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Javier E

Conservative Inequality Denialism | The New Republic - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...servative-inequality-denialism

inequality analysis conservative argument

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • When the topic is growing income inequality, it’s hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead conservatives try to argue that it doesn’t exist.
  • Anyway you slice it, income inequality has been growing rapidly. (Overall, the federal government effects about one-quarter less redistribution today through taxes and benefits than it did in 1979
  • Hassett and Mathur next point out that people’s earnings tend to rise over their working lifetimes, so “snapshot measures of income inequality can be misleading.” True, but when you correct for demographic factors (today’s population is older than it was 33 years ago, and divorce and single parenthood have made households smaller), you find that income inequality, though less extreme than shown by the standard measure, is also growing faster than shown by the standard measure.
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  • What matters isn’t how much money you have, they argue, but how much stuff you have, and the income gap isn’t matched by a comparable consumption gap.
  • From reading Hassett and Mathur’s op-ed piece, you would never know that there’s a disagreement among serious academics on the basic question of whether consumption patterns match income patterns or not.
  • Not all consumption is created equal. Which items are cheaper? Which are more expensive? Hassett and Mathur don’t say. The answer is that clothing and food and electronics are cheaper (Hassett and Mathur marvel that even low-income people often own microwave ovens and cell phones) while housing, transportation (read: automobiles), higher education, and health care are more expensive.
  • Health care is especially expensive when people have no health insurance, or lousy health insurance. In 2010, for instance, Latinos saw their health care expenditures rise by 17 percent (i.e, by $274), while non-Latinos (who tend to be wealthier) saw their health care expenditures rise by a mere one percent (i.e., by $4). On a per-dollar basis, Latinos “consumed” more health care than non-Latinos. But obviously that’s a meaningless statistic. The non-Latinos had cheaper access to health care, which is what matters.
  • To buy stuff you need money, right? Hassett and Mathur pretend this question doesn’t exist, but the answer is obvious. If the middle class really is keeping up with the affluent Joneses, it’s through borrowing. And in fact, a growing body of work (including this recent Century Foundation paper) suggests that income inequality has been driving America’s debt binge.
maddieireland334

Hillary Clinton's email problems just got much worse - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...l-problems-just-got-much-worse

Clinton Policy Election Emails

shared by maddieireland334 on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • The State Department’s inspector general released its report on the email practices of Clinton and a number of other past secretaries of state.
  • The report, which you can read in its entirety here, badly complicates Clinton’s past explanations about the server and whether she complied fully with the laws in place governing electronic communication. And it virtually ensures that Clinton’s email practices will be front and center in Donald Trump’s fusillade of attacks against her credibility and honesty between now and Nov. 8.
  • The inspector general, in a long-awaited review obtained Wednesday by The Washington Post in advance of its publication, found that Clinton’s use of private email for public business was “not an appropriate method” of preserving documents and that her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed.
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  • The report says Clinton, who is the Democratic presidential front-runner, should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013.
  • Clinton’s team has spent months casting the State Department inspector general’s office as overly aggressive and working hand in hand with congressional Republicans to cast the former secretary of state in the worst possible light.
  • It was particularly critical of former secretary of state Colin Powell — who has acknowledged publicly that he used a personal email account to conduct business — concluding that he too failed to follow department policy designed to comply with public-record laws.
  • For a candidate already struggling to overcome a perception that she is neither honest nor trustworthy, the IG report makes that task significantly harder.
  • Clinton remains blessed that Republicans are on the verge of nominating Donald Trump, a candidate whose numbers on honesty, trustworthiness and even readiness to lead are worse — and in some cases, far worse — than hers. But Trump’s task of casting her as “Crooked Hillary” just got easier.
Javier E

A Future Without Jobs? Two Views of the Changing Work Force - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...f-the-changing-work-force.html

UBI tech jobs trends productivity welfare work living standard economic

shared by Javier E on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Eduardo Porter: I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast
  • the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.
  • it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.
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  • The former seems to me a not unreasonable forecast — we’ve been losing good jobs for decades, while low-wage employment in the service sector has grown. But no paid work? That’s more a dream (or a nightmare) than a forecast
  • Farhad Manjoo: Because I’m scared that they’ll unleash their bots on me, I should start by defending the techies a bit
  • They see a future in which a small group of highly skilled tech workers reign supreme, while the rest of the job world resembles the piecemeal, transitional work we see coming out of tech today (Uber drivers, Etsy shopkeepers, people who scrape by on other people’s platforms).
  • Why does that future call for instituting a basic income instead of the smaller and more feasible labor-policy ideas that you outline? I think they see two reasons. First, techies have a philosophical bent toward big ideas, and U.B.I. is very big.
  • They see software not just altering the labor market at the margins but fundamentally changing everything about human society. While there will be some work, for most nonprogrammers work will be insecure and unreliable. People could have long stretches of not working at all — and U.B.I. is alone among proposals that would allow you to get a subsidy even if you’re not working at all
  • If there are, in fact, jobs to be had, a universal basic income may not be the best choice of policy. The lack of good work is probably best addressed by making the work better — better paid and more skilled — and equipping workers to perform it,
  • The challenge of less work could just lead to fewer working hours. Others are already moving in this direction. People work much less in many other rich countries: Norwegians work 20 percent fewer hours per year than Americans; Germans 25 percent fewer.
  • Eduardo Porter: I guess some enormous discontinuity right around the corner might vastly expand our prosperity. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian that knows much more than I do about the evolution of technology, argues that the tools and techniques we have developed in recent times — from gene sequencing to electron microscopes to computers that can analyze data at enormous speeds — are about to open up vast new frontiers of possibility. We will be able to invent materials to precisely fit the specifications of our homes and cars and tools, rather than make our homes, cars and tools with whatever materials are available.
  • Eduardo Porter: To my mind, a universal basic income functions properly only in a world with little or no paid work because the odds of anybody taking a job when his or her needs are already being met are going to be fairly low.
  • The discussion, I guess, really depends on how high this universal basic income would be. How many of our needs would it satisfy?
  • You give the techies credit for seriously proposing this as an optimal solution to wrenching technological and economic change. But in a way, isn’t it a cop-out? They’re just passing the bag to the political system. Telling Congress, “You fix it.
  • the idea of the American government agreeing to tax capitalists enough to hand out checks to support the entire working class is in an entirely new category of fantasy.
  • paradoxically, they also see U.B.I. as more politically feasible than some of the other policy proposals you call for. One of the reasons some libertarians and conservatives like U.B.I. is that it is a very simple, efficient and universal form of welfare — everyone gets a monthly check, even the rich, and the government isn’t going to tell you what to spend it on. Its very universality breaks through political opposition.
  • Farhad Manjoo: One key factor in the push for U.B.I., I think, is the idea that it could help reorder social expectations. At the moment we are all defined by work; Western society generally, but especially American society, keeps social score according to what people do and how much they make for it. The dreamiest proponents of U.B.I. see that changing as work goes away. It will be O.K., under this policy, to choose a life of learning instead of a low-paying bad job
  • The question is whether this could produce another burst of productivity like the one we experienced between 1920 and 1970, which — by the way — was much greater than the mini-productivity boom produced by information technology in the 1990s.
  • investors don’t seem to think so. Long-term interest rates have been gradually declining for a fairly long time. This would suggest that investors do not expect a very high rate of return on their future investments. R.&D. intensity is slowing down, and the rate at which new businesses are formed is also slowing.
  • Little in these dynamics suggests a high-tech utopia — or dystopia, for that matter — in the offing
anonymous

New Report of N.S.A. Spying Angers France - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-nsa-spying-angers-france.html

us france brazil spies diplomacy media journalism

shared by anonymous on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 22 Oct 13
     
    PARIS - The National Security Agency has carried out extensive electronic surveillance in France, a French newspaper reported Monday, drawing an angry condemnation from an important American ally. The report, based on secret documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, was published in Le Monde, the authoritative French newspaper, the day Secretary of State John Kerry arrived here for an official visit.
Javier E

Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cyberattacks-against-iran.html

cybersecurity US foreign policy computer infrastructure

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 12 - Cached
  • It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.
  • If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.
  • Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials.
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  • Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results.
  • The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.
  • The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up.
  • The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success.
  • Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market.
  • “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.
  • It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground. Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within.
  • the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.
  • the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.
  • Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.
  • Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously. “From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.”
  • In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage.
  • An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world.
  • “We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”
  • Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”
  • American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence official said.
  • In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.
Javier E

Christine Rosen: The Machine And The Ghost | The New Republic - 1 views

www.tnr.com/...chnology-morality-intelligence

tech trends personalization online data

shared by Javier E on 28 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Now that we feasibly can embed electronics in nearly any object, from cars to clothing to furniture to appliances to wristbands, and connect them via wireless signals to the World Wide Web, we have created an Internet of Things. In this world, our daily interactions with everyday objects will leave a data trail in the same way that our online activities already do; you become the person who spends three hours a day on Facebook and whose toaster knows that you like your bagel lightly browned. With the Internet of Things, we are always and often unwittingly connected to the Web, which brings clear benefits of efficiency and personalization. But we are also granting to our technologies new powers to persuade or compel us to behave in certain ways.
  • anonymous on 22 Aug 12
     
    As enthralled as I was to read about the technology of the future, I was equally disturbed by Christine Rosen's rebuttal. Technology already seems to be taking over our lives. Add in all of the technologies that will be incorporated in Songdo and all human communication/interaction will soon disappear.
Maria Delzi

BBC News - Obama orders curbs on NSA data use - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-us-canada-25785573

shared by Maria Delzi on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Obama orders curbs on NSA data use
  • President Barack Obama has ordered curbs on the use of bulk data collected by US intelligence agencies, saying civil liberties must be respected.
  • Mr Obama said such data had prevented terror attacks at home and abroad, but that in tackling threats the government risked over-reaching itself. However civil liberties groups have said the changes do not go far enoug
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  • Edward Snowden, the former contractor at the US National Security Agency (NSA) who leaked the information, is wanted in the US for espionage and is now living in exile in Russia.
  • The leaked documents revealed that the US collects massive amounts of electronic data from communications of private individuals around the world, and that it has spied on foreign leader
  • The latest revelations claim that US agencies have collected and stored almost 200 million text messages every day across the globe.
  • 'Rights are protected'
  • In his much-anticipated speech at the Department of Justice, Mr Obama said he would not apologise for the effectiveness of US intelligence operations, and insisted that nothing he had seen indicated they had sought to break the law.
  • It was necessary for the US to continue collecting large amounts of data, he said, but acknowledged that doing so allowed for "the potential of abuse".
  • "The reforms I'm proposing today should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies maintain the tools they need to keep us safe," he said.
  • He has asked the attorney general and the
  • intelligence community to draw up plans for such metadata to be held by a third party, with the NSA required to seek legal permission before it could access them.
  • A panel of independent privacy advocates would also sit on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) which has responsibility for giving permission for mass surveillance programmes.
  • "should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security".
  • "This applies to foreign leaders as well," he said, promising that from now on the US "will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies".
  • But he was also critical of nations he said "feign surprise" over the leaks but "privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower" and have used the information gathered for their own purposes.
  • Mr Obama said he would not "dwell on Mr Snowden's actions or his motivations", but warned that the "sensational way" the NSA details had come to light had potentially jeopardised US operations "for years to come".
  • Mr Obama's reforms were welcomed as progress in some quarters, but others argued they did not go far enough in protecting individuals.
  • "President Obama's surveillance adjustments will be remembered as music on the Titanic unless his administration adopts deeper reforms," said Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Javier E

German Publishers Seek Amazon Inquiry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ny-of-antitrust-violation.html

Germany book publishing amazon distribution online economics monopoly

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • the cozy world of German publishing has been slow to adapt to the Internet age, whether in online sales or digital publishing. That has left a vacuum, which Amazon, which is based in Seattle, has swiftly moved to fill. According to industry estimates, it controls as much as 70 percent of the German market for online sales of printed and electronic books.
  • Germany is the company’s largest market outside the United States. Its earnings in Germany reached 1.9 billion euros, or $2.6 billion, last year.
  • The antitrust agency on Tuesday confirmed receipt of the 22-page formal complaint. After reviewing it, the government will decide whether grounds are sufficient to find that Amazon holds a market-dominant position and as a result may be investigated for potential antitrust violations.
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  • The association accuses Amazon of abusing its “market dominant” position and argues that because many people use Amazon as a modern card catalog to explore what books are available, if an author is not listed, a reader would assume that the writer has not published any books.
Maria Delzi

Allegation of U.S. Spying on Merkel Puts Obama at Crossroads - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-puts-obama-at-crossroads.html

shared by Maria Delzi on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The angry allegation by the German government that the National Security Agency monitored the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel may force President Obama into making a choice he has avoided for years between continuing the age-old game of spying on America’s friends and undercutting cooperation with important partners in tracking terrorists, managing the global economy and slowing Iran’s nuclear program.
  • The pressure to make such a choice builds each day, as some of the United States’ closest allies have demanded explanations from Washington after similar disclosures about the breadth and sophistication of American electronic spying.
  • The tension with Germany built last week after German officials were given evidence of the cellphone monitoring by Der Spiegel, the German weekly newsmagazine. The first protests to Washington came in an angry phone call to Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, from her German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen.
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  • During the call, according to German officials, Ms. Rice insisted that Mr. Obama did not know about the monitoring of Ms. Merkel’s phone, and said it was not currently happening, and would not in the future. But according to American officials familiar with the call, Ms. Rice would not acknowledge that the monitoring took place, even though she did not dispute the evidence the Germans had provided to her, which stretched back into the administration of President George W. Bush.
  • In the past, Germany has pushed for an agreement similar to the understanding that the United States has with Britain and three other English-speaking allies that prohibits spying on one another.
  • Administration officials say the National Security Agency, in its push to build a global data-gathering network that can reach into any country, has rarely weighed the long-term political costs of some of its operations. Whether to make those kinds of reciprocal agreements with allies is among the questions two different administration reviews of N.S.A. spying practices hope to address.
  • The advisers are looking at a range of issues, from the collection of “metadata” about the calls and Web searches conducted by Americans to the surveillance of allies and their leaders.
Javier E

Whose Party Is It Anyway? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-whose-party-is-it-anyway.html

Democratic party trade income middle-class poor labor economic history policy

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • While acknowledging some of the benefits of free trade, Bivens points out the danger of the global expansion of competition:
  • Reducing trade barriers allows each to specialize in what they do more efficiently, and this specialization generally leads to national-level gains for both countries — that is, increased efficiency, worldwide production and total consumption. This is essentially chapter one in trade textbooks.
  • However, a later chapter in the textbook points out that, when the United States exports financial services and aircraft while importing apparel and electronics, it is implicitly exchanging the services of capital for labor. This exchange bids up capital’s price — profits and high-end salaries — and bids down wages for the broad working and middle class, leading to rising inequality and wage pressure for many Americans.
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  • Even if trade flows begin to balance and there is less job loss in the future, the integration of the U.S. economy with those of its low-wage trading partners will pull down wages for many American workers, and will contribute to the ever rising inequality of incomes in the U.S. economy.
  • The mounting pressure applied by organized labor can be seen if you compare the votes of California House Democrats in 1993 on the North American Free Trade Agreement with votes on granting approval this year to fast track the TPP.
  • Nafta was approved in 1993, 234 to 200 by the full House, with Republicans in favor 132-43 and Democrats opposed 156-102. On June 18 of this year, the House passed fast-track legislation, but the partisan differences were much sharper: Republicans voted in favor, 190 to 50; Democrats opposed the legislation 158-28.
  • In between the votes on Nafta in 1993 and this year’s TPP, there was one major development pushing the union movement to the wall: the decline in manufacturing employment as trade with China accelerated in the 2000s.
  • The upstairs-downstairs character of the Democratic coalition proved to be the party’s strength in Obama’s two elections, and its continued viability is crucial to Clinton’s prospects next year. Trade, taxes and social spending are subjects that have not yet achieved progressive consensus and retain the potential to fracture the party
  • Trade always implies job destruction — this is the whole point of trade, namely to destroy jobs in import competing sectors to create them in exporting sectors, thus allowing for reallocation to sectors with comparative advantage, leading to an increased efficiency, the basis for the gains from trade.
  • Trade was linked to job losses in manufacturing that happened in the 1980s and then again in 2001-2004; it’s not happening now, because those jobs that could be shifted have been.” The bigger problem, Shapiro wrote, “is incomes – a majority of households saw their incomes decline from 2002-2013, even as they aged – i.e., people earned less at 40 than they had at 29.
  • In addition, one of “the ripple effects of globalization” is an intensification of competition, which, in turn, forces businesses to cut jobs and wages. “When people are feeling squeezed or worse economically, they retreat and see trade as a threat.”
  • The Democratic opposition to free trade has intensified in large part because of the current prominence of liberal-populist strength and the liberal tilt of individual – as opposed to special interest — donors.
  • The conflict between a pro-free-trade presidential wing of the Democratic Party and an anti-free-trade congressional wing has the potential to become a permanent fixture of the center-left. The conflict gives expression to both the downscale forces in the party that lean against trade and the pro-trade upscale forces.
  • from 2000 (the year that Congress granted China permanent normal trade relations status) to 2010, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 34 percent, from just over 17 million to 11.5 million.
  • The real question, then, is how long will left and right within the Democratic coalition tolerate an inherently unstable posture on such a core issue as how this country does business abroad, and how it provides a livelihood for its citizens.
Javier E

Slavery, a Personal Question Online - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...22slaves.html

slavery activism tech internet

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Do you know how many slaves work on your behalf? Enlarge This Image Michel Filho/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Textile workers in Brazil demonstrate against slavery. While many people may assume the answer to that provocative and unsettling question is zero, the creators of a new Web site want to demonstrate how forced labor, especially overseas, is tantamount to slavery. A nonprofit group, with funding from the State Department, will unveil the new site, www.slaveryfootprint.org, on Thursday in an effort to show that forced laborers are tied to all kinds of everyday products, from electronics and jewelry to the shirt on your back. Ideally, they hope to get consumers engaged enough in the issue to do something about it, primarily hoping people demand that companies carefully audit supply chains to ensure, as best as they can determine, that no “slave labor” was used to manufacture its products.
Javier E

"Nerve": Why is America so anxious? - Nonfiction - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

anxiety US cultural values control comparative

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • fear recognition and the fight-or-flight reflex embedded in our neurochemistry is part of what has enabled our survival and evolution from chest-pounding primates to iPad-wielding bipeds
  • major catastrophes spark widespread anxiety in the countries where they hit. A great example of this is how incredibly overinflated Americans' fears about terrorism grew after 9/11. In one poll that was conducted in the aftermath of the attacks, respondents said that the average American had a 48 percent chance of being injured in a terrorist plot over the next year. As it turned out, the odds were more like 0 percent.
  • Americans have become extremely vulnerable to the pressures of the 21st century. For the past 50 years, we've been getting progressively more anxious in good economic times and bad, so we can't even blame it on the recession. As I was conducting research for the book, psychologists pointed to three basic reasons why our psychic state is deteriorating. The first is a simple matter of social disconnection. As we spend more time with our electronic devices than we do with our neighbors, we lose our physical sense of community. Social isolation flies in the face of our evolutionary history. The second major cause is the information overload that we're experiencing with the Internet and the 24-hour media cycle. We're all aware of it, but I'm not sure we realize how big an impact it's having on our brains. The third explanation can be attributed to what one psychologist refers to as a culture of "feel goodism" -- the idea that we shouldn't ever have to be upset and that all our negative emotions can be neutralized with a pill. This to me feels like a distinctly American phenomenon.
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  • The most anxiety-producing jobs are the ones in which the employee has very little control over what he or she does during the workday.
  • One thing that "Outliers" fails to point out is that practice alone is not enough. Anders Erickson, a psychologist at Florida State University who studies peak human performance, argues that practicing the same thing over and over again does not ensure that you will respond well in a stressful situation. The trick is to challenge yourself so you're constantly improving your skills.
  • The most frustrating thing about a traffic jam is not that we're stuck sitting there. For the most part, we're perfectly comfortable in our cars. The problem is that we have no control over what's going on -- we have no idea as to when the traffic will eventually let up. Those are the exact ingredients that make people anxious. Anger and fear are very similar physiologically, so that's why some people get stressed and some people get pissed. It's all part of the same fight-or-flight reaction cycle.
  • The notion of executive stress syndrome -- the idea that bosses and corporate executives experience much higher levels of anxiety than their underlings -- has proven to be total bullshit. Executives tend to have more control over what they're doing, and they often displace their anxieties on the people that work beneath them.
  • certain phobias can be made extinct by repeated exposure to what scares us.
  • only way to beat these feelings -- and by beat I do not mean extinguish so much as get in a more comfortable relationship with -- is to put yourself in the very situations that make you so uncomfortable.
Javier E

App Quietly Creates a Personal Journal on Your Phone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-journal-on-your-ph-76243.html

electronic data tracking lifestyle surveillance mobile

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Imagine if you could keep a log of everything that you do on your mobile phone. The phone calls that you make (or receive), your emails and text messages, the various places that you visit, and even the music tracks that you listen to on your phone.
  • At first glance, I suspect many readers will be taken aback by how intrusive the software can be as it captures all smartphone activities in the background. It’s a valid concern. But the Internet, combined with smartphones and mobile broadband devices, is pushing us slowly in this direction. The way I see it, we can fight the change unsuccessfully or we can cautiously embrace it. You might not ever subscribe to providing a greater amount of information to the cloud, but within reason, I’m willing to bet your kids will. It’s just a matter of time before more of your personal data is more online than offline. It may take years or decades yet, but it will happen for most.
  • The Android app is clever, not only because it captures your smartphone and app usage profile, but makes it searchable and ties together events with the context of both location and time.
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  • Want to see all of the conversations you had with a particular contact? No problem. Curious what you did and where you were on a certain day in the past? Friday has you covered. Planning a trip and want to associate all of the events to the excursion? Friday supports automatic tagging, which you could enable for a “Family Vacation 2011″ tag before leaving and disable upon your return home. The software also includes analytics to gain insights on how many calls you take or make at various times of the day. var galleryData = [{"title":"friday-events","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-events.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map-filtered","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map-filtered.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Phone Activity Log","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/phone-activity-log.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"What do you want to track","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/what-do-you-want-to-track.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}];
  • Intelligent software such as Friday, my6Sense and others like reQall Rover can help cut through the data clutter by indexing or surfacing important information without raising our stress levels. Yes, that could mean enabling devices to capture our every move, but that’s a price I’m personally willing to pay for easier access to the data I’m looking for.
Javier E

L'Hôte: all by yourself - 0 views

lhote.blogspot.com/...all-by-yourself.html

internet online social solitude conformity

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • "I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity." freddie7 AT gmail DOT com My brother is a tailor and dressmaker. Check him out. Blog Archive ▼  2011 (81) ▼  April (6) seriousness and honesty are only conditionally vir... all by yourself straight fire failing students drop classes reason for optimism today in unfortunate yet amazing errors, Freddie e... ►  March (30) winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow we don't have a worker shortage quote for the day "you see an old woman...." amen sympathy for the juice box set first principles an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya they should have done a miniseries about Benjamin ... next big thing anniversary note the more things change ad hominems left-wing non-interventionism sorry about comments system how perfect is your knowledge? here they come France and the UK Libya gentrification involves more than the gentry the profession that wants to destroy itself they're bringing back all the classics marijuana legalization is a human rights issue Bobby Sands was an MP damn you, DVD clearance fees links and such a man from somewhere today in insanity the incredible naivete of the incredibly savvy ►  February (33) marked bodies What does it mean for a movie to be experimental a... subversion and containment IOZ on Reason's absurdity Reihan and progressivism/neoliberalism/leftism California good people are everywhere what I want submitted without comment welcome to lottery ticket America another perfect opportunity what's before us by the way the Atlantic and the working class ►  January (12) archivedate collaps
  • Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.
  • The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.
Javier E

Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21anonymity.html

online anonymity privacy freedom

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.
  • the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons.
  • This growing “publicness,” as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for commerce, for political speech and for ordinary people’s right to privacy. There are efforts by governments and corporations to set up online identity systems.
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  • “Humans want nothing more than to connect, and the companies that are connecting us electronically want to know who’s saying what, where,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “As a result, we’re more known than ever before.”
  • He posited that because the Internet “can’t be made to forget” images and moments from the past, like an outburst on a train or a kiss during a riot, “the reality of an inescapable public world is an issue we are all going to hear a lot more about.”
jlessner

France to Deploy Thousands of Troops to Protect Jewish Schools and 'Sensitive Sites' - ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-hebdo-terrorist-attacks.html

france troops schools politics culture crisis

shared by jlessner on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • PARIS — Confronting a nation in shock from last week’s terrorist attacks, the French authorities on Monday began to unveil a broad array of measures to send thousands of soldiers and police officers to guard Jewish schools and other sites, reinforce electronic surveillance and reach into schools and prisons that have a reputation as crucibles of jihadist recruitment.
  • Seeking to reassure jittery citizens, the French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said Monday that 10,000 soldiers would be deployed by Tuesday evening, in what he called “the first mobilization on this scale on our territory.”
maddieireland334

France to Deploy Thousands of Troops to Protect Jewish Schools and 'Sensitive Sites' - 0 views

diigo.com/078hde

France Terrorism Religion

shared by maddieireland334 on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 12 Jan 15
     
    PARIS - Confronting a nation in shock from last week's terrorist attacks, the French authorities on Monday began to unveil a broad array of measures to send thousands of soldiers and police officers to guard Jewish schools and other sites, reinforce electronic surveillance and reach into schools and prisons that have a reputation as crucibles of jihadist recruitment.
Javier E

Lawsuits' Lurid Details Draw an Online Crowd - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ails-draw-an-online-crowd.html

legal justice system internet public information public opinion

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • “I don’t think any of us had any idea what the words ‘going viral’ meant when we rolled this out 10 or 12 years ago,” said James Robertson, a retired federal judge in Washington who helped guide the introduction of the federal electronic filing system.
  • In interviews, several plaintiffs’ lawyers said the current online environment was already deterring potential clients from filing suit. Now a Google search can forever portray even a successful litigant as “the complainer, or the slut who allegedly slept with the boss,” as Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor, put it. Those who have suffered privacy violations, like nude pictures posted online, risk making the original damage worse if they sue, since courts are generally reluctant to allow plaintiffs to file anonymously.
  • Leigh Goodmark, another Maryland law professor, said the online boom of gender-related court documents was a harbinger of a future in which virtually no legal document — an eviction notice, a divorce pleading with embarrassing details — would be safe from public consumption.
Javier E

The Promise at Technology's Powerful Heart - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ogys-powerful-heart-1429310535

tech revolution trends economics millennials innovation entrepreneur

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Fifty years ago, on April 19, 1965, chemist and reluctant entrepreneur Gordon E. Moore set out to graph the rapid rate of improvement in semiconductor-chip performance—and ended up discovering the heartbeat of the modern world. That discovery is what became known as “Moore’s Law,” which is the observation that performance (speed, price, size) of integrated circuits, aka microchips, regularly doubled every 18 months.
  • it has proved to be the most effective predictive tool of new chip generations, technology innovation and even social and cultural changes of the last half-century.
  • If some of the recent breakthroughs in atomic-level transistors, nanotechnology and biological computers prove fruitful, Moore’s Law could again accelerate, or at least continue to rule, for decades to come. It now seems more likely than ever that a thousand years from now, what will be remembered most about our time will be its stunning efflorescence of innovation and entrepreneurship. By then Moore’s Law will have become Moore’s Era.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • These predictions have enormous implications for the millennial generation now entering the workforce. They have never known a world not defined by Moore’s Law. But unlike their generational predecessors, to this new cohort social networks and iPhone apps are old hat.
  • What obsesses them is hardware—drones, robots, 3-D printing—that is even more closely connected to the fortunes of Moore’s Law. Their careers will rise and fall on how well they ride the curve of an equation devised during the Johnson administration
  • And what a curve it will be. Moore’s Law is creative destruction on steroids. It regularly fosters the next wave of entrepreneurial opportunities made possible by the latest jump in chip performance. It can be blamed for much of the 90% mortality rate of electronics startups.
  • The great turning took place a decade ago, while we were all distracted by social networking, smartphones and the emerging banking crisis. Its breathtaking climb since tells us that everything of the previous 40 years—that is, the multi-trillion-dollar revolution in semiconductors, computers, communications and the Internet—was likely nothing but a prelude, a warm-up, for what is to come. It will be upon this wall that millennials will climb their careers against almost-unimaginably quick, complex and ever-changing competition.
  • Crowd-sharing, crowdfunding, bitcoin, micro-venture funding, cloud computing, Big Data—all have been early attempts, of varying success, to cope with the next phase of Moore’s Law. Expect many more to come. Meanwhile, as always, this new pace will become the metronome of the larger culture.
  • Rigid command-and-control structures in every walk of life, from corporations to governments to education, become vulnerable to competition by adaptive and short-lived alliances and confederacies. Now that process is going to attack every corner of society.
  • Even the human brain will be challenged by artificial intelligence—the latter enjoying the advantage of continuously improving at the pace of Moore’s Law.
  • Millennials face one of the greatest opportunities any generation has ever known: to completely remake the world through boundless digital technology.
  • The good news is that this generation seems to be already, often unconsciously, preparing for this adventure—through robotics competitions, gatherings of tech enthusiasts, engineers and tinkerers at Maker Faires and other do-it-yourself events, and playing with new applications for their drones and 3D printers. Having lived their entire lives at the pace of Moore’s Law, they seem to sense that the time has come to hit the accelerator. If millennials don’t entirely get it yet, they soon will.
Javier E

Among the Disrupted - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...among-the-disrupted.html

postmodernism media tech disruption culture quantification humanities

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.
  • Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.
  • the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms:
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology
  • The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.
  • even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.
  • The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university
  • The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.
  • So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.
  • are we becoming posthumanists?
  • In American culture right now, as I say, the worldview that is ascendant may be described as posthumanism.
  • The posthumanism of the 1970s and 1980s was more insular, an academic affair of “theory,” an insurgency of professors; our posthumanism is a way of life, a social fate.
  • In “The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973,” the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of “man.”
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