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Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8608

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite surveillance capitalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
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  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
Javier E

Scientists Seek Ban on Method of Editing the Human Genome - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iting-technique-in-humans.html

method human genome modification

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that can be inherited.
  • The biologists fear that the new technique is so effective and easy to use that some physicians may push ahead before its safety can be assessed. They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence. The latter is a path that many ethicists believe should never be taken.
  • a technique invented in 2012 makes it possible to edit the genome precisely and with much greater ease. The technique has already been used to edit the genomes of mice, rats and monkeys, and few doubt that it would work the same way in people.
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  • The technique holds the power to repair or enhance any human gene. “It raises the most fundamental of issues about how we are going to view our humanity in the future and whether we are going to take the dramatic step of modifying our own germline and in a sense take control of our genetic destiny, which raises enormous peril for humanity,”
  • The paper’s authors, however, are concerned about countries that have less regulation in science. They urge that “scientists should avoid even attempting, in lax jurisdictions, germline genome modification for clinical application in humans” until the full implications “are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.”
  • Though such a moratorium would not be legally enforceable and might seem unlikely to exert global influence, there is a precedent. In 1975, scientists worldwide were asked to refrain from using a method for manipulating genes, the recombinant DNA technique, until rules had been established.
  • Though highly efficient, the technique occasionally cuts the genome at unintended sites. The issue of how much mistargeting could be tolerated in a clinical setting is one that Dr. Doudna’s group wants to see thoroughly explored before any human genome is edited.
  • “We worry about people making changes without the knowledge of what those changes mean in terms of the overall genome,” Dr. Baltimore said. “I personally think we are just not smart enough — and won’t be for a very long time — to feel comfortable about the consequences of changing heredity, even in a single individual.”
  • Many ethicists have accepted the idea of gene therapy, changes that die with the patient, but draw a clear line at altering the germline, since these will extend to future generations. The British Parliament in February approved the transfer of mitochondria, small DNA-containing organelles, to human eggs whose own mitochondria are defective. But that technique is less far-reaching because no genes are edited.
  • There are two broad schools of thought on modifying the human germline, said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Doudna group. One is pragmatic and seeks to balance benefit and risk. The other “sets up inherent limits on how much humankind should alter nature,” she said. Some Christian doctrines oppose the idea of playing God, whereas in Judaism and Islam there is the notion “that humankind is supposed to improve the world.” She described herself as more of a pragmatist, saying, “I would try to regulate such things rather than shut a new technology down at its beginning.
  • The Doudna group calls for public discussion, but is also working to develop some more formal process, such as an international meeting convened by the National Academy of Sciences, to establish guidelines for human use of the genome-editing technique.“We need some principled agreement that we want to enhance humans in this way or we don’t,” Dr. Jaenisch said. “You have to have this discussion because people are gearing up to do this.”
criscimagnael

In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rt-transplant-pig-bennett.html

shared by criscimagnael on 12 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.
  • “This is a watershed event,” said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”
  • It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,
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  • It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before
  • Last year, some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ, more than half of them receiving kidneys,
  • But there is an acute shortage of organs, and about a dozen people on the lists die each day. Some 3,817 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but the potential demand is still higher.
  • Researchers hope procedures like this will usher in a new era in medicine in the future when replacement organs are no longer in short supply for the more than half a million Americans who are waiting for kidneys and other organs.
  • He is also being monitored for infections, including porcine retrovirus, a pig virus that may be transmitted to humans, although the risk is considered low.
  • But he added that there were many hurdles to overcome before such a procedure could be broadly applied, noting that rejection of organs occurs even when a well-matched human donor kidney is transplanted.
  • It takes a long time to mature a therapy like this.”
  • Mr. Bennett decided to gamble on the experimental treatment because he would have died without a new heart, had exhausted other treatments and was too sick to qualify for a human donor heart, family members and doctors said.
  • Mr. Bennett is still connected to a heart-lung bypass machine, which was keeping him alive before the operation, but that is not unusual for a new heart transplant recipient, experts said.
  • The new heart is functioning and already doing most of the work, and his doctors said he could be taken off the machine on Tuesday. Mr. Bennett is being closely monitored for signs that his body is rejecting the new organ, but the first 48 hours, which are critical, passed without incident.
  • It is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
  • Xenotransplantation, the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues from animals to humans, has a long history. Efforts to use the blood and skin of animals go back hundreds of years.
  • In the 1960s, chimpanzee kidneys were transplanted into some human patients, but the longest a recipient lived was nine months.
  • In 1983, a baboon heart was transplanted into an infant known as Baby Fae, but she died 20 days later.
  • Two newer technologies — gene editing and cloning — have yielded genetically altered pig organs less likely to be rejected by humans.
  • the time to carry out better screening for infectious diseases, and the possibility of a new organ at the time that the patient needs it.
  • The heart transplanted into Mr. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.
  • The pig had 10 genetic modifications. Four genes were knocked out, or inactivated, including one that encodes a molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response.
  • A growth gene was also inactivated to prevent the pig’s heart from continuing to grow after it was implanted,
  • In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig — modifications designed to make the porcine organs more tolerable to the human immune system.
  • The team used a new experimental drug developed in part by Dr. Mohiuddin and made by Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals to suppress the immune system and prevent rejection.
  • “The anatomy was a little squirrelly, and we had a few moments of ‘uh-oh’ and had to do some clever plastic surgery to make everything fit,”
  • “the heart fired right up” and “the animal heart began to squeeze.”
  • He said his father had had a pig’s valve inserted about a decade ago, and he thought his father might be confused. But after a while, Mr. Bennett said, “I realized, ‘Man, he is telling the truth and not going crazy. And he could be the first ever.’”
Javier E

Life After Oil and Gas - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...life-after-oil-and-gas.html

energy renewable gas policy environment fossil

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • To what extent will we really “need” fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?
  • Thirteen countries got more than 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy in 2011, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, and many are aiming still higher.
  • Could we? Should we?
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  • the United States could halve by 2030 the oil used in cars and trucks compared with 2005 levels by improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles and by relying more on cars that use alternative power sources, like electric batteries and biofuels.
  • New York State — not windy like the Great Plains, nor sunny like Arizona — could easily produce the power it needs from wind, solar and water power by 2030
  • “You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it.”
  • “There is plenty of room for wind and solar to grow and they are becoming more competitive, but these are still variable resources — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” said Alex Klein, the research director of IHS Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm on renewable energy. “An industrial economy needs a reliable power source, so we think fossil fuel will be an important foundation of our energy mix for the next few decades.”
  • improving the energy efficiency of homes, vehicles and industry was an easier short-term strategy. He noted that the 19.5 million residents of New York State consume as much energy as the 800 million in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa)
  • a rapid expansion of renewable power would be complicated and costly. Using large amounts of renewable energy often requires modifying national power grids, and renewable energy is still generally more expensive than using fossil fuels
  • Promoting wind and solar would mean higher electricity costs for consumers and industry.
  • many of the European countries that have led the way in adopting renewables had little fossil fuel of their own, so electricity costs were already high. Others had strong environmental movements that made it politically acceptable to endure higher prices
  • countries could often get 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar without much modification to their grids. A few states, like Iowa and South Dakota, get nearly that much of their electricity from renewable power (in both states, wind), while others use little at all.
  • America is rich in renewable resources and (unlike Europe) has the empty space to create wind and solar plants. New York State has plenty of wind and sun to do the job, they found. Their blueprint for powering the state with clean energy calls for 10 percent land-based wind, 40 percent offshore wind, 20 percent solar power plants and 18 percent solar panels on rooftops
  • the substantial costs of enacting the scheme could be recouped in under two decades, particularly if the societal cost of pollution and carbon emissions were factored in
Javier E

Ban College Football? Breaking Down a Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/...ootball-breaking-down-a-debate

football brain injury

shared by Javier E on 11 May 12 - Cached
  • Two prominent writers argued for banning college football on Tuesday night at New York University’s Skirball Center as part of the Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates series. Their opponents were two journalists, who also happened to be former players.
  • Before hearing the arguments, audience members were asked their opinion, and 16 percent were for the resolution to ban college football; 53 percent were against. At the end of the night, 53 percent were for it and 39 percent against. The undecided vote had plunged from 31 percent to 8 percent.
  • Gladwell was not amenable to modifications, calling the idea that brain injuries could be minimized by better helmets or medical care “a fantasy.”“I’ve seen pictures of the brain scans of people with C.T.E.,” he said, referring to a trauma-induced disease, “and it looks like someone drove a truck across their brain.”
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  • said he had “grave concerns” about concussions, but also denied the problem was as widespread or severe as Gladwell implied. Citing a study from the University of North Carolina, he said there were more direct fatalities in lacrosse, water polo and baseball than football, so why not ban those sports?
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

Students Recall Special Schools Run Like Jails - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-school-run-like-a-prison.html

discipline schools abuse

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • there are no federal laws governing schools like those built on the World Wide model. A 2011 Congressional bill that would have banned physical abuse and the withholding of food at such schools died in committee after it was opposed by lawmakers reluctant to impose new federal standards on a matter often regulated by states.
  • Instead, states oversee the facilities variously as camps, boarding schools or residential treatment facilities, and state regulators often hesitate to step in because the programs exist in an ill-defined area of the law. For example, private boarding schools are not regularly inspected and are not required to be licensed or accredited, according to the federal Department of Education.
  • Daily life is highly structured, with limited free time. Students, who are required to wear uniforms, generally perform schoolwork at their own pace for about five hours a day, though many students and parents say the curriculum is far less rigorous than that of local public schools. While some of the programs have gyms, usually only those who have earned enough points for good behavior can use them. Former students say those points can be rescinded quickly after months of hard work. Violating rules often leads to being placed in isolation, or being “restrained” — held on the floor for as long as an hour by staff members, who students say twist their limbs in painful positions until they stop resisting. Other punishments at World Wide programs have included pepper spraying, handcuffing, being forced into dog cages and being made to sit or stand in uncomfortable positions for hours, according to former students and claims in lawsuits.
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  • World Wide once had behavior modification schools in at least 11 states, as well as countries including Costa Rica and Mexico. In recent years, hit by the recession and accusations of abuse, Mr. Lichfield has divested ownership of the schools, which he once likened to McDonald’s franchises. But the programs’ structure and the disciplinary philosophy he helped conceive continue to be the template at most if not all of the schools.
  • Mr. Lichfield, family members and business partners have financial interests in a layer of secondary companies through a web of limited liability companies, consulting arrangements and property ownership that Mr. Lichfield has acknowledged in depositions — while also saying he does not fully understand the links himself. These entities oversee the marketing, business and educational services for many of the schools, and have received up to one-third of the programs’ gross revenues, according to business records and court depositions.
  • According to business filings and Mr. Lichfield’s court testimony, the schools and programs that have ties to Mr. Lichfield and his associates are Horizon Academy, Cross Creek Programs and Old West Academy in Utah; Seneca Ranch in South Carolina; Midwest Academy in Iowa; Red River Academy in Louisiana; and Pillars of Hope in Costa Rica. Annual tuition ranges from about $36,000 to $60,000. Most of the schools denied an affiliation with World Wide.
  • World Wide schools in Samoa, Mexico and Costa Rica, in addition to the Czech Republic program, have closed after concerns were raised about mistreated children. World Wide says that while the school in Mexico was closed by the Mexican authorities, the other three programs were closed voluntarily. World Wide denies that any children in the Mexican program or the others were abused.
Javier E

A Proud Nation Ponders How to Halt Its Slow Decline - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-to-halt-its-slow-decline.html

France economy

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Today, however, Europe is talking about “the French question”: can the Socialist government of President François Hollande pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?
  • At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years.
  • France’s friends, Germany in particular, fear that Mr. Hollande may simply lack the political courage to confront his allies and make the necessary decisions.
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  • Today, at Nanterre, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are demanding that nothing change at all.
  • as the European economy slowly mends, the French temptation will be to hope that modest economic growth will again mask, like a tranquilizer, the underlying problems.
  • The French are justifiably proud of their social model. Health care and pensions are good, many French retire at 60 or younger, five or six weeks of vacation every summer is the norm, and workers with full-time jobs have a 35-hour week and significant protections against layoffs and firings.
  • the question is not whether the French social model is a good one, but whether the French can continue to afford it. Based on current trends, the answer is clearly no, not without significant structural changes — in pensions, in taxes, in social benefits, in work rules and in expectations.
  • the challenge in France seems especially hard, in part because of the nation’s amour-propre and self-image as a European leader and global power, and in part because French life is so comfortable for many and the day of reckoning still seems far enough away, especially to the country’s small but powerful unions.
  • “The young people march now to reject all reforms,” he said. “We see no alternatives. We’re a generation without bearings.”
  • The Socialists have become a conservative party, desperately trying to preserve the victories of the last century.
  • There is nonetheless an underlying understanding that there will be little lasting gain without structural changes to the state-heavy French economy. The warning signs are everywhere: French unemployment and youth unemployment are at record levels; growth is slow compared with Germany, Britain, the United States or Asia; government spending represents nearly 57 percent of gross domestic product, the highest in the euro zone, and is 11 percentage points higher than Germany. The government employs 90 civil servants per 1,000 residents, compared with 50 in Germany.
  • Hourly wage costs are high and social spending represents 32 percent of G.D.P., highest among the industrialized countries; real wage increases outpace productivity growth; national debt is more than 90 percent of G.D.P.
  • In the World Bank’s ranking of “ease of doing business,” France ranks 34th, compared with 7th for Britain and 20th for Germany.
  • Last year, France was ranked 28th out of the 60 most competitive economies in the world, according to the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. The United States was first. Even China, at 21, and Japan, at 24, outranked France.
  • About 82 percent of the new jobs created last year were temporary contracts, up from 70 percent only five years ago, not the kind of full-time work that opens the door to the French middle class. That keeps nearly an entire generation living precariously, no matter how hard people study or work.
  • France is the world’s fifth-largest economy, with strong traditions in management, science and innovation.
  • The country retains plenty of strengths.
  • The gap between rich and poor is narrower in France than in most Western countries, although it is growing.
  • When the French work, they work hard; labor productivity, perhaps the single most important indicator of an economy’s potential, is still relatively high, if dropping. But with long holidays and the 35-hour week, the French work fewer hours than most competitors, putting an extra strain on corporations and the economy.
  • Large French companies compete globally; there are more French companies in the Fortune 500 than any other European country. But the bulk of their employees are abroad, and there are few of the midsize companies that are the backbone of Germany.
  • Ninety percent of French companies have 10 or fewer employees and fear expansion because of extra tax burdens and strict labor regulations.
  • In poll after poll, the French insist that they want renovation and modernization, so long as it does not touch them. That is always the political challenge, and Mr. Hollande’s conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, is considered to have failed in his promise to make serious structural changes.
  • One of Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers, Alain Minc, who tried to get him interested in Germany’s social market revisions, once admitted that Mr. Sarkozy was simply afraid to confront the unions and the social uproar that real change would provoke.
  • There is a broad consensus that real social and structural renovation can be carried out only by the left. But that can happen only if Mr. Hollande, who has a legislative majority, is willing to confront his own party in the name of the future, as the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder did a decade ago with a series of legal modifications that now get much of the credit for Germany’s revival.
katyshannon

'Anti-malarial mosquitoes' created using controversial genetic technology | Science | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ntroversial-genetic-technology

anti-malarial mosquitos genetic modification technology science the guardian health

shared by katyshannon on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Hundreds of genetically modified mosquitoes that are incapable of spreading the malaria parasite to humans have been created in a laboratory as part of a radical approach to combating the disease.
  • The move marks a major step towards the development of a powerful and controversial technology called a “gene drive” that aims to tackle the disease by forcing anti-malarial genes into swarms of wild mosquitoes.
  • The procedure can rapidly transform the genetic makeup of natural insect populations, making it a dramatic new tool in the fight against an infection that still claims over 400,000 lives a year. The same technology is being considered for other human diseases and infections that devastate crops.
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  • They call on scientists to ensure that experimental organisms cannot escape from their labs, be released on purpose, or even find their way out accidentally in the event of a natural disaster. Researchers should also be open about the precautions they take to prevent an unintended release, they said.
  • But gene drive technology is so powerful that leading researchers have urged scientists in the field to be cautious. A warning published in August in the prestigious journal Science, by teams in the UK, US, Australia and Japan, said that while gene drives have the potential to save lives and bring other benefits, the accidental release of modified organisms “could have unpredictable ecological consequences.”
  • In the latest study, mosquitoes were engineered to carry genes for antibodies that target the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. When released into the wild, researchers believe the modified insects will breed with normal mosquitoes and pass the anti-malarial genes on to their young, making an ever-increasing proportion of future generations resistant to the malaria parasite.
  • In lab tests, the modified mosquitoes passed on their anti-malarial genes to 99.5% of their offspring, suggesting that the procedure was incredibly effective and efficient. To track which insects inherited the antibody genes, the scientists added a tracer gene that gave carriers red fluorescent eyes.
Javier E

The Crash That Failed | by Robert Kuttner | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...financial-crash-that-failed

great recession crash financial crisis

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalism—the belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and with calamitous consequences. Gross economic imbalances of power and wealth persisted.
  • In the United States, the bipartisan financial elite escaped largely unscathed. Barack Obama, whose campaign benefited from the timing of the collapse, hired the architects of the Clinton-era deregulation who had created the conditions that led to the crisis. Far from breaking up the big banks or removing their executives, Obama’s team bailed them out.
  • criminal prosecution took a back seat to the stability of the system.
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  • the economic security of most Americans dwindled, and the legitimacy of the system was called into question. One consequence has been the rise of the far right; another is Donald Trump.
  • Germany insisted that the struggling countries had to practice austerity in order to restore the confidence of private financial markets. In a deep recession, even orthodox economists at the International Monetary Fund soon recognized that austerity was a perverse recipe for economic recovery.
  • Europe, because of Germany’s worries that these policies would lead to inflation, had no way to extend credit to struggling nations or to raise money through the sale of bonds, which would have allowed the ECB to provide debt relief or to invest in public services.
  • The political result was the same on both sides of the Atlantic—declining prospects for ordinary people, animus toward elites, and the rise of ultra-nationalism
  • Not so in Europe. Parties such as the German Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and the French Socialists disgraced themselves as co-sponsors of the neoliberal formula that brought down the economy.
  • In nation after nation, the main opposition to the party of Davos is neofascism.
  • In his masterful narrative, the economic historian Adam Tooze achieves several things that no other single author has quite accomplished. Tooze has managed to explain a hugely complex global crisis in its multiple dimensions, and his book combines cogent analysis with a fascinating history of the political and economic particulars
  • when the collapse came, it was “a financial crisis triggered by the humdrum market for American real estate.”
  • the collapse reinforced the financial supremacy of Washington and New York. “Far from withering away,” he writes, “the Fed’s response gave an entirely new dimension to the global dollar.”
  • When the entire structure of borrowed money collapsed, the losses more than wiped out all the capital of the banking system—not just in the US but in Europe, because of the intimate interconnection (and contagion) of American and European banks. Had the authorities just stood by, Tooze writes, the collapse would have been far more severe than the Great Depression:
  • While insisting to Congress that the emergency response was mainly to shore up US finance, Bernanke turned the Fed into the world’s central bank. “Through so-called liquidity swap lines, the Fed licensed a hand-picked group of core central banks to issue dollar credits on demand,” Tooze writes. In other words, the Fed simply created enough dollars, running well into the trillions, to prevent the global economy from collapsing for lack of credit.
  • Bernanke instigated government action on an unimagined scale to prop up a private system that supposedly did not need the state
  • Using deposit guarantees, loans to banks, outright capital transfers, and purchases of nearly worthless securities, the Fed and the Treasury recapitalized the banking system. To camouflage what was at work, officials invented unlimited credit pipelines with disarmingly technical names.
  • The blandly named policy of quantitative easing, which drove interest rates down to almost zero, was a euphemism for Fed purchases of immense quantities of private and government securities.
  • The crisis, Tooze writes, “was a devastating blow to the complacent belief in the great moderation, a shocking overturning of the prevailing laissez-faire ideology.” And yet the ideology prevailed
  • In a reversal of New Deal priorities, most of the relief went to the biggest banks, while smaller banks and homeowners were allowed to go under
  • Banks were permitted to invent complex provisional loan “modifications” with opaque terms that favored lenders, rather than using their government subsidies to provide refinancing to reduce homeowner debts
  • How did a nominally center-left administration, elected during a financial crisis caused by right-wing economic ideology and policy, end up in this situation?
  • Turning to Europe, Tooze explores the fatal combination of Germany’s demands for austerity with the structural weakness of the ECB and the vulnerability of the euro.
  • Portugal or Greece now enjoyed interest rates that were only slightly higher than Germany’s, and markets failed to take account of the risk of default, which was more serious than that of devaluation.
  • instead of treating the Greek situation as a crisis to be contained and helping a genuinely reformist new government find its footing, Brussels and Berlin treated Greece as an object lesson in profligacy and an opportunity to insist on punitive terms for financial aid
  • A central player in this tragedy was the European Central Bank. Tooze does a fine job of explaining the delicate dance between the bank’s leaders and its real masters in Germany. Since Germany opposed continent-wide recovery spending, the bank could only pursue monetary policy. The model was the Fed. Yet while the Fed has a congressional “dual mandate” to target both price stability and high employment, the ECB’s charter allowed for price stability only
  • The ECB, with the consent of the Germans, came up with one of those bland-sounding names, Outright Monetary Transactions, for its direct purchases of government bonds. But the program, at the insistence of the Germans, was restricted to nations in compliance with Merkel’s rigid fiscal terms, which limited national deficits and debts. In other words, the money could not go to the very nations where it was needed most, since the hardest-hit countries had to borrow heavily to get themselves out of the recession
  • Reading Tooze, you realize that it’s a miracle that the EU and the euro survived at all—but they did so at terrible human cost.
  • the ideal of liberalized trade, and the use of trade treaties to promote deregulation or privatized regulation of finance, is a major element of the story of how neoliberal hegemony promoted the eventual collapse. But except for a passing reference, trade and globalized deregulation get little mention here.
  • he has almost nothing to say about Janet Yellen. Her nomination as Fed chair in 2013 to succeed Bernanke was an epochal event and an improbable defeat for the proponents of austerity, deregulation, and bank bailouts who influenced Obama’s policymaking. Yellen, a left-liberal economist specializing in labor markets, was the only left-of-center Fed chair other then FDR’s chairman Marriner Eccles. She also believed in tough regulation of banks. The extension of quantitative easing well beyond its intended end was substantially due to Yellen’s concern about wages and employment, and not just price stability, since low interest rates can also help promote recovery.
  • Tooze ends the book with a short chapter called “The Shape of Things to Come,” mainly on the ascent of China, the one nation that avoided all the shibboleths of economic and political liberalism, though it also, of course, does not have a political democracy.
Javier E

Language and the Invention of Writing - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...e-and-the-invention-of-writing

language invention writing history culture

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain.
  • Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us.
  • Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.
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  • there’s nothing natural about it or inevitable.
  • There have been a number of independent originations of writing in human history.
  • But our modern world is dominated by only two lines of descent: the character system which is used in China and with some modifications much of East Asia and the ancestor of the alphabet we use as readers and writers of English.
  • What is particularly fascinating is that most historians of writing believe that this invention – the alphabet, designed by and for sub-literate Semites living on the borderlands of Egypt about 4,000 years ago – is likely the origin point of all modern alphabets.
  • the creators of the alphabets that now dominate South Asia (originating 2500 to 3000 years ago) also seem to have borrowed at least the idea of the alphabet from these Semitic innovators, though others believe they are an indigenous creation.
  • The deep history of these letters we are now communicating through is like the DNA – or perhaps rather the record of the DNA – of human cognition and thought, processed through language and encoded into writing.
Javier E

Archaeologists discover 81 ancient settlements in the Amazon - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ient-settlements-in-the-amazon

amazon americas settlement agriculture history

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, de Souza and his colleagues describe the mound village and 80 other newly discovered archaeological sites from the years 1250 to 1500.
  • They predict that the region hides hundreds more undiscovered sites, and that as many as a million people might have carefully managed the rain forest long before Europeans arrived.
  • Fifty years ago, she said, “prominent scholars thought that little of cultural significance had ever happened in a tropical forest. It was supposed to be too highly vegetated, too moist. And the corollary to those views was that people never cut down the forests; they were supposed to have been sort of ‘noble savages,’ ” she said. “But those views have been overturned,” Piperno continued. “A lot of importance happened in tropical forests, including agricultural origins.”
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  • De Souza and his collaborators spent a month conducting on-the-ground surveys of 24 of those sites. All of them contained evidence that they had been inhabited: abandoned stone tools and broken ceramics, buried trash heaps, an enriched soil called terra preta that is characteristic of indigenous land management through burning and adding fertilizer. By measuring how much of samples’ radioactive carbon had decayed over the years, the researchers dated wood charcoal found at the sites to the early and mid-1400s.
  • Others’ research shows that entire regions of the rain forest are dominated by tree species once cultivated for food by indigenous people. And highly planned networks of villages have been identified on either side of the region de Souza studied.
  • The latest discovery, de Souza said, suggests there was a continuous string of settlements across the entire southern rim of the Amazon basin.
  • “It seems that it was a mosaic of cultures,” he continued. The villages shared some practices — enriching the soil, cultivating Brazil nut and cocoa trees, encircling their homes with protective ditches — but spoke a diverse array of languages
  • “The forest is an artifact of modification,” de Souza said. He quickly added: “It has nothing to do with the kind of practice we are seeing nowadays — large-scale, clearing monoculture. These people were combining small-scale agriculture with management of useful tree species. So it was more a sustainable kind of land use.”
krystalxu

Helmuth von Moltke | German military commander [1848-1916] | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...uth-Johannes-Ludwig-von-Moltke

Helmuth von Moltke

shared by krystalxu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • His modification of the German attack plan in the west and his inability to retain control of his rapidly advancing armies significantly contributed to the halt of the German offensive on the Marne in September 1914 and the frustration of German efforts for a rapid, decisive victory.
knudsenlu

Why CNN's Parkland Town Hall Mattered - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553949

town hall gun control florida

shared by knudsenlu on 26 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • I was 10 years old when, in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students at Columbine High School, in what was then the most-deadly school shooting in American history. What I can recall most from my childhood mind from the time aren’t the gruesome details in the news reports or even the sense of dread that gripped students and teachers across the country, but the feeling that something central about the country had changed. Something about America had shifted, and it was significant enough that even a child’s understanding could grasp it.
  • Almost two decades later, after multiple mass shootings and dozens of slain children, it’s clear that what changed wasn’t the mobilization of a country to stop events like Columbine, but the beginning of the normalization of those events.
  • The theme of most of the night was criticism of Rubio, who often appeared hesitant in the face of withering boos and tough questions. As the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos put it: “The pummelling of Rubio felt like an expression of collective rage at the falseness of so much that happens in Washington.” The usual rhetorical feints and misdirections employed by politicians in more milquetoast town halls only seemed to anger the crowd more.
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  • “The issue is not the loopholes,” the senator said, “it’s the problem that once you start looking at how easy it is to get around it, you would literally have to ban every semi-automatic rifle that’s sold.” But the crowd cheered loudly at the suggestion of such a ban, a response that caught Rubio off guard.
  • “I want you to know that we will support your two children in the way that you will not,” Gonzalez said. She also asked Loesch if the NRA supported any restrictions on the purchase of semiautomatic weapons and modifications like bump stocks.
  • It’s unclear if those kinds of restrictions would actually reduce the rate of gun violence or incidence of mass shootings, but the town hall did show that the power of people—especially young people—is still important even in this age of big money.
  • That power only seems to be growing. Students across Florida and other places in the country are marching, and there appears to be an ongoing political awakening among youth about the issue of gun violence. Students from Stoneman Douglas are finding their footing as political leaders in their own right, forced into the fire by tragedy, and have now proven effective in meeting the strongest arguments of their policy opponents, and in wielding the power of public opinion on their side. If there is significant movement on gun-control reforms in the future, it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that the country will look back on Wednesday’s town hall as a paradigm-shifting moment that might have finally moved the debate.
manhefnawi

The Surprisingly Disorderly History of the US Presidential Succession Order | Britannic... - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...-presidential-succession-order

History Succession Presidency

shared by manhefnawi on 17 May 18 - No Cached
  • In 1981 U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan was shot during an assassination attempt
  • In fact, a peaceful transition of power is seen as vital to a democracy.
  • Thus it is somewhat surprising that presidential succession in the United States has often been unclear and problematic. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention (1787) spent little time on succession
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  • if the president is unable to complete his term—either by removal, death, resignation, or inability to discharge the office’s duties—the vice president would assume the post. The lack of details raised questions—notably, who determines if the president is unable to serve? In addition, no provisions were made for a case in which the vice president could not take office
  • Congress passed the Presidential Succession Act in 1792. The legislation placed the president pro tempore of the Senate and then the speaker of the House of Representatives as next in line after the vice president
  • The secretary of state was bypassed largely because Federalists of the time opposed that office’s holder, Thomas Jefferson, a vocal anti-Federalist.)
  • when Pres. James A. Garfield was shot in July 1881, doubts arose over who should be president. Although severely incapacitated, Garfield lived for 80 days. During this time, it was uncertain if Vice Pres. Chester A. Arthur should serve as acting president or if he should officially replace Garfield
  • Congress set out to resolve some of these issues, and a new Presidential Succession Act was officially enacted in 1886
  • Later notable modifications included the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which was ratified in 1967. It explicitly stated (unlike the Constitution) that if the vice president assumes the Oval Office, he or she would be the president—not the acting president
  • Despite such arguments, recent proposals to change the order have been resisted.
manhefnawi

Europe in the Caribbean, Part II: The Monarch of the West Indies | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...an-part-ii-monarch-west-indies

Division Caribbean France Spain England West Indies

shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • the dispute will be whether the King of England or of France shall be the Monarch of the West Indies, for the King of Spain cannot hold it long
  • The wars between the Kings of France and Britain were, on the contrary, waged for supremacy in the Caribbean itself and it was this aspect that gave West Indian history, from Cromwell’s Protectorate to the battle of Trafalgar, its special stamp
  • a handful of stubborn and self-reliant Commonwealth soldiers within five years got the better of the King of Spain
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  • We are starving
  • In 1635 Guadeloupe and Martinique became and, after several changes, remained profitable French possessions
  • The French, unlike the British, also established themselves on Hispaniola, Spain’s largest, most prestigious and administratively most important island in the area.
  • Just before the last Habsburg King of Spain died, the French presence in the Spanish mare nostrum generally, and in Hispaniola in particular, was given international recognition in the treaty of Ryswick of 1697
  • The Most Serene King of Great Britain, his Heirs and Successors, shall have, hold and possess for ever, with full sovereignty, ownership and possession, all the lands, regions, islands, colonies and dominions, situated in the West Indies or in any part of America, that the said King of Great Britain and his subjects at present hold and possess
  • The recognition of the new status quo, distressing but realistic so far as Spain was concerned, while being a considerable political and commercial boon to Charles II’s government
  • the peace of Utrecht was in reality only an uneasy truce
  • Thus with the restoration of Charles II and the almost simultaneous taking up of the reins of government by the young Louis XIV, Britain and France stood poised in the Caribbean facing each other from positions of great potential wealth, strategic advantage and political power. Both monarchs had triumphed over their enemies at home, but equally they had both come into an inheritance accumulated by their predecessor
  • The Netherlands had in fact been the first country deliberately to challenge the power of the King of Spain on his own ground in the Indies
  • No wonder that in 1609 Philip III offered these irrepressible heretics a twelve years’ truce, which implied a preliminary recognition of independence
  • Rich in ships, men and money -the days of the Dutch sea-beggars were over -the company, parent and model of all future companies of this type, pursued an ambitious programme. Not content like the British and French to settle on the smaller islands of the Caribbean neglected by Spain, they attacked the mighty colony of Brazil itself since until 1640 the crowns of Portugal and Spain were united in personal union under the Habsburgs
  • With the Treaty of Westphalia we enter in the West Indies on the violent but passing era of the buccaneers, when Englishmen like Henry Morgan
  • This uncontrollable anarchy in the Caribbean and along the coasts of Central and South America was exceeded only by the savage cruelty with which these accomplished but coarsened sailors pursued their greedy aims, and the spectacle was viewed with mounting disfavour by the governments at Whitehall and Versailles
  • The first opportunity to root out this barbarous nuisance came during the negotiations at Utrecht and elsewhere for a settlement to end the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1713 the Bourbons were accepted as Kings of Spain and the Indies
  • Spain, weakened by Protestant aggression and incapable of adapting its rigid and creaking caste system to the new realities of maritime and economic life
  • In the French islands, les grands blancs, among whom the family of the future Empress Josephine at Martinique was perhaps the most celebrated example, ruled on the basis of the code noir, introduced by Louis XIV and subject to various reforms and modifications in subsequent reigns, especially that of Louis XVI
  • Where in the French islands absolutist rule was maintained by the conseils supérieurs appointed by the King at Versailles, in the British possessions political power was vested in a Governor sent out from England by letter-patent together with a handful of other political and administrative officers
  • In the south another ex-slave presently proclaimed himself Emperor of Haiti, while in 1811 the black titan of the North, Jean Christophe, became King Christophe I of Haiti
nrashkind

'Women Will Not Be Forced to Be Alone When They Are Giving Birth' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-hospitals-visitors-labor.html

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In response to some private hospitals’ decision to bar partners, New York will order all hospitals to allow partners in delivery rooms, despite the coronavirus risk.
  • Women preparing to give birth at some hospitals in New York City will no longer have to labor alone, state officials said Saturday.
  • The order, which the governor released Saturday night, is a response to a decision earlier this week by two major New York City hospital systems, NewYork-Presbyterian and Mount Sinai, to ban support people from labor and delivery rooms because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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  • Melissa DeRosa, the secretary to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, announced that an executive order would be issued that required all hospitals in New York, both public and private, to allow women to have a partner in the labor and delivery room
  • The Department of Health, the regulatory authority over hospitals, had notified hospitals on Friday that they were required to allow one person to accompany a woman throughout labor and delivery.
  • A spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian said in a statement on Saturday that it would comply with the executive order “effective immediately.”
  • “Our highest priority continues to be the safety and well-being of our patients, their families, and our staff,” the statement said.
  • And Renatt Brodsky, a spokeswoman for Mount Sinai, said on Saturday that the hospital system would follow the executive order “effective today.”
  • Details about the cases at Columbia were presented in a paper published online on Thursday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology MFM.
  • Flannery Amdahl, 36, a New Yorker who is in her second trimester of pregnancy, has been following the controversy closely.
  • “It has been so difficult to come to terms with. I have definitely cried over this policy,” she said.
  • “I am torn because on the one hand, it is really scary to think about the possibility of giving birth alone, and not having an advocate in the delivery room,” she said. “However, I don’t think the hospitals made this decision lightly, at all. They recognize that medical personnel are risking their own lives to just be there.”
andrespardo

Will Florida be lost forever to the climate crisis? | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-crisis-sea-level-habitat-loss

enviro climate change global warming

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Few places on the planet are more at risk from the climate crisis than south Florida, where more than 8 million residents are affected by the convergence of almost every modern environmental challenge – from rising seas to contaminated drinking water, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, coastal erosion, flooding and vanishing wildlife and habitat.
  • Below are some of the biggest threats posed by the climate crisis to south Florida today, along with solutions under consideration. Some of these solutions will have a lasting impact on the fight. Others, in many cases, are only delaying the inevitable. But in every situation, doing something is preferable to doing nothing at all.
  • Sea level rise The threat: By any estimation, Florida is drowning. In some scenarios, sea levels will rise up to 31in by 2060, a devastating prediction for a region that already deals regularly with tidal flooding and where an estimated 120,000 properties on or near the water are at risk. The pace of the rise is also hastening, scientists say – it took 31 years for the waters around Miami to rise by six inches, while the next six inches will take only 15 more.
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  • The cost: The participating counties and municipalities are contributing to a $4bn statewide spend, including Miami Beach’s $400m Forever Bond, a $1bn stormwater plan and $250m of improvements to Broward county’s sewage systems to protect against flooding and seawater seepage. In the Keys, many consider the estimated $60m a mile cost of raising roads too expensive.
  • The threat: Saltwater from sea level rise is seeping further inland through Florida’s porous limestone bedrock and contaminating underground freshwater supplies, notably in the Biscayne aquifer, the 4,000-sq mile shallow limestone basin that provides drinking water to millions in southern Florida. Years of over-pumping and toxic runoff from farming and the sugar industry in central Florida and the Everglades have worsened the situation. The Florida department of environmental protection warned in March that “existing sources of water will not adequately meet the reasonable beneficial needs for the next 20 years”. A rising water table, meanwhile, has exacerbated problems with south Florida’s ageing sewage systems. Since December, millions of gallons of toxic, raw sewage have spilled on to Fort Lauderdale’s streets from a series of pipe failures.
  • The cost: The Everglades restoration plan was originally priced at $7.8bn, rose to $10.5bn, and has since ballooned to $16.4bn. Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget includes $250m for Everglades restoration. The estimated $1.8bn cost of the reservoir will be split between federal and state budgets.
  • Possible solutions
  • The cost: With homeowners and businesses largely bearing their own costs, the specific amount spent on “hurricane-proofing” in Florida is impossible to know. A 2018 Pew research study documented $1.3bn in hazard mitigation grants from federal and state funding in 2017, along with a further $8bn in post-disaster grants. Florida is spending another $633m from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on resiliency planning.
  • Wildlife and habitat loss The threat: Florida’s native flora and fauna are being devastated by climate change, with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory warning that a quarter of the 1,200 species it tracks is set to lose more than half their existing habitat, and the state’s beloved manatees and Key deer are at risk of extinction. Warmer and more acidic seas reduce other species’ food stocks and exacerbate the deadly red-tide algal blooms that have killed incalculable numbers of fish, turtles, dolphins and other marine life. Bleaching and stony coral tissue disease linked to the climate crisis threaten to hasten the demise of the Great Florida Reef, the only living coral reef in the continental US. Encroaching saltwater has turned Big Pine Key, a crucial deer habitat, into a ghost forest.
  • As for the Key deer, of which fewer than 1,000 remain, volunteers leave clean drinking water to replace salt-contaminated watering holes as herds retreat to higher ground. A longer-term debate is under way on the merits and ethics of relocating the species to other areas of Florida or the US.
  • Coastal erosion The threat: Tourist brochures showcase miles of golden, sandy beaches in South Florida, but the reality is somewhat different. The Florida department of environmental protection deems the entire coastline from Miami to Cape Canaveral “critically eroded”, the result of sea level rise, historically high tides and especially storm surges from a succession of powerful hurricanes. In south-eastern Florida’s Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, authorities are waging a continuous war on sand loss, eager to maintain their picture-perfect image and protect two of their biggest sources of income, tourism dollars and lucrative property taxes from waterfront homes and businesses.
  • In the devastating hurricane season just one year before, major storms named Harvey, Maria and Irma combined to cause damage estimated at $265bn. Scientists have evidence the climate crisis is causing cyclones to be more powerful, and intensify more quickly, and Florida’s position at the end of the Atlantic Ocean’s “hurricane alley” makes it twice as vulnerable as any other state.
  • With the other option abandoning beaches to the elements, city and county commissions have little choice but costly replenishment projects with sand replacement and jetty construction. Federal law prohibits the importation of cheaper foreign sand, so the municipalities must source a more expensive alternative from US markets, often creating friction with residents who don’t want to part with their sand. Supplementary to sand replenishment, the Nature Conservancy is a partner in a number of nature-based coastal defense projects from West Palm Beach to Miami.
  • benefited from 61,000 cubic yards of new sand this year at a cost of $16m. Statewide, Florida spends an average $50m annually on beach erosion.
  • The threat: “Climate gentrification” is a buzzword around south Florida, a region barely 6ft above sea level where land has become increasingly valuable in elevated areas. Speculators and developers are eyeing historically black, working-class and poorer areas, pushing out long-term residents and replacing affordable housing with upscale developments and luxury accommodations that only the wealthy can afford.
  • No study has yet calculated the overall cost of affordable housing lost to the climate crisis. Private developers will bear the expense of mitigating the impact on the neighborhood – $31m in Magic City’s case over 15 years to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust, largely for new “green” affordable housing. The University of Miami’s housing solutions lab has a $300,000 grant from JPMorgan to report on the impact of rising seas to South Florida’s affordable housing stocks and recommend modifications to prevent it from flooding and other climate events. A collaboration of not-for-profit groups is chasing $75m in corporate funding for affordable housing along the 70-mile south Florida rail trail from Miami to West Palm Beach, with the first stage, a $5m project under way to identify, build and renovate 300 units.
  • Florida has long been plagued by political leadership more in thrall to the interests of big industry than the environment. As governor from 2011 to 2019, Rick Scott, now a US senator, slashed $700m from Florida’s water management budget, rolled back environmental regulations and enforcement, gave a free ride to polluters, and flip-flopped over expanding offshore oil drilling. The politician who came to be known as “Red Tide Rick”, for his perceived inaction over 2018’s toxic algae bloom outbreaks, reportedly banned the words “climate change” and “global warming” from state documents.
  • Last month, state legislators approved the first dedicated climate bill. It appears a promising start for a new administration, but activists say more needs to be done. In January, the Sierra Club awarded DeSantis failing grades in an environmental report card, saying he failed to protect Florida’s springs and rivers and approved new roads that threatened protected wildlife.
  • The cost: Florida’s spending on the environment is increasing. The state budget passed last month included $650m for Everglades restoration and water management projects (an instalment of DeSantis’s $2.5bn four-year pledge) and $100m for Florida Forever. A $100m bridge project jointly funded by the state and federal governments will allow the free flow of water under the Tamiami Trail for the first time in decades.
  • Florida has woken up to the threat of climate change but it is not yet clear how effective the response will be. The challenges are innumerable, the costs immense and the political will to fix or minimize the issues remains questionable, despite recent progress. At stake is the very future of one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, in terms of both its population and its environment. Action taken now will determine its survival.
Javier E

The Hedge-Fund Manager Who Did Battle With Exxon-and Won - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-with-exxonand-won-11623470420

oil exxon activism investor policy environmental

shared by Javier E on 12 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Mr. James convinced Wall Street’s biggest money managers to back a dramatic change in board oversight at Exxon Mobil Corp. , a watershed moment in the effort seeking more environmental, social and governance modifications at the nation’s biggest companies. He contributed nearly $250 million of his own money to support the campaign and launch a new fund called Engine No. 1 LLC. The resulting shareholder vote, tallied last month, secured board seats for three of his handpicked candidates.
anonymous

Officials Increase Security, Limit Public Access Ahead Of Inauguration : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...security-limited-public-access

shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • With just eight days until President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, law enforcement and local government officials in Washington, D.C., are implementing security measures that will make the historic transition of power look very different from those in the past.
  • Last week's events — in which insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol and pipe bombs were left at the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington — have heightened security fears for the swearing-in, with credible threats on the lives of Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris,
  • The inauguration will also take place against the backdrop of an ongoing FBI manhunt to track down Trump supporters who on Wednesday stormed the Capitol building and assaulted police. Investigators are also looking for the person or persons responsible for leaving pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC.
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  • Despite threats of more violence, Biden told reporters Monday he plans to carry on with the day's events saying, "I'm not afraid of taking the oath outside."
  • The event is set to go ahead as scheduled, with several security modifications that will restrict public access to what is usually a very public event, altering a day that was already scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • there will be no public access to the Capitol grounds during the inauguration.
  • She said the Capitol Police — who have been heavily criticized for their handling of Wednesday's violent assault on the House and Senate chambers and offices — are engaged with law enforcement partners on the federal, state, and local levels on security for Inauguration Day.
  • The Washington Monument is also closed to tours due to "credible threats to visitors and park resources" surrounding Biden's inauguration, the National Park Service said. The monument will remain closed through Jan. 24.
  • The NPS says it might also temporarily block public access to roadways, parking areas, and restrooms on the National Mall
  • President Trump granted a state of emergency for Washington, D.C. from Monday through Jan. 24, after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser requested the declaration.
  • Bowser has also asked the Department of the Interior to cancel or deny permits for demonstrations through Jan. 24, and she's asked the Justice Department to provide daily intelligence and threat briefings to D.C. authorities
  • the Guard plans to have up to 10,000 troops present, with the possibility of an additional increase of up to 15,000 in D.C. to meet current and future requests for the inauguration.
  • Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and Bowser issued a joint statement urging Americans not to come to D.C. for the celebrations.
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