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Javier E

We've Lost the True Meaning of Cynicism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621314

life lessons cynicism history culture ethic satisfaction discipline self-sufficiency cosmopolitan

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture.
  • Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.
  • the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.
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  • Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.
  • original cynicism was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.
  • Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics
  • The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”)
  • “Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,”
  • We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a depressed 44-year-old.
  • Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.
  • cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle
  • Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years
  • The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words, being a misanthrope is costly.
  • you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.
  • The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living
  • If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should:
  • in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.
  • To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
  • 1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)
  • The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige.
  • Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises.
  • Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”
  • 2. Askesis (“discipline”)
  • We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life
  • Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead of a cocktail, have a glass of water
  • This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.
  • 3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)
  • Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible.
  • Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely
  • Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.
  • 4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)
  • Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive.
  • Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status
  • he modern cynic is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt
  • The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.
Javier E

For Years, TikTok Told Us What to Buy. Now 'Underconsumption Core' Is About Consuming L... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...erconsumption-influencers.html

consumption fashion sustainability underconsumption waste appropriate

shared by Javier E on 25 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • After years of being told what to buy, TikTok users are trying something new: buying and using only what they need. They’re calling it “underconsumption core,”
  • Instead of pristine fridge shelves, makeup bags with the latest products and fashion fads, users are posting simplified closets, secondhand clothes that have lasted for years and minimal makeup and skin care collections.
  • Many of these videos try to romanticize using what you have, recycling items and finishing one product before moving on to the next, and they are usually set to a Norah Jones song.
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  • The trend is an offshoot of “de-influencing,” which involves creators sharing negative experiences with trendy products and telling viewers not to buy them.
  • “We need to make a shift in who we’re following,” Ms. Pexton said. “We are in control of our algorithm.”
  • TikTok users pointed to several reasons for turning their backs on influencer recommendations. Many said it wasn’t relatable or realistic to live like the influencers they saw, while others cited economic hardships or wanting to live more sustainably.
  • this latest movement can be seen simply as part of a broader pattern of consumer spending that dates back 50 years
  • After a major economic downturn, usually about every decade or so, a similar back-to-basics trend follows, Mr. House said. Take the 2008 financial crisis, for example, when a “new intensity around artisan goods and experiences” arose in opposition to mass-produced products from big brands, he said. We couldn’t stop drinking from Mason jars then, as many are doing again now.
  • This recent cycle may have begun in the wake of post-lockdown “revenge spending,” when shoppers bought large amounts of goods to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic. As that boundless period gave way to the “vibecession,” a term for consumers’ general feelings of anxiety about the economy, many people responded by tightening their budgets, which has brought us to the era of “underconsumption core,”
  • Mr. House said that people should think about the downward shift as appropriate consumption rather than underconsumption.
  • “There’s little new here beyond the names we’re giving macroeconomically induced changes in consumer behavior and the pace at which we’re casting one meme off for the next,”
  • Ms. Wiebe, 30, a communications manager for a legal nonprofit in Ohio, began to notice her own spending habits late last year. Now she considers herself a “de-influencer” and creates videos that call out unnecessary and wasteful products.
  • “It’s pretty rough out there,” she said. “I think people are just enjoying a slower-paced life, and they’re not looking for stuff to fulfill them, in a way. They’re being more creative.”
  • They’re also wanting to stand out, Siegel said.“We’re tired of looking like everyone else,” she said. “Having that all-white house that’s soulless and boring — we want color and patterns and more character.”
  • Between increased anxiety around climate change and the cost of living, “Flagrant displays of wealth that were once aspirational are now insensitive, out-of-touch,” Jade Taylor, a TikTok creator who posts about sustainable fashion, wrote in an email.
Javier E

What Gives Poor Kids a Shot at Better Lives? Economists Find an Unexpected Answer - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-community-employment-3eeef1c3

poor employment income research economics social mobility mobility social

shared by Javier E on 27 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • For all our divisions, Americans have been united by a singular obsession: How can we have a better life? Economists call this economic mobility—the ability to move up the income ladder and make it to a higher rung than your parents.
  • Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has spent more than a decade working to understand what makes mobility possible, and why in some places the children of poor parents have been more able to move up than in others.
  • Using anonymized census and tax data, Chetty and his fellow researchers have been able to follow millions of Americans from childhood into adulthood. The data showed that even in neighborhoods bordering one another, outcomes for poor children can be vastly different.
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  • Analyzing data covering a near universe of Americans born from 1978 to 1992, the researchers found that when employment among the poor parents of children in a community improves, those children are better off economically as adults
  • it doesn’t rely on whether a child’s own parents are employed: Outcomes also improve for children who simply grow up in a neighborhood where more parents have jobs. In other words, their own parents might be unemployed, but if their schoolmates’ parents work, their outcomes will be better.
  • : In places where parental employment deteriorates, the opposite happens—children do worse as adults.
  • “Growing up in a community where employment rates are higher for people in your race and class—if those employment rates are higher, the kids who grew up in those environments do better in the long run,”
  • For poor white children born in 1978, vast swaths of the U.S. were a land of opportunity. Apart from some areas, such as Appalachia and Rust Belt areas of Michigan and Ohio, these children overall had a good chance of making it to a higher rung on the income ladder than their parents. 
  • For poor white children born in 1992, the map was more constrained. While some parts of America, such as the upper Midwest, remained bastions of opportunity, much of the U.S. did worse. Children with parents at the 25th percentile who grew up in Milwaukee had lower income when they turned 27 in 2019—an inflation-adjusted $30,619—than their older counterparts had.
  • This dynamic, playing out across the country, led to a significant widening of the income gap between poor and well-off white children. A white child born to parents at the 25th percentile in 1978 made, on average, an inflation-adjusted $10,383 less at age 27 than a child born to parents at the 75th percentile. But for children born in 1992, that income difference was 27% larger at $13,202.
  • In contrast to the environment for poor white children, few places in America provided poor Black children born in 1978 much opportunity for advancement.
  • Kent County, Mich., is a little more than 100 miles directly east of Milwaukee, and home to Grand Rapids, another old-line manufacturing city. Black children born to parents at the 25th percentile by income in 1978 who grew up in Kent had an average household income of $17,029 at age 27. That put them at the 28th percentile by income, leaving them on essentially the same rung as their parents.
  • But poor Black children born in 1992 who grew up in Kent County did better. On average, a Black child at the 25th percentile in that birth cohort had inflation-adjusted household income of $23,547 at age 27, or 38% more than their 1978 counterpart. 
  • One thing that changed for poor white children compared with poor Black children was the relative share of their parents who were employed. 
  • In Milwaukee County, for example, the share of the parents of low-income white children who were employed went from 69.1% for children born in 1978 to 55.6% for children born in 1992—a 13.5 percentage point decline. Those employment declines were likely driven by the loss of more than a third of the county’s manufacturing jobs during those years. Children born at the 25th percentile in 1992 reached the 44th percentile on average, 4 percentage points lower than those born in 1978.
  • And this pattern of falling parental employment and worsening outcomes repeated itself across much of the country. In counties where employment rates among poor white parents fell sharply, such as Philadelphia County, Pa., the income ranks of poor white children in adulthood fell too. Mobility tended not to deteriorate as much for poor white children growing up in counties such as Sumner, Tenn., where parental employment held up better.
  • the experience in Kent was the general pattern across the country, with employment rates for the parents of poor Black children falling less than their poor white counterparts, or gaining. And as was the case with poor whites, the new research finds that changes in parental employment rates in a community were strongly associated with changes in children’s outcomes.
  • the researchers emphasize that it is not a zero-sum game, with mobility for poor Black people improving only because mobility for poor white people is falling: Indeed, places where opportunity for Black children improved most are also where white children did best.
Javier E

The First World War: the war that changed us all - Telegraph - 1 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...e-war-that-changed-us-all.html

war world effects history culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • It will not take much to involve Britons in the centenary of the First World War – fascination with the war has never been greater
  • There are sociological reasons for the continuing memory of the First World War that go beyond the overwhelming sadness at so many lives cut short. The war marked the beginning of the modern age; and its shock waves are still being felt today in our social and political structures, our economy and our technology.
  • Much of the poignancy of the First World War comes from the transformation of mood over its four years
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  • n that long, hot summer of 1914 when the world fell apart, Britain was at the peak of its fortunes, with London the capital of a world empire
  • It is invidious to look for a silver lining to such an unadulterated catastrophe as the First World War – particularly since, as the Prime Minister pointed out yesterday, it also unleashed the evil forces of Bolshevism and Nazism. Still, as is often the case, conflict led to political and social reform for much of the population; and not just for the millions of soldiers who had never been abroad before they were sent to the Front
  • It was no coincidence that the Representation of the People Act, enfranchising property-owning women over the age of 30, was passed in February 1918; nor that the Eligibility of Women Act was passed in the same month as the Armistice, allowing women to be elected to Parliament. After a war that had seen the violent death of thousands of women serving their country, it would have been perverse to deny them the vote.
  • In 1914, British home ownership patterns had barely changed since feudal times: only 10 per cent of the 7.75 million households belonged to owner-occupiers; the rest were owned by private landlords. After the Homes Fit for Heroes election of December 1918, and the 1919 Housing Act, a million council houses were built over the next two decades. By 1938, the number of owner occupiers had rocketed to 3.75 million out of 11.75 million households.
Javier E

Draft Federal Report Sees Big U.S. Impacts from Global Warming - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...-s-impacts-from-global-warming

global warming us policy

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • “Climate change is already affecting the American people,” declares the opening paragraph of the report, issued under the auspices of the Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federally sponsored climate research. “Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts.“Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and Arctic sea ice are melting. These changes are part of the pattern of global climate change, which is primarily driven by human activity.”
  • When it is final, this report will be an official document of the United States government.
Javier E

What Housework Has to Do With Waistlines - NYTimes.com - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...work-has-to-do-with-waistlines

exercise housework historical research weight

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The study, published this month in PLoS One, is a follow-up to an influential 2011 report which used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine that, during the past 50 years, most American workers began sitting down on the job. Physical activity at work, such as walking or lifting, almost vanished, according to the data, with workers now spending most of their time seated before a computer or talking on the phone. Consequently, the authors found, the average American worker was burning almost 150 fewer calories daily at work than his or her employed parents had, a change that had materially contributed to the rise in obesity during the same time frame, especially among men
  • Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.
  • pulled data from the diaries about how many hours the women were spending in various activities, how many calories they likely were expending in each of those tasks, and how the activities and associated energy expenditures changed over the years.
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  • Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy.
  • Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.
  • In 1965, women typically had spent about eight hours a week sitting and watching television
  • By 2010, those hours had more than doubled, to 16.5 hours per week.
  • According to the authors’ calculations, American women not employed outside the home were burning about 360 fewer calories every day in 2010 than they had in 1965, with working women burning about 132 fewer calories at home each day in 2010 than in 1965.
  • we should start consciously tracking what we do when we are at home and try to reduce the amount of time spent sitting. “Walk to the mailbox,” he said. Chop vegetables in the kitchen. Play ball with your, or a neighbor’s, dog. Chivvy your spouse into helping you fold sheets.
Javier E

Why I'm Not a Vegan - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...why-im-not-a-vegan

vegan diet

shared by Javier E on 22 May 13 - No Cached
  • we still have much to learn about the composition of plants and the aspects of them that are good for us[3] , although it’s becoming clear that they’re beneficial not so much as a combination of nutrients but as the right package of nourishment, which we might as well call real food. In other words, you’re better off eating a carrot than the beta-carotene that was once thought to be its most beneficial “ingredient.”[
  • there are non-dietary reasons to eat fewer animal products. Even if their nutritional profile were unambivalently beneficial, they use too many resources: land, water, energy and — not the least important — food that could nourish people
  • there are two other factors to consider: the industrial production of livestock is a major (if not the leading) contributor to greenhouse gases, and the rampant and nearly unregulated use of antibiotics in that production is making those drugs less effective while encouraging the development of hardier disease-causing germs.
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  • “why not go whole hog” (forgive me) “and advocate a strictly vegan diet?” Isn’t being a part-time vegan, the more strident demand, like being a little bit pregnant?
  • You might think of patterns of eating as falling on one point or another along a spectrum, and moving toward the plant-based end of that spectrum — as opposed to the end represented by Morgan Spurlock’s “super-sized” diet — is almost always beneficial.[7] It is about eating better, or well, not perfectly, and it must be said that “perfectly” has not yet been defined.
  • This much is known, now: We produce most animal products in deplorable conditions, and some of our health and environmental problems can be traced both to dominant production methods and our overconsumption. But we like to eat them, and they’re a pleasurable and even healthy part of many traditional diets and even sound agricultural practices.
Javier E

No Rich Child Left Behind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...no-rich-child-left-behind

education inequality early learning

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
  • e proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a ba
  • chelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
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  • new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
  • average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s.
  • The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly.
  • the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
  • For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand
  • It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
  • The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decade
  • schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students.
  • That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
  • The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
  • one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality
  • the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool
  • The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
  • High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
  • even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
  • from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period
  • the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents.
  • much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
  • not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
  • the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
  • how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers.
  • improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
  • Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
Javier E

Americans Under 50 Fare Poorly on Health Measures, New Report Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-measures-new-report-says.html

health US comparative international report

shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.
  • The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.
  • “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”
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  • The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.
  • Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes rates.
  • Youths fared no better. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and deaths from car crashes. Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries.
  • The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. B
  • the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”
  • The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.
  • In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.
  • Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.  
  • Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages.
  • the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.
Javier E

How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...works-drive-black-unemployment

discrimination racism favoritism jobs affirmative action inequality social networks

shared by Javier E on 06 May 13 - No Cached
  • for African-Americans, the pain continues — over 13 percent of black workers are unemployed, nearly twice the national average. And that’s not a new development: regardless of the economy, job prospects for African-Americans have long been significantly worse than for the country as a whole.
  • The most obvious explanation for this entrenched disparity is racial discrimination. But in my research I have found a somewhat different culprit: favoritism.
  • The mechanism that reproduces inequality, in other words, may be inclusion more than exclusion. And while exclusion or discrimination is illegal, inclusion or favoritism is not — meaning it can be more insidious and largely immune to legal challenges.
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  • Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.
  • the idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false. Whenever possible, Americans seeking jobs try to avoid market competition: they look for unequal rather than equal opportunity
  • Inequality reproduces itself because help is typically reserved for people who are “like me”: the people who live in my neighborhood, those who attend my church or school or those with whom I have worked in the past
  • just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed.
  • Seeing contemporary labor-market politics through the lens of favoritism, rather than discrimination alone, is revealing. It explains, for example, why even though the majority of all Americans, including whites, support civil rights in principle, there is widespread opposition on the part of many whites to affirmative action policies
  • my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.
  • The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs.
  • whites helping other whites is not the same as discrimination, and it is not illegal. Yet it may have a powerful effect on the access that African-Americans and other minorities have to good jobs, or even to the job market itself.
Javier E

Common Ancestor of Mammals Plucked From Obscurity - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ls-plucked-from-obscurity.html

ancestor mammals evolution genetics research

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Humankind’s common ancestor with other mammals may have been a roughly rat-size animal that weighed no more than a half a pound, had a long furry tail and lived on insects.
  • In a comprehensive six-year study of the mammalian family tree, scientists have identified and reconstructed what they say is the most likely common ancestor of the many species on the most abundant and diverse branch of that tree — the branch of creatures that nourish their young in utero through a placenta. The work appears to support the view that in the global extinctions some 66 million years ago, all non-avian dinosaurs had to die for mammals to flourish.
  • a combination of genetic and anatomical data established that the ancestor emerged within 200,000 to 400,000 years after the great dying at the end of the Cretaceous period. At the time, the meek were rapidly inheriting the earth from hulking predators like T. rex.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Within another two million to three million years, Dr. O’Leary said, the first members of modern placental orders appeared in such profusion that researchers have started to refer to the explosive model of mammalian evolution
  • Although some small primitive mammals had lived in the shadow of the great Cretaceous reptiles, the scientists could not find evidence supporting an earlier hypothesis that up to 39 placental mammalian lineages survived to enter the post-extinction world. Only the stem lineage to Placentalia, they said, appeared to hang on through the catastrophe, generally associated with climate change after an asteroid crashed into Earth.
  • the “power of 4,500 characters” enabled the scientists to look “at all aspects of mammalian anatomy, from the skull and skeleton, to the teeth, to internal organs, to muscles and even fur patterns” to determine what the common ancestor possibly looked like.
  • this formidable new systematic data-crunching capability might reshape mammal research but that it would probably not immediately resolve the years of dispute between fossil and genetic partisans over when placental mammals arose. Paleontologists looking for answers in skeletons and anatomy have favored a date just before or a little after the Cretaceous extinction. Those who work with genetic data to tell time by “molecular clocks” have arrived at much earlier origins.
  • the post-Cretaceous date for the placentals “will surely be controversial, as this is much younger than estimates based on molecular clocks, and implies the compression of very long molecular branches at the base of the tree.”
Javier E

Guns don't kill dictatorships, people do | FP Passport - 0 views

blog.foreignpolicy.com/...t_kill_dictatorships_people_do

guns tyranny evidence international

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • I was curious about whether there's any evidence in the modern world for the old notion that a well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny. Do countries with high gun-ownership rights tend to be more democratic? Or more likely to overthrow dictatorships?
  • from a look at the Small Arms Survey's international rankings from 2007, it's hard to detect a pattern.
  • The top 10 gun-owning countries in the world (after the United States) include both democracies like Switzerland and Finland, as well as authoritarian countries like Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • With 34.2 guns per 100 people, Iraq is ranked eighth on the survey. More to the point, the country already had a well-established gun culture and a high rate of gun ownership before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. We can't know for sure if a well-armed population could have stopped Hitler's genocide, but it certainly didn't stop Saddam's.
  • Given the advanced deadly weaponry available to governments these days -- as opposed to the late 18th century -- most tyrants aren't all that threatened by citizens with conventional weapons. Like the Iraqis, Libyans were fairly well armed under Muammar al-Qaddafi -- 15.5 guns per 100 people as of 2007 -- but it still took an assist from NATO air power to finally bring him down.  
  • On the other extreme, the country ranked last on the survey -- with only 0.1 guns per 100 people -- is Tunisia, which as you'll recall was still able to overthrow a longtime dictator in 2011. With only 3.5 guns per 100 people, the Egyptian population that overthrew Hosni Mubarak was hardly well armed either. On the other hand, Bahrain, where a popular revolution failed to unseat the country's monarchy, has 24.8 guns per 100 people, putting it in the top 20 worldwide. A relatively high rate of 10.7 guns per 100 people in Venezuela hasn't stopped the deterioration of democracy under Hugo Chávez.
  • it's hard to see a trend either way
Javier E

Stop climate change: Move to the city, start walking - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...move_to_the_city_start_walking

climate climate change city walking energy efficiency carbon

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • electric cars are currently a bit greener than gasoline cars — per mile. Driving one hundred miles in a Nissan Altima results in the emission of 90.5 pounds of greenhouse gases. Driving the same distance in an all-electric Nissan Leaf emits 63.6 pounds of greenhouse gases — a significant improvement. But while the Altima driver pays 14 cents a mile for fuel, the Leaf driver pays less than 3 cents per mile, and this difference, thanks to the law of supply and demand, causes the Leaf driver to drive more.
  • What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good (or at least less guilty) about driving, which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency.
  • The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging … The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible — the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour solo commutes.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • it turns out that the way we move largely determines the way we live.
  • gadgets cumulatively contribute only a fraction of what we save by living in a walkable neighborhood. It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.
  • “gizmo green”; the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.
  • study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts more than walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.
  • because it’s better than nothing, LEED — like the Prius — is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”
  • 10 to 20 units per acre is the density at which drivable suburbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.
  • “We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to
  • The average New Yorker consumes roughly one-third the electricity of the average Dallas resident, and ultimately generates less than one-third the greenhouse gases of the average American.
  • the American anti-urban ethos remained intact as everything else changed. The desire to be isolated in nature, adopted en masse, led to the quantities and qualities we now call “sprawl,” which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.
  • New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half, as does Sydney — and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half, and you end up with Hong Kong
  • Paris is one place that has determined that its future depends on reducing its auto dependence. The city has recently decided to create 25 miles of dedicated busways, introduced 20,000 shared city bikes in 1,450 locations, and committed to removing 55,000 parking spaces from the city every year for the next 20 years. These changes sound pretty radical, but they are supported by 80 percent of the population.
  • increasing density from two units per acre to 20 units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from 20 to 200.
  • New York is our densest big city and, not coincidentally, the one with the best transit service. All the other subway stations in America put together would not outnumber the 468 stops of the MTA. In terms of resource efficiency, it’s the best we’ve got.
  • most communities with these densities are also organized as traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, the sort of accommodating environment that entices people out of their cars. Everything above that is icing on the cake.
  • unless we hit a national crisis of unprecedented severity, it is hard to imagine any argument framed in the language of sustainability causing many people to modify their behavior. So what will?
  • The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the 10 categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.
  • the top 10 cities always seem to include a bunch of places where they speak German (Vienna, Zurich, Dusseldorf, etc.), along with Vancouver, Auckland, and Sydney. These are all places with compact settlement patterns, good transit, and principally walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, there isn’t a single auto-oriented city in the top 50. The highest-rated American cities in 2010, which don’t appear until No. 31, are Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, and Seattle.
  • Our cities, which are twice as efficient as our suburbs, burn twice the fuel of these European, Canadian, and Aussie/Kiwi places. Yet the quality of life in these foreign cities is deemed higher than ours by a long shot.
  • if we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been done,
Javier E

What if We're Looking at Inequality the Wrong Way? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-at-inequality-the-wrong-way

inequality research economics income

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • By defining income as “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits,” Burkhauser and his co-authors achieved two things: a diminished degree of inequality and, perhaps more important, a conclusion that the condition of the poor and middle class was improving
  • Burkhauser has come up with statistical findings that not only wipe out inequality trends altogether but also purport to show that over the past 18 years, the poor and middle classes have done better, on a percentage basis, than the rich.
  • You get different answers depending on whether you measure income before or after taxes and transfers, whether you count fringe benefits (mainly health insurance), and whether you look at families or households, and whether you count the big hitters as the top 20% or the top 1 percent. Counting health care mutes the increase in inequality, but that really means that most of the increase in working class incomes has been siphoned off to medical providers. Looking at households has the same effect.
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  • In his 2013 paper, Burkhauser and his two co-authors have completely upended the thrust of Figures 1 and 2.
  • Burkhauser’s 2011 methodology worked to make the pattern appear far less extreme, as illustrated by Figure 2:
  • First, take a look at Figure 1, a 2011 Congressional Budget Office chart showing significant inequality in the distribution of income gains from 1979 to 2007. Many on the left consider work done by the C.B.O. to be the gold standard of inequality measurement:
  • If — a virtually impossible if — the economic and policy-making community were to reach even a rough consensus in support of Burkhauser’s 2013 analysis, the victory for the right would be hard to overestimate.
  • If Burkhauser’s approach was accepted, it would render moot the basic political and philosophical tenets of the Obama presidency
  • Not only would Burkhauser lay waste to a core liberal argument — inequality is worsening — but his claim that a declining share of income is going to the wealthy could be used to justify further tax cuts for the affluent in order to foster top-down investment and growt
  • Burkhauser et al. achieve their reversal of past income distribution data by amending the definition of income developed in their 2012 paper — “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits” — to incorporate another accounting tool: “yearly-accrued capital gains to measure yearly changes in wealth.”
  • it is a game changer.
  • Burkhauser attempts to measure the year-to-year increase in taxpayers’ assets — stocks and bonds, housing and privately held businesses – and to count those annual increases as income. Increases in the value of such assets do not show up in tax data because they are taxed by the federal government only when the asset in question is sold and the increased value is realized as taxable gains.
  • The Burkhauser approach does a number of things. First, it spreads and flattens income from capital gains over the duration of ownership. For a wealthy individual who makes a huge killing selling stock or a businesses, his or her income does not spike in the year of the sale, but emerges instead as a series of yearly incremental gains.
  • For assets that have been held for a long time, the Burkhauser system effectively backdates much of currently realized capital gains onto earlier years. This is especially significant in calculating income gains from the current sale of assets purchased in the 1980s and 1990s, since much of the added value was acquired in those earlier decades.
  • I raised the following question: Is it a fair measure of a person’s well-being to include unrealized capital gains? Their house or other assets may have increased in value, but their standard of living has not changed.
  • The unfairness of Burkhauser’s approach is clearly acute at the bottom and middle of income distribution. The most common large asset for those on the bottom rungs is a house. Burkhauser would increase the income of those below the median lucky enough to own a home by the annual appreciation in the value of the home through 2007. For many of these families, however, selling their home is not an option. In Burkhauser’s view, their income goes up even if their living conditions remain unchanged.
  • Burkhauser is respected by his peers; his critics, including some friends, do not accuse him of ideological bias. In addition to A.E.I, he has received support from such center-left institutions as the Pew Foundation, Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation.
  • the “problem is that in such things, especially when it is a difficult task based on lots of new data sources, the devil is in the details. It’s pretty hard to judge those details without doing a substantial amount of work.” Acemoglu’s conclusion: “Bottom line: conceptually there is a valid point here, and this is a serious paper. The rest is to be determined.”
  • “Rich Burkhauser’s work is really the state of the art — the most important research on inequality being done, in my view,” Scott Winship, of the Brookings Institution, e-mailed me. Winship voiced some concern over the reliability of the statistical data used by Burkhauser, but concluded:All that said, I think Rich’s paper is incredibly disruptive for many fields of research in labor economics and other social sciences, and potentially it could change our entire view about rising inequality over the past few decades.
  • Burtless continued:The problem with the authors’ estimates of accruing capital gains is that those numbers are wholly made up based on a prediction that everyone is equally successful in finding homes, stocks, bonds and other assets to invest in.  But they’re not:  Some people are wildly successful, and get into the 1%; others are horribly unsuccessful and become paupers (or receive foreclosure papers); and most earn mediocre returns that are — surprise! — a bit lower than the economy-wide average.
  • Burkhauser et al. measure the period from 1989 to 2007 because those are both peak years in the business cycle. This timing results in a failure to account for the consequences of the 2008-9 financial crisis and the subsequent struggle toward recovery accompanied by persistent high levels of unemployment.
  • During the post-crisis years 2009-11, according to the Pew Center, the wealthiest mean of the nation saw the value of their assets grow by 28 percent, to $3.17 million from $2.48 million, while the bottom 93 percent saw their net worth drop by 4 percent, to $133,816 from $139,896.
  • Wealth trends since the 2008 crash, shown in Figure 5, demonstrate an extraordinary growth in inequality, suggesting that Burkhauser’s findings — restricted to his carefully tailored definition of income — are fatally flawed as an instrument to assess the current real-world position of the poor and middle class compared with the very rich:
  • A key purpose in measuring both wealth and income is to determine what kind of standard of living is possible for those at the top, the middle and the bottom. Do individuals, families and households have enough to provide for themselves, perhaps most importantly for their children? Do they have the financial resources to enter the highly competitive global marketplace?On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.
Javier E

The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...cent-are-only-half-the-problem

inequality divergence social class income union

shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Since 1979, the one-percenters have doubled their share of the nation’s collective income from about 10 percent to about 20 percent.
  • And between 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and 2011, the one-percenters saw their average income rise by 11 percent even as the 99-percenters saw theirs fall slightly
  • This dismal litany invites the conclusion that if we would just put a tight enough choke chain on the 1 percent, then we’d solve the problem of income inequality. But alas, that isn’t true, because it wouldn’t address the other half of the story: the rise of the educated class.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Conceiving of inequality as something caused by the very richest people has obvious political appeal, especially since (by definition) nearly all of us belong to the 99 percent.
  • On those rare occasions when conservatives do bring it up, it’s the skills-based gap that usually draws their attention, because it offers an opportunity to criticize our government-run system of public education and especially teachers’ unions.
  • Liberals resist talking about the skills-based gap because they don’t want to tell the working classes that they’re losing ground because they didn’t study hard enough. Liberals prefer to focus on the 1 percent-based gap.
  • There’s also a pleasing simplicity to the causes of the growing gap between the 1 and the 99. There are only two, and both are familiar liberal targets: the rise of a deregulated financial sector and the erosion of accountability in compensating top executives outside finance
  • One reason the left plays down the growing skills-based gap is that it accepts at face value the conservative claim that educational failure is its root cause.
  • both represent a dramatic reversal of economic trends that prevailed in the United States for most of the 20th century. From the 1930s through the 1970s the 1 percent saw its share of national income decline, while the “college premium” either fell or followed no clear up-or-down pattern over time.
  • At least some of the tools to restore these more egalitarian trends shouldn’t be divisive ideologically. Liberals and conservatives both recognize the benefits of preschool education,
  • Another reform both conservatives and liberals have supported — though at different times — is withholding federal aid from colleges and universities that can’t control tuition increases
  • THERE is also more bipartisan support than you might suppose for restricting some of the Wall Street excesses that enrich the 1 percent.
  • a growing chorus of conservative voices, including the columnist George F. Will, the former Utah governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, favor breaking up the big banks.
  • Since 1979 the income gap between people with college or graduate degrees and people whose education ended in high school has grown. Broadly speaking, this is a gap between working-class families in the middle 20 percent (with incomes roughly between $39,000 and $62,000) and affluent-to-rich families (say, the top 10 percent, with incomes exceeding $111,000)
  • But the decline of labor unions is just as important. At one time union membership was highly effective at reducing or eliminating the wage gap between college and high school graduates. That’s much less true today
  • Only about 7 percent of the private-sector labor force is covered by union contracts, about the same proportion as before the New Deal. Six decades ago it was nearly 40 percent.
  • Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing
  • the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national income.
Javier E

Do We Really Need to Sleep 7 Hours a Night? - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...112251

sleep health research primitive society history human origins

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • By some estimates, Americans sleep two to three hours fewer today than they did before the industrial revolution.
  • now a new study is challenging that notion. It found that Americans on average sleep as much as people in three different hunter-gatherer societies where there is no electricity and the lifestyles have remained largely the same for thousands of years.
  • Dr. Siegel said he worried that putting a number on the amount of sleep people require could push those who get less to resort to using sleeping pills, which carry severe side effects. About 5 percent of Americans take sleeping pills, a percentage that has doubled in the past two decades.
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  • their daily energy expenditure is about the same as most Americans, suggesting physical activity is not the reason for their relative good health.
  • The prevailing notion in sleep medicine is that humans evolved to go to bed when the sun goes down, and that by and large we stay up much later than we should because we are flooded with artificial light
  • Dr. Siegel and his colleagues found no evidence of this. The hunter-gatherer groups they studied, which slept outside or in crude huts, did not go to sleep when the sun went down. Usually they stayed awake three to four hours past sunset, with no light exposure other than the faint glow of a small fire that would keep animals away and provide a bit of warmth in the winter. Most days they would wake up about an hour before sunrise.
  • In a typical night, they slept just six and a half hours — slightly less than the average American
  • “I think this paper is going to transform the field of sleep,” said John Peever, a sleep expert at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the new research. “It’s difficult to envision how we can claim that Western society is highly sleep deprived if these groups that live without all these modern distractions and pressing schedules sleep less or about the same amount
  • in the new study, the hunter-gatherer societies were found to have a sleep period — meaning the time they were actually in bed — of roughly seven to eight and a half hours, which he said was consistent with his group’s recommendations.
  • the question of how much sleep people require was a delicate one. “Really it’s just the amount that allows people to wake up feeling refreshed and alert,
  • Yet the hunter-gatherers included in the new study, which was published in Current Biology, were relatively fit and healthy despite regularly sleeping amounts that are near the low end of those in industrialized societies.
  • called the new study “excellent and very timely,” and he said it suggests that sleep quality is much more important than quantity.
  • Some historians have also argued that it is not natural for people to sleep straight through the night. They say that before the introduction of artificial light it was normal for people to sleep in two intervals separated by an hour of wakefulness, a phenomenon known as segmented sleep, or “first” and “second” sleep.
  • But Dr. Siegel said he always questioned those assertions because there were no rigorous studies of sleep behaviors back then. He and his colleagues decided that one way to get some insight was to study cultures relatively unaffected by artificial light.
  • Among those they chose to follow were the Hadza people, who spend their days hunting and foraging in northern Tanzania, much as their ancestors have for tens of thousands of years; the San of Namibia, who have lived as hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari for at least 20,000 years; and the Tsimané, a seminomadic group that lives in the Andean foothills of Bolivia, near the farthest reaches of the human migration out of Africa.
  • The researchers found that in addition to sleeping roughly similar amounts each night, the three groups rarely took naps during the day and did not sleep in two separate intervals at night.
  • “The Hadza and the San live in the area where we know humans evolved, and then the Tsimané live in some sense at the end of the human migration,” he said. “The fact that we see very similar sleep times gives me great confidence that this is how all of our ancestors slept.”
  • Their sleep did not seem to be problematic. Chronic insomnia, which affects 20 percent to 30 percent of Americans, occurred in just 2 percent of the hunter-gatherers. The San and the Tsimané did not even have a word for it in their languages.
  • ambient temperature may be a major factor. The groups did not go sleep at sunset and they did not wake up at sunrise, suggesting that light exposure did not have much influence on their sleep patterns. But they almost always fell asleep as temperatures began to fall at night, and they would wake up right as the temperatures were rising again.
  • This suggests that humans may have evolved to sleep during the coldest hours of the day, perhaps as a way to conserve energy
  • “Today we sleep in environments with fixed temperatures, but none of our ancestors did,” Dr. Siegel said. “We evolved to sleep in a natural environment where the temperature falls at night. Whether we can treat insomnia by putting people in an environment where the temperature is modulated in this way is something to be studied in the future.
Javier E

'We've Built Right Up to the Edge in the Most Foolish Way' - Arts & Lifestyle - The Atl... - 0 views

www.theatlanticcities.com/...3789

geography sea economics history policy

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gillis sees the destruction brought by Sandy as the inevitable result of a pattern of development that disregards all that history tells us about the ocean and its role in daily human life. "We’ve built right up to the edge in the most foolish way," he says. "The whole coast is now an extended suburb."
  • "There is macro-engineering to be done," concedes Gillis, who thinks rebuilding and preserving wetlands would be a far more effective strategy than hard seawalls. He also cites pioneering Dutch innovations such as floating homes.
  • "The sensible long-term thing is to think in terms of retreat," he says. Only by regaining our respectful distance from the water’s edge, says Gillis, can we truly protect ourselves from the cost – both human and financial – of living on the margin where sea meets land.
Javier E

FC96: The English Revolution: (1603-88) - The Flow of History - 0 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC96

revolution english england

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In religion, Elizabeth skillfully maintained peace in England while much of Europe was embroiled in religious wars. She did this by grafting moderate Protestant theology onto Catholic style ritual and organization.  She also blunted the ferocity of the religiously radical Puritans (Calvinists) by incorporating many of them into the hierarchy of the Church of England.  However, this put many Puritans into positions of authority where they could demand more sweeping reforms beyond the Queen's lukewarm Protestantism.  In addition, many of these Puritans were also members of the gentry (lower nobles) and middle classes who controlled the House of Commons in Parliament and voted on taxes.  Thus the issues of religion and money became even more tangled.
  • Religious wars, which threatened everyone's peace and security, and inflation, which made maintaining armies too expensive for rebellious nobles, also combined to help with the rise of absolutism in Europe.  This rising tide of absolutism would influence the Stuart kings of England to try to establish absolutism in their own realm in spite of popular opinion.  A less skillful and diplomatic ruler than Elizabeth would have trouble dealing with these new forces rising up in England.  Such an undiplomatic ruler succeeded Elizabeth in the person of James I (1603-1625).
  • While Elizabeth had so skillfully kept the issues of money and religion in check, James' absolutist beliefs and abrasive personality brought them to the surface.  As far as religion went, James fought the largely Puritan Parliament to keep the Church of England's Catholic style ritual, decorations, and hierarchy of clergy, over which he as king had control.  In money matters, king and Parliament clashed over James' growing requests for money to support his lavish lifestyle.  He also angered the middle class by raising customs duties, one of his main sources of revenue, to keep pace with inflation.  While James and Parliament never completely broke with one another over these issues, their constant squabbling did set the stage for the revolution that was to follow.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • While the individual events of the English Revolution could be somewhat involved and complicated, they did fit into a basic pattern.  Parliament and the ruler of England would clash over the issues of religion and taxes as the government became less decisive and/or reasonable.  This would trigger a reaction by Parliament that would bring in a new ruler, and then the process would start all over again.  This cycle would repeat itself three times over the next sixty years, with each successive stage feeding back into the aforementioned cycle as well as into the next stage
  • The first stage would see England plunged into civil war (1642-49) that would result in the beheading of Charles I and the rise of the Puritans and Parliament to power.  In the second stage, continued fighting over religion and money, this time between Parliament and its army, would bring in military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell in the 1650's.  After Cromwell's death (1658) would come the third stage with the restoration of the monarchy (1661-88).  However, the old conflicts over money and religion would resurface in the reign of James II and lead to his overthrow by Parliament with the help of William III and Mary of Holland in 1688.
redavistinnell

Supreme Court sides with death row inmate in race discrimination case - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

supreme court court sides death row inmate

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  • Supreme Court sides with death row inmate in racial discrimination case
  • The Supreme Court ruled Monday morning in favor of a death row inmate in a case concerning race discrimination in jury selection.
  • The jury that convicted him was all white. Twenty years after his sentence his attorneys obtained notes the prosecution team took while it was engaged in picking a jury, including marking potential jurors who were black had a "b" written by their name.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The 7-1 decision comes as a welcome relief to critics who say racial discrimination in jury selection persists across the country some 30 years after the Supreme Court ruled potential jurors cannot be struck because of race.
  • Monday's ruling can provide "new life to these so-called Batson claims in the lower courts and the issue of racial bias in jury selection," said Steve Vladeck, CNN contributor and law professor at American University Washington College of Law, referring to the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky.
  • "This discrimination became apparent only because we obtained the prosecution's notes which revealed their intent to discriminate. Usually that does not happen," said Foster's lead lawyer, Stephen Bright, from the Southern Center of Human Rights. "The practice of discriminating in striking juries continues in courtrooms across the country. Usually courts ignore patterns of race discrimination and accept false reasons for the strikes."
  • "The Court today invites state prisoners to go searching for new 'evidence' by demanding the files of the prosecutors who long ago convicted them . ...I cannot go along with that 'sort of sandbagging of state courts.' New evidence should not justify the relitigation of Batson claims,
  • Nearly 20 years after the conviction, through an open records request, Foster's lawyers obtained the notes the prosecution team took while it was engaged in the process of picking a jury.
  • "The prosecutors in this case came to court on the morning of jury selection determined to strike all the black prospective jurors," Bright said. "Blacks were taken out of the picture here, they were taken and dealt with separately."
  • One set of documents from the prosecution files shows that potential jurors who were black had a "B" written by their name and their names highlighted with a green pen. On some juror questionnaire sheets, the juror's race "black," "color" or "negro" was circled. One juror, Eddie Hood, was labeled "B #1. Others were labeled B#2, and B#3.
  • The Supreme Court's 1986 case held that once a defendant has produced enough evidence to raise an inference that the state impermissibly excluded a juror based on race, the state must come forward with a race-neutral explanation for the exclusion.
rachelramirez

The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...507614

linguistics culture US

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The Evolution of 'Like'
  • It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like.
  • To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”
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  • The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like.
  • Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly. To the extent that slowly means “in a slow fashion,” as in “with the quality of slowness,” it is easy (and correct) to imagine that slowly began as “slow-like,”
  • Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’
  • Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse.
  • So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population. The seeds of the modern like lay among ordinary people; the Beatniks may not even have played a significant role in what happened later. The point is that like transformed from something occasional into something more regular.
  • It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.
  • In that light, what has happened to like is that it has morphed into a modal marker—actually, one that functions as a protean indicator of the human mind at work in conversation.
  • There are actually two modal marker likes—that is, to be fluent in modern American English is to have subconsciously internalized not one but two instances of grammar involving like.
  • The like acknowledges—imagine even a little curtsey—the discomfort. It softens the blow—that is, eases—by swathing the statement in the garb of hypotheticality that the basic meaning of like lends.
  • Something “like” x is less threatening than x itself; to phrase things as if x were only “like,” x is thus like offering a glass of water, a compress, or a warm little blanket.
  • People’s sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality, and the person of a certain age who claims never to use like “that way” as often as not, like, does—and often.
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