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Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin describes attempts to phone gunman during school massacre -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ayor-interview-school-shooting US politics
shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In an interview with The Washington Post, McLaughlin (R) said he rushed to Hillcrest Funeral Home about 15 minutes after “the first call” reporting that 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had crashed his pickup truck nearby. He found himself standing near an official he identified only as “the negotiator,” while frightened parents gathered outside the school and police waited well over an hour to storm the classroom.
  • He said he doesn’t believe the negotiator was aware there were children calling 911 and asking police to save them while the gunman was in the classroom. The mayor said he was not aware of those calls, nor did he hear shots fired from inside the school, across the street.
  • In the recent Texas primary for governor, he opted not to endorse the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, labeling him a “fraud” over his approach to the border and immigration. And he has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” multiple times to lambaste the Border Patrol’s release of migrants into the streets of Uvalde and lament that he cannot get a call back from the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.
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  • McLaughlin said he has not been in touch with Pete Arredondo, the embattled head of the Uvalde school district’s police department, who served as the incident commander during the shooting and has been criticized for not sending officers in sooner.Arredondo has not spoken publicly about the incident, telling CNN on Wednesday that he would do so after more time has passed and the victims of the massacre are buried.
  • During the interview on Wednesday, however, McLaughlin took a much more conciliatory tone, urging compromise between Republicans and Democrats to find a set of laws that “work for everyone.”
  • “Why should any of us be afraid of expanding background checks? There’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t have anything to hide,” said McLaughlin, who has also long pushed to build a psychiatric hospital in Uvalde.
  • Last week, Abbott said he was “misled” by law enforcement authorities about the series of events that took place.
  • “The briefing that the governor and the lieutenant governor and everybody else in that room [had] ... was given by the DPS, not local law enforcement,” McLaughlin said.“They’ve had three press conferences,” he added. “In all three press conferences, something has changed.”
  • In his letter to Patrick, who presides over the Senate, and House Speaker Dade Phelan (R), Abbott asked that both chambers form committees to explore five issues: school safety; mental health; social media; police training; and firearm safety.“As leaders, we must come together at this time to provide solutions to protect all Texans,” Abbott said in his letter.
  • Abbott also announced new instructions for the Texas School Safety Center, a research center focused on campus safety and security that is statutorily responsible for auditing schools for safety processes and establishing best practices.
  • According to a letter Abbott sent to education officials, the governor said the San Marcos-based safety center should start conducting “random intruder detection audits,” designed to find weaknesses in campus security systems.
  • McLaughlin said he could not imagine the school returning to normal operations.“I hope we tear it down to the ground,” he said. “I would never expect a teacher, a student, anyone to go walk back in that building.”
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What Oppenheimer really knew about an atomic bomb ending the world - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...oject-history-atomic-bomb-test world atom bomb end-of-the-world catastrophe physics quantum
shared by Javier E on 28 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • In a chilling, existential, bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question: Did Manhattan Project scientists think there was even a minute possibility that detonating the first atomic bomb on the remote plains of New Mexico could destroy the world?
  • physicists knew it wouldn’t, long before the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, about 210 miles south of the secret Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory.
  • “This thing has been blown out of proportion over the years,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The question on the scientists’ minds before the test, he said, “wasn’t, ‘Is it going to blow up the world?’ It was, ‘Is it going to work at all?’”
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  • In the movie, one scene has J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory, seeking to reassure his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves, on the eve of the test. Upon investigation, Oppenheimer tells him, physicists have concluded that the chances the test detonation will destroy the world are “near zero.” Realizing the news has alarmed, not reassured, the general, Oppenheimer asks, “What do you want from theory alone?”“Zero would be nice,” the general replies.
  • no physicists or historians interviewed for this story recalled coming across any mention of such a conversation between Oppenheimer and the general in the historical record.
  • Still, the discussions and calculations persisted long after the Trinity test. In 1946, three Manhattan project scientists, including Teller, who would later become known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, wrote a report concluding that the explosive force of the first atomic bomb wasn’t even close to what would be required to trigger a planet-destroying chain reaction in air. The report was not declassified until 1973.
  • At a conference in the summer of 1942, almost a full year before Los Alamos opened, physicist Edward Teller raised the possibility of atomic bombs igniting Earth’s oceans or atmosphere. According to Rhodes’s account, Hans Bethe, who headed the theoretical division at Los Alamos, “didn’t believe it from the first minute” but nonetheless performed the calculations convincing the other physicists that such a disaster was not a reasonable possibility.
  • “I don’t think any physicists seriously worried about it,” said John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology.
  • “Did the actual exchange happen at that moment? No, I don’t think so,” said Alex Wellerstein, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and author of the 2021 book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.”“But were there discussions like that? I believe so,” he added.
  • A 1979 study by scientists at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory examined the question of whether a nuclear explosion might trigger a runaway reaction in the atmosphere or oceans. In page after page of mathematical equations, the scientists described a complex set of factors that made atmospheric ignition effectively impossible.
  • As outlandish as the notion was to many scientists, the nuclear research organization CERN felt obliged to deal with the fear, noting on its website that “some theories suggest that the formation of tiny ‘quantum’ black holes may be possible. The observation of such an event would be thrilling in terms of our understanding of the Universe; and would be perfectly safe.”
  • Dudley’s essay also recounted a story that on the day of the test, “as zero hour approached” Gen. Groves was annoyed to find Manhattan Project physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi making bets with colleagues about whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, “and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico ― or the entire world.” (Some experts have suggested Fermi’s actions may have been more of a joke, or an example of gallows humor.)
  • Fascination with this doomsday scenario may stem, at least in part, from a misunderstanding of what physicists mean when they say “near zero.” The branch of physics known as quantum mechanics, which deals with matter and light at the atomic and subatomic scale, does not rule out any possibilities.
  • For example, if a boy tosses a rubber ball at a brick wall, there is an exceedingly remote — but still valid — possibility that instead of watching the ball bounce back, he could see it pass through the wall.
  • Aditi Verma, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan, put it this way: “What a physicist means by ‘near zero’ would be zero to an engineer.”
  • In the 2000s, scientists encountered a similar problem of terminology as they prepared to generate high-speed particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Talk surfaced that the activity might generate a black hole that would devour Earth.
  • Probably the easiest to grasp is the fact that, even under the harshest scenarios, far more energy would be lost in the explosion than gained, wiping out any chance to sustain a chain reaction.
  • In other words, any black hole created by the collider would be far too small to pose any risk to the planet.Scientists say such disaster scenarios are sometimes the price of crossing new thresholds of discovery.
  • “You don’t often talk in certainties,” he said. “You talk in probabilities. If you haven’t done the experiment, you are hesitant to say ‘This is impossible. It will never happen.’ … It was good to think it through.”
  • Rhodes added that he hopes the “Oppenheimer” movie will not lead people to doubt the scientists on the Manhattan Project.“They knew what they were doing,” he said. “They were not feeling around in the dark.”
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GOP senator: Trump did not make 's---hole' comment | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...-did-not-make-shithole-comment Trump US culture
shared by malonema1 on 14 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • I’m telling you he did not use that word, George. And I’m telling you it’s a gross misrepresentation. How many times do you want me to say that?” Perdue said after host George Stephanopoulos pressed him for an answer.Perdue was one of several lawmakers participating in a meeting with Trump last week when the president reportedly referred to immigrants from African nations, El Salvador and Haiti as coming from "shithole countries."
  • Trump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownTrump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownPlay VideoPlayMute0:00/0:43Loaded: 0%0:00Progress: 0%Stream TypeLIVE-0:43 SharePlayback Rate1xChaptersChaptersDescriptionsdescriptions off, selectedCaptions
  • "Following comments by the President, I said my piece directly to him yesterday. The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel. I've always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals," Graham said. 
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CNN's Leana Wen: 'Public health is now under attack in a way that it has not been befor... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-a452-4da5fe48582d_story.html public health crisis policy politics Culture pandemic
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • You write movingly in your book about your family relying on the social safety net, about difficult things you saw as a child — and how those influences shaped your path.We came to the U.S. with $40. My parents were both professionals in China who had difficulty finding employment here. They worked multiple jobs, but we still really struggled
  • We went through substantial periods of being dependent on some type of government service, whether food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, children’s health insurance. And I had an acute awareness as a child of what happens when people go without access to health care. I also had an acute awareness that people’s lives were not valued the same.
  • Do you remember when that understanding hit you?I saw a neighbor’s child die in front of me as a child. And watching someone die from an illness that I knew was preventable — because I had asthma — left an imprint on me. And he died not because of lack of medical care, but because his family — his grandmother — was too afraid for what would happen to their family, that they could be deported, if they called for help. And so that’s what motivated me to go into medicine. I felt very strongly about caring for the most vulnerable, who otherwise would have nowhere else to go for their care.
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  • It’s the height of American exceptionalism that we are where we are. I have family in other parts of the world where health-care workers and vulnerable elderly people are begging to get the vaccine. And here, we’re sitting on stockpiles and begging people to take the vaccine.
  • Do you think verification and mandates could work in the U.S. with our notions of freedom, individual liberty?
  • I think we need to reframe freedom here, right? I don’t agree with the statement that some people have been putting out about vaccines, that this is just about personal choice. You can say that maybe eating unhealthy food is your personal choice. But in this case, nobody should have the right to carry an infectious disease that is able to endanger others and potentially kill them. I mean, I’ve got two little kids. I’m very upset thinking about how there are other people who are choosing not to be vaccinated. And as a result, they are choosing to endanger our children. I’m sure they’re not trying to do this intentionally, but that is the end result.
  • I hope that people see that by not being vaccinated, they’re actually impeding societal progress too. They’re making it harder for kids to get back in school. They’re making it harder for the economy to come back. And why are we allowed to make that kind of personal choice when we do not allow people to make the personal choice to go drunk driving?
  • How much do you worry about hesitancy, not just around the vaccine, but mistrust of science and mistrust of public health even?
  • I worry about this a lot. You’ve seen what happened in Tennessee with the vaccine director being fired for trying to promote covid vaccines to adolescents. And even more disturbing, I think is that now, Tennessee health officials are being prohibited from promoting vaccines to children. Not just covid vaccines, but all other childhood immunizations. I mean, public health is now under attack in a way that it has not been before.
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Covid hospital bills arrive for patients as insurers restore deductibles and copays - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tal-bills-insurance-deductible hospital costs Covid-19 health care insurance
shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Nationally, covid hospitalizations under insurance contracts on average cost $29,000, or $156,000 for a patient with oxygen levels so low that they require a ventilator and ICU treatment,
  • The calculus in place in 2020 changed with the advent of vaccines, which now makes most hospitalizations preventable,
  • Hospitals along the Connecticut River, the border between Vermont and New Hampshire, draw patients from both states. Vermont health plans are waiving deductibles and co-pays into 2022. In New Hampshire, where Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has a dominant presence, insurance companies have reinstated cost-sharing.
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  • Marvin Mallek, a doctor who treats covid patients from both sides of the river at Springfield Hospital in Vermont, said New Hampshire covid patients are now facing business as usual from insurers, suffering the same sort of financial stress that routinely affects patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious ailments.
  • “The inhumanity of our health-care system and the tragedies it creates will now resume and will now cover this one group that was exempted,'' he said. “The U.S. health-care system is sort of like a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs, and some people are going to get hurt and devastated financially.”
  • Hospitals also are in the position of having to resume billings and collections for individuals who may have been laid off because of the pandemic or been too sick to work, experts said.
  • “These waivers ended in January as we all had gained a better understanding of the virus, and people and communities became more familiar with best practices and protocols for limiting COVID-19 exposure and spread,” the company said in a statement. “Also, at this time vaccines, which are proven to be the safest and most effective way to protect oneself from COVID-19, were starting to become readily available.”Anthem took in $4.6 billion in profits in 2020, compared to $4.8 billion in 2019.
  • The reintroduction of cost-sharing mainly affects people with private or employer-based insurance. Patients with no insurance can have 100 percent of their expenses covered by the federal government, under a special program set up by the government for the pandemic, with hospitals reimbursed for care at Medicare rates.
  • Covid patients with Medicaid, the government plan for lower-income people that is paid for by states and the federal government, continue to be protected from cost-sharing, insurance specialists said
  • Patients on Medicare, the federal plan for the elderly, could face out-of-pocket costs if they do not have supplemental insurance.
  • Last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 88 percent of people covered by private insurance had their co-pays and deductibles for covid treatment waived. By August 2021, only 28 percent of the two largest plans in each state and D.C. still had the waivers in place, and another 10 percent planned to phase them out by the end of October,
  • general, a person with Azar’s type of plan would have an in-network deductible of $1,500 and an in-network out-of-pocket maximum of $4,000,
  • “We still don’t know where the numbers will land because the system makes the family wait for the bills,” s
  • Bills related to her stay at the out-of-network rehab hospital in Tennessee could climb as high as $10,000 more, her relatives have estimated, but they acknowledged they were uncertain this month what exactly to expect, even after asking UnitedHealthcare and the providers.
  • In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available.
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Biden says he heard late about baby formula shortage - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...biden-formula-heard-late baby formula US
shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Biden’s comments came after he met with executives of companies that manufacture infant formula, who told the president they knew the shortage would be severe in February after the closure of an Abbott plant in Michigan. Biden suggested he was not informed until April.
  • The disconnect between the industry’s alertness to the looming crisis and the administration’s lack of awareness was hinted at during the panel discussion itself. Biden asked one panelist directly if his company had been surprised by the “profound effect immediately” of the Abbott closure.“No, sir, we were aware of the general impact that this would have,” said Robert Cleveland, a senior vice president at Reckitt. “From the moment that that recall was announced, we reached out immediately to retail partners like Target and Walmart to tell them this is what we think will happen.”
  • “We have been doing this whole-of-government approach since the recall,” she said at the White House daily press briefing after Biden met with the executives. “We have been working on this for months, for months. We have been taking this incredibly seriously.”When pressed why Biden himself said he was unaware of the “whole-of-government approach,” Jean-Pierre said that Biden “has multiple issues, crises at the moment” and that administration officials often respond to problems before the president is aware.
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  • In recent weeks, Biden has scrambled to show he is on top of the matter. He invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up domestic production of baby formula, and his administration has airlifted supplies from foreign countries to try to address the mushrooming crisis. But the declaration by industry leaders that the scope of the problem was immediately clear to them in February raises questions of why the president was slow to learn of the issue.
  • “Seeing the empty shelves is unacceptable,” she said. “Seeing what families are going through is unacceptable. This is why we have been working 24-7 to make sure that we are using every lever at our disposal to deliver for the American people.”
  • Officials said United Airlines had agreed to transport Kendamil formula for free from Heathrow Airport in London to multiple airports across the United States over a three-week period. The formula will be distributed and available for purchase at selected U.S. retailers nationwide as well as online, the White House said.All told, about 3.7 million 8-ounce bottle equivalents of Kendamil infant formula will be delivered, it said.
  • Still, despite the all-hands-on-deck approach to replenishing the American supply, store shelves continue to be emptier: Data firm IRI reported Tuesday that the nationwide in-stock inventory figure was 76 percent for the week ending May 22, down from 79 percent the week before.
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Robust Hiring in December Caps Solid Year for U.S. Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-unemployment-december.html caps new york times economics
shared by johnsonma23 on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Robust Hiring in December Caps Solid Year for U.S. Jobs
  • In an impressive sprint at 2015’s end, employers added 292,000 workers to their payrolls in December
  • The unemployment rate stayed at 5 percent last month, the Labor Department said, but that was mostly because large numbers of people went looking for work.
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  • adding 50,000 more jobs to last year’s total
  • economy added 2.65 million jobs for the year, capping a two-year gain that was the best since the late 1990s.
  • The jobless rate, which has declined since topping the 10 percent mark in October 2009, continues to hover just above what economists consider full employment
  • Despite the improving job market, sluggish wage growth remains a persistent thorn
  • Wages remained flat in December
  • biggest question is whether overall growth will remain strong enough to keep hiring steady, or whether turmoil in China and elsewhere in the global economy will weigh on the United States economy
  • ertainly see the impact of global conditions in the manufacturing sector, where the strong dollar and weak commodities prices have diminished momentum substantially,”
  • “The remarkable thing is how consistent employment growth has been over the past three or four years
  • We’re getting at least 200,000 jobs per month on a consistent basis. That’s quite an achievement.”
  • The country’s economic fortunes will figure largely in this year’s presidential campaign
  • Republican candidates have attacked President Obama and other Democrats’ economic policie
  • Cautious optimism about the labor market contributed to the Federal Reserve’s decision a few weeks ago to raise interest rates from their near-zero levels
  • Mr. Chamberlain said worker benefits like paid parental leave and free catered lunches had significantly outpaced wage increases over the past decade.
  • The pain of a disappointing paycheck has been blunted by the continued decline in oil prices, which has lowered the cost of heating a home or filling up a car.
  • in addition to fundamental shifts in the economy, continuing slack in the labor market is partly responsible for the lack of improvement on wages
  • Employment in nonroutine occupations — both cognitive and manual — has been increasing steadily for several decades,
  • end of last year were the balmy temperatures in the Northeast and elsewhere. That clearly hurt retailers like Macy’s, which announced this week it was laying off 4,500 employees, largely because of a sharp decline in sales of coats and other winter wear,
  • The job hunting outlook varies significantly depending on the region of the country.
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The Birth of 'Illegal' Immigration - History in the Headlines - 0 views

www.history.com/...e-birth-of-illegal-immigration immigration history culture crisis economic
shared by g-dragon on 09 Sep 17 - No Cached
    • g-dragon
      g-dragon on 09 Sep 17
       
      Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 ~ banned almost all immigration from China Asiatic Barred Zone Act ~ banned most immigration from Asia and prostitutes, polygamists, anarchists, and people with contagious diseases 1924 Immigration Act ~ banned all people who could not become a citizen from a previous Act that said only free white people could become citizens + introduced numerical caps by country 1960 Law ~ the U.S. can not issue more than 7% of its visas to one country
  • Chinese become the only group required to carry around certificates of residence, which are intended to show—to document—that they have in fact entered legally
  • before you can immigrate somewhere illegally, there has to be a law for you to break
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  • Europeans had entered as settlers—which is something totally different. While immigrants are beholden to the laws of the land they migrate to, settlers come to disrupt the current system and implement their own laws
  • there were no federal laws governing who could enter and who couldn’t until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
  • white Americans blamed them for low wages and other economic problems. To placate economic and racial anxieties, the radical exclusion act banned almost all immigration from China
  • the Immigration Act passed that same year banned people who were poor, mentally ill, or convicted of crimes from entering the country.
  • DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a policy to give people who came to the U.S. as undocumented children a legal avenue to stay
  • Until the late 19th century, there wasn’t any such thing as “illegal” or “legal” immigration to the United States.
  • 1924 Immigration Act, which banned all people who could not become naturalized citizens per the 1790 Naturalization Act. That naturalization law had originally said that only free white people could become naturalized citizens
  • previously excluded groups like Mexicans, black Americans, and Native Americans had won citizenship rights, and the law really only applied to Asians.
  • introducing numerical caps or quotas based on country of origin. These quotas gave enormous preference to people from northern and western Europe over those from southern and eastern parts of the continent
  • people
  • the Asiatic Barred Zone Act banned most immigration from Asia, as well as immigration by prostitutes, polygamists, anarchists, and people with contagious diseases
  • 1960s,
  • when a new law established a new system. Each year, there is a cap on the total number of visas that the U.S. can issue. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the U.S. cannot issue more than seven percent of the total allowable visas to one nation.
  • Before this change in 1965, there had been no numeric caps on immigration within the Americas.
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The inside story of how Pennsylvania failed to deliver millions in coronavirus rent relief - 0 views

www.inquirer.com/...enants-landlords-20210215.html
shared by lmunch on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • As a result, Pennsylvania tenants in dire need of assistance, some of whom had been living day to day in fear of losing their homes, missed out on roughly $96 million of $150 million in federal coronavirus relief.
  • unemployment spiked to 16.1 percent in April.
  • In May, the state legislature approved a spending package that included $150 million for rent relief from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, as well as $25 million to help homeowners who had fallen behind on their mortgage payments
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  • They put a $750 monthly cap on the assistance each family could receive. In parts of Pennsylvania, that’s less than the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment. Assistance through the mortgage program was capped at $1,000 a month.
  • In addition, landlords who accepted the assistance payments had to agree to treat $750 as full payment of rent, regardless of the actual amount owed. Many balked. And tenants couldn’t receive the aid unless their landlords agreed to take part.
  • Some weren’t eligible because they weren’t yet behind on rent, or had landlords who wouldn’t participate. Others couldn’t produce the right paperwork. Many applications arrived incomplete, requiring hours of follow-up by local agencies.
  • To qualify, tenants couldn’t earn more than the median income in their county. They also needed to have filed for unemployment since March 1, 2020, or have lost at least 30% of their income. Both presented difficulties. To prove a loss of income, applicants needed paperwork to show their current income, as well as their income from before the pandemic — pay stubs from January or February, for instance.
  • A reform bill introduced by Democrats had been referred to the committee. But, despite pleas from officials and advocates for both landlords and tenants, Senate Republicans did not act on it.
  • A bill that would have made more sweeping changes to the program — replacing the $750 cap with a more flexible standard and allowing applicants who couldn’t document their loss of income to sign a certification form, instead — passed the state House unanimously later in October. But Republican leaders in the Senate did not bring it up for a vote, saying Wolf’s changes were enough
  • While federal law allows state and local governments to spend up to 10% of their allocation on the cost of running their programs, Pennsylvania limits those expenses to 5%. That number was a compromise after Senate Republicans initially proposed a 2% cap that local officials said would be untenable.
  • And this time, if Pennsylvania cannot spend the new funding quickly enough, the state could lose some of it to other states. Federal law says that, starting Sep. 30, the U.S. Treasury can redistribute unused money to state and local governments that have already spent at least 65% of their allocation.
  • Bryce Maretzki was in charge of a $150 million effort to keep Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable tenants in their homes.
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You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/ion-to-be-a-smartphone-skeptic smartphone weaponisation tech psychology manipulation internet social media education
shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?
  • Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave
  • complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.
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  • No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why.
  • we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.
  • These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile
  • The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away.
  • they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.
  • Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world.
  • The expectation that children and adolescents will navigate new technologies with fully formed and muscular capacities for reason and responsibility often seems to go along with a larger abdication of responsibility on the part of the adults involved.
  • It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you.
  • It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.
  • The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.
  • the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well—that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers
  • these are unreasonable things to demand of me, a fully adult woman
  • To enjoy the conveniences that a smartphone offers, I must struggle against the lure of the permanent scroll, the notification, the urge to fix my eyes on the circle of light and keep them fixed. I must resist the default pseudo-activity the smartphone always calls its user back to, if I want to have any hope of filling the moments of my day with the real activity I believe is actually valuable.
  • for a child or teen still learning the rudiments of self-control, still learning what is valuable and fulfilling, still learning how to prioritize what is good over the impulse of the moment, it is an absurd bar to be asked to clear
  • One camp says yes, the kids are fine
  • adults have frequently given in to a Faustian temptation: offering up their children’s generation to be used as guinea pigs in a mass longitudinal study in exchange for a bit more room to breathe in their own undeniably difficult roles as educators, caretakers, and parents.
  • One reason commonly offered for maintaining our socio-technological status quo is that nothing really has changed with the advent of the internet, of Instagram, of Tiktok and Youtube and 4Chan
  • But the environments in which humans find themselves vary significantly, and in ways that have equally significant downstream effects on the particular expression of human nature in that context.
  • The pre-internet advertising world was vicious, to be sure, but when the “pre-” came off, its vices were moved into a compound interest account. In the world of online advertising, at any moment, in any place, a user engaged in an infinite scroll might be presented with native content about how one Instagram model learned to accept her chunky (size 4) thighs, while in the next clip, another model relates how a local dermatologist saved her from becoming an unlovable crone at the age of 25
  • developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now
  • You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content—the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.
  • And when interpersonal relations between teens become sour, nasty, or abusive, as they often do and always have, the unbalancing effects of transposing social life to the internet become quite clear
  • No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity.
  • This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone; but I especially think it hurts those young enough to receive it as a natural state of affairs rather than as a profound innovation.
  • so I am baffled by the most routine objection to any blaming of smartphones for our society-wide implosion of teenagers’ mental health,
  • In short, and inevitably, today’s teenagers are suffering from capitalism—specifically “late capitalism,
  • what shocks me about this rhetorical approach is the rush to play defense for Apple and its peers, the impulse to wield the abstract concept of capitalism as a shield for actually existing, extremely powerful, demonstrably ruthless capitalist actors.
  • This motley alliance of left-coded theory about the evils of business and right-coded praxis in defense of a particular evil business can be explained, I think, by a deeper desire than overthrowing capitalism. It is the desire not to be a prude or hysteric of bumpkin
  • For both young men and young women, the pornographic scenario—dominance and degradation, exposure and monetization—creates an experiential framework for desires that they are barely experienced enough to understand.
  • No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday.
  • But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us
  • To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain.
  • The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life?
  • this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.
  • I am not sure how to build a world in which childrens and adolescents, at least, do not feel they need to live their whole lives online.
  • whatever particular solutions emerge from our negotiations with each other and our reckonings with the force of cultural momentum, they will remain unavailable until we give ourselves permission to set the terms of our common life.
  • And this we must do without waiting for social science to hand us a comprehensive mandate it is fundamentally unable to provide; without cowering in panic over moral panics
  • most of all, without affording Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk the defensive allegiance we should reserve for each other.
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Opinion | What do we do when air conditioning is a matter of life and death? - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ning-global-warming-life-death air conditioning culture history
shared by Javier E on 06 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, extreme heat caused more than 3,000 deaths between 2018 and 2020. And no, it’s not just your imagination: The number of extremely hot days is rising.
  • Which means that air conditioning is no longer a symbol of the good life. It’s now a matter of life and death.
  • What turned air conditioning into a necessity? Well, in part, air conditioning did. Carrier’s brilliant invention made it possible for Americans to live in places where it’s too hot to live without it.
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  • Phoenix, our hottest city, endured 53 days above 110 degrees and suffered more than 300 heat-related deaths in 2020. But Phoenix exists as a major American city only because the popularization of air conditioning after World War II spurred a population explosion there — from fewer than 250,000 in 1950 to more than 4.5 million in 2022
  • We have to treat air conditioning like the necessity it’s become, making sure that everyone who needs it has access to it.
  • A few years ago, the federal Energy Star program recommended setting home thermostats to 78 degrees, a recommendation that was not well received. The consensus seemed to be that a warmer house wasn’t worth the savings on energy costs. But what if we thought of a little extra sweat as saving the planet — and ourselves — from the cost of energy?
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Accused document leaker Jack Teixeira fixated on guns and envisioned 'race war' - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...xeira-discord-leaked-documents terrorist US leak discord guns racism
shared by Javier E on 14 May 23 - No Cached
  • “Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump.”Teixeira raised his weapon, aimed at an unseen target and fired 10 times in rapid succession, emptying the magazine of bullets.
  • Previously unpublished videos and chat logs reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with several of Teixeira’s close friends, suggest that he was readying for what he imagined would be a violent struggle against a legion of perceived adversaries — including Blacks, political liberals, Jews, gay and transgender people — who would make life intolerable for the kind of person Teixeira professed to be: an Orthodox Christian, politically conservative and ready to defend, if not the government of the United States, a set of ideals on which he imagined it was founded.
  • For Teixeira, firearms practice seemed to be more than a hobby. “He used the term ‘race war’ quite a few times,” said a close friend who spent time with Teixeira in an online community on Discord, a platform popular with video game players, and had lengthy private phone and video calls with him over the course of several years.“He did call himself racist, multiple times,” the friend said in an interview. “I would say he was proud of it.”
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  • In the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Teixeira told friends that he saw a storm gathering. “He was afraid they would target White people,” his friend said. “He had told me quite a few times he thought they need to be prepared for a revolution.” The friend said Teixeira spoke approvingly of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who shot three people, two fatally, during protests that summer in Kenosha, Wis., claiming that he had acted in self-defense
  • Teixeira wanted his online companions, many of them teenage boys, to “be prepared for things the government might do, reinforcing to them that the government was lying to them,”
  • Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.
  • Already united by their love of guns and their Orthodox Christian faith, two members of Thug Shaker Central said their nascent political beliefs became hardened and more polarized during the isolation of the pandemic. Unable to see their local friends in person, the young members spent their entire days in front of screens and came under the influence of outsize online figures like Teixeira. Some on the server saw him as an older brother — others, friends said, like a father figure.
  • In interviews, some of the members struggled to explain worldviews that had developed largely online, and expressed remorse. Several admitted they had become radicalized during the pandemic and were influenced by Teixeira, whose own politics seemed animated by social grievances and an obsession with guns.
  • The members may have sensed they were treading into dangerous political waters, even before leaked classified documents started circulating. During video chats, some hid their faces behind masks, fearful of being publicly identified with a group of self-professed bigots, Teixeira’s close friend said.
  • The interest in video games and conservative politics was accompanied by an acute obsession with violence, the friend said. “He would send me a video of someone getting killed, ISIS executions, mass shootings, war videos. People would screen-share it, and he would laugh very loudly and be very happy to watch these things with everyone else. He absolutely enjoyed gore.”
  • After he enlisted in the U.S. Air National Guard in September 2019, Teixeira also feared that his own racist and violent statements would jeopardize his chances of getting a security clearance. “He was worried something from Discord would come up during his interview,” said the friend, who met him when the application was still pending. Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, the friend added, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.
  • But Teixeira already had an offline record that arguably should have raised concerns for the officials who approved his security clearance. In March 2018, Teixeira was suspended from his high school “when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to a Justice Department filing last month that argued Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged leaks.
  • Teixeira’s close friend, who knew him after he had graduated high school, said he had confessed to wanting to take a gun to school and carry out a shooting.
  • “He had told me multiple times about when he was younger, his desire to shoot up his school,” the friend said. “He hated his school.”
  • “To my knowledge, he never hurt anyone physically, but he absolutely talked about it pretty often,” the friend added. Other friends confirmed Teixeira talked about attacking his school, but they said they didn’t take his threats seriously.
  • The YouTuber added that Discord deleted the civil-discussion channel on April 24 after “multiple members” received notices from the company.
  • Teixeira’s gaming and political cultures overlapped, the friend observed. “Once you start getting into the more niche video games, a lot of those communities are much more conservative. I think he found a small place where his views got echoed back to him and made them worse.”
  • The Post obtained previously unpublished screenshots from the server and recordings of members playing games together. Racist and antisemitic language flowed through the community, as did hostility for gay and transgender people, whom Teixeira deemed “degenerate.” The line between sarcasm and genuine belief became increasingly blurred. On video calls, users held up a finger, jokingly imitating members of ISIS. In their rooms were flags associated with Christian nationalism and white power.
  • Friends may not have taken seriously Teixeira’s threats against his high school. But he voiced approval of some shooters, particularly when they targeted people of different races and faiths. Teixeira was especially impressed by a gunman’s rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and 4o injured. “He was very happy that those people died,” the friend said, because they were Muslim. The shooter live-streamed his massacre as though he were in a video game.
  • “He was very against gun control. And so he would talk about wanting to kill ATF agents or when ATF agents would show up to his house, like theoretically preparing your house so that they would die in some strange trap.”
  • In arguing that Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges, federal prosecutors pointed to his threats of violence in high school. But among online communities whose members hold “more extremist conservative views,” the friend said, “it’s really common to joke about killing government agents like that, so it never seemed worrying to me.”
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U.K. Energy Price Cap to Rise 80%, Regulator Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uk-energy-price-cap.html energy costs response uk europe policy politics
shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • with leaders from London to Berlin mounting costly state interventions, it augurs a reversal of decades of liberalization in energy markets.
  • France has capped gas and electricity rates, subsidized the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel and spent 45 billion euros ($45 billion) to help hard-hit families.
  • Germany has moved to take command of its energy markets, subsidizing new liquefied gas import terminals and bailing out one of the largest utilities, Uniper,
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  • In Britain, where gas accounts for roughly 40 percent of electricity generation but has a disproportionate effect on its cost
  • if the price of beer had risen as much that of natural gas over the last year, a pint in a pub would cost £25, or about $30.
  • “How can you adapt to a rise like this?” said Tewdos Gebreysus, a 35-year-old Uber driver in London, who said he was now paying four times as much on his energy bills as he was at the beginning of the year.
  • Johnson has left it for his successor to devise a response to the skyrocketing energy costs.
  • She and her opponent, Rishi Sunak, reject more sweeping measures, like using state subsidies to freeze the energy price cap for two years.
  • at a campaign gathering with Mr. Sunak on Thursday, she said the solution to the crisis was not to throw more money carelessly at consumers. Mr. Sunak, who has proposed cutting value-added tax on energy bills, warned that without drastic action, “there’s a high risk that millions of people will fall into destitution.
  • Britain is far less dependent on Russian gas than Germany or other European countries. But the structure of its energy market makes it extremely sensitive to fluctuations in the market price of natural gas.
  • The Bank of England has predicted that inflation will peak at 13 percent in October as the new energy prices turn up in household bills. Other estimates are higher; analysts at Citibank have said the rate could reach as high as 18 percent early next year.
  • Britain’s opposition Labour Party recently proposed to freeze energy tariffs where they are now, paying part of the £29 billion cost by increasing the so-called windfall taxes that the Conservative government imposed this year on oil and gas giants operating in the North Sea
  • The leadership contest has been dominated by Ms. Truss’s promise to cut taxes, which is popular with the rank-and-file Conservative Party members who will vote for the next prime minister. But economists say it would do little to protect the most vulnerable people from the ravages of soaring energy bills.
  • With another hefty price increase looming in October, the public outcry over energy costs is likely to haunt the next prime minister. Unless the government develops an effective response, some analysts said, the issue could cripple the government and tilt the next election to the Labour Party.
  • “We have a sort of worst-of-both-worlds system,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of a professor of economics and public policy at Kings College London. “Household prices are related to the spot market, and we sort of save up price increases and dump them on households all at once.”
  • Beyond the mechanics of the system, critics said Britain had lagged Germany and other European countries in urging people to reduce energy consumption and increase the efficiency of their homes and offices.
  • “This is the poverty of our politics,” said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, an environmental think tank, and a former government adviser. “You’ve got to do some financial work to address the costs in the short term, and then you’ve got to really drive forward on demand reduction in the long run.”
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AI could change the 2024 elections. We need ground rules. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-election-2024-deepfake-pledge elections AI threat
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  • New York Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t speak Spanish. But it sure sounds like he does.He’s been using artificial intelligence software to send prerecorded calls about city events to residents in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu and Yiddish. The voice in the messages mimics the mayor but was generated with AI software from a company called ElevenLabs.
  • Experts have warned for years that AI will change our democracy by distorting reality. That future is already here. AI is being used to fabricate voices, fundraising emails and “deepfake” images of events that never occurred.
  • I’m writing this to urge elected officials, candidates and their supporters to pledge not to use AI to deceive voters. I’m not suggesting a ban, but rather calling for politicians to commit to some common values while our democracy adjusts to a world with AI.
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  • If we don’t draw some lines now, legions of citizens could be manipulated, disenfranchised or lose faith in the whole system — opening doors to foreign adversaries who want to do the same. AI might break us in 2024.
  • “The ability of AI to interfere with our elections, to spread misinformation that’s extremely believable is one of the things that’s preoccupying us,” Schumer said, after watching me so easily create a deepfake of him. “Lots of people in the Congress are examining this.”
  • Of course, fibbing politicians are nothing new, but examples keep multiplying of how AI supercharges misinformation in ways we haven’t seen before. Two examples: The presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) shared an AI-generated image of former president Donald Trump embracing Anthony S. Fauci. That hug never happened. In Chicago’s mayoral primary, someone used AI to clone the voice of candidate Paul Vallas in a fake news report, making it look like he approved of police brutality.
  • But what will happen when a shocking image or audio clip goes viral in a battleground state shortly before an election? What kind of chaos will ensue when someone uses a bot to send out individually tailored lies to millions of different voters?
  • A wide 85 percent of U.S. citizens said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the spread of misleading AI video and audio, in an August survey by YouGov. And 78 percent were concerned about AI contributing to the spread of political propaganda.
  • We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. AI is already embedded in tech tool campaigns that all of us use every day. AI creates our Facebook feeds and picks what ads we see. AI built into our phone cameras brightens faces and smooths skin.
  • What’s more, there are many political uses for AI that are unobjectionable, and even empowering for candidates with fewer resources. Politicians can use AI to manage the grunt work of sorting through databases and responding to constituents. Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson has an AI chatbot trained to answer questions like him. (I’m not sure politician bots are very helpful, but fine, give it a try.)
  • Clarke’s solution, included in a bill she introduced on political ads: Candidates should disclose when they use AI to create communications. You know the “I approve this message” notice? Now add, “I used AI to make this message.”
  • But labels aren’t enough. If AI disclosures become commonplace, we may become blind to them, like so much other fine print.
  • The bigger ask: We want candidates and their supporting parties and committees not to use AI to deceive us.
  • So what’s the difference between a dangerous deepfake and an AI facetune that makes an octogenarian candidate look a little less octogenarian?
  • “The core definition is showing a candidate doing or saying something they didn’t do or say,”
  • Sure, give Biden or Trump a facetune, or even show them shaking hands with Abraham Lincoln. But don’t use AI to show your competitor hugging an enemy or fake their voice commenting on current issues.
  • The pledge also includes not using AI to suppress voting, such as using an authoritative voice or image to tell people a polling place has been closed. That is already illegal in many states, but it’s still concerning how believable AI might make these efforts seem.
  • Don’t deepfake yourself. Making yourself or your favorite candidate appear more knowledgeable, experienced or culturally capable is also a form of deception.
  • (Pressed on the ethics of his use of AI, Adams just proved my point that we desperately need some ground rules. “These are part of the broader conversations that the philosophical people will have to sit down and figure out, ‘Is this ethically right or wrong?’ I’ve got one thing: I’ve got to run the city,” he said.)
  • The golden rule in my pledge — don’t use AI to be materially deceptive — is similar to the one in an AI regulation proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers
  • Such proposals have faced resistance in Washington on First Amendment grounds. The free speech of politicians is important. It’s not against the law for politicians to lie, whether they’re using AI or not. An effort to get the Federal Election Commission to count AI deepfakes as “fraudulent misrepresentation” under its existing authority has faced similar pushback.
  • But a pledge like the one I outline here isn’t a law restraining speech. It’s asking politicians to take a principled stand on their own use of AI
  • Schumer said he thinks my pledge is just a start of what’s needed. “Maybe most candidates will make that pledge. But the ones that won’t will drive us to a lower common denominator, and that’s true throughout AI,” he said. “If we don’t have government-imposed guardrails, the lowest common denominator will prevail.”
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Russians abandon wartime Russia in historic exodus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...russia-diaspora-war-ukraine russia exodus emigrants history
shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
  • The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.
  • Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.
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  • The financial cost, while vast, is impossible to calculate. In late December, Russia’s Communications Ministry reported that 10 percent of the country’s IT workers had left in 2022 and not returned.
  • those remaining in the depleted political opposition also faced a choice this year: prison or exile. Most chose exile. Activists and journalists are now clustered in cities such as Berlin and the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia.
  • “This exodus is a terrible blow for Russia,” said Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who moved to Portugal after the invasion. “The layer that could have changed something in the country has now been washed away.”
  • the influx of Russians into countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have long sent immigrants to Russia, set off political tremors, straining ties between Moscow and the other former Soviet states. Real estate prices in those countries have shot up, causing tensions with local populations.
  • For many Russians choosing to flee, Armenia was a rare easy option. It is one of five ex-Soviet countries that allow Russians to enter with just a national ID — making it a popular destination for former soldiers, political activists and others needing a quick escape.
  • Given the shared religion and use of language, Russians typically do not face animosity or social stigma in Armenia. Obtaining residency permits is also straightforward, and living costs are lower than in the European Union.
  • Yerevan has attracted thousands of IT workers, young creatives and working-class people, including families with children, from across Russia. They have established new schools, bars, cafes and robust support networks.
  • n the courtyard of the “Free School” for Russian children, established in April, Maxim, a construction company manager, was waiting for his 8-year-old son, Timofey. The school started with 40 students in an apartment. Now, there are nearly 200 in a multistory building in the city center.
  • “I did not want to be a murderer in this criminal war,” said Andrei, who is being identified by his first name for safety reasons
  • Like the White Russian emigres of the Bolshevik era and the post-Soviet immigrants of the 1990s, many of those leaving Russia because of the war in Ukraine are probably gone for good.
  • The family has adapted seamlessly to Yerevan. Everyone around them speaks Russian. Maxim works remotely on projects in Russia. Timofey likes his school and is learning Armenian. Maxim said he is sure the family will not return to Russia.
  • Tanya Raspopova, 26, arrived in Yerevan last March, with her husband but without a plan, overwhelmed and frightened.Then she heard that another emigre was seeking partners to set up a bar, a space where Russian expats could come together, and she wanted to help. Tuf, named after the pink volcanic rock common throughout Yerevan, opened its doors within a month.
  • They started with a neon-lit bar and kitchen on the ground floor, which soon expanded into a small courtyard. Then they opened up a second floor, then a third. Upstairs there is now a recording studio, a clothing boutique and a tattoo parlor. On a Wednesday night in January, the place was packed with young Russians and Armenians singing karaoke, drinking cocktails and playing ping-pong. “We have since created such a big community, a big family,” Raspopova said. “Tuf is our new home.”
  • Thousands have chosen the UAE, which did not join Western sanctions and still has direct flights to Moscow, as their new home. Russians enjoy visa-free travel for 90 days, and it is relatively easy to get a national ID, through business or investment, for a longer stay.
  • The high cost of living means there are no activists or journalists. Dubai is a haven, and the go-to playground, for Russian tech founders, billionaires under sanctions, unpenalized millionaires, celebrities, and influencers.
  • Shortly after the invasion, conversations in Moscow’s affluent Patriarch Ponds neighborhood turned to the best Dubai real estate deals, said Natalia Arkhangelskaya, who writes for Antiglyanets, a snarky and influential Telegram blog focused on Russia’s elite. A year later, Russians have ousted Brits and Indians as Dubai’s top real estate buyers, Russian-owned yachts dock at the marina, and private jets zigzag between Dubai and Moscow.
  • Russians can still buy apartments, open bank accounts and snag designer leather goods they previously shopped for in France.
  • The UAE’s embrace of foreign business has lured a stream of Russian IT workers seeking to cut ties with Russia and stay linked to global markets. Start-ups seek financing from state-supported accelerators. Larger firms pursue clients to replace those lost to sanctions.
  • About a dozen people arrived to discuss opportunities in India, which has maintained ties with Russia despite the war. Most expressed bitterness about the Kremlin’s politics and a longing for Moscow when it was an aspiring global hub.
  • “The most important thing for me is to be able to develop international projects and to integrate my kids into a global community, so they grow up in a free environment,”
  • Andrei works as a delivery driver and shares a modest room with two other men in a shelter set up by Kovcheg, a support organization for Russian emigrants. “Before the war, I never followed politics, but after the invasion, I started reading about everything,” Andrei said. “I feel so ashamed about what Russia has done.”
  • “Every extra month leads people to get used to a different country,” she said. “They get a job there, their children go to school, they begin to speak a different language. The longer the war lasts — the longer the dictatorship in the country continues — the fewer people will return.”
  • the expats could become “a repository of relevant skills for a better, freer, modern Russia.” For now, though, Rojansky said, the outflow sends a clear message.
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Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail ... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...lobal-warming-predictions.html
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  • Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year
  • A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.
  • the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
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  • days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.
  • eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century
  • The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
  • The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to hold a crisis meeting.
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Does the Euro Have a Future? by George Soros | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...does-euro-have-future euro crisis sovereign debt germany
shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • To resolve a crisis in which the impossible becomes possible it is necessary to think about the unthinkable. To start with, it is imperative to prepare for the possibility of default and defection from the eurozone in the case of Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Ireland. To prevent a financial meltdown, four sets of measures would have to be taken.
  • First, bank deposits have to be protected. If a euro deposited in a Greek bank would be lost to the depositor, a euro deposited in an Italian bank would then be worth less than one in a German or Dutch bank and there would be a run on the banks of other deficit countries.
  • Second, some banks in the defaulting countries have to be kept functioning in order to keep the economy from breaking down.
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  • Third, the European banking system would have to be recapitalized and put under European, as distinct from national, supervision.
  • Fourth, the government bonds of the other deficit countries would have to be protected from contagion.
  • The German public still thinks that it has a choice about whether to support the euro or to abandon it. That is a mistake. The euro exists and the assets and liabilities of the financial system are so intermingled on the basis of a common currency that a breakdown of the euro would cause a meltdown beyond the capacity of the authorities to contain. The longer it takes for the German public to realize this, the heavier the price they and the rest of the world will have to pay.
  • The fact that arrangements are made for the possible default or defection of three small countries does not mean that those countries would be abandoned. On the contrary, the possibility of an orderly default—paid for by the other eurozone countries and the IMF—would offer Greece and Portugal policy choices.
  • he discussions ought to start right away because even under extreme pressure they will take a long time to conclude. Once the principle of setting up a European Treasury is agreed upon, the European Council could authorize the ECB to step into the breach, indemnifying the ECB in advance against risks to its solvency. That is the only way to forestall a possible financial meltdown and another Great Depression.
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Raise, Don't Save, Social Security - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20geoghegan.html retirement benefits US
shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • A recent Harris poll found that 34 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement — not even a hundred bucks. In this lost decade, that percentage is sure to go up. At retirement the lucky few with a 401(k) typically have $98,000. As an annuity that’s about $600 a month — not exactly an upper-middle-class lifestyle.
  • The most paralyzing half-truth in this country is that people hate taxes. People are willing to pay taxes that they spend on themselves. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a CBS/New York Times poll in January were willing to pay more taxes to save Social Security at its modest level.
  • To “save” it, most of us don’t need to pay. We could lift the cap on high earners, the 6 percent of workers who make over $106,800 a year. If earnings above the cap were subject to the payroll tax with no increase in benefits to high earners, there would be no deficit in the Social Security trust fund in 2037, as projected.
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  • to close the deficit and raise benefits to nearly half of average worker earnings, we would need to find an additional 5 percent of taxable payroll, or find the money elsewhere. If we lift the cap on the payroll tax without paying more benefits to those above it, that gets us 2.32 percent (or a bit less if we slightly increase benefits to the rich). Dedicating revenues from the estate tax at its 2009 levels to Social Security gets another half percent. A few other tweaks, like covering new public employees, add another 0.42 percent. The remainder can be found by raising the payroll tax by roughly 1 percentage point for both employees and employers.
  • Retirees today are shortchanged on Social Security because they have been shortchanged on wages for their entire working lives. The labor economist Richard B. Freeman points out that the hourly earnings of workers dropped by 8 percent from 1973 to 2005 while productivity shot up 55 percent or more. The United States is one of the few developed countries where workers are routinely cheated of a share in higher productivity.
  • And where has the money from the extra productivity gone? It’s gone right to the top, to the top few percent. If wages had been paid fairly based on productivity, there would have been enough money subject to the payroll tax to avoid even a modest shortfall.
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What Is the U.S. Visa System for 'Skilled' Migrants? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...589615 visa us immigration labor
shared by Javier E on 18 May 19 - No Cached
  • The H-1B visa in particular, both its supporters and detractors argue, desperately needs an overhaul. Yet competing interests and disagreement over what needs fixing mean that, even with Trump’s administration having put restricting immigration flows at the center of its agenda, change is far from guaranteed.
  • The H-1B is one of several visa categories that allow foreign citizens to work while in the United States. Designed in the early 1990s as a temporary program to fill labor-market needs in highly specialized fields, such visas are issued in low numbers each year: This year’s cap was 85,000 in a nation with a labor force that’s estimated to be about 163 million people.
  • The White House has become more selective about approving new H-1B applications and changed the rules governing renewals so that the process is no longer automatic, as in Mahoney-Steel’s case.
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  • the administration is gradually making the program a little more restrictive overall. (This appears to have had little impact thus far on the number of people who have applied for H-1Bs—as Bloomberg Law noted, more than 201,000 people put in for the 85,000 visas issued this year, a 6 percent increase over the previous year’s figures.)
  • in the Immigration Act of 1990. That original legislation did two things: It expanded legal immigration by increasing the number of green cards awarded each year, and it updated a 1950s-era program for temporary workers of “distinguished merit and ability” by capping the number who could obtain the visa at 65,000. (The cap has varied over the years.) This new program, the H-1B, was designed for skilled, temporary workers in certain occupations.
  • what came next: the global tech boom and the birth of the outsourcing industry. Suddenly, what had begun as a temporary solution to address a labor shortage became a device through which hundreds of thousands of IT professionals from around the world, especially India, came to the United States. The program became a de facto path to permanent residence and, ultimately, American citizenship.
  • Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who studies the impact of the visa, says the H-1B prioritizes outsourcers, sets wages too low, and doesn’t address the problem it was created to solve—filling labor-market gaps.“The program has been flawed from the inception,” he told me. “My primary complaint is that it’s used for cheap indentured workers.”
  • cation process is expensive, costing upwards of $2,400 (not counting lawyer’s fees), and has become cumbersome, they argue, so no American company would voluntarily seek to hire a foreign worker when simply hiring an American one is far easier.
  • Previous administrations tried to walk the line between these competing interests, but the Trump administration, through its actions, is making the H-1B far more difficult to get—especially for Indian software companies, whose visa applications were rejected in record numbers last year.
  • all of the changes so far to the existing system have introduced an atmosphere of uncertainty for people like Mahoney-Steel. Johns Hopkins decided not to seek to renew her visa. She told me that her supervisors were trying to rewrite her job description, but that the position she occupied was deemed by her employers too generic to be a specialized skill.
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Trump Targets Permits to Cap Off 'Infrastructure Week' | US News - 0 views

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  • Trump Targets Permits to Cap 'Infrastructure Week'
  • President Donald Trump wrapped up his administration's "infrastructure week" Friday by unveiling a council and a new White House office tasked with streamlining fixes for America's infrastructure. During a speech at the Department of Transportation, the president announced plans to create a council designed to "help project managers navigate the bureaucratic maze." "This council will also improve transparency by creating a new online dashboard allowing everyone to easily track major projects through every stage of the approval process," Trump said. "This council will make sure that every federal agency that is consistently delaying projects by missing deadlines will face tough, new penalties. ... We will hold the bureaucracy accountable."
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