Ukraine War Will Accelerate the Decline of Globalization - Bloomberg - 0 views
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At the dawn of the 20th century, Norman Angell famously (or infamously) predicted that the era of global commercial integration had made great power conflict so costly and destructive as to be unthinkable.
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A few years later, the outbreak of World War I proved him right about the cost and destruction, but wrong about being unthinkable. The Great War ended the first era of globalization, and it took generations to rebuild the level of worldwide integration that pertained before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a much smaller conflict than World War I, and the trade disruptions associated with the U.S./European quasi-embargo on Russia are smaller than the British blockade of the Central Powers.
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Opinion | Big Tech Is Bad. Big A.I. Will Be Worse. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet/Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially A.I.-dominated future. This is not good news. History has shown us that when the distribution of information is left in the hands of a few, the result is political and economic oppression. Without intervention, this history will repeat itself.
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The fact that these companies are attempting to outpace each other, in the absence of externally imposed safeguards, should give the rest of us even more cause for concern, given the potential for A.I. to do great harm to jobs, privacy and cybersecurity. Arms races without restrictions generally do not end well.
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We believe the A.I. revolution could even usher in the dark prophecies envisioned by Karl Marx over a century ago. The German philosopher was convinced that capitalism naturally led to monopoly ownership over the “means of production” and that oligarchs would use their economic clout to run the political system and keep workers poor.
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Opinion | Elon Musk Is Buying Twitter. Shudder. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Carnegie and the steel barons elected Republican lawmakers and presidents committed to protecting their companies’ profits by levying high tariffs on foreign competitors. Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites.
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What makes Mr. Musk particularly powerful and potentially more dangerous than the industrial-era moguls is his ability to promote his businesses and political notions with a tweet
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The likely consequences of Mr. Musk’s Twitter ownership will be political as well as economic disruption.
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Biden's Climate Law Is Ending 40 Years of Hands-off Government - The Atlantic - 0 views
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It is no exaggeration to say that his signature immediately severed the history of climate change in America into two eras. Before the IRA, climate campaigners spent decades trying and failing to get a climate bill through the Senate. After it, the federal government will spend $374 billion on clean energy and climate resilience over the next 10 years. The bill is estimated to reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by about 40 percent below their all-time high, getting the country two-thirds of the way to meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement.
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Far less attention has been paid to the ideas that animate the IRA.
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, the IRA makes a particularly interesting and all-encompassing wager—a bet relevant to anyone who plans to buy or sell something in the U.S. in the next decade, or who plans to trade with an American company, or who relies on American military power
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Adam Tooze, Crisis Historian, Has Some Bad News for Us - The Atlantic - 0 views
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merica and the world are living through what Adam Tooze, the internet’s foremost historian of money and disaster, describes as a “polycrisis.”
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the revelation that Tooze is now putting forth is that we might not be emerging from crisis. Indeed, we might be in a worsening one, in which much of the world faces a series of self-reinforcing financial and geopolitical pressures, building, perhaps, to some ominous end.
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Each crisis is hard enough to parse by itself; the interconnected mess of them is infinitely more so. And he feels “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.”
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Why Rotterdam Wouldn't Allow a Bridge to Be Dismantled for Bezos' Yacht - The New York ... - 0 views
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we think that rich people are not acting normal. Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think ‘Be average.’ That’s good enough.”
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“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’”
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The streak of austerity in Dutch culture can be traced to Calvinism, say residents, the most popular religious branch of Protestantism here for hundreds of years. It emphasizes virtues like self-discipline, frugality and conscientiousness. Polls suggest that most people in the Netherlands today are not churchgoers, but the norms are embedded, as evidenced by Dutch attitudes toward wealth.
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Amazon Prime Day Is Dystopian - The Atlantic - 0 views
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hen Prime was introduced, in 2005, Amazon was relatively small, and still known mostly for books. As the company’s former director of ordering, Vijay Ravindran, told Recode’s Jason Del Rey in 2019, Prime “was brilliant. It made Amazon the default.”
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It created incentives for users to be loyal to Amazon, so they could recoup the cost of membership, then $79 for unlimited two-day shipping. It also enabled Amazon to better track the products they buy and, when video streaming was added as a perk in 2011, the shows they watch, in order to make more things that the data indicated people would want to buy and watch, and to surface the things they were most likely to buy and watch at the very top of the page.
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And most important, Prime habituated consumers to a degree of convenience, speed, and selection that, while unheard-of just years before, was made standard virtually overnight.
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'We will coup whoever we want!': the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech... - 0 views
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there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.
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Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society.
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The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEO before he made a dramatic comeback this week, wants to upload his consciousness to the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).
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How a French Bank Captured Haiti - The New York Times - 0 views
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The documents help explain why Haiti remained on the sidelines during a period so rich with modernization and optimism that Americans dubbed it the Gilded Age and the French called it the Belle Époque. This extraordinary growth benefited both faraway powers and developing neighbors, yet Haiti had vanishingly little to invest in basics like running water, electricity or education.
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The damage was lasting. Over three decades, French shareholders made profits of at least $136 million in today’s dollars from Haiti’s national bank — about an entire year’s worth of the country’s tax revenues at the time, the documents show.
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The financial historian Éric Monnet of the Paris School of Economics summed up the national bank’s role as “pure extraction.”
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Israel Moves Blood Bank Underground to Safeguard It From Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views
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When the sirens warning of incoming rockets split the skies, Israel’s national blood bank moves into high alert to keep the nation’s blood supply safe. The heavy machinery for blood processing, plasma freezers and centrifuges are transferred to a basement bomb shelter, a cumbersome operation that takes 10 to 12 hours.
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By the end of the year, the blood bank will be relocated to a bright, state-of-the-art subterranean facility built to withstand chemical, biological and conventional weapons, including a direct hit from a large missile, as well as earthquakes and cyberattacks.
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“It will save the lives of our loved ones, our frontline workers and our soldiers in times of routine emergencies and conflict,”
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Opinion | For Ukraine, Europe Thinks Russia's Putin Wants More Than War - The New York ... - 0 views
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In the final weeks of World War I, a German general sent a telegram to his Austrian allies summarizing the situation. It was, he wrote, “serious, but not catastrophic.” The reply came back: “Here the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”
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“The U.S. thinks Putin will do a full-blown war,” he said. “Europeans think he’s bluffing.”
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full-scale war is generally as unimaginable for a Western European public as an alien invasion. The many decades of peace in Western Europe, combined with the continent’s deep dependence on Russia’s oil and gas, incline officials to assume aggressive Russian moves must be a ruse.
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Food Prices Hit Two-Decade High, Threatening the World's Poor - The New York Times - 0 views
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Food prices have skyrocketed globally because of disruptions in the global supply chain, adverse weather and rising energy prices, increases that are imposing a heavy burden on poorer people around the world and threatening to stoke social unrest.
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A global index released on Thursday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed food prices in January climbed to their highest level since 2011, when skyrocketing costs contributed to political uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The price of meat, dairy and cereals trended upward from December, while the price of oils reached the highest level since the index’s tracking began in 1990.
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But as the pandemic began in early 2020, the world experienced seismic shifts in demand for food. Restaurants, cafeterias and slaughterhouses shuttered, and more people switched to cooking and eating at home.
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Most-read 2022: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under easter... - 0 views
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I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing
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Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.
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over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’
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Chocolate Might Never Be the Same - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”
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The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,
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Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.
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