Another appealing factor about Bernie is that he’s intellectually consistent. He has a big, overarching, simple-to-grasp vision of what’s wrong with the country and how to fix it: the billionaire class is screwing it up for the rest of us
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Message to Millennials: Bernie Sanders Is Intellectually Consistent, Not Intellectually... - 0 views
www.washingtonmonthly.com/...o_millennials_bernie059844.php
politics socialism 2016 candidate principles honesty authenticity
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He’s surely got way more of the latter than the buffoons running for president in the GOP (Ohio Governor John Kasich being an exception). And there’s a basic decency and candor about Bernie that I really admire. He says what he thinks and he doesn’t play word games or tailor his approach to different audiences.
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It’s in the realm of policy, however, where I find Bernie intellectually quite dishonest, and Hillary pretty damned honest. When you scrutinize his policy ideas, as wonky liberals have begun doing (finally) in the last couple of months, those ideas don’t stand up, on a bunch of different levels.
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One of those levels is political—as in there’s no way, in the foreseeable future, there will be sixty votes in the Senate, much less support in a likely GOP-controlled House, to pass single-payer health care, or break up the big banks, or reform the political campaign system, or provide free college tuition for every student.
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Even if you could somehow get them passed, practically they either wouldn’t work or would be recklessly disruptive or both.
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On the billionaire class, it’s not just that America has never, since its founding, been able to keep money out of political campaigns (though the problem has clearly gotten much worse in recent years). It’s that campaign donations are not remotely the most important way billionaires and corporations rig the system to their benefit. Rather, it’s through the money that flows into the Washington lobbying machine, and Bernie’s campaign finance reforms won’t do squat about that.
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many big ideas (single-payer, free college) would be insanely costly and be coming at a time when federal deficits will start climbing because of the retirement of the Baby Boomers. Hillary’s many proposals will also hit that rising deficit wall, but hers aren’t anywhere near as costly as Bernie’s.
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It drives me crazy that so many people buy into the idea that Bernie’s policies are the principled ones and that other people’s more “pragmatic” policies are compromised, watered down, and, ultimately, something to be ashamed of. I don’t see it that way at all. To me, selling policies that you know or should know won’t work is pretty much the definition of unprincipled.
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Bernie has had thirty-five years in Congress to get involved in and bone up on issues of national security and foreign policy. He’s chosen not to, while Hillary spent four years as secretary of state.
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Of course, most people don’t have the time or inclination to learn the nuances of complicated policy questions. If you’re a young person who leans left, you’re probably engaged in a simpler thought process: establishment politics has left me with high student debts and diminished job prospects; Hillary Clinton is the ultimate example of establishment politics; Bernie Sanders has fought establishment politics for years on behalf of progressive goals I believe in; why the hell shouldn’t I vote for Bernie?
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I get it. The simplest response I can offer is this: on policy, Bernie doesn’t know what he’s talking about; the policies that most damaged your life came overwhelmingly from the Republicans, not the Democrats; and the Democrat most likely to beat the Republican in November is not Bernie Sanders.
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The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for Journalism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.
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Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.
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Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”
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In the past, the deaths of news organizations have jeopardized the prospect of a safe, well-informed, civically-engaged community
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One 2014 paper found a substantial drop-off in civic engagement in both Seattle and Denver from 2008 to 2009, after both cities saw the closure of longstanding daily newspapers
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The problem is that Zuckerberg lays out concrete ideas about how to build community on Facebook, how to encourage civic engagement, and how to improve the quality and inclusiveness of discourse—but he bakes in an assumption that news, which has always been subsidized by the advertising dollars his company now commands, will continue to feed into Facebook’s system at little to no cost to Facebook
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In some ways, Zuckerberg is building a news organization without journalists. The uncomfortable truth for journalists, though, is that Facebook is much better at community building in the digital age than news organizations are.
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for context: The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun claims that its circulation of 9 million copies daily makes it the largest in the world
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you can see how Zuckerberg is continuing to push Facebook’s hands-off approach to editorial responsibility. Facebook is outsourcing its decision-making power about what’s in your News Feed. Instead of the way a newspaper editor decides what’s on the front page, the user will decide.
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“For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum,” Zuckerberg wrote. Which makes some sense. There are all kinds of issues with an American company imposing its cultural values uniformly on 1.9 billion individuals all over the world.
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In the United States, the combined daily prime time average viewership for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC was 3.1 million people in 2015,
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and now also to act as unpaid editors, volunteering to teach Facebook’s algorithmic editors how and when to surface the content Facebook does not pay for.
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Lip service to the crucial function of the Fourth Estate is not enough to sustain it. All of this is the news industry’s problem; not Zuckerberg’s. But it’s also a problem for anyone who believes in and relies on quality journalism to make sense of the world.
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Zuckerberg doesn’t want Facebook to kill journalism as we know it. He really, really doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean he won’t.
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The Mystery of John Roberts - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Steven M. Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of the commendable “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,” suggested in The Washington Monthly that Chief Justice Roberts was not comfortable with “sweeping uses of judicial power to limit government.” Professor Teles said that while the chief justice was “sympathetic” with his fellow conservatives, he “simply lacks the taste for the jugular that they have, either as a result of his role as chief justice or his prudential sense of how far it is reasona
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Joel Alicea, in a smart post on the conservative Web site The Public Discourse, wrote that the health care decision revealed “a clash between two visions of judicial restraint and two eras of the conservative legal movement.” If Chief Justice Roberts, nearly a generation younger than Justices Scalia and Kennedy, in fact represents the old form of legal conservatism, in which the judicial role is to salvage statutes if possible rather than eviscerate them in the service of a bigger agenda, that’s a fascinating and highly consequential development.
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Is John Roberts the new swing justice? I have strong doubts. The man is conservative to his bones. So the real question is what the word “conservative” means in 2012 and the decades ahead.
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“I mean, what would you do if you were Roberts? All of a sudden you find out that the people you thought were your friends have turned against you, they despise you, they mistreat you, they leak to the press. What do you do? Do you become more conservative? Or do you say, ‘What am I doing with this crowd of lunatics.’ Right? Maybe you have to reexamine your position.”
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Nobody Understands Debt - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments. This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
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First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base
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Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves
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America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
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And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe.
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Why French Parents Are Superior by Pamela Druckerman - WSJ.com - 1 views
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Middle-class French parents (I didn't follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.
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Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
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Parents don't have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.
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The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.
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One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)
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Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family's daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification. Delphine said that she sometimes bought Pauline candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Pauline wasn't allowed to eat the candy until that day's snack, even if it meant waiting many hours.
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Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. "The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself," she said of her son, Aubane. It's a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.
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patience isn't a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don't.
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most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase "n'importe quoi," meaning "whatever" or "anything they like." It suggests that the American kids don't have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It's the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that's the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.
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Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren't constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.
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French socialized medicine vs U.S. health care: Having a baby in Paris is much less cos... - 0 views
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France is a proud welfare state, where public spending accounts for 53 percent of GDP—the second-highest percentage in the developed world (only Sweden’s is higher). The U.S. is the third-lowest, at 36 percen
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France’s health care system is a public/private hybrid: Everyone is covered to a certain extent by the government’s Assurance Maladie, but most people also have private insurance, called a mutuelle, that is either offered through their employer or bought on the private market. There’s a thriving private insurance market in France—one that the Affordable Care Act can only dream of.
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my husband’s employers provided a choice of mutuelle; the top-of-the-line plan, which we signed up for, cost about 50 euros ($68) a month. By contrast, in the U.S., I’d been paying about $350 a month with an additional $50 co-pay for each doctor’s appointment.
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crowding, especially in bigger cities, is one of the downsides of a government-run health care system. On the upside, had I managed to book a bed in one of the public wards, my birth would have been completely free, paid for entirely by the government’s Assurance Maladie. Everyone pays into Assurance Maladie through charges that are taken directly from their paycheck
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From the sixth month of pregnancy to 11 days after a child’s birth, the government covers a woman’s medical expenses in full.
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transparency in the price of medical care is a legal requirement in France. The government sets what they consider fair prices for all appointments and procedures, and then reimburses these for everyone at 70 percent. This is not unlike Medicare and Medicaid in the U.S., but because the French government system covers the entire population, it has more bargaining power to keep prices low
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t’s not uncommon in the bigger cities, particularly in Paris, for a doctor to charge more than the government’s recommended price. But these overages, called dépassements, don’t come anywhere near what an American specialist might charge. In fact, under French law, a doctor must issue a receipt explaining any dépassement above 70 euros before beginning the test or appointment.
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In the U.S., meanwhile, it’s often impossible to get a price for a delivery out of a hospital. Estimates vary by orders of magnitude: This California study of 100,000 complication-free deliveries showed that new mothers were charged anywhere from $3,296 to $37,227, with no clear medical reason for the massive discrepancy.
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By contrast, for my complication-free delivery and five-day stay in a private clinic, my total out-of-pocket cost was 400 euros, or about $542.
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I don’t think we should count Obamacare’s average monthly premium of $328 as a success. That’s still a lot of money for a middle-class family—and that’s before co-pays, in-network deductibles, and all manner of hidden costs. From my French-ified perspective, a single-payer system—with strong government oversight to keep the price of medical care low—seems like the only way to go.
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As I Was Saying About Web Journalism ... a Bubble, or a Lasting Business? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“It’s a generational changing of the guard happening with greater speed than at any time before,” he wrote. “Afternoon and morning newspapers, TV and cable network news shows, monthly and weekly newsmagazines all had times when they reigned supreme. These days the reigns are briefer than ever because the march of technology has quickened to a trot.”
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This is not a bubble,” he told me. “There are fundamental secular trends behind it — ad growth, mobile growth, page-view growth — that suggest the large media companies of tomorrow are being created right in front of us, right now.”
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Barons of Broadband - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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There used to be a bipartisan consensus in favor of tough antitrust enforcement. During the Reagan years, however, antitrust policy went into eclipse, and ever since measures of monopoly power, like the extent to which sales in any given industry are concentrated in the hands of a few big companies, have been rising fast.
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, it became common to assert that the world had changed in ways that made all those old-fashioned concerns about monopoly irrelevant. Aren’t we living in an era of global competition? Doesn’t the creative destruction of new technology constantly tear down old industry giants and create new ones?
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The truth, however, is that many goods and especially services aren’t subject to international competition: New Jersey families can’t subscribe to Korean broadband.
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creative destruction has been oversold: Microsoft may be an empire in decline, but it’s still enormously profitable thanks to the monopoly position it established decades ago.
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there’s good reason to believe that monopoly is itself a barrier to innovation. Ms. Crawford argues persuasively that the unchecked power of telecom giants has removed incentives for progress: why upgrade your network or provide better services when your customers have nowhere to go?
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HarperCollins Joins Scribd in E-Book Subscription Plan - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Scribd, with a generous base of 80 million visitors to its site each month, said it was positioned to become a prominent e-book subscription service, in which consumers pay a flat monthly fee for access to a large catalog of e-books.
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Oysterbooks.com, a venture introduced last month, offers consumers access to more than 100,000 books for $9.95 a month.
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Scribd’s e-book subscription service already includes books from smaller publishers, including Rosetta Books, Workman and Sourcebooks. The addition of HarperCollins means subscribers will have access to literary fiction (“The Family Fang: A Novel” by Kevin Wilson), humor (“The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee” by Sarah Silverman) and memoirs
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Trump and Fiorina's Snake Oil Sales - The New York Times - 0 views
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By every metric that mattered, HP was in far worse shape when she was fired than when she was hired. The company’s stock price dropped more than 50 percent during her tenure, compared to a 7 percent drop in the S.&P. 500. And net earnings dropped to $2.4 billion from $3.1 billion during that same time. The Compaq merger, meanwhile, was a misguided fiasco; today, virtually all remnants of it have disappeared from HP. Fiorina’s me-me-me leadership style demoralized the company and its shareholders. When she walked out the door in February 2005 — with a $21 million severance package — the stock jumped nearly 7 percent.
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As for the casino bankruptcies, Trump likes to characterize them as shrewd business moves, and stresses that he never filed for personal bankruptcy. But those corporate bankruptcies were costly; he wound up having to give up many of his real estate holdings, and was even put on a monthly budget for a time.
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if, in 1988, he had simply put his money in a stock index fund, it would be worth $13 billion today. In effect, his post-1988 business career has cost him $5 billion.
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And with some $900 million in personal guarantees, he avoided personal bankruptcy by a whisker. Again, according to O’Brien, Trump borrowed millions from his siblings to keep his head above water.
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“The company is a disaster,” scoffed Trump, referring to Hewlett-Packard, the iconic technology company Fiorina ran from 1999 to 2005. Trump continued: “When Carly says the revenues went up that’s because she bought Compaq. It was a terrible deal, and it really led to the destruction of the company.”
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Fiorina responded by focusing on how Trump ran his three Atlantic City casinos into the ground. “You ran up mountains of debt, as well as losses,” she said, “using other people’s money, and you were forced to file for bankruptcy not once, not twice [but] four times, a record four times.”
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They’re both right. Fiorina’s tenure at HP was indeed a disaster, and Trump’s casino interests did indeed file for bankruptcy multiple times.
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Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace - The New York Times - 0 views
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At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
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The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”
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his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
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Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.
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Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working.
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Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
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“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,”
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At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath them.”
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In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime
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“You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders
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As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,”
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perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (
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According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.
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Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.
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But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.
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As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects
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Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.
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many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster.
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A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500
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To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do:
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Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.
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Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.
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many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue
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The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat
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Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.
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David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.
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Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.
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Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.
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“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
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A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
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A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
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Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.
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In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. A
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“One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”
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Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed.
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By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.
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just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.
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“Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”
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Restoring Henry by Michael O'Donnell | The Washington Monthly - 0 views
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The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed
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The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.
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[A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?
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Tellingly, at several points in the narrative Ferguson strays from his thesis and defends Kissinger on more utilitarian grounds: the Cold War was real, its outcome was uncertain, and the United States needed every ugly advantage it could find on the geostrategic battlefield. The crimes of communist regimes vastly dwarfed Kissinger’s in scope and scale, Ferguson writes
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Ferguson is now on the hook for his next volume to weigh the strategic implications of Kissinger’s most barbaric foreign policies once he assumed power
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Ferguson’s problem is not a conflict of interest: it is his ideological affinity with his subject, and his determination because of that affinity to present his man favorably
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This begins with Ferguson’s use of language, which repeatedly seeks to bring the reader onto Kissinger’s side
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Ferguson spends much of the book attempting to rehabilitate Kissinger’s character. He makes an unpersuasive attempt to convince readers that Kissinger was not the relentless ladder climber we think we know.
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The book also largely sidesteps the topic of Kissinger’s famous vanity, thin skin, and penchant for insincere flattery
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Kissinger provided information and analysis to Nixon’s aide Richard Allen in breathless telephone calls, which he insisted be kept secret. Nixon’s campaign subsequently passed word to the South Vietnamese government that it could obtain better peace terms under a Nixon administration. South Vietnam pulled out of the talks just days before the U.S. election, the Democratic Party was humiliated, Nixon won the presidency—and then he immediately appointed Kissinger, a man he had met only once, his national security advisor.
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Johnson referred to the maneuver—spiking a peace deal in order to win an election, thereby extending the Vietnam War—as treason
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Yet Ferguson again is not convinced. He questions Allen’s reliability as a witness and contends that Nixon’s memoir does not prove that Kissinger was his insider. (Decide for yourself. Here is Nixon: “During the last days of the campaign, when Kissinger was providing us with information about the bombing halt, I became more aware of both his knowledge and his influence.”)
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Ferguson also makes the legalistic argument that Kissinger’s intervention was not determinative, for Nixon had other informers, and North Vietnam “would surely” have found a pretext to abandon the peace talks had South Vietnam not walked out first. If we use Johnson’s terms, I suppose that reduces the charge to attempted treason.
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Kissinger’s Shadow. Grandin, a historian at New York University, contends that Kissinger has left us with war as an instrument of policy, less as a last resort than as a kind of peacock’s strut. “Kissinger taught that there was no such thing as stasis in international affairs,” Grandin writes. “[G]reat states are always either gaining or losing influence, which means that the balance of power has to be constantly tested through gesture and deed.” (He quotes Kissinger as asking a fellow cabinet member, “Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?”)
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The abiding concern driving Kissinger’s foreign policy was therefore maintaining credibility: action to avoid the appearance of inability to act.
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Secrecy is very much a part of Kissinger’s legacy. His systematic efforts to keep the war in Cambodia from becoming public—false records, wiretaps, blatant lies told to Congress—are much more disturbing than the fourth-rate jiggery-pokery of Watergate
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Ferguson downplays this too, projecting his disagreement by writing disdainfully that “we are told” Kissinger loved secrecy
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Report: Syria using chemical weapons in growing number of attacks - The Washington Post - 0 views
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prominent human rights group accused the Syrian government Wednesday of using toxic chemicals during a recent surge in attacks involving barrel bombs on rebel-held areas in northern Syria.
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Assad’s government has been accused by Western countries of using chemical weapons over the course of the four-year conflict, including an attack involving sarin gas in 2013 that killed hundreds of people in a suburb of the capital.
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Regime opponents and activists allege that Assad’s forces have punished residents in rebel-controlled areas with barrages of the crude bombs, which are built from oil barrels or gas cylinders and can be filled with toxic chemicals such as chlorine gas
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In its Wednesday report, Human Right Watch said evidence indicates that three attacks in April and May on towns in Idlib involved barrel bombs containing toxic chemicals.
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The total number of attacks involving chlorine gas during that time is probably much higher, according to the report, which was released to coincide with the U.N. Security Council’s regular monthly meeting on chemical weapons in Syria
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Podcasting Blossoms, but in Slow Motion - The New York Times - 0 views
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The largest podcasting operations are attracting sizable audiences and advertising revenue. The ads work. Large and small advertisers report a significant upside to the campaigns they run on podcasts, and ad rates on top-tier podcasts approach $100 per thousand listeners, which is many times what it costs advertisers to reach audiences in most other digital formats.
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the overall audience for podcasts is growing very slowly. In February, Edison Research reported that 17 percent of Americans had listened to one podcast in the previous month. That is up just slightly from Edison’s 2012 survey, when 14 percent of Americans had done so. The business also has some problems, including a labor-intensive ad-buying process, a shortage of audio producers and the inability to accurately measure who is listening.
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it is that rarest thing in the technology industry: a slow, steady and unrelentingly persistent digital tortoise that could eventually — but who really knows? — slay the analog behemoths in its path.
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The share of podcasts in Americans’ diet of audio programming grew by 18 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to Edison. People who listen to podcasts daily spend about two hours a day, on average, with podcasts, a larger share than for any other form of audio, Edison reported
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For Gimlet, listeners’ willingness to try new podcasts has translated into instant audiences for its newest shows. “Startup,” the company’s first show, took 30 days to reach 100,000 listeners a week. Its weekly audience is now more than 500,000. “Mystery Show” took four days to reach 100,000 listeners, mainly because it was being promoted by Gimlet’s two other shows. By its fourth episode, its audience was about 250,000 weekly listens.
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Several advertisers told me that podcast ads had proved to be tremendously effective. They can’t be easily skipped, and because they are often read by hosts, audiences are often convinced of their authenticity. “We feel it creates a deep personal connection to our brand,”
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Podcasting is destined to be huge, both as a medium and a business. “It’s the future of radio,” Mr. Turck of Panoply said. Just don’t expect that future to come tomorrow.
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shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 15
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As Putin Talks More Missiles and Might, Cost Tells Another Story - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...s-russian-nuclear-arsenal.html
russia deterrence defense foreign policy militarism economics politics international
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“Everybody should understand that we are living in a totally different world than two years ago,” said Alexander M. Golts, an independent Russian military analyst.“In that world, which we lost, it was possible to organize your security with treaties, with mutual-trust measures,” he said. “Now we have come to an absolutely different situation, where the general way to ensure your security is military deterrence.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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“The Russian Army is returning to normal combat activities and training,” said Igor Korotchenko, the editor in chief of National Defense, a monthly Russian magazine. “We are doing exactly what our Western partners are doing.”
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From a Western point of view, Russia shattered the postwar, and certainly post-Cold War, European order by seizing Crimea and destabilizing Ukraine with a not-terribly-covert military program. That left former Soviet client states next door feeling vulnerable.
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Russia, which had long given up on military exercises, then started sending long-range bombers and fighter aircraft on patrol along the edges of European or American airspace. The West, and the United States in particular, felt the aggressive attitude warranted a military response. Hence, a new program of maneuvers and talk of deploying tanks and other heavy equipment.
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“Russia has been making aggressive statements, insisting that it lives in a world of mutual military deterrence, while thinking that the West will not pay attention,” Mr. Golts said.But the West paid attention, he said, and Russia is not ready. It is one thing to use a force of up to 100,000 well-trained, well-booted soldiers to seize Crimea or even to destabilize a neighbor, but it is a very different matter to take on NATO, he noted.
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Russia, lacking both the manpower and the weapons systems, will not be ready to do so any time soon, which is why Mr. Putin resorts to asymmetrical responses like nuclear weapons, analysts said.The war with Ukraine severed cooperation with some critical defense industries there, while Western sanctions cut off some technology used in military applications, like microchips.
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The steep drops in the price of oil and the value of the ruble mean Russia is facing a recession this year, although recent figures suggest it will not be as bad as originally anticipated.
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Yuriy Borisov, a deputy defense minister, told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper this year that the military had underestimated how much it would need to spend to acquire new Armata tanks. Mr. Putin had pledged the government would buy 2,300 by 2020.“We miscalculated on the Armata,” Mr. Borisov was quoted as saying. “The money allocated for that project turns out to be too little.” Production costs are 250 percent higher than anticipated, he said, without further details
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He and other analysts suggested that maintaining the image of a robust military being resupplied on schedule was a political necessity, speaking to the large constituency that supports Mr. Putin because he has promised to restore Russia to its great power status.
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shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 15
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The University of Oklahoma Video, and the Problem Fraternities Can't Fix Themselves - N... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ities-cant-fix-themselves.html
fraternity white privilege white supremacy college
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I study race and the Greek-letter system on North American campuses. I have interviewed hundreds of members of historically white fraternities and sororities, at big state universities and smaller liberal arts colleges, on the East Coast and in the South. My research indicates that nonwhite students who successfully pledge those groups — roughly 3 to 4 percent of fraternity or sorority members — live a harsh existence of loneliness and isolation.
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Without attention to the internal power dynamics and racism inside these organizations, we place an inordinate burden on the few students of color in them to carry our torch of idealism while we ignore the banal hostility they face.
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Nearly all the nonwhite members told me of their white fraternity and sorority brothers’ and sisters’ expectation that they conform to demeaning racial stereotypes. If they failed, they were seen as not fully belonging; if they succeeded, they were understood to be “too” black, Latino or Asian to fit in. This, known as the paradox of participation, governed their acceptance. But to outsiders, the color line was broken.
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All of the examples chosen that represent racial slights or overt racism only raise the specter of how these frat members are raised, what they truly believe, and how organizations that permit such behavior and encourage the newbies to go along with it perpetuate racism in all its forms. As such, the question "what should we do about fraternities" isn't any different from the same question with the terms "KKK", "Neo-Nazis", or "anti semetics" substituted in for "fraternities".
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The fraternities are a reflection of college life and life in America.There is more polarization on campuses, with students not mixing, exchanging ideas and engaging one another. Instead, they are congregating with other students just like them, and this is occurring across the race and color spectrum. Several college professors blame the Greek system for seeming to foster this division, but I believe it is more of a reflection of what is going on in America, as society is similarly divided and not engaging with anyone who is not alike.Is it risk aversion, need for affirmation, security? Unknown, but while I'm not a fan of the Greek system/life, I do not believe it is the crux of the problem.
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I will take advantage of the vacuum to explain why my fraternity brought out the worst in its members. The fundamental problem is that most college-age men lack the judgment and life-experience to live together in a self-governing group. Inevitably, the most aggressive, extroverted risk takers will come to dominate the organization. Their best teenage thinking is what gives birth to the worst ideas and greatest excesses of the insular frat life. What else contributes to fraternities' bad reputations? The college administrations, which long ago renounced their in-loco-parentis responsibilities. There was a time when fraternities had seasoned adult house fathers who could keep the guys in line. No more.
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"Powerful alumni." That's all that really needs to be said. As we've reduced public funding for higher education, universities are more and more dependent on the deep pockets of alumni who are going to place a phone call to any campus administrator who tries to seriously address all the "fun." Drinking, sexual assault, racism. Fraternities are good at breeding loyalty, loyalty to their chapters, loyalty to their campuses. Few universities can afford to toy with that. Note this Atlantic Monthly article, "The Dark Power of Fraternities." http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fr...
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As a student, it seemed to me that the purpose of fraternities was to reaffirm that education didn't really matter -- a big poke in the eye at anyone who believed that they could advance by excelling academically. What really mattered was how much you could drink and debase yourself in tribute to the bastions of current privilege and wealth
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for the quality of life in the house, it certainly was not apparent to me. When I came to them with proof positive that a "brother" had stolen a check payable to me, forged my signature and cashed it, they did nothing to sanction him.The dominant group in my fraternity had no apparent thirst for knowledge, just an unquenchable thirst for daily alcohol-fueled parties that lasted into the wee hours with loud music and drugs. We outsiders subsidized their party life and all we got in return was the privilege of living in their zoo.
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Why do some Greek-letter organizations seem to bring out the worst in people? Historically white fraternal groups can be key mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of white wealth, power and status. The stakes for belonging are high, and the culture must legitimate its own existence, forcing out those who fail to conform.
Cruz (Out of) Control by D.R. Tucker | Political Animal | The Washington Monthly - 0 views
www.washingtonmonthly.com/...cruz_out_of_control059386.php
climate change global warming politics scientific method
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Opinion | The High School We Can't Log Off From - The New York Times - 0 views
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It appears we’re in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely)
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last week, Twitter’s stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users
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The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys
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It uncomplicates complicated discussion; stealth-curates our news; hijacks our dopamine systems, carrying us off on a devil’s quest for ever more dime bags of retweets and likes.
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Twitter is changing us — regressing us — in ways developmental psychologists would find weirdly recognizable.
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the “imaginary audience” phenomenon in adolescents — the idea that teenagers somehow see themselves as stars of their own productions, believing themselves to be watched by an eager, if sometimes judgmental, public.
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On Twitter, you actually are living your life on a stage. “It’s the imaginary audience come to life,
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political and opinion Twitter has made many otherwise well-adjusted people a bit obsessed with their new publics, checking just a bit too frequently whether that brilliant aperçu they just typed has begun its viral zoom
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Whenever anyone proposes boycotting social media altogether, Mr. Shirky always answers: Fine. Got a way to do that while protecting #blacklivesmatter and #metoo?
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described high school to me as “a large box of strangers.” The kids don’t necessarily share much in common, after all; they just happen to be the same age and live in the same place. So what do they do in this giant box to give it order, structure? They divide into tribes and resort to aggression to determine status.
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the faster the medium is, the more emotional it gets. Twitter, as we know, is pretty fast, and therefore runs pretty hot.
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Our self-regulation deserts us (been there); our prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function and impulse control, goes offline; we become reward-seeking Scud missiles, addicts in search of a fix.
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We become, in other words, teenagers, who are notoriously poor models of self-regulation — in large part because their prefrontal cortices are still developing and their dopamine circuits are pretty busy seeking stimulation
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The psychologist Laurence Steinberg describes adolescents as “cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes
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Do we really want something so important, so vital, as our political conversation to be conducted in a teenage register and defined by teenage behaviors? Do we really want to have this discussion on a medium that makes us lose sight of our adult selves?
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The same can be said of Twitter. It’s the ultimate large box of strangers. As in high school, Twitter denizens divide into tribes and bully to gain status; as in high school, too-confessional musings and dumb mistakes turn up in the wrong hands and end in humiliation.
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But something is wrong with this ecosystem. Too often, as Jaron Lanier notes in his recent jeremiad on social media, we think we’re controlling it when it’s controlling us.
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the best response to adolescent deviltry, tough as it is, is to let kids make their own mistakes and hope that one day they realize they’re inflicting harm.