Opinion | This Is the Actual Danger Posed by D.E.I. - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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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Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. - WSJ - 0 views
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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.
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Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.
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Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
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To Live Past 100, Mangia a Lot Less: Italian Expert's Ideas on Aging - The New York Times - 0 views
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Valter Longo, a nutrition-obsessed Italian Ph.D. student, wrestled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.
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“For studying aging, Italy is just incredible,
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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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Opinion | The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions - The New Yo... - 0 views
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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:
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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?
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“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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Opinion | Administrators Will Be the End of Us - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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. 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.”
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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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Order and Calm Eased Evacuation from Burning Japan Airlines Jet - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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“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.”
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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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Germany's Far-Right AfD Is Worse Than the Rest of Europe's Populists - 0 views
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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.
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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
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Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
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Opinion | How to Reboot Free Speech on Campus - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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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
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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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German living standards plummeted after Russia invaded Ukraine, say economists | German... - 0 views
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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.
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real wages in the country slumped further in 2022 than in any year since 1950.
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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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He Turned 55. Then He Started the World's Most Important Company. - WSJ - 0 views
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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.
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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
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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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The Friar Who Became the Vatican's Go-To Guy on A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views
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, 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.
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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.”
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his job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective
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For the Love of Justice - by Damon Linker - 0 views
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Thanks to social media, gaining widespread public attention for oneself and one’s favored causes has never been easier.
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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.
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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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(3) Chartbook 285: Cal-Tex - How Bidenomics is shaping America's multi-speed energy tra... - 0 views
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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?
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What did I learn?
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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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Europe Has a New Economic Engine: American Tourists - WSJ - 0 views
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the Mediterranean rush is turning Europe’s recent economic history on its head. In the 2010s, Germany and other manufacturing-heavy economies helped drag the continent out of its debt crisis thanks to strong exports of cars and capital goods, especially to China.
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Today, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal contribute between a quarter and half of the bloc’s annual growth.
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While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism
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AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: 'We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045' ... - 0 views
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American computer scientist and techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil is a long-serving authority on artificial intelligence (AI). His bestselling 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, sparked imaginations with sci-fi like predictions that computers would reach human-level intelligence by 2029 and that we would merge with computers and become superhuman around 2045, which he called “the Singularity”. Now, nearly 20 years on, Kurzweil, 76, has a sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer
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no longer seem so wacky.
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Your 2029 and 2045 projections haven’t changed…I have stayed consistent. So 2029, both for human-level intelligence and for artificial general intelligence (AGI) – which is a little bit different. Human-level intelligence generally means AI that has reached the ability of the most skilled humans in a particular domain and by 2029 that will be achieved in most respects. (There may be a few years of transition beyond 2029 where AI has not surpassed the top humans in a few key skills like writing Oscar-winning screenplays or generating deep new philosophical insights, though it will.) AGI means AI that can do everything that any human can do, but to a superior level. AGI sounds more difficult, but it’s coming at the same time.
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OpenAI Whistle-Blowers Describe Reckless and Secretive Culture - The New York Times - 0 views
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A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created.
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The group, which includes nine current and former OpenAI employees, has rallied in recent days around shared concerns that the company has not done enough to prevent its A.I. systems from becoming dangerous.
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The members say OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit research lab and burst into public view with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, is putting a priority on profits and growth as it tries to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., the industry term for a computer program capable of doing anything a human can.
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Opinion | MAGA Turns Against the Constitution - The New York Times - 0 views
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the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left.
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now, for parts of MAGA, the Constitution itself is part of the crisis. If it doesn’t permit Trump to take control, then it must be swept aside.
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Elements of this argument are now bubbling up across the reactionary, populist right
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