.
  • After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.
  • However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.
  • The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.
  • A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”
  • One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.
  • Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.
  • The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.
  • One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”
  • The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.
  • Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.
  • The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.
  • By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.
  • Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”
  • Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.
  • More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.
  • This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.
  • “This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.
  • “I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”
5More

Explainer: Can the U.N. do more than just talk about Russia, Ukraine crisis? | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ssia-ukraine-crisis-2022-01-31
shared by sidneybelleroche on 31 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The U.N. Security Council is due to meet in public on Monday, at the request of the United States, to discuss Russia's troop build-up on the border with Ukraine as international diplomacy aimed at easing tensions moves to the world body in New York.
  • The United States describes the meeting of the 15-member body as a chance for Russia to explain itself, while Russia signaled it could try and block it.
  • Russia is one of five permanent, veto-wielding powers on the council along with the United States, France, Britain and China.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • If Russia's military escalates the crisis, diplomats and foreign policy analysts say diplomacy and action at the United Nations is likely to mirror what happened in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region.
  • So far, Western diplomacy at the United Nations during the latest military build-up has largely focused on trying to rally support - should they need it - among U.N. members by accusing Russia of undermining the U.N. Charter.
22More

'Be thankful you don't have our poison': US pollster Frank Luntz's warning to UK | US p... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...erview-pollster-us-uk-politics poison pollster warning politics crisis culture trump gop division polarization
shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The 59-year-old, well known from countless media appearances and for running focus groups that provide an insight into America’s political psyche, has also now chosen a less partisan path.
  • Having once worked for rightwing Republicans such as Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, he no longer hesitates to condemn Donald Trump’s pernicious influence or fears the conservative media backlash.
  • “If I didn’t die, I’m not afraid any more, so you will hear me criticise people I never would have criticised two years ago. What are they going to do to me? It can’t be any worse than what I’ve been through and, when you become more fearless, it makes life easier to navigate.”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Last year he went to the UK for a month and ended up staying nearly eight, finding an antidote to American’s poison.
  • “I still haven’t fully recovered from my stroke, and what goes on in this country, I couldn’t talk about it. I got in the middle of it. Tucker Carlson [a host on Fox News] was killing me every fucking night.”
  • also invited UK journalists to disseminate a warning: don’t let British politics become as polarised and debased as the American system.
  • “You still like each other, you still respect each other, you still value public debate: your democracy is still functioning,”
  • “Ours has seized up and I don’t know how to get ours flowing again. Be thankful that you don’t have our poison … I’m very afraid of the American system being hopelessly damaged.”
  • You all have proven that there’s still a desire for substance in politics, not just slogans and soundbites, and thank God you haven’t completely embraced American politics because your elections are of substance rather than style.
  • “I know that you guys are critical of the UK in recent times for being too American in your elections. You’re not. We are becoming more and more superficial. You are still substantial.”
  • Later he plays a video clip of one of his US focus groups descending into angry shouting and recriminations, a glimpse of a society that seems to be falling apart. He comments: “The worst of the worst. This is my warning to you. This is shit. This is a disaster and it will come to you if you let it happen.”
  • “Boris Johnson has written more books than Donald Trump has read. Boris is the real Trump. He understands the hopes and dreams of the public. He gets the historic context. He can wax poetically about 2,000 years ago, 200 years ago and two years ago. Trump could not do that.
  • “Biden does not understand the hopes and dreams of the average American,” says the messaging expert, who remains on the centre-right. “He does not empathise with them. His team is ideological rather than emotional and so he’s missing all this. It’s how people feel even more than how they think; feeling is a deeper emotion and Biden is not connecting to them at all.
  • Luntz argues that he overpromised. “He created unrealistic expectations. He’s a very arrogant human being and very flawed and the combination of flaws and arrogance is a really unhealthy cocktail.”
  • Wasn’t Biden supposed to be Mr Empathy? “There’s nothing about him that screams empathy. There’s everything about him that screams someone who’s already made up their mind.”
  • He identifies six issues that will determine voters’ choices: crime, immigration, shortages, prices, education and the January 6 insurrection. “Democrats have a huge problem on five out of the six.”
  • Today, after the catharsis of his stroke, Luntz finds plenty of blame to go around. He casts a harsh light on the media, social media and his own younger self. In an infamous 2003 memo, for example, he advised George W Bush’s Republican party to abandon the phrase “global warming” in favour of “climate change” because it is “less frightening”
  • The Great Rethink. It is a study of America voters’ attitudes and disillusionment with their leaders. “The only thing we agree on is that politicians suck,” Luntz says. “If you’re American, this is a very depressing time right now.”
  • nother offers some words to use (I am your voice, accountability, fact-based) and words to lose (agenda, I’m listening, transparency).
  • Luntz argues that even in a polarised society such as America, every parent asks the same question: will my child/grandchild be happy
  • Perhaps rather optimistically, he urges politicians to focus on children as “the great unifier”
  • “If you want to bring people together, you do it over their children. You guys are divided on just about everything; this crushes that divide. This brings people together and it’s not been done before.
19More

A war in Ukraine could have global consequences | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...could-have-global-consequences politics history crisis
shared by woodlu on 27 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A full Russian invasion would be Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s, and the first toppling since then of a democratically elected European government by a foreign invader.
  • Russians would not only suffer casualties, especially during a long-running insurgency, but also cause the death of untold Ukrainians—fellow Slavs, with whom many have family ties.
  • War would affect the prices of other commodities, too. Oil is already spiking. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, with Ukraine close behind. Russia is a big source of metals: in today’s tight markets even a small shock could send commodity prices upwards.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Europe faces the prospect of Russia throttling the flow of piped gas. Even in the absence of a cut-off, it was expected to spend $1trn on energy in 2022, twice as much as in 2019.
  • Russia would also suffer heavy sanctions. Its banks would be harshly penalised and its economy deprived of crucial American high-tech components.
  • Sanctions might be lighter, but they would still be painful. Russia’s decoupling from the West would still accelerate. Moreover, if the government in Kyiv remained independent, it would only redouble its efforts to join the West.
  • And the subjugation of Ukraine would come at a strategic cost to Russia. Every country in its shadow would revise its security calculations. NATO would reinforce the defences of its eastern members. Sweden and Finland might join the alliance.
  • For Mr Putin, the economic consequences of war would be survivable, at least in the short term. His central bank has $600bn in reserves—more than enough to weather sanctions. But the political gains in Ukraine could easily be overwhelmed by setbacks at home which, as Mr Putin knows better than anyone, is where his fate will ultimately be determined.
  • Perhaps, then, he will start with a less ambitious invasion. However, a limited war could claim many lives and be hard to contain.
  • Perhaps Mr Putin is planning a full-scale invasion, with Russian forces thrusting deep into Ukraine to seize the capital, Kyiv, and overthrow the government. Or he may seek to annex more territory in eastern Ukraine, carving out a corridor linking Russia with Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Mr Putin grabbed in 2014. Then again, he may want a small war, in which Russia “saves” Kremlin-backed separatists in Donbas, an eastern region of Ukraine, from supposed Ukrainian atrocities—and, at the same time, degrades Ukraine’s armed forces.
  • The global order has long been buttressed by the norm that countries do not redraw other countries’ borders by force of arms. When Iraq seized Kuwait in 1990 an international coalition led by America kicked it out.
  • if he seizes a bigger slice of Ukraine, it is hard to see him suddenly concluding that the time has come to make peace with NATO.
  • More likely, he would push on, helped by the newly established presence of Russian troops in Belarus to probe NATO’s collective-security pact, under which an attack on one member is an attack on all.
  • Not only would he relish the chance to hollow out America’s commitments to Europe, but he has also come to rely on demonising an enemy abroad to justify his harsh rule at home.
  • The likelihood of China invading Taiwan would surely rise. The regimes in Iran and Syria would conclude they are freer to use violence with impunity. If might is right, more of the world’s disputed borders would be fought over.
  • West should respond in three ways: deter, keep talking and prepare. To deter Mr Putin, Western powers—especially Germany—should stop equivocating, present a united front and make clear that they are willing to pay the price for imposing sanctions on Russia and also to support those Ukrainians who are ready to resist an occupying army.
  • Meanwhile, diplomats should keep talking, looking for common ground on, say, arms control and pressing for a face-saving climbdown that Mr Putin and his captive media would be free to spin however they wish.
  • And Europe should prepare for the next crisis by making clear that its energy transition will cut its dependence on Russian gas by using storage, diversification and nuclear power.
  • Russia would benefit from better, closer, peaceful relations with the West. Such ties would be available if Mr Putin didn’t behave so abominably. Only he benefits from discord, since he can tell Russians they are under siege and need a strongman to defend them. But even the wiliest strongman can miscalculate. Invading Ukraine could ultimately prove Mr Putin’s undoing, if it turns into a bloody quagmire or makes Russians poorer, angrier and more eager for change.
11More

Ukraine-Russia crisis: What to know about rising fear of war | AP News - 0 views

apnews.com/...ccc883cce24b0199118549911013cc war ukraine russia
shared by kennyn-77 on 04 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The U.S. has obtained intelligence indicating that the Russian government has developed a plan to stage a fake Ukrainian attack to establish a pretext for military action, according to a senior Biden administration official.
  • U.S. intelligence indicates that the Russian government has developed a plan to stage a false attack that would depict the Ukrainian military or its intelligence forces assaulting Russian territory, a senior Biden administration official said Thursday.
  • Erdogan has again offered to host talks between Moscow and Kyiv aimed at easing tensions that have sparked fears of war.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The plan includes production of a graphic propaganda video that would show staged explosions and would use corpses and actors depicting grieving mourners, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.The plan, which was revealed in declassified intelligence shared with Ukrainian officials and European allies in recent days, is the latest allegation by the U.S. and Britain that Russia is plotting to use a false pretext to go to war against Ukraine.
  • He reiterated Turkey’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
  • Meanwhile, Putin met with Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez in Moscow and then spoke by phone to Macron, who had a call Wednesday night with U.S. President Joe Biden. Macron then spoke with Zelenskyy.
  • The NATO chief said Russian forces in Belarus are likely to rise to 30,000, including special forces, supported by fighter jets and missiles.
  • French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed Thursday that Paris is sending troop reinforcements to Romania under NATO command, as part of France’s commitment to the alliance and its member states in Eastern Europe.
  • He did not say how many French soldiers will be deployed. The announcement came a day after the U.S. said it was moving troops stationed in Germany to Romania.
  • Ukraine’s defense minister is urging calm, saying the likelihood of a Russian invasion was “low.”Oleksii Reznikov said the threat of attack has loomed over the country since 2014, the year Russia seized Crimea, but he added: “There are no grounds for panic, fear, flight or packing of bags.”The minister said there are about 115,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s border, including those deployed to Belarus for war games, but he said no battle groups have been detected along Ukraine’s border with Belarus. He also reiterated earlier assurances that Kyiv doesn’t plan to attack rebel-held areas in the war-torn east of Ukraine or Crimea — something the Kremlin has accused Kyiv of plotting.
  • An ice hockey fan, Putin will also attend Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.His talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday will be their first face-to-face since 2019 and will help cement a strong personal relationship that has been a key factor behind a growing partnership between the two former Communist rivals.
16More

Opinion | We Need a New Language for Talking About Race - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...talking-about-race.html race ancestry dna genetics identity history social construct racism
shared by Javier E on 04 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The other day, while teaching a lecture class, one of us mentioned in passing that the average African American, according to a 2014 paper, is about 24 percent European and less than 1 percent Native American. A student responded that these percentages were impossible to measure, since “race is a social construction.”
  • the fact that race is a social invention and not a biological reality cannot be repeated too much.
  • However, while race is socially constructed, genetic mutations — biological records of ancestry — are not, and the distinction is a crucial one.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • To varying degrees, we have all inherited a muddled understanding of race, ancestry and phenotype from the Enlightenment,
  • if we don’t disentangle these concepts, we may miss the great promise of using genetics to push back against a very long and sad history of the misuse of science for pernicious purposes.
  • One of the key moments in the evolution of modern concepts of race occurred in France in 1741, when the members of Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held a continentwide essay contest on the “cause” of dark skin and textured hair among African populations. Why, they asked, were Black people Black?
  • this contest signaled a new era of “scientific racism.” In the decades that followed, naturalists increasingly subdivided the human species into several so-called races by things like skin color, hair texture, skull shape and, most perniciously, according to supposedly transcendent essences.
  • genetics — or, for that matter, any science — has the potential to be misused, co-opted by racist ideologies and employed to bolster harmful narratives about racial purity or biological superiority.
  • There is no category for white in genetic analysis; half of his ancestry traces back to regions in Europe. We should never forget that whiteness, like Blackness, is just another social fiction.
  • If, throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, science put an enormous amount of effort into dividing the human species into separate categories, 21st-century genetic analysis promises to reveal just how meaningless those categories are — and how connected we’ve been all along.
  • it feels urgent that we develop new language for discussing the relationship between identity, ancestry, history and science
  • DNA analysis could help create that language by offering more nuanced ways of looking at individual origins and a more unifying narrative about our shared heritage
  • While, biologically speaking, the idea of individual human races with different origins is as farcical as the medieval belief that elves cause hiccups, the social reality of race is undeniable.
  • The multitude of population clusters, regions and genetic groups reflected in DNA tests counters existing narratives that try to reduce the astonishing variety of the human community to the four or five socially constructed races of man
  • But if we can, at the very least, embrace the understanding that race (a toxic social construction) and ancestry (a shared genetic history) are not only distinct but also fundamentally opposed — and teach that in our classrooms — it could go a long way toward freeing us from some of the binds in which scientific racism have trapped us.
  • The stories embedded in our genes beg to be told. They tell of ancestral diversity that stretches back thousands of years and ultimately underscores all that we — despite superficial physical differences — have in common.
7More

Two maps show NATO's growth and Russia's isolation since 1990 - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...wing-isolation-since-1990.html maps russia isolation nato
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Russia has become increasingly isolated from the rest of Europe over the last 30 years, and maps of the continent illustrate just how drastic the change has been.
  • Russia first attacked Ukraine in 2014, after a civilian uprising ejected a pro-Russia leader from the country. Ukraine sought military training and assistance from Western countries afterward but had not been admitted to NATO.
  • Countries in NATO are bound by treaty to defend each other. Like Ukraine, Finland shares a long border with Russia.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Though Sweden and Finland want to join their Nordic
  • neighbors in NATO,
  • admission
  • could take many months or be blocked entirely.
9More

NATO should avoid learning the wrong lessons from Russia's blunder in Ukraine, says Mic... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...in-ukraine-says-michael-kofman nato lessons russia ukraine europe military
shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • It may be tempting to believe that because Ukraine has done remarkably well against Russian forces, a NATO victory could be taken for granted in almost any scenario. That is the wrong lesson to take away from this war
  • The peculiarities of the situation in which a war occurs strongly determine how military power manifests and whether it can achieve political aims. An American defeat in Afghanistan offers few insights on how a war with China might go.
  • the Russian armed forces are not just suffering from a bad plan in Ukraine. From the perspective of training, leadership and discipline, their army has serious deficiencies. However, there is much about the war that we still do not know, and our early interpretations of it could be wrong
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Ultimately, a reassessment will be in order, not just of where the Russian armed forces are, but where they are going.
  • Another area where Russia fell flat was its inability to scale up operations. What its army could do on a lesser scale in 2014 and 2015, it could not replicate across Ukraine. From communications to logistics, combined arms and beyond, Russia’s armed forces lacked experience in large-scale operations prior to the invasion, and it showed.
  • The Russian armed forces will take years to recover from this blunder but, at the same time, failure is often a better teacher than success.
  • this shift in perceptions should not mislead NATO members into the belief that, in a different context, Russia would be easily defeated.
  • The conflict serves as a fresh reminder that sustained conventional war hinges on the availability of manpower, materiel, ammunition and defence industrial capacity to sustain it.
  • It follows that the alliance should not take a dismissive attitude towards Russia, or become complacent. Despite significant losses, the Russian army will rebuild sooner or later. Sanctions will affect Russia’s defence industry, but writing Russia off as a military power would be the wrong lesson to learn from this war.
11More

The One Parenting Decision That Really Matters - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629734 parenting decision location influence children success
shared by Javier E on 09 May 22 - No Cached
  • Hillary Clinton, then the first lady of the United States, published It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. Clinton’s book—and the proverb the title referenced—argue that children’s lives are shaped by many people in their neighborhood: firefighters and police officers, garbage collectors, teachers and coaches.
  • Dole said, “I am here to tell you: It does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” The crowd roared.
  • So who was right, Bob Dole or Hillary Clinton?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • some neighborhoods produce more successful kids: One in every 864 Baby Boomers born in Washtenaw, Michigan, the county that includes the University of Michigan, did something notable enough to warrant an entry in Wikipedia, while just one in 31,167 kids born in Harlan County, Kentucky, achieved that distinction
  • The results showed that some large metropolitan areas give kids an edge. They get a better education. They earn more money: The best cities can increase a child’s future income by about 12 percent. They found that the five best metropolitan areas are: Seattle; Minneapolis; Salt Lake City; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Madison, Wisconsin.
  • a website, The Opportunity Atlas, that allows anyone to find out how beneficial any neighborhood is expected to be for kids of different income levels, genders, and races.
  • We find that one factor about a home—its location—accounts for a significant fraction of the total effect of that home.
  • I have estimated that some 25 percent—and possibly more—of the overall effects of a parent are driven by where that parent raises their child. In other words, this one parenting decision has much more impact than many thousands of others.
  • Three of the biggest predictors that a neighborhood will increase a child’s success are the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms.
  • These are neighborhoods, in other words, with many role models: adults who are smart, accomplished, engaged in their community, and committed to stable family lives.
  • Data can be liberating. It can’t make decisions for us, but it can tell us which decisions really matter. When it comes to parenting, the data tells us, moms and dads should put more thought into the neighbors they surround their children with—and lighten up about everything else.
14More

Ukraine Tells Story of War in Museum Show - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukraine-war-museum.html new york times ukraine
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • KYIV, Ukraine — Just days after Russian troops retreated from the suburbs surrounding Kyiv, Yuriy Savchuk, director of a World War II museum in the city, joined the police and prosecutors who were investigating the full extent of the suffering inflicted there by enemy soldiers.
  • Over the next month, Mr. Savchuk and his colleagues meticulously documented what they saw, taking more than 3,000 photographs.
  • The sign, and everything else in the basement, was taken from a bomb shelter in a Kyiv suburb, Hostomel, the site of an airport that Russian soldiers tried to take in the first days of the war.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The exhibition is one of several ways that Ukraine’s government is highlighting the devastation its people have endured even as new suffering is inflicted every day.
  • And Ukraine has taken the rare step of prosecuting Russian soldiers for war crimes just months after they were allegedly committed, greatly accelerating the normal judicial timetable.
  • “It is necessary to explain to our children what is happening in Ukraine now,” Mr. Spodinskiy said, as other visitors took photographs of the debris. “We cannot speak with our children as if nothing is happening,” he added, “because they clearly understand everything, and they see what happens in our country.”
  • “The history of our country is being created, and now this is an opportunity to get in touch with it,” said another visitor, Serhiy Pashchukov, a 31-year-old from Luhansk, which was occupied by Russia in 2014.
  • Those discoveries and many others have become items in an exhibition called “Crucified Ukraine” that opened on May 8 at Mr. Savchuk’s museum, an unusual effort to chronicle the war even as battles continue to rage in Ukraine’s east and south.
  • The rooms are dank and cold, but the most striking thing, many visitors said, was that it smells as if the people who sheltered with their belongings there — including onions, blankets, and toys — had just left.
  • “We had a similar basement in Bucha in a newly built apartment building,” said Evgeniya Skrypnyk, a 32-year-old from a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed and terrorized civilians.
  • The one historical inaccuracy in the shelter was the absence of the five buckets that stood in the hallway where the people who lived underground for more than a month relieved themselves.
  • Remembrance of World War II has become more complex since the war started. In Russia, the Kremlin has sought to glorify the Soviet victory — to which millions of Ukrainians contributed — as a source of national pride. But it has also called upon memories of that war to justify and build support for the invasion of Ukraine, with Mr. Putin seeking to falsely portray Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis.”
  • Mr. Savchuk said that in light of the current war, people were talking about a “complete reconstruction” of the museum complex, whose architecture is intended to awe visitors with the memory of the Soviet victory in World War II, to de-emphasize the fight against Nazi Germany.
  • “This war changed everything,” he said. “A museum is not only an exhibition, it is a territory, it is its monuments, it is a place of memory. We are thinking about changing not only the ideology, but also the architecture, the emphasis.”
9More

U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Yacht Company That Caters to Russian Elites - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ligarchs-yachts-sanctions.html NYT
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The U.S. government leveled sanctions against a yacht management company and its owners, describing them as part of a corrupt system that allows Russian elites and President Vladimir V. Putin to enrich themselves, the Treasury Department announced on Thursday.
  • “Russia’s elites, up to and including President Putin, rely on complex support networks to hide, move and maintain their wealth and luxury assets,” said Brian Nelson, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department.
  • “We will continue to enforce our sanctions and expose the corrupt systems by which President Putin and his elites enrich themselves,” he added.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, a group of investors led by one of Russia’s richest men, Gennady Timchenko, who has been under sanctions since 2014, provided the money to buy three ships: the Scheherazade, the Crescent and the Amadea, whose construction at a German shipyard was overseen by Imperial Yachts. Their combined cost of as much as $1.6 billion could have bought six new frigates for the Russian navy.
  • “Imperial Yachts conducts all its business in full compliance with laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which we operate,” the company added. “We are not involved in our clients’ financial affairs.”
  • But Treasury officials disputed that contention in their announcement. U.S. and international authorities have moved to seize the three yachts connected to Mr. Kochman and his company.
  • In an interview Tuesday, before the new sanctions were announced, Elizabeth Rosenberg, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, said that international cooperation to go after Russian oligarchs and their assets was increasing.
  • “It feels like we’re experiencing a sea change right now,” Ms. Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge leap forward on international cooperation for hunting assets, for freezing them and for pursuing law enforcement investigations and activity, including seizure activities.”
  • Treasury officials say taking action against oligarchs and the companies that help them spend their wealth will ultimately hurt the Russian government’s ability to wage war against Ukraine.
« First ‹ Previous 1481 - 1500 of 1524 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page