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Pause or panic: battle to tame the AI monster - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-tame-the-ai-monster-mjd97lhkh AI control threat report crisis
shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • What exactly are they afraid of? How do you draw a line from a chatbot to global destruction
  • This tribe feels we have made three crucial errors: giving the AI the capability to write code, connecting it to the internet and teaching it about human psychology. In those steps we have created a self-improving, potentially manipulative entity that can use the network to achieve its ends — which may not align with ours
  • This is a technology that learns from our every interaction with it. In an eerie glimpse of AI’s single-mindedness, OpenAI revealed in a paper that GPT-4 was willing to lie, telling a human online it was a blind person, to get a task done.
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  • For researchers concerned with more immediate AI risks, such as bias, disinformation and job displacement, the voices of doom are a distraction. Professor Brent Mittelstadt, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the warnings of “the existential risks community” are overblown. “The problem is you can’t disprove the future scenarios . . . in the same way you can’t disprove science fiction.” Emily Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, believes the doomsters are propagating “unhinged AI hype, helping those building this stuff sell it”.
  • Those urging us to stop, pause and think again have a useful card up our sleeves: the people building these models do not fully understand them. AI like ChatGPT is made up of huge neural networks that can defy their creators by coming up with “emergent properties”.
  • Google’s PaLM model started translating Bengali despite not being trained to do so
  • Let’s not forget the excitement, because that is also part of Moloch, driving us forward. The lure of AI’s promises for humanity has been hinted at by DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, which predicted the 3D structures of nearly all the proteins known to humanity.
  • Noam Shazeer, a former Google engineer credited with setting large language models such as ChatGPT on their present path, was asked by The Sunday Times how the models worked. He replied: “I don’t think anybody really understands how they work, just like nobody really understands how the brain works. It’s pretty much alchemy.”
  • The industry is turning itself to understanding what has been created, but some predict it will take years, decades even.
  • Alex Heath, deputy editor of The Verge, who recently attended an AI conference in San Francisco. “It’s clear the people working on generative AI are uneasy about the worst-case scenario of it destroying us all. These fears are much more pronounced in private than they are in public.” One figure building an AI product “said over lunch with a straight face that he is savoring the time before he is killed by AI”.
  • Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, told the TED2023 conference this week: “We hear from people who are excited, we hear from people who are concerned. We hear from people who feel both those emotions at once. And, honestly, that’s how we feel.”
  • A CBS interviewer challenged Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, this week: “You don’t fully understand how it works, and yet you’ve turned it loose on society?
  • In 2020 there wasn’t a single drug in clinical trials developed using an AI-first approach. Today there are 18
  • Consider this from Bill Gates last month: “I think in the next five to ten years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionising the way people teach and learn.”
  • If the industry is aware of the risks, is it doing enough to mitigate them? Microsoft recently cut its ethics team, and researchers building AI outnumber those focused on safety by 30-to-1,
  • The concentration of AI power, which worries so many, also presents an opportunity to more easily develop some global rules. But there is little agreement on direction. Europe is proposing a centrally defined, top-down approach. Britain wants an innovation-friendly environment where rules are defined by each industry regulator. The US commerce department is consulting on whether risky AI models should be certified. China is proposing strict controls on generative AI that could upend social order.
  • Part of the drive to act now is to ensure we learn the lessons of social media. Twenty years after creating it, we are trying to put it back in a legal straitjacket after learning that its algorithms understand us only too well. “Social media was the first contact between AI and humanity, and humanity lost,” Yuval Harari, the Sapiens author,
  • Others point to bioethics, especially international agreements on human cloning. Tegmark said last week: “You could make so much money on human cloning. Why aren’t we doing it? Because biologists thought hard about this and felt this is way too risky. They got together in the Seventies and decided, let’s not do this because it’s too unpredictable. We could lose control over what happens to our species. So they paused.” Even China signed up.
  • One voice urging calm is Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist. He has labelled ChatGPT a “flashy demo” and “not a particularly interesting scientific advance”. He tweeted: “A GPT-4-powered robot couldn’t clear up the dinner table and fill up the dishwasher, which any ten-year-old can do. And it couldn’t drive a car, which any 18-year-old can learn to do in 20 hours of practice. We’re still missing something big for human-level AI.” If this is sour grapes and he’s wrong, Moloch already has us in its thrall.
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Opinion | This Is the Actual Danger Posed by D.E.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iversity-unconstitutional.html DEI opposition analysis history
shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.
  • the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.
  • Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.
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  • For instance, when a Harvard scholar such as Steven Pinker speaks of “disempowering D.E.I.” as a necessary reform in American higher education, he’s not opposing diversity itself. Pinker is liberal, donates substantially to the Democratic Party and “loathes” Donald Trump. The objections he raises are shared by a substantial number of Americans across the political spectrum.
  • , the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values.
  • First, it is a moral necessity for colleges to be concerned about hateful discourse, including hateful language directed at members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, colleges that receive federal funds have a legal obligation
  • I’ll share with you three pervasive examples
  • In the name of D.E.I., all too many institutions have violated their constitutional commitments to free speech, due process and equal protection of the law.
  • Yet that is no justification for hundreds of universities to pass and maintain draconian speech codes on campus, creating a system of unconstitutional censorship that has been struck down again and again and again in federal court. Nor is it a justification for discriminating against faculty members for their political views or for compelling them to speak in support of D.E.I.
  • There is a better way to achieve greater diversity, equity, inclusion and related goals. Universities can welcome students from all walks of life without unlawfully censoring speech. They can respond to campus sexual violence without violating students’ rights to due process. They can diversify the student body without discriminating on the basis of race
  • Second, there is a moral imperative to respond to sexual misconduct on campus.
  • that is no justification for replacing one tilted playing field with another. Compelled in part by constitutionally problematic guidance from the Obama administration, hundreds of universities adopted sexual misconduct policies that strip the most basic due process protections from accused students. The result has been systematic injustice
  • The due process problem was so profound that in 2019 a state appellate court in California — hardly a bastion of right-wing jurisprudence — ruled that “fundamental fairness” entitles an accused student to cross-examine witnesses in front of a neutral adjudicator.
  • Third, it is urgently necessary to address racial disparities in campus admissions and faculty hiring — but, again, not at the expense of the Constitution.
  • it is difficult to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Harvard attempted to achieve greater diversity in part by systematically downranking Asian applicants on subjective grounds, judging them deficient in traits such as “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected.” That’s not inclusion; it’s discrimination.
  • Our nation has inflicted horrific injustices on vulnerable communities. And while the precise nature of the injustice has varied — whether it was slavery, Jim Crow, internment or the brutal conquest of Native American lands — there was always a consistent theme: the comprehensive denial of constitutional rights.
  • But one does not correct the consequences of those terrible constitutional violations by inflicting a new set of violations on different American communities in a different American era. A consistent defense of the Constitution is good for us all,
  • The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.
  • Virtuous goals should not be accomplished by illiberal means.
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Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-global-decline-cause-ddaf8be2 population demographic revolution decline global response
shared by Javier E on 14 May 24 - No Cached
  • The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
  • Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.
  • Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
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  • It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
  • “The demographic winter is coming,”
  • Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
  • Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
  • A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
  • Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since
  • In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s. Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2
  • He has found that national birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected.
  • China reported 9 million births last year, 16% less than projected in the U.N.’s central scenario. In the U.S., 3.59 million babies were born last year, 4% less than the U.N. projected. In other countries, the undershoot is even larger: Egypt reported 17% fewer births last year. In 2022, Kenya reported 18% fewer.
  • In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100. By 2022 it had lowered and brought forward the peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That, too, is likely out of date
  • the University of Washington now thinks it will peak around 9.5 billion in 2061 then start declining. 
  • The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
  • In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.
  • In 2017, when the fertility rate was 1.8, the Census Bureau projected it would converge over the long run to 2.0. It has since revised that down to 1.5. “It has snuck up on us,”
  • Historians refer to the decline in fertility that began in the 18th century in industrializing countries as the demographic transition. As lifespans lengthened and more children survived to adulthood, the impetus for bearing more children declined. As women became better educated and joined the workforce, they delayed marriage and childbirth, resulting in fewer children. 
  • Some demographers see this as part of a “second demographic transition,” a societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable. 
  • In research published in 2021, the University of Maryland’s Kearney and two co-authors looked for possible explanations for the continued drop. They found that state-level differences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt could explain almost none of the decline
  • “We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify,” they conclude.
  • while raising children is no more expensive than before, parents’ preferences and perceived constraints have changed
  • “If people have a preference for spending time building a career, on leisure, relationships outside the home, that’s more likely to come in conflict with childbearing.” 
  • Once a low fertility cycle kicks in, it effectively resets a society’s norms and is thus hard to break, said Jackson. “The fewer children you see your colleagues and peers and neighbors having, it changes the whole social climate,”
  • Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.
  • Urbanization and the internet have given even women in traditional male-dominated villages a glimpse of societies where fewer children and a higher quality of life are the norm. “People are plugged into the global culture,
  • mothers and fathers, especially those that are highly educated, spend more time with their children than in the past. “The intensity of parenting is a constraint,”
  • Sub-Saharan Africa once appeared resistant to the global slide in fertility, but that too is changing. The share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022
  • Jose Rimon, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, credits that to a push by national leaders in Africa which, he predicted, would drive fertility down faster than the U.N. projects. 
  • Mae Mariyam Thomas, 38, who lives in Mumbai and runs an audio production company, said she’s opted against having children because she never felt the tug of motherhood. She sees peers struggling to meet the right person, getting married later and, in some instances, divorcing before they have kids. At least three of her friends have frozen their eggs,
  • Danielle Vermeer grew up third in a family of four children on Chicago’s North Side, where her neighborhood was filled with Catholics of Italian, Irish and Polish descent and half her close friends had as many siblings as her or more.
  • Her Italian-American father was one of four children who produced 14 grandchildren. Now her parents have five grandchildren, including Vermeer’s two children, ages 4 and 7.
  • The 35-year-old, who is the co-founder of a fashion thrifting app, said that before setting out to have children, she consulted dozens of other couples and her Catholic church and read at least eight books on the subject, including one by Pope Paul VI. She and her husband settled on two as the right number.“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.
  • Perhaps no country has been trying longer than Japan. After fertility fell to 1.5 in the early 1990s, the government rolled out a succession of plans that included parental leave and subsidized child care. Fertility kept falling.
  • In 2005, Kuniko Inoguchi was appointed the country’s first minister responsible for gender equality and birthrate. The main obstacle, she declared, was money: People couldn’t afford to get married or have children. Japan made hospital maternity care free and introduced a stipend paid upon birth of the child. 
  • Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.
  • This year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rolled out yet another program to increase births that extends monthly allowances to all children under 18 regardless of income, free college for families with three children, and fully paid parental leave.
  • noguchi, now a member of parliament’s upper house, said the constraint on would-be parents is no longer money, but time. She has pressed the government and businesses to adopt a four-day workweek
  • If you’re a government official or manager of a big corporation, you should not worry over questions of salary now, but that in 20 years time you will have no customers, no clients, no applicants to the Self-Defense Forces.”
  • Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed one of Europe’s most ambitious natality agendas. Last year he expanded tax benefits for mothers so that women under the age of 30 who have a child are exempt from paying personal income tax for life. That’s on top of housing and child-care subsidies as well as generous maternity leaves. 
  • Hungary’s fertility rate, though still well below replacement, has risen since 2010. But the Vienna Institute of Demography attributed this primarily to women delaying childbirth because of a debt crisis that hit around 2010. Adjusted for that, fertility has risen only slightly, it concluded.
  • The usual prescription in advanced countries is more immigration, but that has two problems.
  • With no reversal in birthrates in sight, the attendant economic pressures are intensifying. Since the pandemic, labor shortages have become endemic throughout developed countries. That will only worsen in coming years as the postcrisis fall in birthrates yields an ever-shrinking inflow of young workers, placing more strain on healthcare and retirement systems.
  • worsening demographics could make this a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth.
  • The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.
  • As more countries confront stagnant population, immigration between them is a zero-sum gam
  • Historically, host countries have sought skilled migrants who enter through formal, legal channels, but recent inflows have been predominantly unskilled migrants often entering illegally and claiming asylum.
  • High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance,
  • Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigratio
  • As birthrates fall, more regions and communities experience depopulation, with consequences ranging from closed schools to stagnant property values. Less selective colleges will soon struggle to fill classrooms because of the plunge in birthrates that began in 2007, said Fernández-Villaverde. Vance said rural hospitals can’t stay open because of the falling local population.
  • An economy with fewer children will struggle to finance pensions and healthcare for growing ranks of elderly. South Korea’s national pension fund, one of the world’s largest, is on track to be depleted by 2055
  • There’s been little public pressure to act, said Sok Chul Hong, an economist at Seoul National University. “The elderly are not very interested in pension reform, and the youth are apathetic towards politics,” he said. “It is truly an ironic situation.”
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To Live Past 100, Mangia a Lot Less: Italian Expert's Ideas on Aging - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...italy-aging-valter-longo.html aging longevity italy research researcher diet genetics
shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Valter Longo, a nutrition-obsessed Italian Ph.D. student, wrestled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.
  • “For studying aging, Italy is just incredible,
  • Italy has one of the world’s oldest populations, including multiple pockets of centenarians who tantalize researchers searching for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”
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  • Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the U.S.C. Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through eating Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field that is itself still in its adolescence.
  • In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he has created a plant and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimics fasting to, he argues, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the down side of actually starving.
  • He has patented and sold his ProLon diet kits; published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and been called an influential “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.
  • Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of older people — including in the Calabria town from which his family hails — that he said suggests that periodic cycles of his own faux-fasting approach could reduce biological age and stave off illnesses associated with aging.
  • “It’s very similar to the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” she said, pointing at photographs on the wall of a bowl of ancient legumes similar to the chickpe
  • “Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,”
  • He added that many Italian children, especially in the country’s south, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps — pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread).
  • in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to be forever young have funded secretive labs. Wellness articles have conquered newspaper home pages and Fountains-of-Youth workout and diet ads featuring insanely fit middle-aged people teem on the social media feeds of not insanely fit middle-aged people.
  • he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a disgrace.
  • even as concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy’s are fretting over a creakier future in which booming populations of old people drain resources from the dwindling young.
  • many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics the world over continue to stare longingly toward Italy, seeking in its deep pockets of centenarians a secret ingredient to long life.
  • “Probably they kept breeding between cousins and relatives,” Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relations in little Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it sort of generated the super-longevity genome.”
  • The genetic drawbacks of incest, he hypothesized, slowly vanished because those mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce or because the town noticed a monstrous ailment — like early onset Alzheimer’s — in a particular family line and steered clear.
  • Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians had been protected from later disease by a starvation period and old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during rural Italy’s abject war-era poverty. Then a boost of proteins and fats and modern medicine after Italy’s postwar economic miracle protected them from frailty as they got older and kept them alive.
  • At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles fed on the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks suffered diabetes and cardiovascular disease that their relatives back in Calabria did not.
  • He eventually earned his Ph.D in biochemistry at U.C.L.A. and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at U.S.C. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.
  • He found a fount of inspiration in the pescatarian-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.
  • he also found the modern Italian diet — the cured meats, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables the world hungered for — horrendous and a source of disease.
  • His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also consults for Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is actually foreign to most Italians today.
  • “Italy’s got such incredible history and a wealth of information about aging,” he said. “But spends virtually nothing.”
  • He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast, and how he has investigated whether the same pathway was at work in all organisms.
  • Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not simply putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world,” in which only the rich could afford to live for centuries, potentially forcing caps on having children
  • A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was division between two populations. The first would live as we do now and reach about 80 or longer through medical advancements. But Italians would be saddled with long — and, given the drop in the birthrate, potentially lonely — years burdened by horrible diseases.
  • The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific breakthroughs and live to 100 and perhaps 110 in relative good health.
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Opinion | The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...god-evangelicals-anointed.html deification trump evangelical populism Christianist crisis culture politics
shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:
  • Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?
  • “Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”
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  • Some of Trump’s Christian followers do appear to have grown to see him as a kind of religious figure. He is a savior. I think it began with the sense that he was uniquely committed to saving them from their foes (liberals, Democrats, elites, seculars, illegal immigrants, etc.) and saving America from all that threatens it.
  • In this sense, Gushee continued, “a savior does not have to be a good person but just needs to fulfill his divinely appointed role. Trump is seen by many as actually having done so while president.”
  • This view of Trump is especially strong “in the Pentecostal wing of the conservative Christian world,” Gushee wrote, wherehe is sometimes also viewed as an anointed leader sent by God. “Anointed” here means set apart and especially equipped by God for a holy task. Sometimes the most unlikely people got anointed by God in the Bible. So Trump’s unlikeliness for this role is actually evidence in favor.
  • The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, “They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you.” The idea that he is unjustly suffering and, in so doing, vicariously absorbing the suffering that his followers would be enduring is a powerful way for Trump to be identified with Jesus.
  • Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of P.R.R.I. (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute), contends that Trump’s religious claims are an outright fraud:Trump has given us adequate evidence that he has little religious sensibility or theological acuity. He has scant knowledge of the Bible, he has said that he has never sought forgiveness for his sins, and he has no substantive connection to a church or denomination. He’s not only one of the least religious but also likely one of the most theologically ignorant presidents the country has ever had.
  • If people wanted to make him out to be savior, anointed one and agent of God, he would not object
  • Lacking any inner spiritual or moral compass that would seek to deflect overinflated or even idolatrous claims about himself, he instead reposted their artwork and videos and so on. Anyone truly serious about the Christian faith would deflect claims to being a savior or anointed one, but he did not have such brakes operating.
  • there are evangelicals of the charismatic and Pentecostal variety — the so-called New Apostolic Reformation or Independent Network Charismatics — who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God to rescue the United States from the atheistic, even demonic, secularists and progressives who want to destroy the country by advancing abortion, gay marriage, wokeness, transgenderism, etc.
  • “This whole movement,” Fea wrote,is rooted in prophecy. The prophets speak directly to God and receive direct messages from him about politics. They think that politics is a form of spiritual warfare and believe that God is using Donald Trump to help wage this war. (God can even use sinners to accomplish his will — there are a lot of biblical examples of this, they say.)
  • As far as Trump goes, Fea continued, “he probably thinks these charismatics and Pentecostals are crazy. But if they are going to tell him he is God’s anointed one, he will gladly accept the title and use it if it wins him votes. He will happily accept their prayers because it is politically expedient.”
  • The more interesting case, Gushee wrote,is Trump himself. I accept as given that he entered politics as the amoral, worldly, narcissistic New York businessman that he appeared to be. Like all G.O.P. politicians, he knew he would have to win over the conservative Christian voting bloc so central to the party.
  • Trump, Jones added in an email, “almost certainly lacks the kind of religious sensibility or theological framework necessary to personally grasp what it would even mean to be a Jesus-like, messianic figure.”
  • According to Jones, in order to rationalize this quasi-deification of Trump — despite “his crassness and vulgarity, divorces, mocking of disabled people, his overt racism and a determination by a court that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” — white evangelicals refer not to Jesus but the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible.”
  • Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterization of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse.
  • According to Jones, “White evangelicals’ stalwart, enduring support for Trump tells us much more about who they see themselves to be than who they think Trump is. As I argued in my most recent book, ‘The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,’” Jones continued in his email, “the primary force animating white evangelical Protestant politics — one that has been with us since before the founding of the Republic — is the vision of America as a nation primarily of, by and for white Christians.”
  • “a majority (56 percent) of white evangelical Protestants, compared to only one-third of all Americans, believed that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.’”
  • Jones argued that Trump’s declaration on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021 — “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — was a direct appeal “to this sense of divine entitlement of those who believed this mythology strongly enough to engage in a violent insurrection.”
  • “White evangelicals,” Guth found, “are invariably the most populist: more likely to favor strong leadership (even when that means breaking the rules), to distrust government, to see the country on the wrong track and to think that the majority should always rule (and minorities adapt).”
  • Guth also found thatanother salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a “rough politics” score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of rotten apples and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and progressives tend to demur.
  • Guth wrote that his “findings help us understand what many have struggled to comprehend: How can white evangelical Protestants continue to provide strong support for President Donald Trump, whose personal values and behavior trample on the biblical and ethical standards professed by that community?”
  • The most common explanation, according to Guth,is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: As long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.
  • “The evidence here,” he wrote, “suggests a more problematic answer”:White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism and nativism, as well as his political style, with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.
  • The pervasive populism of white evangelical laity not only helps explain their support for President Trump but suggests powerful barriers to influence by cosmopolitan internationalist evangelical elites, who want to turn the community in a different direction. As hostile responses to efforts of antipopulist evangelicals like Michael Gerson, Russell Moore, David Platt and many others indicate, there is currently a very limited market for such alternative perspectives among the rank and file.
  • Nor does cosmopolitan or cooperative internationalism find much purchase among local evangelical clergy. Analysis of the 2017 Cooperative Clergy Survey shows that ministers from several evangelical denominations, especially the large Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God, exhibit exactly the same populist traits seen here in white evangelical laity, but in more pronounced form: strong Islamophobia, Christian nationalism, extreme moral traditionalism, opposition to trade pacts, militaristic attitudes, resistance to political compromise and climate change denial, among others.
  • In other words, conservative populism, with all its antidemocratic implications, has taken root in America. What we don’t know is for how long — or how much damage it will do.
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Opinion | Administrators Will Be the End of Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...american-life-bureaucracy.html bureaucracy administration populism culture history crisis
shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
  • . Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”
  • The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review
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  • 17 percent of G.D.P.
  • there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”
  • This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees
  • The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control
  • Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up
  • As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion
  • kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.
  • High school students design their lives to fit the metrics that college admissions officers require. And what traits are selective schools looking for? They’re looking for students who are willing to conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise.
  • t Stanford is apparently now tamed. I invite you to read Ginevra Davis’s essay “Stanford’s War on Social Life” in Palladium, which won a vaunted Sidney Award in 2022 and details how university administrators cracked down on student initiatives to make everything boring, supervised and safe.
  • Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.
  • the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives
  • The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.”
  • this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data
  • Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.
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Order and Calm Eased Evacuation from Burning Japan Airlines Jet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-airlines-fire.html discipline order panic airplane fire japan culture history
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • While a number of factors aided what many have called a miracle at Haneda Airport — a well trained crew of 12; a veteran pilot with 12,000 hours of flight experience; advanced aircraft design and materials — the relative absence of panic onboard during the emergency procedure perhaps helped the most.
  • “Even though I heard screams, mostly people were calm and didn’t stand up from their seats but kept sitting and waiting,” said Aruto Iwama, a passenger who gave a video interview to the newspaper The Guardian. “That’s why I think we were able to escape smoothly.”
  • Experts said that while crews are trained — and passenger jets are tested — for cabin evacuations within 90 seconds in an emergency landing, technical specifications on the 2-year-old Airbus A350-900 most likely gave those on the flight a bit more time to escape.
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  • Firewalls around the engines, nitrogen pumps in fuel tanks that help prevent immediate burning, and fire-resistant materials on seats and flooring most likely helped to keep the rising flames at bay, said Sonya A. Brown, a senior lecturer in aerospace design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
  • “Really, the Japan Airlines crew in this case performed extremely well,” Dr. Brown said. The fact that passengers did not stop to retrieve carry-on luggage or otherwise slow down the exit was “really critical,” she added.
  • Tadayuki Tsutsumi, an official at Japan Airlines, said the most important component of crew performance during an emergency was “panic control” and determining which exit doors were safe to use.
  • Former flight attendants described the rigorous training and drills that crew members undergo to prepare for emergencies. “When training for evacuation procedures, we repeatedly used smoke/fire simulation to make sure we could be mentally ready when situations like those occurred in reality,” Yoko Chang, a former cabin attendant and an instructor of aspiring crew members, wrote in an Instagram message.
  • Ms. Chang, who did not work for JAL, added that airlines require cabin crew members to pass evacuation exams every six months.
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Germany's Far-Right AfD Is Worse Than the Rest of Europe's Populists - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-europe-remigration-immigrants and germany far right europe
shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.
  • Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities
  • Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
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  • Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.
  • “They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”
  • Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.
  • this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.
  • The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.
  • The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.
  • While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.
  • they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”
  • She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)
  • The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union
  • Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”
  • “The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.
  • “By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”
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Opinion | How to Reboot Free Speech on Campus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tests-college-free-speech.html campus protest limits lessons culture policy
shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • In the course of those cases and confrontations, I’ve learned that the issue of campus protest is remarkably complex and that campus culture is at least as important as law and policy in setting the boundaries of debate.
  • There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission
  • Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms, but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?
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  • The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law
  • universities should protect the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.
  • That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities
  • Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.
  • Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space.
  • reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.
  • In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”
  • But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness
  • Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences.
  • Administrators and faculty members will often abandon any pretense of institutional neutralit
  • For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says, “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
  • In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.
  • But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline; three were expelled; and one was suspended.
  • The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”
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German living standards plummeted after Russia invaded Ukraine, say economists | German... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...invaded-ukraine-say-economists Germany economy 2023 ukraine war russia
shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The energy shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the biggest collapse in German living standards since the second world war and a downturn in economic output comparable to the 2008 financial crisis, a stark assessment has found.
  • real wages in the country slumped further in 2022 than in any year since 1950.
  • A failure to protect German industry from the energy price spike may turn the 2020s into “a lost decade for Germany” and further fuel the rise of the populist far-right Alternative für De
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  • “In an age of conflict, climate and geopolitical crisis the rise of the AfD is a wake-up call. The collapse in living standards experienced by Germans is unprecedented since world war two. While it is true that the factors that fuelled the rise of the AfD go beyond economics, it is also impossible to ignore how this unprecedented slump in German living went hand-in-hand with the rising popularity of the far right.”
  • Europe’s largest economy is still reeling from the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The International Monetary Fund forecast for German growth in 2024 and 2025 is that it will be lower than any comparable advanced economy save Argentina.
  • Weber and Krebs highlighted that two distinct surges in support for the AfD in the summers of 2022 and 2023 coincide with periods of uncertainty in the German government about how to address the impact of energy price shocks on living standards.
  • Once the damage to output caused by the Covid crisis is included, actual output at the end of 2023 was about 7% below the pre-crisis trend. Real wages were 10% below their pre-crisis trend in 2023.
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He Turned 55. Then He Started the World's Most Important Company. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hips-entrepreneurship-506fcbc4 entrepreneur chip company Taiwan
shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.
  • The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about
  • I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC. 
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  • “I could not have done it sooner,” he says. “I don’t think anybody could have done it sooner. Because I was the first one.” 
  • By the late 1960s, he was managing TI’s integrated-circuit division. Before long, he was running the entire semiconductor group. 
  • He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and would have stayed for his Ph.D. if he hadn’t failed the qualifying exam. Instead, he got his first job in semiconductors and moved to Texas Instruments in 1958
  • he came along as the integrated circuit was being invented, and his timing couldn’t have been any better, as Chang belonged to the first generation of semiconductor geeks. He developed a reputation as a tenacious manager who could wring every possible improvement out of production lines, which put his career on the fast track.
  • Chang grew up dreaming of being a writer—a novelist, maybe a journalist—and he planned to major in English literature at Harvard University. But after his freshman year, he decided that what he actually wanted was a good job
  • “They talk about life-work balance,” he says. “That’s a term I didn’t even know when I was their age. Work-life balance. When I was their age, if there was no work, there was no life.” 
  • These days, TSMC is investing $40 billion to build plants in Arizona, but the project has been stymied by delays, setbacks and labor shortages, and Chang told me that some of TSMC’s young employees in the U.S. have attitudes toward work that he struggles to understand. 
  • Chang says he wouldn’t have taken the risk of moving to Taiwan if he weren’t financially secure. In fact, he didn’t take that same risk the first time he could have.
  • “The closer the industry match,” they wrote, “the greater the success rate.” 
  • By then, Chang knew that he wasn’t long for Texas Instruments. But his stock options hadn’t vested, so he turned down the invitation to Taiwan. “I was not financially secure yet,” he says. “I was never after great wealth. I was only after financial security.” For this corporate executive in the middle of the 1980s, financial security equated to $200,000 a year. “After tax, of course,” he says. 
  • Chang’s situation had changed by the time Li called again three years later. He’d exercised a few million dollars of stock options and bought tax-exempt municipal bonds that paid enough for him to be financially secure by his living standards. Once he’d achieved that goal, he was ready to pursue another one. 
  • “There was no certainty at all that Taiwan would give me the chance to build a great semiconductor company, but the possibility existed, and it was the only possibility for me,” Chang says. “That’s why I went to Taiwan.” 
  • Not long ago, a team of economists investigated whether older entrepreneurs are more successful than younger ones. By scrutinizing Census Bureau records and freshly available Internal Revenue Service data, they were able to identify 2.7 million founders in the U.S. who started companies between 2007 and 2014. Then they looked at their ages.
  • The average age of those entrepreneurs at the founding of their companies was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, that number was 45. The economists also determined that 50-year-old founders were almost twice as likely to achieve major success as 30-year-old founders, while the founders with the lowest chance of success were the ones in their early 20s
  • “Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young,” they wrote in their 2020 paper.  
  • Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists throw money at talented young entrepreneurs in the hopes they will start the next trillion-dollar company. They have plentiful energy, insatiable ambition and the vision to peek around corners and see the future. What they don’t typically have are mortgages, family obligations and other adult responsibilities to distract them or diminish their appetite for risk. Chang himself says that younger people are more innovative when it comes to science and technical subjects. 
  • But in business, older is better. Entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s may not have the exuberance to believe they will change the world, but they have the experience to know how they actually can. Some need years of specialized training before they can start a company. In biotechnology, for example, founders are more likely to be college professors than college dropouts. Others require the lessons and connections they accumulate over the course of their careers. 
  • one more finding from their study of U.S. companies that helps explain the success of a chip maker in Taiwan. It was that prior employment in the area of their startups—both the general sector and specific industry—predicted “a vastly higher probability” of success.
  • Chang was such a workaholic that he made sales calls on his honeymoon and had no patience for those who didn’t share his drive
  • Morris Chang had 30 years of experience in his industry when he decided to uproot his life and move to another continent. He knew more about semiconductors than just about anyone on earth—and certainly more than anyone in Taiwan. As soon as he started his job at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chang was summoned to K.T. Li’s office and given a second job. “He felt I should start a semiconductor company in Taiwan,”
  • “I decided right away that this could not be the kind of great company that I wanted to build at either Texas Instruments or General Instrument,”
  • TI handled every part of chip production, but what worked in Texas would not translate to Taiwan. The only way that he could build a great company in his new home was to make a new sort of company altogether, one with a business model that would exploit the country’s strengths and mitigate its many weaknesses.
  • Chang determined that Taiwan had precisely one strength in the chip supply chain. The research firm that he was now running had been experimenting with semiconductors for the previous 10 years. When he studied that decade of data, Chang was pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s yields, the percentage of working chips on silicon wafers. They were almost twice as high in Taiwan as they were in the U.S., he said. 
  • “People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.” 
  • Taiwan’s government took a 48% stake, with the rest of the funding coming from the Dutch electronics giant Philips and Taiwan’s private sector, but Chang was the driving force behind the company. The insight to build TSMC around such an unconventional business model was born from his experience, contacts and expertise. He understood his industry deeply enough to disrupt it. 
  • “TSMC was a business-model innovation,” Chang says. “For innovations of that kind, I think people of a more advanced age are perhaps even more capable than people of a younger age.”
  • the personal philosophy that he’d developed over the course of his long career. “To be a partner to our customers,” he says. That founding principle from 1987 is the bedrock of the foundry business to this day, as TSMC says the key to its success has always been enabling the success of its customers.  
  • TSMC manufactures chips in iPhones, iPads and Mac computers for Apple, which manufactures a quarter of TSMC’s net revenue. Nvidia is often called a chip maker, which is curious, because it doesn’t make chips. TSMC does. 
  • Churning out identical copies of a single chip for an iPhone requires one TSMC fab to produce more than a quintillion transistors—that is, one million trillions—every few months. In a year, the entire semiconductor industry produces “more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history,” Miller writes. 
  • I asked how he thought about success when he moved to Taiwan. “The highest degree of success in 1985, according to me, was to build a great company. A lower degree of success was at least to do something that I liked to do and I wanted to do,” he says. “I happened to achieve the highest degree of success that I had in mind.” 
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The Friar Who Became the Vatican's Go-To Guy on A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...icial-intelligence-ethics.html AI vatican catholic expert italy culture policy
shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • , he told a crowd of ambassadors that “global governance is needed, otherwise the risk is social collapse.” He also talked up the Rome Call, a Vatican, Italian government, Silicon Valley and U.N. effort he helped organize.
  • The author of many books (“Homo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition”) and a fixture on international A.I. panels, Father Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregorian, the Harvard of Rome’s pontifical universities, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and a course called “The Fall of Babel: The Challenges of Digital, Social Networks and Artificial Intelligence.”
  • his job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective
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  • He is concerned that masters of the A.I. universes are developing systems that will expand chasms of inequality. He fears the transition to A.I. will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial jobs, or nothing, stripping people of dignity and unleashing floods of “despair.”
  • Father Benanti, who does not believe in the industry’s ability to self-regulate and thinks some rules of the road are required in a world where deep fakes and disinformation can erode democracy.
  • He shares his insights with Pope Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message on Jan. 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI to prevent a world devoid of human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms decide who is granted asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.
  • all the time he applies his perspective about what it means to be alive, and to be human, when machines seem more alive and human. “This is a spiritual question,” he said.
  • raises enormous questions about redistributing wealth in an A.I. dominant universe.
  • he pursued an engineering degree at Sapienza University in Rome. It wasn’t enough.“I started to feel that something was missing,” he said, explaining that his advancement as an engineering student erased the mystique machines held for him. “I simply broke the magic.”
  • He left Rome to study in Assisi, the home of St. Francis, and over the next decade, took his final vows as a friar, was ordained as a priest and defended his dissertation on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got his job at the Gregorian, and eventually as the Vatican’s IT ethics guy.
  • In 2017, Cardinal Ravasi organized an event at the Italian embassy to the Holy See where Father Benanti gave a talk on the ethics of A.I. Microsoft officials in attendance were impressed and asked to stay in touch. That same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to A.I. policy documents and the next year he successfully applied to sit on its commission for developing a national A.I. strategy.
  • Francis, he said, didn’t at first realize what Microsoft really did, but liked that Mr. Smith took out of his pocket one of the pope’s speeches on social media and showed the pontiff the concerns the business executive had highlighted and shared.
  • e said, arguing that as ancient Roman augurs turned to the flight of birds for direction, A.I., with its enormous grasp of our physical, emotional and preferential data, could be the new oracles, determining decisions, and replacing God with false idols.
  • “It’s something old that probably we think that we left behind,” the friar said, “but that is coming back.”
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For the Love of Justice - by Damon Linker - 0 views

damonlinker.substack.com/...for-the-love-of-justice justice protest suicide politics policy
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Thanks to social media, gaining widespread public attention for oneself and one’s favored causes has never been easier.
  • This has incentivized a lot of performative outrage that sometimes manifests itself in acts of protest, from environmental activists throwing soup on paintings in European museums to pro-Palestinian demonstrators halting traffic in major cities by sitting down en masse in the middle of roadways.
  • I don’t think they do much to advance the aims of the activists. In fact, I think they often backfire, generating ill-will among ordinary citizens inconvenienced by the protest. (As for the activists hoping to fight climate change by destroying works of art, I don’t even grasp what they think they’re doing with their lives.)
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  • there’s a deeper reason for my harsh judgment, which is that I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.
  • The love of justice can be noble, but it can also be incredibly destructive.
  • (This is hard to see if you conveniently associate such love exclusively with positions staked out by your ideological or partisan allies. In reality, the political ambitions of one’s opponents are often fueled by their own contrary convictions about justice and its demands.
  • My liberal commitments therefore make me maximally suspicious of most examples of “street politics,” especially forms of it in which the activists risk very little and primarily appear to be engaging in a spiritually fulfilling form of socializing with likeminded peers.
  • But Bushnell’s act of self-immolation belongs in a different category altogether—one distinct from just about every other form of protest,
  • Bushnell could have written an op-ed. He could have joined, organized, or led a march and delivered a speech. He could have built up a loud social-media presence and used it to accuse the United States of complicity in genocide and publicize the accusation. He could have leveraged his position in the Air Force to draw added attention to his dissent from Biden administration policy in the Middle East. He could even have embraced terrorism and sought to gain entry to the Israeli embassy with a weapon or explosive
  • But Bushnell didn’t do any of these things. Instead, a few hours before his act of protest, he posted the following message on Facebook:
  • Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
  • I will no longer be complicit in genocide…. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
  • And then, like a small number of other intensely committed individuals down through the decades, he doused himself in a flammable liquid and set himself ablaze, opting to sacrifice his own life in a public act of excruciating self-torture, without doing anything at all to harm anyone but himself, in order to draw attention to what he considered an ongoing, intolerable injustice.
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(3) Chartbook 285: Cal-Tex - How Bidenomics is shaping America's multi-speed energy tra... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 27 May 24 - No Cached
  • If the Texas solar boom, the biggest in the USA, has little to do with Bidenomics, are we exaggerating the impact of Bidenomics? Rather than the shiny new tax incentives is it more general factors such as the plunging cost of PVs driving the renewable surge in the USA. Or, if policy is indeed the key, are state-level measures in Texas making the difference? Or, is this unfair to the IRA? Are its main effects still to come? Will it pile-on a boom that is already underway?
  • What did I learn?
  • First, when we compare the US renewable energy trajectory with the global picture, there is little reason to believe that Bidenomics has, so far, produced an exceptional US trajectory.
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  • Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions
  • How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA?
  • The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.
  • The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.
  • all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.
  • The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”
  • The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA
  • At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters.
  • As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”
  • So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.
  • Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation
  • Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.
  • According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”
  • The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum.
  • Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy.
  • The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.
  • The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up
  • Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.
  • though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development,
  • If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.
  • the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system.
  • So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post).
  • What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance
  • The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.
  • Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.
  • This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves
  • And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.
  • Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact.
  • A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side.
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The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community - 0 views

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  • In our first post, Zach discussed Robert Putnam’s essential work on the decline of social capital and trust, which happened in part because new individualizing technologies (such as television) emerged and participation in local and communal activities waned. As communities weakened and trust eroded, so did the play-based childhood.
  • In the second post, we featured an essay by Seth Kaplan, author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins who studies fragile states. In it, he argued that to restore the play-based childhood, we must first rebuild strong in-person local communities
  • A web of overlapping, affect-laden associations and relationships that crisscross and reinforce each other;
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  • On one end is doubling down on technology
  • On the other end is to focus on strengthening the real-world human communities and neighborhoods we live in. Seth advocates for the latter and provides us with a roadmap to get there.
  • A prototypical community consists of most or all of the following:
  • We note that the first generation to move its social life onto social media platforms immediately became the loneliest generation on record. There is a spectrum of approaches that we as a society can take to address the crushing loneliness of Gen Z and Gen Alpha
  • A set of shared values, norms, and goals—a common culture that unifies and constrains;
  • A common identity, ideally based on a common history and narrative and recognition of mutual interdependence
  • Shared rituals that celebrate the group, its past, and future;
  • High levels of trust;
  • High levels of commitment, with limited options for (or high costs to) exit;
  • Recognition of and respect for common authority figures who guide the group’s decision-making;
  • More affluent children had many of their activities organized for them by their parents, putting them in a variety of highly structured functional groups with different kids rather than repeatedly playing freely with their neighbors.
  • A diverse range of skills and personalities that can contribute complementary things of value (e.g., money, time, expertise) to the group;
  • Role models who exhibit the cultural behaviors that the group should ideally replicate or at least aspire to;
  • Exhibiting a high degree of inclusiveness by actively seeking to encompass every member who shares the same identity or location;
  • Capacity to strongly encourage through moral suasion certain norms of conduct and, if necessary, sanction misconduct.
  • As we can see from this list, a community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices. In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom.
  • This explains why creating community in America today is so difficult—few want to compromise their ability to make choices.
  • This is especially true among those with the resources and/or capacity to relocate as soon as a better opportunity beckons—the very people whose leadership and role-modeling communities can ill afford to lose.
  • Why Kids Need Real-World Community
  • Much of a child’s learning and formation is absorbed from the environment rather than directly taught by adults; behavior is better shaped by modeling than by lecturing.
  • The institutions (e.g., schools, churches, and parents’ groups) and norms (e.g., regular family dinners, neighborhood play dates, and the expectation that adults will monitor streets) around us shape our kids' lives in ways we sometimes fail to consider because they are subtle
  • Keystone actors and institutions that bridge and bond different members together;
  • As I documented in a previous essay at After Babel, unsupervised, child-directed play was in decline long before kids had smartphones. Why? Because place-based institutions and the communities they support were in decline
  • This oversupervision or “coddling”—the subject of the 2018 book co-authored by Greg Lukianoff and Jon—made the attractions of smartphones and social media even more appealing.
  • Many praise the myriad benefits that smartphones and social media are said to bring; online connection can give a person a sense of “community,” we are told.  We can find new friends, discover just about any idea imaginable, network, and even date through our phones. We can video chat with hundreds of people simultaneously from far-flung locations. We can pursue learning largely untethered from any physical space. Based on all of this, it would be easy to assume that place doesn’t matter.
  • I disagree. Physical place actually matters far more than we realize, especially as our lives become ever more placeless.
  • As Jon writes in The Anxious Generation, only real-world (place-based) social relationships and interactions have the four features that have characterized human interactions for millions of years. Such interactions are embodied, they are  synchronous, they involve one-to-one or one-to-several communications, and they have a high bar for entry and exit.
  • The challenge today is that smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.
  • today, the term “community” is often used in ways that are aspirational and limitless (e.g., many online advertisements for new social networks)—quite different from the original meaning of the term.
  • Why? Perhaps fewer individuals have any experience of what community really means. Young people are marketed to and formed by the twin pursuits of convenience and choice while simultaneously being told that a person’s chief purpose is to express themselves (usually through consumption)
  • First, you can select a place to live based on its social wealth.
  • Community differs significantly from friendships, social networks, or what is experienced online. Whereas communities offer mutual support in times of good and bad and are bolstered by robust institutions and norms encouraging frequent, positive interactions, care and concern for one another, and ample opportunities to work together towards common goals, the alternatives typically fall short on these elements. 
  • they fall far short of actually producing community, which requires overlapping institutions and activities, things that are very hard to achieve if you don’t share a physical place with one another. 
  • online communities are also voluntary, with many being platforms built for expression or personal advancement. Few provide the diversity of personalities, experiences, income levels, and outlooks that were common in most neighborhoods a few decades ago
  • This vision of the good life is part of the next generation’s socialization. It feels “natural” to them, and yet it does little to prepare them for the demands and delights of membership in a community.   
  • If you are a parent and want to join or build a community to enmesh your kids in, what can you do? Here are a few ideas to get started.
  • Few provide the incentives to earn recognition through the force of character rather than a performative act about oneself. Few provide multifaceted psychological and practical support when needed for members who feel vulnerable or fall into practical difficulties. 
  • we visited, stayed overnight, met lots of people, and asked lots of questions. In the end, we chose the D.C. suburb where I live now—a warm, welcoming, and institutionally rich place.
  • Second, consider how you can befriend neighbors and other parents in your immediate vicinity
  • Try the 8 Front Door Challenge, which helps you plan and host a Get-Together with neighbors closest to you
  • Participate in organizations or activities in your neighborhood. Spend time in places where people congregate locally
  • Organize a block party or play street. Create a neighborly block. 
  • Third, leverage local institutions to build neighborhood community. Schools are best placed for this because of their direct ties to local families and kids, but libraries, local businesses, houses of worship, and any other entity with strong ties to your locale can play an important role
  • Working with the local library to organize activities in or geared towards your specific neighborhood would create an opportunity for residents to meet one another.
  • In general, it’s always easier if you find allies among your neighbors, build partnerships with existing institutions, and leverage the assets (cultural, environmental, educational, economic, etc.) you already have locally. Think incrementally, building momentum step by step rather than thinking there is a magic bullet.
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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.
  • And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.
  • Silicon Valley has already triggered tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on AI, and companies only want to spend more.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Their reasoning is straightforward: These companies have decided that the best way to make generative AI better is to build bigger AI models. And that is really, really expensive, requiring resources on the scale of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the data centers and related infrastructure that generative AI depends on
  • “If we’re going to justify a trillion or more dollars of investment, [AI] needs to solve complex problems and enable us to do things we haven’t been able to do before.” Today’s flagship AI models, he said, largely cannot.
  • Now a number of voices in the finance world are beginning to ask whether all of this investment can pay off. OpenAI, for its part, may lose up to $5 billion this year, almost 10 times more than what the company lost in 2022,
  • Over the past few weeks, analysts and investors at some of the world’s most influential financial institutions—including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, Moody’s, and Barclays—have issued reports that raise doubts about whether the enormous investments in generative AI will be profitable.
  • Dario Amodei, the CEO of the rival start-up Anthropic, has predicted that a single AI model (such as, say, GPT-6) could cost $100 billion to train by 2027. The global data-center buildup over the next few years could require trillions of dollars from tech companies, utilities, and other industries, according to a July report from Moody’s Ratings.
  • generative AI has already done extraordinary things, of course—advancing drug development, solving challenging math problems, generating stunning video clips. But exactly what uses of the technology can actually make money remains unclear
  • At present, AI is generally good at doing existing tasks—writing blog posts, coding, translating—faster and cheaper than humans can. But efficiency gains can provide only so much value, boosting the current economy but not creating a new one.
  • Right now, Silicon Valley might just functionally be replacing some jobs, such as customer service and form-processing work, with historically expensive software, which is not a recipe for widespread economic transformation.
  • McKinsey has estimated that generative AI could eventually add almost $8 trillion to the global economy every year
  • “Here, we can manufacture intelligence.”
  • Tony Kim, the head of technology investment at BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, told me he believes that AI will trigger one of the most significant technological upheavals ever. “Prior industrial revolutions were never about intelligence,”
  • this future is not guaranteed. Many of the productivity gains expected from AI could be both greatly overestimated and very premature, Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, has found
  • AI products’ key flaws, such as a tendency to invent false information, could make them unusable, or deployable only under strict human oversight, in certain settings—courts, hospitals, government agencies, schools
  • AI as a truly epoch-shifting technology, it may well be more akin to blockchain, a very expensive tool destined to fall short of promises to fundamentally transform society and the economy.
  • Researchers at Barclays recently calculated that tech companies are collectively paying for enough AI-computing infrastructure to eventually power 12,000 different ChatGPTs. Silicon Valley could very well produce a whole host of hit generative-AI products like ChatGPT, “but probably not 12,000 of them,
  • even if it did, there would be nowhere enough demand to use all those apps and actually turn a profit.
  • Some of the largest tech companies’ current spending on AI data centers will require roughly $600 billion of annual revenue to break even, of which they are currently about $500 billion short.
  • Tech proponents have responded to the criticism that the industry is spending too much, too fast, with something like religious dogma. “I don’t care” how much we spend, Altman has said. “I genuinely don’t.
  • the industry is asking the world to engage in something like a trillion-dollar tautology: AI’s world-transformative potential justifies spending any amount of resources, because its evangelists will spend any amount to make AI transform the world.
  • in the AI era in particular, a lack of clear evidence for a healthy return on investment may not even matter. Unlike the companies that went bust in the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, Big Tech can spend exorbitant sums of money and be largely fine
  • perhaps even more important in Silicon Valley than a messianic belief in AI is a terrible fear of missing out. “In the tech industry, what drives part of this is nobody wants to be left behind. Nobody wants to be seen as lagging,
  • Go all in on AI, the thinking goes, or someone else will. Their actions evince “a sense of desperation,” Cahn writes. “If you do not move now, you will never get another chance.” Enormous sums of money are likely to continue flowing into AI for the foreseeable future, driven by a mix of unshakable confidence and all-consuming fear.
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America's New Political War Pits Young Men Against Young Women - WSJ - 0 views

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  • The forces of American culture and politics are pushing men and women under age 30 into opposing camps, creating a new fault line in the electorate and adding an unexpected wild card into the 2024 presidential election. 
  • Voters under 30 have been a pillar of the Democratic coalition since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989. That pillar is showing cracks, with young men defecting from the party. Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and Trump for president after backing President Biden and Democratic lawmakers in 2020.
  • Women under 30 remain strongly behind Democrats for Congress and the White House. They are also far more likely to call themselves liberal than two decades ago.
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  • Young men backed Trump over Biden by 14 points in the merged Journal polls this year, a substantial swing from 2020. In that election, they supported Biden by 15 points, according to AP VoteCast, a voter survey. Young women in the Journal surveys backed Biden by 30 points and Democratic control of Congress by 34 points, essentially unchanged from 2020.
  • Women now make up a record 60% of college students and carry 66% of all student-loan debt, research shows.
  • The testosterone-fueled lineup, coming on the heels of Trump’s fist-pumping response to bullets flying past him, “positions Trump as an anti-hero that millions of young men—specifically, young, first-time voters—connect with and even aspire to,’’ said John Della Volpe, director of the Harvard Youth Poll. “It’s something they see everywhere they consume information, whether it’s in the gamer community, TikTok, Instagram.’’
  • “The American flag is in the background, and there’s blood on his face,” Mertz said, “I mean, it just looks pretty badass.”
  • The gender gap extends to opposing views of abortion, student-loan forgiveness and other issues affecting the lives of young adults.
  • Polling last week by the Journal found Harris leading Trump among young voters by about 10 percentage points, less support than Biden drew from the group in 2020. The sample size was too small to measure how voter preferences differ by gender among those under 30.
  • Some men say they have lost economic, cultural and political influence to women amid the focus on equity and diversity. Others expressed resentment over feminist and progressive attitudes on college campuses, in the entertainment industry and at many workplaces. 
  • In certain U.S. cities, young women are outpacing young men in median annual income and are more likely than young men to live apart from their parents. A larger share of women under 30 are reaching financial independence compared with young women in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center, while fewer young men are reaching that milestone compared with four decades ago.
  • The Democratic push for diversity is making them more likely to vote for Republicans, some men said. An April survey by the Pew Research Center found that 23% of men—and 33% of men who backed Trump—believed the advancement of women has come at their expense. 
  • Many young men feel abandoned by Democrats, saying Republican politicians are the ones making direct appeals to them, according to interviews with dozens of men under 30.
  • Biden successfully pressed for trillions of dollars in federal spending on infrastructure construction, semiconductor manufacturing and other sectors that traditionally employ men. Yet young men maintain an overwhelmingly negative view of him,
  • The shift toward Trump includes Black and Latino men. Young Black men had backed Biden over Trump by about 70 percentage points in 2020, and Latino men backed Biden by more than 40 points, according to AP VoteCast. 
  • Journal polls found support for Biden shrank this year before the president withdrew from the race, leaving him with a narrow lead, as small as in the single digits, among nonwhite men.
  • Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men.
  • Other men say they are drawn to the so-called manosphere, a loose collection of male influencers who espouse macho, “anti-woke” views. The hyper-masculinity of the right, many of them said, is at the core of its appeal, not policies or party politics.“Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline,” said Lester, who kickboxes in his spare time. 
  • Many young people said their political views hardened years before they could vote.“Even back in 2016, when I was a 12-year-old trying to make sense of my place in the world and one of the candidates for president was making crude remarks toward women about their body parts—even at that age I felt it wasn’t right,” Isabelle Ems, a 19-year-old rising junior at Pennsylvania State University, said of Trump.
  • Harrison Wells, 22, said Trump’s 2016 campaign initiated his shift to the political right. He recalled being confused by the apoplectic reaction from teachers and students to Trump’s victory. His high school canceled classes and held listening sessions with students.“People were crying, upset,” he said. “Everyone was hysterical.”The experience crystallized growing skepticism of his private Catholic high school outside Menlo Park, Calif., which organized lectures about the importance of access to abortion and contraceptives and celebrated transgender visibility. 
  • “I felt as though there was a narrative and certain school of thought that was being pushed on us aggressively,” said Wells. “That was what made me think and start learning more about politics.”
  • He led a chapter of a conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, at the University of Wisconsin and voted for Trump in 2020. He sides with the former president on the economy, taxes and immigration.
  • Journal polling found that young men are open to Trump policy proposals that young women reject. That includes Trump’s idea to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
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China Rules Solar Energy, but Its Industry at Home Is in Trouble - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Over the past 15 years, China has come to dominate the global market for solar energy. Nearly every solar panel on the planet is made by a Chinese company. Even the equipment to manufacture solar panels is made almost entirely in China. The country’s solar panel exports, measured by how much power they can produce, jumped another 10 percent in May over last year.
  • But China’s solar panel domestic industry is in upheaval.
  • Wholesale prices plummeted by almost half last year and have fallen another 25 percent this year. Chinese manufacturers are competing for customers by cutting prices far below their costs, and still keep building more factories.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Stock prices of its five biggest makers of panels and other equipment have halved in the past 12 months. Since late June, at least seven large Chinese manufacturers have warned that they will announce heavy losses for the first half of this year.
  • The turmoil in the solar energy sector amid enormous factory capacity and booming exports highlights how China’s industrial policymaking works. The government decided 15 years ago to put extensive support behind solar power, and then let the companies claw it out. Beijing has shown a high tolerance for letting firms stumble and even fail in large numbers.
  • Something similar is happening in the automotive sector. Annual car sales in China are around 25 million a year, more than any other country but barely half the country’s ability to make vehicles. So automakers in China are now following the solar industry’s lead in cutting prices sharply and ramping up exports.
  • China’s approach can lead to big financial losses for local governments, state investment funds and state-supported banks, all of which bankroll companies in favored industries.
  • Sunzone’s rivals, including Tongwei and Longi Green Energy Technology, gained formidable economies from large-scale production. They have plowed part of their extra revenue into developing solar panels that are increasingly efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.
  • The rise and fall of Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in south-central China, is a case study of how China’s policies work.
  • “It’s a very expensive development model, but it produces national champions quite reliably,” said David R. Hoffman, a senior adviser on China for the Conference Board, a global business group.
  • Despite the financial help, Sunzone’s factory now sits empty. A large “Sunzone” sign on the second floor rusts in the swampy heat of Changsha. The only person still working at the site on a recent afternoon, a security guard, said that manufacturing equipment was removed in January and the factory was set to be demolished and turned into office buildings.
  • Sunzone epitomizes how lavish lending from state-owned banks and generous local subsidies have produced manufacturing overcapacity. Solar companies cut costs and prices sharply to maintain market share. That led to a few low-cost survivors while many other competitors were driven out of business in China and around the world.
  • China’s banks, acting at Beijing’s direction, have lent so much money to the sector for factory construction that the country’s solar factory capacity is roughly double the entire world’s demand.
  • Started in 2008, the solar panel manufacturer benefited early on from practically every possible subsidy. It got 22 acres of prime downtown land in the heart of the city almost for free. One of China’s biggest state-owned banks arranged a loan at a low interest rate. The Hunan provincial government then agreed to pay most of the interest.
  • Many other factories, like Sunzone’s, quickly become obsolete.
  • “Enterprises continue to put advanced production capacity into operation to maintain competitiveness” said Zhang Jianhua, director of China’s National Energy Administration, at a news conference last month. “At the same time, the outdated production capacity is still extensive and needs to be gradually phased out.”
  • Compounding the problems facing China’s solar energy companies is the rapid disappearance of local subsidies. Local governments are running out of money as a housing crisis makes it hard for them to sell long-term leases on state land to real estate developers — previously their biggest source of cash.
  • Partly because of worries about Chinese subsidies, President Biden last month allowed steep tariffs that had expired to go back into force on solar products imported from Southeast Asia that use lots of Chinese components. And the Department of Commerce has begun trade cases against imported solar panels that could lead to further tariffs.
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What Gives Poor Kids a Shot at Better Lives? Economists Find an Unexpected Answer - WSJ - 0 views

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  • 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.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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. 
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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