Volkswagen, Johnson & Johnson, and Corporate Responsibility - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.”
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In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.”
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Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.
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Claudia Rankine, John Lucas Document Blondness in 'Stamped' - The Atlantic - 0 views
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naturally fair hair is uncommon: An estimated 2 percent of the world’s population—and 5 percent of white Americans—is actually towheaded. Blond hair is the result of a genetic mutation typically associated with northern Europeans, but it has also been seen in a small percentage of Aboriginal Australians, Northern Africans, and Asians.
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There are a multitude of reasons why someone might choose blond. For subjects featured in Stamped, it was a way to cover gray hair, to look younger, to be treated better, to look better, or to look more like themselves:
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for the most part, interviewees didn’t mention the connection between whiteness and blondness until Rankine prompted them. “I think part of our orientation as Americans has been to substitute the word ‘white’ with ‘people,’” Rankine says. “Consequently, when they think of blondness, they're thinking of the hair color of ‘people,’ people who are valued. But they don’t understand that that value attaches to whiteness.”
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Did Ohio get coronavirus right? Early intervention, preparation for pandemic may pay of... - 0 views
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Now, Ohio may be realizing the benefits of early intervention in the pandemic by its government and medical community. With about 5,100 covid-19 cases, it has fewer than a third the number of people with the novel coronavirus than in three comparably sized states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois. And Ohio has just a small fraction of the deaths reported in those states.
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The Cleveland Clinic, which eventually beefed up plans to expand from 3,200 beds to 8,000 should the worst occur, held just 150 covid-19 patients (along with 2,000 others) this week and is preparing to scale back some facilities. It is moving to lend medical personnel to cities such as Detroit and New York hit hard by the virus.
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In the Cincinnati region, models now show that peak occupancy of hospital beds by covid-19 patients may be just 10 percent of the predicted worst-case scenario.
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Amazon's CEO tells investors 'you may want to take a seat,' as he explains why the comp... - 0 views
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Bezos’s fortune, meanwhile, has surged by more than $24 billion since the pandemic took the broader market for a roller-coaster ride, according to Fortune. That rise has lifted his net worth to a stunning $148.6 billion, according to Forbes, making him by far the richest person in the world, even after relinquishing much of his wealth to his partner in divorce proceedings back in July.
Tech CEOs To Trump: We'll Always Have Paris | HuffPost - 0 views
Biden Seeks Deal to Buy Additional 100 Million Doses of J&J Covid-19 Vaccine - WSJ - 0 views
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President Biden directed his administration to secure an additional 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year and said he planned to share any excess vaccine supply with other nations.
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“We need maximum flexibility. There’s always a chance we’ll encounter unexpected challenges,” Mr. Biden said of his additional intended purchases on Wednesday, following a meeting at the White House with J&J CEO Alex Gorsky and Merck & Co. Inc. CEO Kenneth Frazier. Asked what the U.S. will do with any leftover doses, Mr. Biden said, “If we have a surplus, we’re going to share it with the rest of the world.”
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the U.S. would contribute a total of $4 billion to the international Covax program, an initiative aimed at supplying Covid-19 vaccines to the world’s poorest countries.
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Election Lawsuits Are A New Tactic To Fight Disinformation : NPR - 0 views
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The victims of some of the most pernicious conspiracy theories of 2020 are fighting back in court. Voting equipment companies have filed a series of massive defamation lawsuits against allies of former President Trump in an effort to exert accountability over falsehoods about the companies' role in the election and repair damage to their brands.
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On Friday, Fox News became the latest target and was served with a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems after several of the network's hosts entertained on air conspiracy theories pushed by former President Trump that the company had rigged the results of the November election against him in key states.
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Dominion has also sued Trump associates Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell for billions in damages. The company is one of the top providers of voting equipment to states and counties around the country and typically relies on procurement decisions made by elected officials from both political parties.
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How Tulsa Race Massacre Shaped Today's Most Successful Black CEOs : NPR - 0 views
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The riots that engulfed Tulsa a hundred years ago killed hundreds and destroyed scores of businesses in the then thriving neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.
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Today, Stradford's great grandson is a well known Black investor in the modern Wall Street, and he remembers the emotional – and financial – impact the riots had on his family.
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"Over time, we think it would have compounded to over $100 million,"
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Hacking: These are just the attacks we know about - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Ransomware hacks are everywhere if you look for them. These are just the ones we know about:
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Food -- A hack of JBS Foods, the world's largest meat processor, shut multiple plants over the weekend.Fuel -- The Colonial Pipeline hack led to fuel shortages on the East Coast last month. The company has admitted to paying more $4.4 million in ransom, although the FBI has said ransoms of more than $25 million have been demanded.Hospitals -- A hack of the Scripps hospital system in San Diego has led to the breach of medical information for more than 150,000 people. The Irish health system was also targeted. More on how hackers target hospitals and first responders below.Trains -- A New York City subway system hack from April was reported Wednesday by the The New York Times.Ferries -- There are also smaller hacks, like the one affecting the ferry system in Cape Cod.
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Eyes on Russia. The White House has its eyes on Russia for enabling both the Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat processing hacks. Read CNN's full report on the JBS attack here.
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Q&A with Elizabeth Catte and Leah Hampton: Rural America and social inequity - CNN - 0 views
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The January 6 invasion of the US Capitol laid bare many uncomfortable truths about American society.
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Some of the danger comes directly out of Capitol attack coverage
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it's critical not to let stereotypes about "hillbilly malignancy" or economic anxiety blind us to the role that "respectable people" — business owners, CEOs and real estate brokers; at least 19 state and local officials; and law enforcement and service members — played in the siege that left five dead and scores of police officers injured.
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Opinion: What Biden gets about being president -- and Trump doesn't - CNN - 0 views
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It was especially refreshing to see President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris use their CNN interview with Jake Tapper on Thursday to make clear that leading America is, first and always, a complex effort requiring the cooperation and good will of millions.
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the Biden-Harris conversation made clear why voters kicked Trump out of the White House.
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Trump spouted falsehoods and tried to advance his own interests by demanding that somebody -- courts, state legislatures, maybe even Santa Claus -- somehow reverse the outcome of the election he lost last month.
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Election Fraud Attack: Ex-Houston Police Captain Charged With Assaulting Man : NPR - 0 views
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The suspect, Mark Anthony Aguirre, told police he was part of a group of private citizens investigating claims of the massive fraud allegedly funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and involving election ballots forged by Hispanic children. He said the plot was underway in Harris County, Texas, prior to the Nov. 3 election.
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Aguirre said he was working for the group Liberty Center for God and Country when, on Oct. 19, he pulled a gun on a man who he believed was the mastermind of the scheme.
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Authorities found no evidence that he was involved in any fraud scheme claimed by Aguirre.
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A Revealing Look At Zuckerberg | Talking Points Memo - 0 views
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these tradeoffs get to the heart of Facebook’s problem and the heart of what the site is. The harm is inherent to Facebook’s business model. When you find ways to reduce harm they’re almost always at the expense of engagement metrics the maximization of which are the goal of basically everything Facebook does. The comparison may be a loaded or contentious one. But it is a bit like the Tobacco companies. The product is the problem, not how it’s used or abused. It’s the product. That’s a challenging place for a company to be.
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Facebook now makes up a very big part of the whole global information ecosystem. In many countries around the world Facebook for all intents and purposes is the Internet. The weather patterns of information as we might call them are heavily shaped by Facebook’s algorithms and the various tweaks and adjustments it makes to them in different countries. Facebook may not create the misinformation or hate speech or hyper-nationalist frenzies but its algorithms help drive them.
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the guiding light for those algorithms is first to maximize engagement.
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The End of Men - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same
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Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions
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“You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.”
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'We will coup whoever we want!': the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech... - 0 views
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there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.
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Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society.
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The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEO before he made a dramatic comeback this week, wants to upload his consciousness to the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).
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I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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From my parents’ teenage years in the 1930s and ’40s through my teenage years in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and democratic and secure than it had been when my grandparents were teenagers. But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.
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I read an article about that year’s record-setting bonuses on Wall Street. The annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Earth—a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 each to everybody else at the place.
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“This is not the America in which we grew up,” I wrote in a magazine column at the time, by which I meant America of the several very prosperous decades after World War II, when the income share of the super-rich was not yet insanely high. Since the 1980s, the portion of income taken each year by the rich had become as hugely disproportionate as it had been in the 1920s, with CEOs paid several hundred times more than the average worker, whose average income had barely budged for decades. “We’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes,” I wrote, but “also inured ourselves to the spectacle.”
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Before Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Fed Spotted Big Problems - The New York Times - 0 views
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In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as “matters requiring attention” and “matters requiring immediate attention,” flagged that the firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of trouble.
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But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions
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It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality.
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Elon Musk, Other AI Experts Call for Pause in Technology's Development - WSJ - 0 views
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Calls for a pause clash with a broad desire among tech companies and startups to double down on so-called generative AI, a technology capable of generating original content to human prompts. Buzz around generative AI exploded last fall after OpenAI unveiled a chatbot with its ability to perform functions like providing lengthy answers and producing computer code with humanlike sophistication.
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Microsoft has embraced the technology for its Bing search engine and other tools. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has deployed a rival system, and companies such as Adobe Inc., Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Salesforce Inc. have also introduced advanced AI tools.
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“A race starts today,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last month. “We’re going to move, and move fast.”
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Silicon Valley's Trillion-Dollar Leap of Faith - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Tech companies like to make two grand pronouncements about the future of artificial intelligence. First, the technology is going to usher in a revolution akin to the advent of fire, nuclear weapons, and the internet.
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And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.
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Silicon Valley has already triggered tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on AI, and companies only want to spend more.
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