Group items tagged

The truth is that Uber and Lyft exist largely as the embodiments of Wall Street-funded bets on automation, which have failed to come to fruition. These companies are trying to survive legal challenges to their illegal hiring practices, while waiting for driverless-car technologies to improve. The advent of the autonomous car would allow Uber and Lyft to fire their drivers.

Having already acquired a position of dominance with the rideshare market, these companies would then reap major monopoly profits. There is simply no world in which paying drivers a living wage would become part of Uber and Lyft’s long-term business plans.

Only in a world where more profitable opportunities for investment are sorely lacking can such wild bets on far-flung futuristic technologies become massive multinational companies. Corporations and wealthy individuals have accumulated huge sums of money and cannot figure out where to put it because returns on investments are extremely low

Chinese scholars and Communist Party cadres have a succinct way of describing the tectonic shifts taking place here: Deng Xiaoping made us rich, now Xi Jinping is making us strong.

Xi has devoted his seven years in power to strengthening the ruling Communist Party, and by extension the country. He has relentlessly quashed dissent, sidelined rivals and demanded absolute loyalty.After pledging to make the party “north, south, east and west,” he has ensured that it is paramount not just in policymaking but in the military, business, education and the law. 

Now, Xi is facing challenges on multiple fronts, and the Communist Party, riven with paranoia at the best of times, is seeing threats at every turn.ADHe has to contend not just with a slowing economy but also a protracted trade war with the United States that has entered a new confrontational phase with President Trump’s decision to impose more tariffs next month.

the United States is not a normal democracy. Untreated illness and uncertain care fill our politics with unnecessary fear and rage. Our president pushes this logic by offering insecurity instead of security as the aim of politics

This is not inefficiency or neglect. It is a pattern evident all across the Trump administration: Governing is not about problems to be solved, but emergencies to be magnified.

Health care is always political, but the politics can confirm or deny democratic norms and practices. A democratic country that handles a pandemic well generates trust in government, and even national pride. If care is not universal, then the political equation, especially during a pandemic, is entirely different.

I’ve found the writings of conventional international relations experts to be not very helpful in understanding what this whole crisis is about. But I’ve found the writing of experts in social psychology to be enormously helpful.

That’s because Vladimir Putin is not a conventional great power politician. He’s fundamentally an identity entrepreneur.

The war in Ukraine is not primarily about land; it’s primarily about status. Putin invaded so Russians could feel they are a great nation once again and so Putin himself could feel that he’s a world historical figure along the lines of Peter the Great.

while I freely acknowledge that there was more racism on the right than I was willing or able to see before the rise of Trump, there has been a distinct change in young right-wing culture. It is dramatically different from what it was when I was in college, in law school and starting my legal career.

As I survey the right — especially the young, so-called new right — I see a movement in the grip of some rather simple but powerful cultural forces. Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice

they’re not strong or tough or courageous. They’re timid sheep in wolves’ clothing, moving exactly where the loudest and most aggressive voices tell them to.

Several factors may explain the phenomenon, analysts say. “We really should be careful about assuming a cultural or ideological alignment between young voters and the far right,”

“We know in many countries young people are more pro-immigration than older voters. They have not become xenophobic. But their lives are more precarious. These are often votes for what in this Dutch election was called ‘livelihood security’.”

The Dutch word bestaanszekerheid translates roughly as an existence with a sufficient and predictable income, a satisfactory home, adequate access to education and healthcare, and a cushion against unexpected eventualities.

It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us

I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust

On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.

Despite their ability to carry prodigious amounts of data, fiber-optic cables are also highly insecure. An eavesdropper needs only to bend a cable and expose the fiber, Dr. Shields said. It is then possible to capture light that leaks from the cable and convert it into digital ones and zeros. “The laws of quantum physics tell us that if someone tries to measure those single photons, that measurement disturbs their state and it causes errors in the information carried by the single photon,” he said. “By measuring the error rate in the secret key, we can determine whether there has been any eavesdropping in the fiber and in that way directly test the secrecy of each key.”

similarities with the Holy Roman Empire — which at its greatest extent encompassed almost all of Central Europe — exist at many levels.

Today’s European Council, at which the union’s member states gather, reminds one of the old Reichstag, where the representatives of the German cities and principalities met to deliberate matters of mutual concern.

like the European project, which originated in a determination to banish war after 1945, the “modern” Holy Roman Empire, which was reformed by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, was intended to defuse the domestic German antagonisms that had culminated in the traumatic Thirty Years’ War.

I agree with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the current nihilist extremism of the current Republican Party is “the central problem in American life.”

And yet I find the chances of getting reform from within close to impossible, given how far they’ve now gone over the edge. And this is a tragedy not just for America, but for the GOP itself.

Here, for example, was a man whose family life would make him a cult hero if he were a Republican, but who has been demonized as an alien threat to America from the get-go. Here’s a Democrat who adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for healthcare exchanges. Here’s a Democrat who has actually cut Medicare. His stimulus was one-third tax cuts. Domestic energy production has soared under Obama, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have been deported. There were and are so many ways in which the GOP could have used Obama for their own advantage – both strategically and culturally. But they refused to, opting instead for visceral, dumb, self-defeating short-term tactical political advantage. All tactics and emotion; no strategy and reason.

Fukuyama, you see, believed that just because we'd reached the end of history didn't mean we'd stay in the end of history. That peace and prosperity might not be enough for some people who would, "struggle for the sake of struggle" simply "out of a certain boredom" from living in a world that doesn't seem to have meaning or identity any more.

the white working class is letting out a wail across the Western world against a political system they don't think recognizes them, and a society they don't recognize themselves. Add in the monotony of day-to-day life—why not smash it up just to see what happens?—and you've got a global revolt against the global order.

the first 25 years of the postwar liberal order had maybe the best and most broadly-shared growth in all of human history. We built the UN to keep the peace, NATO to defend Europe, the IMF to help countries out of economic trouble, and a middle class that, if you were white, got the help it needed to own a home and go to college.

Trump was not a normal candidate, the transition is not a normal transition, and this will probably not be a normal administration. The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty.

By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless.

In the best of times, government service carries with it the danger of compromising your principles. Here, though, we may be in for something much worse.

I believe there is a good likelihood, probably even a probability, that if the Russian subversion campaign had never happened and James Comey had never released his letter, Hillary Clinton would be prepping to become our new President. My own guess is that Comey's letter had the bigger impact. These were both profoundly damaging events in the race and Clinton lost by very tight margins in most of the newly (hopefully temporarily) red states. I see little way to challenge this assertion.

But the tiny margins are only one side of the story. Let's take Wisconsin. The final tally puts Trump ahead by .8%, or 22,748 votes. That's a tiny margin. Any number of things could have shifted the balance. Spending the final week of the campaign talking about a new investigation of Clinton's emails was more than enough to tip the balance. Spending not just a single trip but more concerted time in the state could have too.

But now look at the shift from 2012. The shift in the direction of the GOP was 7.7%. That is a huge shift over four years. Huge. There's no getting around that. If you step back from Wisconsin to the larger Upper Midwest region and indeed the United States you see something more fundamental. Donald Trump did what we all remember Barack Obama doing in 2008: He changed the shape of the electorate.

We’ve long known that Trump is so petty and insecure that he can’t stop himself from lashing out at anyone who criticizes him.

But now we have to seriously ask how long it’s going to be before his vindictiveness gets somebody killed.

as soon as Trump sent those missives out to his millions of followers, Jones’ phone started to ring with threats against him and his family.

This go-it-alone mentality works against the ways that, historically, workers have improved their lot. It encourages workers to see unions and government as flawed institutions that coddle the undeserving, rather than as useful, if imperfect, means of raising the relative prospects of all workers.

It also makes it more likely that white workers will direct their frustration toward racial and ethnic minorities, economic scapegoats who are dismissed as freeloaders unworthy of help—in a recent survey, 64 percent of Trump voters (not all of whom, of course, are part of the white working class) agreed that “average Americans” had gotten less they they deserved, but this figure dropped to 12 percent when that phrase was replaced with “blacks.” (Among Clinton voters, the figure stayed steady at 57 percent for both phrases.

This is one reason that enacting good policies is, while important, not enough to address economic inequality. What’s needed as well is a broader revision of a culture that makes those who struggle feel like losers.

It was obvious to anyone paying attention that the incoming administration would be blatantly corrupt. But would it at least be efficient in its corruption?

Mr. Trump hasn’t pivoted, matured, whatever term you prefer. He’s still the insecure, short-attention-span egomaniac he always was. Worse, he is surrounding himself with people who share many of his flaws — perhaps because they’re the sort of people with whom he is comfortable.

the typical Trump nominee, in everything from economics to diplomacy to national security, is ethically challenged, ignorant about the area of policy he or she is supposed to manage and deeply incurious.

The real threat is from the man who has done most to stoke national rage, and who will, in Cleveland, accept the Republican Party’s nomination to run for president. Win or lose in November, Donald Trump has the power to reshape America so that it becomes more like the dysfunctional and declining place he claims it to be

The dissonance between gloomy rhetoric and recent performance is greatest on the economy. America’s recovery is now the fourth-longest on record, the stockmarket is at an all-time high, unemployment is below 5% and real median wages are at last starting to rise. There are genuine problems, particularly high inequality and the plight of low-skilled workers left behind by globalisation. But these have festered for years. They cannot explain the sudden fury in American politics

On race relations there has, in fact, been huge progress. As recently as 1995, only half of Americans told pollsters that they approved of mixed-race marriages. Now the figure is nearly 90%. More than one in ten of all marriages are between people who belong to different ethnic groups. The movement of non-whites to the suburbs has thrown white, black, Hispanic and Asian-Americans together, and they get along just fine

the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes?

In Mr. Vance’s estimation, the answer is: a lot. Economic insecurity, he’s convinced, accounts for only a small part of his community’s problems; the much larger issue is hillbilly culture itself. Though proud of it in many ways, he’s also convinced that it “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

“Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation,” Mr. Vance writes. He suspects those cellphones have a lot to do with it. “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largess enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”

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.