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Javier E

Chocolate Might Never Be the Same - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678053

chocolate culture crisis history economics

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”
  • The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,
  • Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.
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  • Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland.
  • ore important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.
  • Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.
  • Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown
  • Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature,
  • Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA.
  • No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat.
  • So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.
Javier E

Opinion | America's Irrational Macreconomic Freak Out - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntiment-inflation-anxiety.html

bias perception economic cognitive bias psychology brain science

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel.
  • It follows that the typical worker can now afford two percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a faster rate of improvement than the average rate of real wage growth over the past few decades.
  • many folks feel that they’re falling behind, even when a careful analysis of the numbers suggests they’re not.
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  • That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways.
  • In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains due to inflation and externalize the losses. These different processes yield different emotional responses.
  • Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.
  • younger folks — anyone under 60 — had never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.
  • Even though wages tend to rise hand-in-hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage rises we get have nothing to do with price rises that cause them.
  • But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment
  • Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.
  • The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage rises that actually restore it.
  • in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.
  • While older Americans understood that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.
  • Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.
  • More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “silent depression,” and those who want to make American great again are certain it was once so much better.
  • in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history
  • And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.
  • The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.
  • Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.
Javier E

Why has the '15-minute city' taken off in Paris but become a controversial idea in the ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...is-toxic-idea-uk-carlos-moreno

urban design planning Paris culture policy history politics economics

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • he “15-minute city” has become a toxic phrase in the UK, so controversial that the city of Oxford has stopped using it and the transport minister has spread discredited conspiracy theories about the urban planning scheme.
  • while fake news spreads about officials enacting “climate lockdowns” to “imprison” people in their neighbourhoods, across the Channel, Parisians are enjoying their new 15-minute neighbourhoods. The French are stereotyped for their love of protest, so the lack of uproar around the redesign of their capital is in stark contrast to the frenzied response in Oxford.
  • Moreno has been working with the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to make its arrondissements more prosperous and pleasurable to live in. He says there are 50 15-minute cities up and running, with more to come.
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  • “We have an outstanding mayor, who is committed to tackling climate change. She said the 15-minute city will be the backbone for creating a new urban plan. The last time Paris had a new urban plan was in 2000, so this road map will be relevant for the next 10 or 15 years at least,”
  • “I said to Hidalgo, the 15-minute city is not an urban traffic plan. The 15-minute city is a radical change of our life.”
  • He also thinks office should generally be closer to homes, as well as cultural venues, doctors, shops and other amenities. Shared spaces such as parks help the people living in the areas to form communities.
  • They have also often been segmented into wealthier and poorer areas; in the less prosperous area to the north-east of Paris, Moreno says up to 40% of homes are social housing. In the wealthier west of Paris, this drops below 5%.
  • “My idea is to break this triple segregation,” he says.
  • Moreno thinks this segregation leads to a poorer quality of life, one designed around outdated “masculine desires”, so his proposal is to mix this up, creating housing developments with a mixture of social, affordable and more expensive housing so different social strata can intermingle
  • He also wants to bring schools and children’s areas closer to work and home, so caregivers can more easily travel around and participate in societ
  • When many modern cities were designed, they were for men to work in. Their wives and family stayed in the suburbs, while the workers drove in. So they have been designed around the car, and segmented into different districts: the financial district (think Canary Wharf), the cultural area (for example, the West End) and then the suburbs
  • The city has also been regenerating the Clichy-Batignolles district in the less prosperous north-west of Paris to have a green, village-like feel. About a quarter of it is taken up by green space and a new park.“As a 15-minute district, it is incredible,” says Moreno. “It is beautiful, it has proximity, social mixing, 50% of the inhabitants live in social housing, 25% in middle class and 25% own their homes.”
  • Many of his proposals are dear to the culture of the French. In a large, wealthy metropolis such as Paris, it is easy for small shops to be choked out by large chains. The city of Paris, in its new plan, has put measures in to stop this.
  • “We have a commercial subsidiary of the city of Paris which has put €200m into managing retail areas in the city with rates below the speculative real estate market. This is specifically to rent to small shops, artisans, bakeries, bookstores.
  • This is not only a good investment because it creates a good economic model, but it keeps the culture of the city of Paris,”
  • This is in keeping with the 15-minute city plan as it keeps local shops close to housing, so people can stroll down from their apartment to pick up a fresh baguette from an independent baker. “It creates a more vibrant neighbourhood,” he adds.
  • Hidalgo inevitably faced a large backlash from the motorist lobby. Stroll down the banks of the Seine today in the new protected parks and outdoor bars, and it is hard to imagine that it was recently a traffic-choked highway
  • “The drivers were radically very noisy, saying that we wanted to attack their individual rights, their freedom. The motorist lobby said she cannot be elected without our support, that they are very powerful in France,” Moreno says. But Hidalgo called their bluff: “She often says ‘I was elected two times, with the opposition of the automotive lobby’. In 2024, nobody requests to open again the highway on the Seine, no one wants the Seine urban park to be open for cars.”
  • Moreno talks about the concept of a “giant metronome of the city” which causes people to rush around. He wants to slow this down, to allow people to reclaim their “useful time” back from commuting and travelling to shops and cultural areas.
  • “I bet for the next year, for the next decade, we will have this new transformation of corporation real estate,” he says. “Businesses are choosing multi-use areas with housing, schools, shops for their office space now. The time of the skyscrapers in the masculine design is finished.”
Javier E

'Humanity's remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50': meet the neo-lu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-warning-of-an-ai-apocalypse

AI threat timeline warning apocalypse

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • A few weeks back, in January, the largest-ever survey of AI researchers found that 16% of them believed their work would lead to the extinction of humankind.
  • “That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student. “That’s Russian-roulette odds.”
  • What would the others have us do? Stewart, the soldier turned grad student, wants a moratorium on the development of AIs until we understand them better – until those Russian-roulette-like odds improve. Yudkowsky would have us freeze everything today, this instant. “You could say that nobody’s allowed to train something more powerful than GPT-4,” he suggests. “Humanity could decide not to die and it would not be that hard.”
Javier E

Opinion | Is This a Sputnik Moment? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sia-nuclear-space-sputnik.html

satellite russia nuclear threat

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.
  • Nor is it new for Russia to violate nuclear arms control agreements. In recent years, Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, suspended its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and de-ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Backing out of arms control commitments is part of Russia’s modus operandi.
  • What appears unprecedented now is that Russia could be working toward deploying nuclear weapons on satellites, which are constantly orbiting the Earth, to be detonated at times and locations of Moscow’s choosing.
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  • Russian military doctrine states that Russia would use nuclear weapons in the event of attacks against key Russian assets or threats to the existence of the state, and experts believe Russia could use nuclear weapons first in a crisis to signal resolve.
  • Russia has seen how important space-based assets can be on the battlefield in Ukraine. Starlink, with its thousands of satellites orbiting Earth, provides Ukrainian forces with uninterrupted communication. The U.S. Department of Defense openly discusses its investments in large satellite constellations. Hundreds of satellites used for missile warning, intelligence and communications are seen as a way to be more resilient against a variety of growing space threats. Moscow would look for ways to target these large satellite constellations and to erode the advantage they provide.
  • Russia has been testing weapons that target space capabilities or using them on the battlefield in Ukraine. In November 2021, Moscow conducted an antisatellite test by launching a missile at one of its own defunct satellites. It has also employed systems designed to jam Starlink and GPS to degrade Ukraine’s communication systems, as well as the drones and munitions the country uses to defend itself. It is not surprising that Moscow would seek to develop a more powerful way to cause widespread damage to constellations of satellites.
  • But a nuclear detonation in space is indiscriminate. It would degrade or destroy any satellites in its path and within the same orbital region. It wouldn’t just affect U.S. satellites but also the aggressor’s own satellites, as well as an unknown number of satellites owned by the over 90 countries operating in space, and astronauts living on the International Space Station and Chinese space station
  • Russia, however, has less to lose: Its once vaunted space program is in decline, dinged by sanctions, and said it intends to withdraw from the International Space Station program after 2024. Moscow is now well behind China in its total number of operating on-orbit satellites.
  • Third, we need to be realistic about prospects for future arms control with Russia. Moscow has shown a disregard for its treaty commitments. Just last month, Moscow rejected attempts by the Biden administration to restart bilateral arms control talks. Rather than trying again, the administration should instead focus on strengthening deterrence by improving our own capabilities and building multilateral coalitions for responsible nuclear behavior
  • Finally, policymakers need to protect our intelligence sources and intelligence gathering methods
  • With Russian officials already demanding proof of what the United States knows, declassifying those sources and methods plays directly into Moscow’s hands and jeopardizes those channels for future intelligence collection.
Javier E

'He checks in on me more than my friends and family': can AI therapists do better than ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-do-better-than-the-real-thing

AI therapy chatbot psychology emotions culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.
  • Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.
  • ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece
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  • The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.
  • AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”
  • AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.
  • Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.
  • n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.
  • One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.
  • erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.
  • “There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).
  • A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.
  • Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”
  • Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”
  • Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”
  • One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)
  • AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.
  • Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.
  • With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.
  • Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”
  • His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”
  • Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.
  • Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.
  • Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”
  • Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”
  • A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.
  • Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.
  • Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.
  • ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load
  • We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”
  • Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits
  • But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.
  • n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.
  • Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.
  • ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”
Javier E

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

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-war-ukraine.html

politics history policy global foreign policy world order

shared by Javier E on 25 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • 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.
Javier E

Dave Ramsey Tells Millions What to Do With Their Money. People Under 40 Say He's Wrong.... - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...nder-40-say-hes-wrong-56733630

financial advice advisor austerity discipline Gen Z money learning trends culture

shared by Javier E on 19 May 24 - No Cached
  • Ramsey, the well-known and intensely followed 63-year-old conservative Christian radio host, has 4.4 million Instagram followers, 1.9 million TikTok followers and legions more who listen to his radio shows and podcasts.
  • His message is brutal and direct: Avoid debt at all costs. Pay for everything in cash. Embrace frugality.
  • Plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are pushing back, largely on TikTok. The hashtag #daveramseywouldntapprove, for instance, has 66.8 million views. Many say they don’t want to eat rice and beans every night—a popular Ramsey trope—or hold down multiple jobs to pay off loans. They also say Ramsey is out of touch with their reality.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Rising inflation has led to surging prices for groceries, cars and many essentials. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in two decades, with the average student debt for federal loans at $37,000, according to the Education Department. Overall debts for Americans in their 30s jumped 27% from late 2019 to early 2023—steeper than for any other age group.
  • home prices have risen considerably, while wages haven’t kept pace.
  • “What Dave Ramsey really misses is any kind of social context,” says Morgan Sanner, a
  • She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. S
  • he feels these sorts of real-life decisions don’t factor into his advice.
  • When she saw a comment from Ramsey online about how people receiving pandemic stimulus payments were “pretty much screwed already,” Israel felt it came across as shaming people. The pandemic shutdowns ended a decadelong economic expansion for Black Americans, a disproportionate number of whom lost their jobs and relied on those checks.
  • “Moralizing financial decisions is very damaging to marginalized groups,” says Israel, who is Black.
  • Many young adults scratch their heads over his advice that people should let their credit scores dwindle and die.
  • People need a good credit score, says Mandy Phillips, a 39-year-old residential mortgage loan originator in Redding, Calif. She uses TikTok and other social media to educate millennials and Gen Z about home buying. Scores are vital when applying for mortgages and rentals.
  • She also takes issue with Ramsey’s advice to only obtain a home loan if you can take out a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage with a down payment of at least 10%. Few younger buyers can pay the large monthly bills of shorter-term mortgages.
  • “That may have worked years ago in the ’80s and ’90s, but that’s not something that is achievable for the average American,” Phillips says.
  • Housing is a particularly hot-button topic. He advises people to only buy a house with their lawfully wedded spouse. Yet many young adults are pooling their finances with partners, friends or roommates to buy their first homes. 
  • Ramsey is perhaps best known for advocating a “debt snowball method”: People with multiple loans pay off the smallest balances first, regardless of interest rate. As you knock out each loan, he says, the money you have to put toward larger debt snowballs. Seeing small wins motivates people to keep going, he says.Conventional economic theory would be to pay off the highest-interest loans first, says James Choi, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, who has studied the advice of popular finance gurus.
  • Ramsey’s save-not-spend message sounds logical, young adults say. It’s his all-or-nothing approach that doesn’t work for them.
  • Kate Hindman, a 31-year-old administrative assistant in Pasadena, Calif., who has taken an anti-Ramsey stance on TikTok, ended up with $30,000 in credit-card debt after she and her husband faced income-reducing job changes. They’ve since turned it into a consolidation loan with an 8% interest rate and pay about $1,200 a month.
  • She wonders if the debt aversion is generational. Perhaps younger people are less willing to make huge sacrifices to be debt-free. Maybe carrying some amount of debt forever is a new normal.
Javier E

Sex-positive feminism had its moment - and now it has been replaced by voluntary celiba... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...sober-4b-sex-positive-feminism

feminism celibacy sex culture

shared by Javier E on 22 May 24 - No Cached
  • The campaign – which Fast Company described as “eyebrow-raising”, “controversial” and “tone-deaf” – did not land well. Some critics pointed out that celibacy can be a response to trauma. Others noted that abstaining from sex might be a smart move in a post-Roe US, where one accident could mean you are forced by repressive laws to give birth to a child you are not ready for and can’t possibly afford.
  • The actor Julia Fox was similarly unimpressed. “2.5 years of celibacy and never been better tbh,” she commented on a post about Bumble. Fox hasn’t talked much about her celibacy but last year she told Elle magazine that she just wanted to be left alone and was sick of men. “I feel like knowingly engaging in a heterosexual relationship, you are signing yourself up for an unhealthy dynamic,” she mused.
  • a fascinating change in culture. Sex-positive feminism, which was all about unapologetically celebrating female sexuality, has been on the way out for a few years now, and this feels like its final death knell
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • some sort of correction was probably due. Sex-positive feminism went from “hey, women shouldn’t feel ashamed about enjoying sex” to “it’s feminist to enjoy being choked while having lots of casual sex” alarmingly quickly.
  • What was meant to liberate women turned into a repackaging of the patriarchy. “It feels like we were tricked into exploiting ourselves,” one twentysomething told BuzzFeed, summing up the general vibe.
  • A new passion for celibacy among young women feels like a natural way of putting that chapter of feminism to bed.
Javier E

Some Silicon Valley VCs Are Becoming More Conservative - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...valley-conservative-trump.html

silicon valley politics support GOP Trump VC

shared by Javier E on 24 May 24 - No Cached
  • The circle of Republican donors in the nation’s tech capital has long been limited to a few tech executives such as Scott McNealy, a founder of Sun Microsystems; Meg Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay; Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Larry Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital.
  • But mostly, the tech industry cultivated close ties with Democrats. Al Gore, the former Democratic vice president, joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2007. Over the next decade, tech companies including Airbnb, Google, Uber and Apple eagerly hired former members of the Obama administration.
  • During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who supports Mr. Biden.
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  • after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.
  • The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.
  • Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.
  • Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats,
  • Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.
  • “If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”
  • Some tech investors are also fuming over how Mr. Biden has handled foreign affairs and other issues.
  • Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.
  • Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.
  • “Tech, venture capital and Silicon Valley are looking at the current state of affairs and saying, ‘I’m not happy with either of those options,’” he said. “‘I can no longer count on Democrats to support tech issues, and I can no longer count on Republicans to support business issues.’”
  • Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post last year that the firm would back any politician who supported “an optimistic technology-enabled future” and oppose any who did not. Andreessen Horowitz has donated $22 million to Fairshake, a political action group focused on supporting crypto-friendly lawmakers.
  • Venture investors are also networking with lawmakers in Washington at events like the Hill & Valley conference in March, organized by Jacob Helberg, an adviser to Palantir, a tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel. At that event, tech executives and investors lobbied lawmakers against A.I. regulations and asked for more government spending to support the technology’s development in the United States.
  • This month, Mr. Helberg, who is married to Mr. Rabois, donated $1 million to the Trump campaign
Javier E

How Asian Groceries Like H Mart and Patel Brothers Are Reshaping America - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-grocery-stores-america.html

groceries food asian industry

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by the musician Michelle Zauner). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.
  • Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.
  • Asian American grocers still represent less than one percent of the total U.S. grocery business,
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • ate which products the big-box chains stock.
  • But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they di
  • more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.
  • April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales
  • Miso, ghee, turmeric, soy sauce — their journeys to becoming widely available pantry staples all began with an Asian grocer.
  • H Mart is attracting the clientele of the big grocers, too. Thirty percent of its shoppers today are non Asian, Mr. Kwon said, and he’s made changes to continue drawing them
  • placing more emphasis on in-store tastings, explaining how ingredients are used and posting signs in both Korean and English. Similarly, at 99 Ranch, the announcements ring out in Mandarin and English, and Western music has been added to the store playlists.
  • Swetal Patel, a partner at Patel Brothers, said that as the chain has expanded its audience — he estimates that 20 to 25 percent of shoppers are now non South Asian
  • “I find it fascinating that there are things on the shelf that I have no idea what they are,” said Jill Connors, an economic development director for the city of Dubuque, Iowa, who started shopping at Hornbill Asian Market earlier this year because she and her husband became vegan and wanted high-quality tofu at a reasonable price.
  • The sheer variety of foods to explore “brings more joy to the shopping and cooking process,”
Javier E

It's not just vibes. Americans' perception of the economy has completely changed. - ABC... - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

perception economy consumer sentiment housing

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Applying the same pre-pandemic model to consumer sentiment during and after the pandemic, however, simply does not work. The indicators that correlated with people's feelings about the economy before 2020 no longer seem to matter in the same way
  • As with so many areas of American life, the pandemic has changed virtually everything about how people think about the economy and the issues that concern them
  • Prior to the pandemic, our model shows consumers felt better about the economy when the personal savings rate, a measure of how much money households are able to save rather than spend each month, was higher. This makes sense: People feel better when they have money in the bank and are able to save for important purchases like cars and houses.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Before the pandemic, a number of variables were statistically significant indicators for consumer sentiment in our model; in particular, the most salient variables appear to be vehicle sales, gas prices, median household income, the federal funds effective rate, personal savings and household expenditures (excluding food and energy).
  • During the pandemic, the personal savings rate soared. In April 2020, the metric was nearly double its previous high, recorded in May 1975.
  • All this taken together meant Americans were flush with cash but had nowhere to spend it. So despite the fact that the savings rate went way up, consumers still weren't feeling positively about the economy — contrary to the relationship between these two variables we saw in the decades before the pandemic.
  • Fast forward to 2024, and the personal savings rate has dropped to one of its lowest levels ever (the only time the savings rate was lower was in the years surrounding the Great Recession)
  • during and after the pandemic, Americans saw some of the highest rates of inflation the country has had in decades, and in a very short period of time. These sudden spikes naturally shocked many people who had been blissfully enjoying slow, steady price growth their entire adult lives. And it has taken a while for that shock to wear off, even as inflation has cre
  • the numbers align with our intuitive sense of how consumers process suddenly having their grocery store bill jump, as well as the findings from our model. In simple terms: Even if inflation is getting better, Americans aren't done being ticked off that it was bad to begin with.
  • surprisingly, our pre-pandemic model didn't find a notable relationship between housing prices and consumer sentiment
  • However, in our post-pandemic data, when we examined how correlated consumer sentiment was with each indicator we considered, consumer sentiment and median housing prices had the strongest correlation of all****** (a negative one, meaning higher prices were associated with lower consumer sentiment)
  • during the pandemic, low interest rates, high savings rates and changes in working patterns — namely, many workers' newfound ability to work from home — helped overheat the homebuying market, and buyers ran headlong into an enduring supply shortage. There simply weren't enough houses to buy, which drove up the costs of the ones that were for sale.
  • That's true even if a family has been able to save enough for a down payment, already a difficult task when rents remain high as well. Fewer people are able to cover their current housing costs while saving enough to make a down payment.
  • Low-income households are still the most likely to be burdened with high rents, but they're not the only ones affected anymore. High rents have also begun to affect those at middle-income levels as well.
  • In short, there was already a housing affordability crisis before the pandemic. Now it's worse, locking a wider array of people, at higher and higher income levels, out of the home-buying market
  • People who are renting but want to buy are stuck. People who live in starter homes and want to move to bigger homes are stuck. The conditions have frustrated a fundamental element of the American dream
  • In our pre-pandemic model, total vehicle sales had a strong positive relationship with consumer sentiment: If people were buying cars, you could pretty reasonably bet that they felt good about the economy. This feels intuitive — who buys a car if they think the economy
  • Cox Automotive also tracks vehicle affordability by calculating the estimated number of weeks' worth of median income needed to purchase the average new vehicle, and while that number has improved over the last two years, it remains high compared to pre-pandemic levels. In April, the most recent month with data, it took 37.7 weeks of median income to purchase a car, compared with fewer than 35 weeks at the end of 2019.
  • "Right before the pandemic, the typical average transaction price was around $38,000 for a new car. By 2023, it was $48,000," Schirmer said. This could all be contributing to the break in the relationship between car sales and sentiment, he noted. Basically, people might be buying cars, but they aren't necessarily happy about it.
  • Inspired by our model of economic indicators and sentiment from 1987 to 2019, we tried to train a similar linear regression model on the same data from 2021 to 2024 to more directly compare how things changed after the pandemic. While we were able to get a pretty good fit for this post-pandemic model,******* something interesting happened: Not a single variable showed up as a statistically significant predictor of consumer sentiment.
  • This suggests there's something much more complicated going on behind the scenes: Interactions between these variables are probably driving the prediction, and there's too much noise in this small post-pandemic data set for the model to disentangle i
  • Changes in the kinds of purchases we've discussed — homes, cars and everyday items like groceries — have fundamentally shifted the way Americans view how affordable their lives are and how they measure their quality of life.
  • Even though some indicators may be improving, Americans are simply weighing the factors differently than they used to, and that gives folks more than enough reason to have the economic blues.
Javier E

Opinion | In Indiana, the MAGA Revolution Eats Its Own - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionalist-republican-party.html

revolution gop division 2024 extremism politics US history crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2023 American Values Atlas, 55 percent of Trump supporters are Christian nationalists, as measured by their agreement with statements like “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”
  • The Christian right increasingly sees American politics as zero-sum, meaning it is either going to triumph or face subjugation. As Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court was recorded saying, “One side or the other is going to win.”
Javier E

The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-already-losing-steam-a93478b1

ai revolution analysis evaluation 2024 economics

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Most of the measurable and qualitative improvements in today’s large language model AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—including their talents for writing and analysis—come down to shoving ever more data into them. 
  • AI could become a commodity
  • To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to “synthetic data,” which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models,
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  • AIs like ChatGPT rapidly got better in their early days, but what we’ve seen in the past 14-and-a-half months are only incremental gains, says Marcus. “The truth is, the core capabilities of these systems have either reached a plateau, or at least have slowed down in their improvement,” he adds.
  • the gaps between the performance of various AI models are closing. All of the best proprietary AI models are converging on about the same scores on tests of their abilities, and even free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are catching up.
  • models work by digesting huge volumes of text, and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.
  • A mature technology is one where everyone knows how to build it. Absent profound breakthroughs—which become exceedingly rare—no one has an edge in performance
  • companies look for efficiencies, and whoever is winning shifts from who is in the lead to who can cut costs to the bone. The last major technology this happened with was electric vehicles, and now it appears to be happening to AI.
  • the future for AI startups—like OpenAI and Anthropic—could be dim.
  • Microsoft and Google will be able to entice enough users to make their AI investments worthwhile, doing so will require spending vast amounts of money over a long period of time, leaving even the best-funded AI startups—with their comparatively paltry warchests—unable to compete.
  • Many other AI startups, even well-funded ones, are apparently in talks to sell themselves.
  • the bottom line is that for a popular service that relies on generative AI, the costs of running it far exceed the already eye-watering cost of training it.
  • That difference is alarming, but what really matters to the long-term health of the industry is how much it costs to run AIs. 
  • Changing people’s mindsets and habits will be among the biggest barriers to swift adoption of AI. That is a remarkably consistent pattern across the rollout of all new technologies.
  • the industry spent $50 billion on chips from Nvidia to train AI in 2023, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue.
  • For an almost entirely ad-supported company like Google, which is now offering AI-generated summaries across billions of search results, analysts believe delivering AI answers on those searches will eat into the company’s margins
  • Google, Microsoft and others said their revenue from cloud services went up, which they attributed in part to those services powering other company’s AIs. But sustaining that revenue depends on other companies and startups getting enough value out of AI to justify continuing to fork over billions of dollars to train and run those systems
  • three in four white-collar workers now use AI at work. Another survey, from corporate expense-management and tracking company Ramp, shows about a third of companies pay for at least one AI tool, up from 21% a year ago.
  • OpenAI doesn’t disclose its annual revenue, but the Financial Times reported in December that it was at least $2 billion, and that the company thought it could double that amount by 2025. 
  • That is still a far cry from the revenue needed to justify OpenAI’s now nearly $90 billion valuation
  • the company excels at generating interest and attention, but it’s unclear how many of those users will stick around. 
  • AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as
  • While these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them. This means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll. He compares it to the way that self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.
  • Add in the myriad challenges of using AI at work. For example, AIs still make up fake information,
  • getting the most out of open-ended chatbots isn’t intuitive, and workers will need significant training and time to adjust.
  • That’s because AI has to think anew every single time something is asked of it, and the resources that AI uses when it generates an answer are far larger than what it takes to, say, return a conventional search result
  • None of this is to say that today’s AI won’t, in the long run, transform all sorts of jobs and industries. The problem is that the current level of investment—in startups and by big companies—seems to be predicated on the idea that AI is going to get so much better, so fast, and be adopted so quickly that its impact on our lives and the economy is hard to comprehend. 
  • Mounting evidence suggests that won’t be the case.
Javier E

Opinion | How We've Lost Our Moorings as a Society - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-civility-society.html

guardrails society evolution context culture crisis trump politics

shared by Javier E on 30 May 24 - No Cached
  • To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature.
  • Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.
  • You see, shame used to be a mangrove
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • That shame mangrove has been completely uprooted by Trump.
  • The reason people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms — so their cheeks would turn red when they knew they had fallen short
  • in the kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and leadership norms are being eroded,” Seidman said to me, “no one has to feel shame anymore because no norm has been violated.”
  • People in high places doing shameful things is hardly new in American politics and business. What is new, Seidman argued, “is so many people doing it so conspicuously and with such impunity: ‘My words were perfect,’ ‘I’d do it again.’ That is what erodes norms — that and making everyone else feel like suckers for following them.”
  • Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman, than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.
  • Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”
  • . Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a broken system.
  • He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get flooding with lots of mud.
  • Responsibility, especially among those who have taken oaths of office — another vital mangrove — has also experienced serious destruction.
  • It used to be that if you had the incredible privilege of serving as U.S. Supreme Court justice, in your wildest dreams you would never have an American flag hanging upside down
  • Your sense of responsibility to appear above partisan politics to uphold the integrity of the court’s rulings would not allow it.
  • Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be a mangrove.
  • when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage — and immediate demands for firings — “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding.”
  • In November 2022, the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group, surveyed 1,564 full-time college students ages 18 to 24. The group found that nearly three in five students (59 percent) hesitate to speak about controversial topics like religion, politics, race, sexual orientation and gender for fear of negative backlashes by classmates.
  • Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy interdependencies
  • in 2023, the loss of local newspapers accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week, “leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”
  • As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and disease — or, in society, diseased ideas.
  • It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through.”
  • we have gone from you’re not supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a nation that is now being permanently exposed to for-profit systems of political and psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China stoking the fires today as well), so people are not just divided, but being divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is big business at home now and war by other means by our geopolitical rivals.
  • More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective — all the things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments — get blown away.
  • Blown away — that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves.
  • a trend ailing America today: how much we’ve lost our moorings as a society.
  • Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be mangroves.
  • civility itself also used to be a mangrove.
  • “Why the hell not?” Drummond asks.“You’re not supposed to say ‘hell,’ either,” the announcer says.You are not supposed to say “hell,” either. What a quaint thought. That is a polite exclamation point in today’s social media.
  • Another vital mangrove is religious observance. It has been declining for decades:
  • So now the most partisan national voices on Fox News, or MSNBC — or any number of polarizing influencers like Tucker Carlson — go straight from their national studios direct to small-town America, unbuffered by a local paper’s or radio station’s impulse to maintain a community where people feel some degree of connection and mutual respect
  • In a 2021 interview with my colleague Ezra Klein, Barack Obama observed that when he started running for the presidency in 2007, “it was still possible for me to go into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. … They didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value.”
Javier E

How 'Rural Studies' Is Thinking About the Heartland - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...studies-american-politics.html

rural studies US politics culture history economics community theory conservatism free trade' immigration discrimination

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • “White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.
  • Several rural scholars whose research was included in the book immediately denounced it
  • Ms. Lunz Trujillo excoriated the book in an opinion piece for Newsweek as “a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing” people unlike them.
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  • this latest effort provoked a response that was swift and scathing and revealed something new: the existence of a tightknit group of scholars who are clamoring for more empathetic political analyses of rural Americans.
  • “We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins,’” said Mr. Jacobs, a co-author of “The Rural Voter.” “Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?”
  • There is an obvious reason for academics’ neglect of the political urban-rural divide until recently: It barely existed.
  • It’s only since the late 1990s that there has been a marked gap between rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections, and it has widened ever since. In 2016, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of rural voters. Four years later, that climbed to 65 percent, according to Pew. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote.
  • Even if that shift does hint that “rural” may now be its own kind of identity, it’s a cohort that’s hard to define.
  • The Census Bureau classifies any community as rural if it isn’t within an urban area, meaning it is not part of a densely settled area with 5,000 or more people or 2,000 or more housing units. (In the 2020 census, 20 percent of Americans were classified as rural.)
  • Beyond these basic definitional problems, rural communities can be wildly different socially. “When you aggregate to the national level, you lose so much,”
  • “I get frustrated especially when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latino America. In the Deep South, it’s Black America.”
  • Traditionally, political scientists argued that measuring the effects of place was just a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, like race or education. And because many did not come from rural areas, growing up rural didn’t tend to strike academics as a salient part of political identity.
  • Maybe because so few people fashioned themselves as “rural political experts” until recently, the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural Republicanism were widely embraced by the chattering classes.
  • Thomas Frank in his best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, like abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.
  • a handful of academics were so frustrated with the book that it inspired them to pursue their own research.
  • Ms. Cramer came to a different understanding from Mr. Frank’s of why people voted the way they did: Rural Americans resented city dwellers. They believed that national and state governments had enriched urban areas at the expense of rural ones, taking note of all the road-building in Madison, for example, when they drove to sports games.
  • Their reaction was hostility toward the very idea of government, so they supported politicians who promised to keep it out of their lives; Ms. Cramer called this “the politics of resentment.”
  • Ms. Cramer’s 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment,” quickly became an anchor in the growing field of rural political studies. At least half a dozen academics credit her with foundational thinking for their research.
  • “A lot of the focus has been on ‘What’s wrong with those people?’” she said. “But most people studying what’s going on with rural political behavior are people with empathy for people who live in rural places. They aren’t discounting them as ignorant or uninformed. There’s more of an attempt to understand the way they’re seeing the world.”
  • When Mr. Jacobs decided this year to convene a group of 15 scholars for a conference called Rethinking Rural, he was struck by the flurry of excitement that greeted the invitations. “It was like the first time they’d been asked to the dance,”
  • What rankled the experts who had read “White Rural Rage” was what they considered slapdash analysis. The authors build some arguments on polls with sample sizes as small as 167 rural people. The book is filled with critiques of rural Americans — their resistance to pluralism, their willingness to embrace conspiracies — that apply to many groups and that some scholars reject because they are not based on the long-term observation they say is needed to truly understand the political motives of any community.
  • Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.
  • Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.
  • That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often,
  • “If you go down my street in Vassalboro, the nicest house on the street is right across from the least nice house on the street,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Their kids go to the same school because there’s only one school.”
  • Such interconnectedness means that pollsters sometimes miss how rural voters are really feeling, he added. “It’s not enough to simply ask: Are you doing better than you were last year?
  • As millions left rural areas seeking economic opportunity, an appreciation formed for the businesspeople who stayed and tried to create jobs. That led to an outsize influence by local business leaders in the political realm, driving support for anti-union laws and tax policies generous to businesses.
  • Broadly, rural Americans see free trade and the rise of new technologies as hurting their communities while helping cities prosper
  • So the resentment they felt toward urbanites didn’t come out of nowhere.
  • “Rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms,” he wrote in Politico. “Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience.”
  • And while resentment, like rage, doesn’t easily dissolve, he suggests that trying to understand where it comes from could start to build a bridge over that ever-widening urban-rural divide.
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