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brookegoodman

Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people | Simon Tisd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...enemy-of-his-own-people-russia

politics

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • News that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s latter-day tsar, is making plans to cling to power indefinitely comes as no surprise. All the same, it is deeply worrying for Putin’s prey – principally the Russian people and the western democracies.
  • Russia under Putin’s grim tutelage has grown notorious for cronyism and corruption on a vast scale, repression of domestic opponents and free speech, and military aggression and disruption abroad.
  • Yet it appears Putin does not want to emulate out-and-out dictators in other countries by making himself president-for-life – the path chosen by China’s Xi Jinping. He values a veneer of democratic legitimacy.
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  • Putin also has options to be speaker of the Duma (parliament) or leader of its main party, United Russia, thereby exercising power behind the scenes in the manner of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party.
  • The accompanying, enforced resignation of the entire government, including the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, is Putin’s attempt to reset his administration before Duma elections next year. Analysts say he feared Medvedev’s unpopularity – he has been accused of corruption – was beginning to rub off on him.
  • Although these changes are dressed up as desirable constitutional reforms, they clearly serve one common purpose: establishing Putinism in perpetuity. By showing he has no intention of retiring, Putin hopes to nip a possible succession battle in the bud.
  • Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialise. His promises of economic modernisation and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions.
  • The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.
  • Putin is in cahoots with Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his campaign against pro-western Kurds in north-east Syria. More recently, he has inserted Russian mercenaries into the war in Libya, backing rebels against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.
  • And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?
  • The prospect of Putin prolonging and strengthening his nihilistic reign is a terrible one. Putin’s is the face of the enemy. Henceforth he must be recognised as such.
  • More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
mattrenz16

Voters Are Motivated To Keep Protections For Preexisting Conditions : Shots - Health Ne... - 1 views

www.npr.org/...-up-traditional-party-politics

shared by mattrenz16 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The sources of Puerto Rico's economic and social troubles are many, but prominent among them, Llompart believes, is a system in which the island's two main political parties have spent decades fighting over one major issue – whether Puerto Rico should remain a commonwealth territory of the United States, or seek statehood.
  • "We haven't become a state in all these decades," she said.
  • When she goes to the polls to vote for a new governor on Tuesday, Llompart said she'll vote for neither Pedro Pierluisi, the candidate for the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, nor for Carlos Delgado from the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party.
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  • Llompart said she'll split her ballot. For governor, she's supporting the candidate who supports Puerto Rico's independence from the United States, and for downticket offices she'll support candidates from a new party, Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana — or Citizens' Victory Movement — that's emerging as the first substantial challenge in decades to the island's two-party system.
  • Though polling indicates that one of the two traditional party candidates will win, the numbers also suggest it could be with support from less than 40% of the electorate, the smallest vote share ever to propel a Puerto Rican governor to office.
  • The island's youngest voters have come of age during a recession that has driven an exodus of half-a-million people — largely young adults — to the mainland United States. The past four years alone have arguably been the most tumultuous in Puerto Rico's modern history. It has declared bankruptcy, lost control of its own finances to a federal board appointed to resolve its debt, faced massive cuts to education and pensions, muddled through the recovery from two major hurricanes, faced earthquakes, corruption scandals, and a pandemic.
  • Both parties' candidates are polling around 10 to 12%, and have similar policy priorities, though the pro-independence party has historically made the island's independence from the United States a central tenet of its platform.
  • Lebrón said it's that same energy driving the unprecedented political realignment that appears to be taking hold this year, as more voters demand a move away from the two-party system they believe has prioritized the statehood question while sidelining the needs of everyday Puerto Ricans.
  • "Not in this election, but maybe in 2024, or 2028, because the numbers in the younger demographic with these two old parties are very, very weak."
  • Alexandra Lúgaro, the Citizens' Victory gubernatorial candidate – is considered a longshot to win, but if candidates from her party earn seats in the legislature or at the municipal level, it could build momentum that carries the party to stronger showings in future elections.
  • "We're exhausted," Lebrón said.
  • Tuesday's election will also include a non-binding referendum asking Puerto Ricans whether they support statehood, and two additional minor candidates for the governorship.
  • DeLeón believes Victoria Ciudadana has a better chance of siphoning support away from the traditional pro- and anti-statehood parties that he feels have driven Puerto Rico's economy into the ground.
anonymous

Vote to Legalize Abortion Passes Lower House of Argentine Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...argentina-abortion.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The bill’s approval in Argentina’s lower house of Congress by 131 to 117 votes, after more than 20 hours of debate, was a legislative victory for Mr. Fernández, who has dedicated funding and political capital to improving conditions for women and for gay and transgender people
  • “It’s a false dilemma to say it’s one thing or the other,”
  • Argentina would become only the fourth nation — and by far the most populous — to make abortion legal in Latin America
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  • Mr. Fernández has also asked his team to avoid scheduling meetings that include only straight men. Since August, any audience of more than four people with the president should have women or members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community make up one-third of participants.
  • Despite these hardships, Mr. Fernandez, 61, kept gender and sexual orientation parity a priority in his government
  • Mr. Fernández’s 2021 budget identifies more than 15 percent of projected spending as going to initiatives that would further gender parity, including funding violence prevention programs, bringing women who were not part of the formal labor force into the pension system, and fighting human trafficking.
  • The country imposed one of the world’s longest and strictest lockdowns, but still the virus spread, leaving it among the nations with the highest death rates per capita.
  • “More equality and access to opportunities is part of the vision that we are pursuing in this government,”
  • At least 65 women died between 2016 and 2018 from complications from abortions, according to a report by Argentina’s Access to Safe Abortion Network.
  • Argentina came close to legalizing abortion in 2018, despite loud protests from the churches and from Pope Francis, who is Argentine.
  • In doing so, he fulfilled a campaign promise that some reproductive rights activists feared would get lost amid the heavy toll the coronavirus and the economic crisis have taken on Argentina.
  • “In Argentina, the pandemic has fully exposed the inequality between men and women,” said Mercedes D’Alessandro
woodlu

The mess Merkel leaves behind | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-mess-merkel-leaves-behind

politics policy economics

shared by woodlu on 23 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Mrs Merkel’s achievements are more modest. In her 16 years in the chancellery she has weathered a string of crises, from economic to pandemic. Her abilities as a consensus-forger have served her country and Europe well.
  • But her government has neglected too much, nationally and internationally.
  • when a new government forms after an election this weekend, admiration for her steady leadership should be mixed with frustration at the complacency she has bred.
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  • The public sector has failed to invest adequately or wisely, falling behind its peers in building infrastructure, especially the digital sort.
  • Penny-pinching is hard-wired into the state. In 2009, on Mrs Merkel’s watch, Germany hobbled itself with a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal to run more than a minute deficit. With interest rates so low, sensible governments ought to have been borrowing for investment, not fainting at the first spot of red ink.
  • Germany’s most severe domestic problem is a failure to reform its pension system. Germans are ageing fast, and the baby-boomers will place an even heavier burden on the budget later this decade as they retire
  • Germany has also been sluggish, and still emits more carbon per head than any other big EU country, not helped by Mrs Merkel’s shutdown of Germany’s nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
  • The EU has not grappled sufficiently with the weakness of its indebted southern members. Only during the pandemic did it create a financial instrument that lets the EU issue jointly guaranteed debt, and dispense some of the cash as grants, rather than yet more loans.
  • Worse, the “stability” rules that will force countries back into austerity to shrink their stocks of debt are ready to revive, unless amended.
  • China is an increasingly challenging economic and strategic rival, Russia an unpredictable threat and America a distracted and uncertain ally.
  • Despite recent increases, it spends too little on defence. It cosies up to Beijing in the hope of better trading terms. It is giving Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, a chokehold over European energy supplies by backing the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which, as it happens, makes landfall in Mrs Merkel’s own constituency.
  • The polls suggest that Germany is set for a messy new parliament, with no single party, or even two, able to form a government. Instead, some sort of ideologically incoherent three-way coalition is on the cards—one that, by combining high-spending greens and pro-business liberals, may struggle to agree on anything ambitious.
  • Comfortable, cautious Germans seem uninterested in serious debate about the future. Crisis-management has become a substitute for initiative. Candidates have no incentive to highlight their country’s looming problems.
  • One is a coalition headed by Mrs Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister-party (the CDU/CSU), led by Armin Laschet. The other is a coalition led by Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrats (SPD), who is Germany’s finance minister. In either case, the coalition would be joined by the Greens and by the pro-business Free Democrats.
  • Sixteen years in power has been enough. The party has run out of ideas and drive, as its decision to choose the gaffe-prone and uninspiring Mr Laschet for chancellor makes clear. An affable lightweight, he has run a dismal campaign, and is predicted to lead his team to its worst result since the second world war. The polls say that Mr Scholz is preferred by twice as many voters.
  • The problem is that although he belongs to the business-friendly wing of his party, the SPD is stuffed with left-wingers.
  • They may try to drag him further in their direction than the Free Democrats will wear and enterprise can comfortably bear.
Javier E

Putin's War in Ukraine Shatters an Illusion in Russia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-russia.html

putin war russia ukraine illusion totalitarian repression

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Moscow had blossomed into a beautiful, European city, full of meticulously planted parks, bike lanes and parking spaces. Income for the average Russian had risen significantly over the course of the previous decade.
  • At the same time, its political system was drifting ever closer to authoritarianism.
  • By the summer of 2015, his successor, President Vladimir V. Putin, had seemingly made Russia bright and prosperous. The political system he built was increasingly restrictive, but many had learned to live with it.
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  • Many Russian liberals had gone to work for nonprofits and local governments, throwing themselves into community building — making their cities better places to live. A protest movement in 2011 and 2012 had failed, and people were looking for other ways to shape their country. Big politics were hopeless, the thinking went, but one could make a real difference in small acts.
  • There was another side to this bargain: Mr. Putin was seemingly constrained, as well. Political action may have been forbidden, but there was tolerance when it came to other things, for example religion, culture and many forms of expression. His own calculus for the system to run smoothly meant he had to make some room for society.
  • Greg Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, argues it was the political opposition’s success, which began to accelerate in 2018 and 2019, that tipped Mr. Putin toward war.
  • I began to wonder whether Russia was always going to end up here, and we just failed to see it. So I called Yevgeniya Albats, a Russian journalist who had warned of the dangers of a K.G.B. resurgence as early as the 1990s
  • She said 2008 was a turning point, the moment Mr. Putin divorced the West, even invaded another country, and the West barely noticed.
  • “For Putin, it was a clear sign,” she said by telephone last month, “that he can do whatever he wants. And that’s exactly what he started doing. He behaved extremely rationally. He just realized that you don’t care.”
  • “People have a metaphor. They say, ‘We were trying to make some cosmetic changes to our faces, when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomachs.’”
  • “The best comparison is Germany in 1939,” he said. “What kind of democratic movement would you expect there? This is the same. People are basically right now trying to save their lives.”
  • about two-thirds of people nationwide approve of Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine.
  • “It is a less-educated, older part of the population, mainly living in rural areas or in small and medium-sized cities, where the population is poorer and more dependent on power,” he said, referring to those who rely on public funds like pensions and state jobs. “They also receive their whole construction of reality exclusively from television.”
  • “if you look at 20 years of our research since Putin came to power, then the peaks of support for Putin and his popularity have always coincided with military campaigns.”
  • Now the bargain is broken, the illusion has shattered. And the country has been pitched into a new phase. But what is it?
  • Mr. Yudin argues that Russia is moving out of authoritarianism — where political passivity and civic disengagement are key features — into totalitarianism, which relies on mass mobilization, terror and homogeneity of beliefs. He believes Mr. Putin is on the brink, but may hesitate to make the shift.
  • “In a totalitarian system, you have to release free energy to start terror,” he said. Mr. Putin, he said, “is a control freak, used to micromanagement.”
  • if the Russian state starts to fail, either through a collapse of Russia’s economy or a complete military defeat in Ukraine, “unleashing terror will be the only way for him to save himself.”
  • Which is why the current situation is so dangerous, for Ukraine and for people in Russia opposed Mr. Putin.
  • “Putin is so convinced that he cannot afford to lose, that he will escalate,” Professor Yudin said. “He has staked everything on it.”
clairemann

Cashing In Grandma's Gold Coins, a Turkish Family Struggles to Get By - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-inflation-rising-prices.html

Turkey crisis economics pandemic

shared by clairemann on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • As inflation soars and the value of Turkey’s currency plummets, one couple described how working families can’t make ends meet and have had to cut back on basic necessities as well as life’s smaller pleasures.
  • The Turkish economy has been in trouble for several years now, but in the last three months, its currency has lost nearly half its value against the dollar. Turks have been shaken by almost daily price increases in staples from flour and cooking oil to necessities such as electricity and gas. They are finding that their salaries and pensions can no longer pay for even the basics.
  • for fear of repercussions in a country where criticizing the government can land a person in jail.
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  • President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of a new economic plan, promising to turn around the decline. But instead, that announcement, including a promise to lower interest rates despite high inflation, set off the country’s worst currency crisis in two decades.
  • “You cannot win a fight against us.”
  • They survived the pandemic — Bilal was on half pay for a while, but the government made up the other half.
  • Turkey went through a similar economic downturn at the millennium. But then, under Mr. Erdogan, who came to power in 2003, the country enjoyed about a decade of uninterrupted growth, giving many Turks a taste of the middle-class lifestyle.
  • Economists say, however, that there has been a steady erosion of confidence in Mr. Erdogan’s stewardship of the economy as he has grown more authoritarian, intervened in the workings of the Central Bank, which is supposed to set interest rates independent of political pressure, and undermined the rule of law.
  • urkey was trying to ward off a recession caused by mountainous debt, steep losses in the value of the lira and rising inflation.
  • As the lira’s slide continues, sporadic protests have broken out around Turkey and the opposition parties have called for a series of rallies to demand a change of government. Scores of people have been detained for joining street protests.
  • acing an election in 2023 and sliding in opinion polls, Mr. Erdogan has doubled down on his financial approach and seems convinced that his strategy will enable the economy to grow out of its problems. Most economists, however, say a crash is more likely.
sidneybelleroche

A COVID Mega-Surge on Top of Putin's War Is Creating Hell on Earth - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/push-ukraine-to-breaking-point

shared by sidneybelleroche on 19 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • About 800 people in Ukraine are dying of the virus daily. But the battle against COVID isn’t the only crisis the country is facing: Already traumatized by 7 years of war, Ukrainians are living in fear of a potential Russian invasion, with some 100,000 Russian troops deployed near Ukraine’s border as of this month.
  • Meanwhile, public trust in President Volodymyr Zelesky is plummeting quickly.
  • His approval ratings have gone down from 73 percent in 2019 to 21 percent this month.
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  • only 8.8 million Ukrainians have been fully vaccinated—less than one third of the population.
  • The pandemic has killed more Ukrainians in the past four months than the ongoing war in Donbas has in seven years.
  • Seven years later, tensions are still flaring on an on-again-off-again basis, as Ukrainian forces continue to fight Russian-backed militias, resulting in the loss of some 4,500 Ukrainian citizens so far.
  • Now, the Ukraine-controlled part of Donetsk, a virtual warzone, is bearing the brunt of the COVID crisis in the country, registering 120 virus-induced deaths on Monday alone
  • locals seem to be directing their fury at their own government for its staggering vaccine campaign and overwhelmed medical institutions.
  • 7,507 people have died in the self-proclaimed People’s Donetsk Republic since the beginning of the pandemic.
  • Tens of thousands of young professionals, including medical personnel and doctors have left the Ukrainian government-controlled parts of the Donbas region since 2014.
  • The remaining population of about 300,000 live in small towns close to the frontlines.
  • More than three million people live in the seperatist Donetsk and Luhansk republics, where they rely on Russian-supplied vaccines. Due to the pandemic, most of the checkpoints along the line of contact were shut down, and up to 200,000 pensioners living in the separatist regions were not able to enter Ukraine to receive their funds.
  • To promote COVID vaccination, President Zelensky announced this week that every fully vaccinated Ukrainian would receive a reward of $38, but since Ukraine does not recognize the Russian vaccine, residents of the separatist territories will not be paid the promised reward.
Javier E

Migrant Workers Propelled China's Rise. Now Many See Few Options. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ural-jobs-migrant-workers.html

china workers history economics

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Now that times are tough and jobs harder to find, China’s roughly 300 million migrant workers, with flimsy social benefits, have little to fall back on. They don’t enjoy the same health insurance, unemployment and retirement benefits as city-born people, as threadbare as their safety net is. Once migrant workers pass their prime working age, they are expected to go back to their home villages so they won’t become burdens to the cities.
  • Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, conceded in a speech in 2020, “When the economy experiences fluctuations, the first group to be affected are the migrant workers.”
  • He said more than 20 million migrant workers, unable to find work, had returned to their villages during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, he said, nearly 30 million migrant workers had to stay home, and out of the reach of jobs, because of the pandemic.
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  • The national unemployment rate, as calculated by the National Bureau of Statistics, accounts only for urban unemployment, which stands at just above 5 percent and is believed to be underestimated. The average monthly income of migrant workers was $630 in 2022, or less than half the income of those working for the government. And that data is flawed because it includes only months when a worker has a job.
  • Mr. Xi said in his speech that the mass return of migrant workers in 2008 and 2020 had not caused any social problems because they “have land and houses back in their home villages so they can return to cultivate the land, have food to eat, and work on something.”
  • But the prospect of moving back to the villages is often bleak and even scary, especially for younger migrant workers who have spent their adult lives in the cities. They can see what awaits them. Their parents and grandparents may need to work until they physically cannot anymore and hesitate to seek medical care. They usually do not have unemployment benefits, and they cannot rely on their families, as some urban youths do, because their parents’ and grandparents’ pensions are “only enough to buy salt,
  • The other reality facing migrant workers is that returning to their villages to earn money farming is not an option, as Mr. Xi said it was. There is not enough land waiting for them
  • “For Chinese, especially in the countryside, there’s no such thing called retirement,” he said. His grandfather is 90 and cleans pig manure for a farm every day in the central province of Henan.
  • The morning we spoke he had just gotten off a shift that started at 7:30 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. He had worked for two weeks without a day off because of the demand for Apple’s newest iPhone.
  • He feels he cannot go home to his village and do nothing while his parents and grandfather are still working. “It’s just not appropriate,”
  • “My ideal country is one where the people live in peace and prosperity, where there is food safety, freedom of speech, justice, a media that can expose injustices, a five-day, eight-hour workweek for workers,” said Mr. Zhang, the unemployed welder. “If these can be achieved, I will support whoever is in power, regardless of their party or how long they govern.”
  • Mr. Ge left his village at age 17 and started working on construction sites and in factories. He had benefits during the six years he worked at Foxconn, a contract manufacturer for Apple. But when he was out of work this year, he could not get any unemployment benefits, which is not uncommon as local governments are deeply in debt. Now 34, he still works 10-hour shifts at another Apple contract manufacturer and lives in a dormitory.
  • “Only people who couldn’t find jobs would do farming,” said Guan, a migrant worker in the northwestern province of Gansu, “because income from farming is too low.”
  • “To be honest, deep down I feel lost,” he said. “All I can say is that for the time being, I’ll save as much money as possible. As for what the future holds, it’s really hard to say. I might not even live to see that age.”
Javier E

Why things are even worse than you think - by Sam Freedman - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...things-are-even-worse-than-you

UK public service policy crisis history

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • I have a feature piece in this month’s Prospect using 13 charts to tell the story of 13 years of government failure. Had they wanted to fill the whole magazine I could have used 100 charts. With a handful of exceptions (exam results, use of renewable energy, workplace pension enrolment) every trend graph is going in the wrong direction. The public sector is in a bad way. Hospitals are at breaking point, the police are charging fewer criminals, prisons are full, most schools have to run food banks, care homes can’t find staff. And so on.
  • But even this bleak picture puts a gloss on reality because of how institutions react in conditions of scarcity. If demand for a service is higher than providers can manage they will start rationing access more aggressively.
  • The NHS is a great example. The waiting list for elective treatments has risen over the course of the year from 7.2 million to 7.7 million, despite Rishi Sunak’s pledge to bring it down. But there hasn’t been any increase in the numbers joining the list compared to pre-pandemic.
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  • It’s only in the last few months that the number of new referrals taken on by hospitals has reached the levels seen in 2019.
  • Now maybe this hasn’t happened because that apparent pent-up demand wasn’t really there. Perhaps people recovered without medical assistance or found other ways to deal with it. But when you dig into the data it looks more like there is considerable demand suppression going on to try and keep numbers as manageable as possible.
Javier E

How Boeing Favored Speed Over Quality for the 737 Max - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-quality-problems-speed.html

boeing quality

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • After the Max 8 crashes, Boeing and its regulators focused most on the cause of those accidents: flawed design and software. Yet some current and former employees say problems with manufacturing quality were also apparent to them at the time and should have been to executives and regulators as well.
  • Davin Fischer, a former mechanic in Renton, who also spoke to the Seattle TV station KIRO 7, said he noticed a cultural shift starting around 2017, when the company introduced the Max.
  • “They were trying to get the plane rate up and then just kept crunching, crunching and crunching to go faster, faster, faster,” he said.
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  • When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, air travel plummeted, and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began to cut jobs and encouraged workers to take buyouts or retire early. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees companywide — including some with decades of experience.
  • Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respected the company and its employees and wanted Boeing to succeed.
  • “For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference last week.
  • In late 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in bigger monthly pension payments, which were tied to interest rates, according to the union that represents them,
  • “We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise, and we proposed some workarounds, but the company blew us off,” Ray Goforth, executive director of the union, said in a statement, adding that he thought the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower-paid entry-level engineers and technical workers.”
  • the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members had dropped sharply in recent years. The proportion of its members who have less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.
Javier E

Opinion | A.I. Is Endangering Our History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...istory-deepfake-watermark.html

history AI threat watermark

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • Fortunately, there are numerous reasons for optimism about society’s ability to identify fake media and maintain a shared understanding of current events
  • While we have reason to believe the future may be safe, we worry that the past is not.
  • History can be a powerful tool for manipulation and malfeasance. The same generative A.I. that can fake current events can also fake past ones
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  • there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.
  • countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.
  • There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed
  • Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
  • The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.
  • In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.
  • As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.
  • Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.
  • Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.
  • In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.
  • They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.
  • many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.
  • creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.
  • Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.
  • Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models
Javier E

Dilemma on Wall Street: Short-Term Gain or Climate Benefit? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inancial-industry-climate.html

climate change response environment wall street dilemma prisoners' climate

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average cost, adjusted for improved methods, is substantially higher than even the U.S. government’s most up-to-date figure.
  • That means greenhouse gas emissions, over time, will take a larger toll than regulators are accounting for. As tools for measuring the links between weather patterns and economic output evolve — and the interactions between weather and the economy magnify the costs in unpredictable ways — the damage estimates have only risen.
  • It’s the kind of data that one might expect to set off alarm bells across the financial industry, which closely tracks economic developments that might affect portfolios of stocks and loans. But it was hard to detect even a ripple.
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  • In fact, the news from Wall Street lately has mostly been about retreat from climate goals, rather than recommitment. Banks and asset managers are withdrawing from international climate alliances and chafing at their rules. Regional banks are stepping up lending to fossil fuel producers. Sustainable investment funds have sustained crippling outflows, and many have collapsed.
  • In some cases, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: If firms collectively shift to cleaner energy, a cooler climate benefits everyone more in the future
  • in the short term, each firm has an individual incentive to cash in on fossil fuels, making the transition much harder to achieve.
  • when it comes to avoiding climate damage to their own operations, the financial industry is genuinely struggling to comprehend what a warming future will mean.
  • A global compact of financial institutions made commitments worth $130 trillion to try to bring down emissions, confident that governments would create a regulatory and financial infrastructure to make those investments profitable. And in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed.
  • What about the risk that climate change poses to the financial industry’s own investments, through more powerful hurricanes, heat waves that knock out power grids, wildfires that wipe out towns?
  • “If we think about what is going to be the best way to tilt your portfolios in the direction to benefit, it’s really difficult to do,”
  • “These will probably be great investments over 20 years, but when we’re judged over one to three years, it’s a little more challenging for us.”
  • Some firms cater to institutional clients, like public employee pension funds, that want combating climate change to be part of their investment strategy and are willing to take a short-term hit. But they aren’t a majority
  • And over the past couple of years, many banks and asset managers have shrunk from anything with a climate label for fear of losing business from states that frown on such concerns.
  • On top of that, the war in Ukraine scrambled the financial case for backing a rapid energy transition. Artificial intelligence and the movement toward greater electrification are adding demand for power, and renewables haven’t kept up
  • All of that is about the relative appeal of investments that would slow climate change
  • If you bought some of the largest solar-energy exchange-traded funds in early 2023, you would have lost about 20 percent of your money, while the rest of the stock market soared.
  • There is evidence that banks and investors price in some physical risk, but also that much of it still lurks, unheeded.
  • “I’m very, very worried about this, because insurance markets are this opaque weak link,” Dr. Sastry said. “There are parallels to some of the complex linkages that happened in 2008, where there is a weak and unregulated market that spills over to the banking system.”
  • Regulators worry that failing to understand those ripple effects could not just put a single bank in trouble but even become a contagion that would undermine the financial system.
  • But while the European Central Bank has made climate risk a consideration in its policy and oversight, the Federal Reserve has resisted taking a more active role, despite indications that extreme weather is feeding inflation and that high interest rates are slowing the transition to clean energy.
  • “The argument has been, ‘Unless we can convincingly show it’s part of our mandate, Congress should deal with it, it’s none of our business,’”
  • a much nearer-term uncertainty looms: the outcome of the U.S. election, which could determine whether further action is taken to address climate concerns or existing efforts are rolled back. An aggressive climate strategy might not fare as well during a second Trump administration, so it may seem wise to wait and see how it shakes out.
  • big companies are hesitating on climate-sensitive investments as November approaches, but says that “two things are misguided and quite dangerous about that hypothesis.”
  • One: States like California are establishing stricter rules for carbon-related financial disclosures and may step it up further if Republicans win
  • And two: Europe is phasing in a “carbon border adjustment mechanism,” which will punish polluting companies that want to do business there.
  • at the moment, even European financial institutions feel pressure from the United States, which — while providing some of the most generous subsidies so far for renewable-energy investment — has not imposed a price on carbon.
  • The global insurance company Allianz has set out a plan to align its investments in a way that would prevent warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, if everyone else did the same. But it’s difficult to steer a portfolio to climate-friendly assets while other funds take on polluting companies and reap short-term profits for impatient clients.
  • “This is the main challenge for an asset manager, to really bring the customer along,” said Markus Zimmer, an Allianz economist. Asset managers don’t have sufficient tools on their own to move money out of polluting investments and into clean ones, if they want to stay in business,
  • “Of course it helps if the financial industry is somehow ambitious, but you cannot really substitute the lack of actions by policymakers,”
  • According to new research, the benefit is greater when decarbonization occurs faster, because the risks of extreme damage mount as time goes on. But without a uniform set of rules, someone is bound to scoop up the immediate profits, disadvantaging those that don’t — and the longer-term outcome is adverse for all.
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