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Javier E

The climate emergency really is a new type of crisis - consider the 'triple inequality'... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gency-crisis-conference-cop-28

climate emergency crisis triple inequality tooze

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Stare at a climate map of the world that we expect to inhabit 50 years from now and you see a band of extreme heat encircling the planet’s midriff. Climate modelling from 2020 suggests that within half a century about 30% of the world’s projected population – unless they are forced to move – will live in places with an average temperature above 29C. This is unbearably hot. Currently, no more than 1% of Earth’s land surface is this hot, and those are mainly uninhabited parts of the Sahara.
  • The scenario is as dramatic as it is because the regions of the world affected most severely by global heating – above all, sub-Saharan Africa – are those expected to experience the most rapid population growth in coming decades.
  • But despite this population growth, they are also the regions that, on current trends, will contribute least to the emissions that drive the climate disaster.
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  • So extreme is inequality that the lowest-earning 50% of the world population – 4 billion people – account for as little as 12% of total emissions.
  • And those at the very bottom of the pile barely register at all. Mali’s per capita C02 emissions are about one-seventy-fifth of those in the US. Even if the lowest-earning third of the global population – more than 2.6 billion people – were to raise themselves above the $3.2-a-day poverty line, it would increase total emissions by a mere 5% – that is, one-third of the emissions of the richest 1%.
  • Half the world’s population, led by the top 10% of the income distribution – and, above all, by the global elite – drive a globe-spanning productive system that destabilises the environment for everyone
  • The worst effects are suffered by the poorest, and in the coming decades the impact will become progressively more extreme. And yet their poverty means they are virtually powerless to protect themselves.
  • This is the triple inequality that defines the climate global equation: the disparity in responsibility for producing the problem; the disparity in experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis; and the disparity in the available resources for mitigation and adaptation.
  • global heating will pose huge distributional problems. How will climate refugees be resettled? How will the economy adapt?
  • For fragile states such as Iraq, it may prove too much. The risk is that they will tip from just about coping into outright collapse, failing to provide water and the electricity for cooling – the bare essentials for survival in extreme heat
  • You might say, plus ça change. The poor suffer and the rich prosper. But the consequences of the climate triple inequality are radical and new
  • Rich countries have long traded on unequal terms with the poor. During the era of colonialism, they plundered raw materials and enslaved tens of millions. For two generations after decolonisation, economic growth largely bypassed what was then known as the third world.
  • As we run ever closer to the edge of the environmental envelope – the conditions within which our species can thrive – the development of the rich world systematically undercuts the conditions for survival of billions of people in the climate danger zone
  • The middle 40% of the world’s income distribution now account for 41% of global emissions, meaning they have achieved a considerable level of energy consumption. But this “global middle class”, concentrated above all in east Asia, crowds out the carbon budget remaining for those on the lowest incomes, and their growth inflicts irreversible damage on some of the poorest and most disempowered people in the world.
  • Since the 1980s, with the acceleration of China’s economic growth, the scope of development has dramatically widened.
  • They are not so much exploited or bypassed as victimised by the climactic effects of economic growth taking place elsewhere. This violent and indirect entanglement is new in its quality and scale
  • Violent and unequal relationships between groups usually involve some degree of interaction and can, as a result, be resisted. Workers can strike.
  • But arms-length ecological victimisation entails no such relationship and offers correspondingly fewer channels for resistance from within the system.
  • can we not hope for more constructive responses to the triple inequality?
  • This question is still what gives such huge importance to the global climate conferences such as Cop28, which starts on 30 November. They may seem like staid and ritualistic affairs, but it is in such venues that the lethal connection between oil, gas and coal production, rich-world consumption and the lethal risks facing those in the climate danger zone can be articulated in political form.
  • since then the resistance of US and European negotiators has hardened. As we approach Cop28, the organisation and the financing of the fund are yet
  • Such a fund is no solution to the problem of the triple inequality. For that we need a comprehensive energy transition and new models of truly inclusive and sustainable development
  • But a loss and damage fund does one essential thing. It recognises that the global climate crisis is no longer a problem of future development. We have entered the stage where the failure to urgently address the mounting crisis becomes an active process of victimisation. A victimisation that cries out, at least, for an admission of responsibility and adequate compensation.
  • Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University
Javier E

Confessions of a Tiger Couple - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...essions-of-a-tiger-couple.html

tiger mother cultural values

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who is cited in “The Triple Package,” hadn’t yet read the book, but said he hoped that Chua and Rubenfeld were aware that they’re flirting with a Typhoid Mary. “I’m all for culture,” Patterson said, but “culture is a tricky concept. It has tripped up a lot of anthropologists and sociologists.”
  • “The Triple Package” is full of qualifications, earnest settings-of-the-terms, explicit attempts to head off misinterpretations at the pass. “This point is so important we’re going to repeat it,” they write in a section about Appalachian poverty, which they argue was caused by geography and industrial decline, rather than by any lack of triple-package values.
  • Chua remained optimistic.“I feel like it should be a book that if you approach it with an open mind, it actually shouldn’t be controversial. It should be thought-provoking.”
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  • “Battle Hymn” was written at a time when Chua’s sister was ill and Lulu, then 13, was going “public with her insurgency” against her mother’s oppressive methods. After a showdown in a Russian restaurant (yelling, smashed glass), Chua admits that she pushed her younger daughter too hard. But that doesn’t mean she thinks she shouldn’t have been pushing at all. For all of her claims about the book’s satire and hyperbole, she expresses a deep conviction about how she raised her daughters: “There is nothing I’m prouder of.”
  • Yale Law School prides itself on being a kind of oasis for the country’s brightest students, the ones who scored highest on the LSAT and got the best grades and have done something ambitious already — volunteered in an African refugee camp, say, or worked as a C.E.O. It’s among the most selective law schools, and unlike the bigger ones, it doesn’t grade on a curve. Incoming students are told they’re “off the treadmill.” They can take some time to figure out what it is that they really want to do.
  • In “The Triple Package,” Rubenfeld and Chua write that this is the point of striving: to get to a place where you can break out of the straitjacket of conventional success and pursue the life you really want to live
  • “The Triple Package” conveys a message familiar from self-help books: Adopt these values and you too can take control of your life. But you have only to step outside of Yale’s campus to see that the world doesn’t operate according to the same principles of effort and reward
woodlu

A triple shock slows China's growth | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21805725

economics politics

shared by woodlu on 19 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • it is hard to imagine China could ever run short of this familiar fuel. But in recent months, the black pyramids have been not quite immense enough. A scarcity of coal, which accounts for almost two-thirds of China’s electricity generation, has contributed to the worst power cuts in a decade
  • The Chinese economy has been hit by a triple shock, stemming not only from the power cuts but also the pandemic and a property slowdown exacerbated by the financial woes of Evergrande, a developer.
  • the economy’s pace of growth slowed to 4.9% in the third quarter,
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  • Industrial production expanded by only 3.1% year-on-year in September,
  • The causes of the coal shortage fall into two categories: structural and incidental. The unlucky contingencies include floods in Henan province in July and in Shanxi this month, which forced some mines to close. In addition, in Inner Mongolia, which accounts for about a quarter of China’s coal output, an investigation into corruption has implicated and hamstrung some of the officials who might previously have approved expansions in coal mining. Shaanxi province, China’s third-largest producer of coal, slowed production to keep the skies clear for a national athletics event in September
  • When supply is tight, prices are supposed to rise, obliging customers to economise on their consumption. But as the price of coal shot up, power stations were unable to pass their higher costs on.
  • In a press conference on October 15th, China’s central bank described Evergrande as an idiosyncratic case in a generally healthy industry. That should have been reassuring, except that policymakers will not come to the property sector’s rescue until they are sufficiently worried about its plight.
  • property sector, a perennial engine of growth, employment, leverage and anxiety
  • Regulators are trying to curb speculative demand for flats and limit the excessive borrowing of homebuilders. That effort to limit financial risk has brought some pre-existing dangers to a head
  • Some homebuyers are now understandably nervous about handing over their cash to any developer who may not be in business long enough to finish the projects they are selling.
  • Another shock to the economy came from the pandemic. Outbreaks of covid-19, such as a cluster that began in Nanjing in July, prompted strict, localised lockdowns, depressing retail spending, especially catering, and travel.
  • Most economists think China’s year-on-year growth will slow even further in the last three months of the year, to 4% or below. China will maintain its vigilance against covid-19, and the property downturn has further to run.
katieb0305

NATO bolsters presence in Eastern Europe as Russia tension rises - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

nato europe russia

shared by katieb0305 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The UK has deployed hundreds of troops to Eastern Europe as NATO continues to bolster its presence in the face of perceived Russian provocation.
  • "Russia has tripled defense spending," Stoltenberg told reporters.
  • "Russia has invested heavily in a modern military equipment. They are conducting a large-scale, no-notice exercises close to NATO borders, but perhaps most importantly Russia has been willing to use military force against neighbors.
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  • said Russia withdrew the request after the ministry had asked the Russian Embassy in Madrid to clarify reports the flotilla might participate in military operations against the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo.
  • On Wednesday, Russia withdrew a request for a flotilla of warships, including its flagship aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov, to refuel in the Spanish port of Ceuta as the ships head toward Syria.
  • The UK has deployed hundreds of troops to Eastern Europe as NATO continues to bolster its presence in the face of perceived Russian provocation.
  • "Russia has tripled defense spending," Stoltenberg told reporters.
  • NATO defense ministers met Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, to discuss the situation as well as the fight against ISIS.
  • Poland's paramilitary defense has grown rapidly, with more than 35,000 people signing up and undergoing military training. They range from high school students to lawyers and doctors.
  • n July, the UK said it would deliver one of four battalions to NATO's enhanced forward presence in the Baltic states and Poland.
  • Belgium, Croatia, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway will join a German-led battalion in Lithuania, while Denmark and France will contribute to the UK-led battalion in Estonia.
  • In February, the US Department of Defense announced it was spending $3.4 billion for the European Reassurance Initiative to deter Russian aggression against NATO allies.
  • A limited rotational force of 330 Marines are set to be located at the Vaernes military base in Norway, according to a statement from the Norwegian Defense Ministry.
Javier E

What Drives Success? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-drives-success.html

success culture ethnicity insecurity superiority impulse control psychology values

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
  • These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
  • Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
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  • The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.
  • Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
  • Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism.
  • The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
  • Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
  • By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
  • Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
  • MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time.
  • while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
  • The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
  • the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success
  • The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
  • research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.
  • Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
  • it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
  • We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense.
  • That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.
  • Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.
  • In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
  • Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children.
  • Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment.
  • The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age
  • Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to
  • At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control.
  • success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies
  • Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
  • Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
  • It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.
  • But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating
  • Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.
  • Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts
  • The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched.
  • Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.
  • THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.
  • The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit.
  • It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
  • research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children.
  • The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
  • But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification.
  • the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
Javier E

Everyone likes the idea of equal opportunity. This economist thinks it's a fantasy. - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...economist-thinks-its-a-fantasy

social mobility equal opportunity economics culture biology success

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • His new book, "The Son Also Rises" (Clark is a big fan of Hemingway puns), traces families with particular surnames to measure social mobility over the course of hundreds of years in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China and more. He finds that there's much less mobility than we often assume, and that government interventions to promote it more often than not fail.
  • What gave you the idea to look at surname data? Initially I was interested just in extending conventional social mobility estimates into the distant past. Estimating social mobility is very data intensive. You need to link individual parents and children. There are thus no such estimates for any society before 1850. Tracking surname status was a convenient shortcut. In most societies, all the people with a surname such as Goodhart descended from the earlier set of Goodharts. We do not know the individual linkages, but we can ask what is happening to their status as a group across generations.
  • I found that you get radically slower estimated mobility rates for all societies when you switch to surnames.
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  • The effect is dramatic in some countries. Modern Sweden has some of the most rapid social mobility rates estimated in the world. Yet surnames in modern Sweden show status persistence exactly in this 0.7-0.8 range. This result was completely unexpected. Understanding why that is the case is a key puzzle the book tackles.
  • The book mainly concentrates on measures such as education, occupational status, wealth and longevity as indicators of status. Another surprising puzzle that emerged is that with surnames, the persistence of status was the same for all these measures. We might expect wealth to persist in a different way, since it can be transmitted across generations in a different way than education. You do not need any talent to inherit wealth. This is another regularity the book tries to account for.
  • Another remarkable feature of the surname data is how seemingly impervious social mobility rates are to government interventions. In all societies, what seems to matter is just who your parents are. At the extreme, we see in modern Sweden an extensive system of public education and social support. Yet underlying mobility rates are no higher in modern Sweden than in pre-industrial Sweden or medieval England.
  • Interestingly, in China, the extreme social intervention represented by the Communist Revolution of 1949, which included executing large numbers of members of the old upper class, has not resulted in much of an increase in social mobility. Surnames of high status in the Imperial and Republican era continue to be overrepresented among modern elites, including Communist Party officials.
  • families that have high social competence, whatever the social system is, typically find their way to the top of the social ladder.
  •  It is clear that families are very powerful determinants of children’s outcomes. But what do parents transmit to their children? Is it mainly some type of culture? Or is it mainly genetics?
  • The data does not exist to provide any conclusive answer to this question. But even if this is cultural transmission, it looks in all respects just the same as biological inheritance. The book performs a series of tests to see if biological transmission can be ruled out as the important link, and the empirical patterns never rule this out.
  • A recent book, "The Triple Package"  [by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld], argues the extreme opposite of biology in explaining social status, with the claim that successful cultural groups in the U.S. have three key features leading to success, one being impulse control. But what is remarkable is how disparate the culturally successful groups they identify are – Jews, Chinese, Indians, Mormons, Iranians, Lebanese, Nigerians, Cubans. And it is demonstrable that most of the successful groups identified here were elites selected from the parent populations as a combined result of politics at home and immigration policy in the U.S.
  • All this information on social mobility within societies unfortunately does not offer much insight into why societies as a whole succeed or fail in economic terms.
  • The surname data suggests that you will not be able to do much to increase social mobility through social policies of any type.  We already live in societies of massive social intervention in terms of the provision of education and health care. Yet we have not been able to raise social mobility rates above those of the pre-industrial era.
  • But if we're learning that we can predict the majority of people's outcomes at conception, that should lead us to reexamine our assumption that whatever income distribution comes out in society is fine. Because if it's the case that a lot of this is determined before someone enters the game, it weakens the case for letting the market determine the distribution. You'd be much more likely to favor a society with much less inequality.
  • And that's where Sweden's system does provide advantages over the U.S.'s. They haven't changed mobility rates, but they've changed the consequences, strongly, of ending up at various points in the distribution. It's a much better place for people who end up at the bottom of the distribution.
  • One piece of news that most people will find encouraging in these various studies is that eventually all elites become average in their characteristics, even if that takes 300 years
  • Accounts that emphasize cultural transmission all have a hard time explaining why successful groups, and successful families in general, all experience regression to the mean. There is nothing to stop a cultural trait being inherited unchanged
  • Only biological inheritance has an inbuilt mechanism to explain observed regression to the mean. It also has predictions about when this regression to the mean will not be observed (complete endogamy). It further implies that the rate of regression to the mean will be the same at the top of the status distribution as at the bottom. So the biological pathway has two advantages over the cultural. It produces a mechanism to explain the regression of all elites and underclasses that we observe, and it has testable implications about the speed and character of that mobility.
  • The final surprise in conducting this study was to find a seeming simple physics that underlies social mobility.
  • When we observe an elite group in 1800 in England, we can predict to seven generations in the future what their relative social position will be, despite the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the modern welfare state in the interval.
  • Two very simple equations are sufficient to describe a major feature of the social world, and a feature that you would think impossible to model in any such manner.
blaise_glowiak

ANKARA, Turkey: Turkey and the Islamic State: Clash of interests feeds suspicions | Syr... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...d-the-islamic-state-clash.html

turkey ISIS

shared by blaise_glowiak on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • blaise_glowiak on 28 May 15
     
    ANKARA, TURKEY - Governments throughout the Middle East and well beyond look with suspicion on Turkey's role in the war against the Islamic State. "Turkey's policy is either a double or triple game,"  a former top Jordanian intelligence official was more direct. "They are collaborating with Daash, but they just don't say it," he said of Turkey, referring to the Islamic State by its pejorative Arabic acronym. Turkish officials see a different issue. "The question is not where Turkey is," the official said. "The question is who will be with Turkey when the mayhem starts. Our soldiers will be the primary target. And we don't want to be the heroes . . . we don't want to be left alone with this problem at the end of the day."
redavistinnell

Putin vows to 'immediately destroy' any target threatening Russia in Syria | World news... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...arget-threatening-russia-syria

putin target russia syria world

shared by redavistinnell on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Putin vows to 'immediately destroy' any target threatening Russia in Syria
  • Speaking at a meeting with senior commanders in Moscow, Putin said the military should respond with full force to any “further provocations”, adding that additional aircraft and air defence weapons have been sent to the Russian base near Latakia.
  • In continuing violence, Islamic State claimed responsibility for a triple suicide truck bombing that killed 50 to 60 Kurds in Tell Tamer in the Hasaka area of northern Syria, while the UN said it was sending its senior relief official, Stephen O’Brien, to Damascus to examine the deteriorating humanitarian situation.
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  • Russia has insisted the plane remained in Syrian airspace. Putin denounced the Turkish action as a “treacherous stab in the back”.
  • The campaign took advantage of western disarray and galvanised efforts to end the four-and-a-half-year war.
  • He said Russia was also helping some units of the opposition Free Syrian Army, which were fighting “terrorists” in Syria, providing air cover and supplying them with weapons.
  • The US and Britain have meanwhile welcomed agreement by Syrian opposition groups to hold talks with Assad in the new year. But the Syrians are still insisting he stands down at once – in the face of strong resistance from Russia and Iran, the president’s closest allies.
  • John Kerry, the US secretary of state, welcomed the Riyadh agreement by what he called “an extremely diverse group of Syrians” who created a negotiating body to represent them. The last talks between the Syrian government and opposition groups were in Geneva in January 2014 and got nowhere. Kerry admitted, however, that there were still some “kinks” to be ironed out.
  • The talks excluded Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaida and an important fighting force, as well as representatives of Syrian Kurdish groups.
  • Philip Hammond, the British foreign secretary, called the Riyadh agreement an important step ahead of new international talks on Syria in New York next week, following up on what diplomats call the Vienna process. The Syrian negotiations are due to be held in the first half of January.
ethanshilling

Western States Sizzle Under Triple-Digit Temperatures - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...excessive-heat-warning.html

US climate change

shared by ethanshilling on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Temperatures were forecast to hit 107 on Wednesday in the San Joaquin Valley in the center of California, according to the National Weather Service. While temperatures in Fresno were 16 to 18 degrees above normal for this time of year, they fell short of breaking records.
  • In Redding, in Northern California, temperatures reached 107 on Tuesday, a day after peaking at 109 and breaking the previous record of 103 set in 2016, meteorologists said.
  • In Nevada, Las Vegas saw its first 100-degree day of the year on Monday, followed by another triple-digit day — 103 — on Tuesday. It’s forecast to hit 105 on Wednesday and 106 on Thursday.
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  • An expanded heat advisory is also in effect through Thursday night for the central and southeastern portion of Washington, the Weather Service said. High temperatures could reach the upper 90s or lower 100s.
  • Hot weather is also forecast for Montana over Wednesday and Thursday with high temperatures climbing into the upper 80s and upper 90s. High temperatures could reach 15 to 25 degrees above normal, meteorologists said.
  • Warmer-than-average temperatures have been the trend in recent memory. Last year tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, according to European climate researchers. To complicate matters, a severe drought is ravaging the entire western half of the United States, from the Pacific Coast, across the Great Basin and desert Southwest, and up through the Rockies to the Northern Plains.
  • A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggested that more than a third of heat-related deaths in many parts of the world can be attributed to the extra warming associated with climate change.
  • The research found that heat-related deaths in warm seasons were boosted by climate change by an average of 37 percent, in a range of a 20 to 76 percent increase.
carolinehayter

US coronavirus cases hit record daily high and experts warn daily death rates will trip... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US trump pandemic policy

shared by carolinehayter on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Daily Covid-19 cases in the US reached a record high on Thursday, with experts warning that death rates could triple by mid-January
  • In total, there have been more than 8,947,980 cases and at least 228,677 deaths in the US -- 971 of them on Thursday, JHU data shows.
  • Thursday's average marks an 82.68% increase in new cases over the last month, Johns Hopkins says. This week alone, the nation added a record-setting 536,131 cases. Total coronavirus cases could top 9 million Friday.
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  • On Thursday, nine states reported their record high single-day of new cases ever
  • New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy told CNN Friday that he attributed the rise in cases to the cold, "fatigue" and indoor private gatherings.
  • "The fall/winter surge should lead to a daily death toll that is approximately three times higher than now by mid-January. Hospital systems, particularly ICUs, are expected to be under extreme stress in December and January in 18 states."
  • "If states do not react to rising numbers by re-imposing mandates, cumulative deaths could reach 514,000 by the same date," the IHME said in its latest forecast.
  • The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine says it is most likely that by the middle of January, 2,250 Americans will be dying every day from the coronavirus -- three times more than the current rate.
  • Forty-three states have shown an increase in cases compared to last week, with five holding steady and two -- Oklahoma and Louisiana -- reporting a decline, according to JHU.
  • "We are at an unsustainable growth rate," said Dr. Jason Mitchell Thursday. Mitchell is the chief medical officer at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, which operates nine regional hospitals in New Mexico
  • Mitchell says the state's rate of case growth is averaging about 5% a day, which would result in catastrophic numbers if there's no effort to change the trend
  • A CNN investigation of 17 Trump campaign rallies finds that 14 of the host counties had an increased rate of new Covid-19 cases one month after the rally.
  • CNN evaluated the rate of new daily cases per 100,000 residents at four weeks before the rally, on the rally date, and four weeks after the rally at the county level and at the state level.
  • Of the 14 host counties that had increased infection rates, eight of them had declining rates of infection in the month before the rally. The other six counties already had increasing rates of infection in that preceding month.
  • CNN's analysis also found that in 10 counties, the new rates of infection were growing faster than the overall rate for the state.
anonymous

Student Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the Left - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-student-loans.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale
  • ut Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency.
  • The Education Department is effectively the country’s largest consumer bank and the primary lender, since 2010, for higher education. It owns student loans totaling $1.4 trillion
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,
  • People who go to college “are often from more advantaged backgrounds, and they end up doing very well in the labor market,”
  • more than 70 percent of currently unemployed workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, and 43 percent did not attend college at all
  • almost 60 percent of America’s educational debt is owed by households in the nation’s top 40 percent of earners, with an annual income of $74,000 or more.
  • Many economists, including liberals, say higher education debt forgiveness is an inefficient way to help struggling Americans who face foreclosure, evictions and hunger.
  • Without a parallel effort to curb tuition growth, one-time debt relief could actually lead to more higher-education debt in the future as students take on larger loans
  • Mr. Looney said that canceling $50,000, at a projected cost of $1 trillion, would be “among the largest transfer programs in American history,”
  • Student debt load has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed both credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages, and much of it falls on Black graduates, who owe an average of $7,400 more than their white peers at the time they leave school.
  • The legal argument for debt cancellation by executive action hinges on a passage in the Higher Education Act of 1965 that gives the education secretary the power to “compromise, waive or release” federal student loan debts
  • The government has struggled to get all borrowers who would benefit from income-linked plans enrolled in them, in part because the loan servicers it hired to work with borrowers and collect their payments have not guided people through the complicated process of getting and staying enrolled.
  • The “benefit of outright cancellation is simplicity,”
  • “There’s no question that student debt is a problem in this country, but simply forgiving student loans is not the answer,” Mr. Thune said.
Javier E

U.S. and China Agree to Displace Fossil Fuels by Ramping Up Renewables - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-china-climate-agreement.html

china US climate agreement response international fossil renewables policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The United States and China, the world’s two largest climate polluters, have agreed to jointly tackle global warming by ramping up wind, solar and other renewable energy with the goal of displacing fossil fuels.
  • The United States and China, the world’s two largest climate polluters, have agreed to jointly tackle global warming by ramping up wind, solar and other renewable energy with the goal of displacing fossil fuels, the State Department said Tuesday.
  • The statements of cooperation released separately by the United States and China on Tuesday do not include a promise by China to phase out its heavy use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, or to stop permitting and building new coal plants. That has been a sticking point for the United States in months of discussions with Beijing on climate change.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The statements of cooperation released separately by the United States and China do not include a promise by China to phase out its heavy use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, or to stop permitting and building new coal plants
  • both countries agreed to “pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030.” That growth should reach levels high enough “so as to accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation,” the agreement says. Both countries anticipate “meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction” in this decade, it says. That appears to be the first time China has agreed to cut emissions in any part of its economy.
  • both countries agreed to “pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030.” That growth should reach levels high enough “so as to accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation,” the agreement says
  • Both countries anticipate “meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction” in this decade, it says
  • That appears to be the first time China has agreed to specific emissions targets in any part of its economy
  • As part of the deal, China agreed to set reduction targets for all greenhouse gas emissions. That is significant because the current Chinese climate goal addresses only carbon dioxide, leaving out methane, nitrous oxide and other gases that are acting as a blanket around the planet.
  • The United States and China also agreed that in the next set of climate pledges — which nations are supposed to put forward in 2025 — China will set emissions reduction targets across its economy. Its current pledge calls for carbon dioxide emissions to peak before 2030 but does not specify how high they might go before the curve begins to bend or specify by how much it might slash emissions.
  • Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, praised the U.S.-China agreement and called it “a foundation of ambition” ahead of the U.N. climate summit in Dubai.
Javier E

The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...680280

AI timetable

shared by Javier E on 17 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, repeated in August his suggestion from earlier this year that AGI could arrive by 2030, adding that “we could cure most diseases within the next decade or two.”
  • A month later, even Meta’s more typically grounded chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said he expected powerful and all-knowing AI assistants within years, or perhaps a decade
  • Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the rival AI start-up Anthropic, wrote in a sprawling self-published essay last week that such ultra-powerful AI “could come as early as 2026.” He predicts that the technology will end disease and poverty and bring about “a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights,” and that “many will be literally moved to tears” as they behold these accomplishments.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Then the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, wrote a blog post stating that “it is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” which would in turn make such dreams as “fixing the climate” and “establishing a space colony” reality
  • All of this infrastructure will be extraordinarily expensive, requiring perhaps trillions of dollars of investment in the next few years. Over the summer, The Information reported that Anthropic expects to lose nearly $3 billion this year. And last month, the same outlet reported that OpenAI projects that its losses could nearly triple to $14 billion in 2026 and that it will lose money until 2029, when, it claims, revenue will reach $100 billion
  • Microsoft and Google are spending more than $10 billion every few months on data centers and AI infrastructure.
  • Amodei’s and Hassabis’s visions that omniscient computer programs will soon end all disease is worth any amount of spending today. With such tight competition among the top AI firms, if a rival executive makes a grand claim, there is pressure to reciprocate.
  • All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.
Javier E

'The Sleepwalkers' and 'July 1914' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...leepwalkers-and-july-1914.html

WWI origins historiography

shared by Javier E on 10 May 13 - No Cached
  • In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers
  • Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”
  • By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”
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  • Clark declines to join McMeekin in what he calls “the blame game,” because there were so many participants. He argues that trying to fix guilt on one leader or nation assumes that there must be a guilty party and this, he maintains, distorts the history into a prosecutorial narrative that misses the essentially multilateral nature of the exchanges, while underplaying the ethnic and nationalistic ferment of a region. “The outbreak of war in 1914,” he writes, “is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol.” Not having a villain to boo is emotionally less satisfying, but Clark makes a cogent case for the war as a tragedy, not a crime: in his telling there is a smoking pistol in the hands of every major character.
  • Clark makes a fascinating point I’ve not seen before: not simply were all the political players in the drama male, but they were men caught in a “crisis of masculinity.” He cites historians of gender who argue that at this particular time “competition from subordinate and marginalized masculinities — proletarian and nonwhite for example” accentuated assertiveness. You’d expect the military men to exude testosterone, and they do, but Clark is struck by how ubiquitous in memoir and memorandums are pointedly masculine modes of comportment, and how closely they are interwoven with their understanding of policy. “Uprightness,” “backs very stiff,” “firmness of will,” “self-castration” are typical modes of expression.
  • The brilliance of Clark’s far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue. The participants were conditioned to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment, sure of their own moral compass, but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures, patriotism and paranoia, sediments of history and folk memory, ambition and intrigue. They were, in Clark’s term, “sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”
Javier E

Why the Economy Doesn't Roar Anymore - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...doesnt-roar-anymore-1476458742

economic Policy history theory productivity golden age

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The U.S. presidential candidates have made the usual pile of promises, none more predictable than their pledge to make the U.S. economy grow faster. With the economy struggling to expand at 2% a year, they would have us believe that 3%, 4% or even 5% growth is within reach.
  • But of all the promises uttered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the course of this disheartening campaign, none will be tougher to keep. Whoever sits in the Oval Office next year will swiftly find that faster productivity growth—the key to faster economic growth—isn’t something a president can decree.
  • It might be wiser to accept the truth: The U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.
  • Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year
  • these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.
  • looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.
  • that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.
  • The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.
  • Many factors played a role in this achievement.
  • The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.
  • As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.
  • New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.
  • Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.
  • Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.
  • The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.
  • But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.
  • The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973
  • and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.
  • the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.
  • With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right
  • Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.
  • But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them
  • Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.
  • It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control
sarahbalick

India hospital transfusions infect thousands with HIV - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-india-36417789

india hospital hiv

shared by sarahbalick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • India hospital transfusions infect thousands with HIV
  • At least 2,234 Indians have contracted the deadly HIV virus while receiving
  • blood transfusions in hospitals in the past 17 months alone.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • India has around 2.09 million people living with HIV/Aids.The highest number of patients who had been infected with HIV as a result of contaminated blood in hospitals, were from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh with 361 cases, Mr Kothari's RTI (Right to Information) query revealed.
  • "This is the official data, provided by the government-run Naco. I believe the real numbers would be double or triple that," Mr Kothari told the BBC.
  • "But each such test costs 1,200 rupees ($18; £12) and most hospitals in India do not have the testing facilities. Even in a big city like Mumbai, only three private hospitals have HIV testing facilities. Even the largest government hospitals do not have the technology to screen blood for HIV," Mr Kothari said.
sarahbalick

DEATH VALLEY: Three suspects ID'd in death of rare Devil's Hole pupfish (UPDATE) - Pres... - 0 views

www.pe.com/...one-802498-hole-devil.html

death valley devil hole

shared by sarahbalick on 13 May 16 - No Cached
  • DEATH VALLEY: Three suspects ID'd in death of rare Devil's Hole pupfish (UPDATE)
  • It only lives in one spot – the 93-degree waters of Devil’s Hole, part of a detached unit of Death Valley National Park in Nye County, Nevada.
  • Three men on a drunken spree killed one of the Devil’s Hole pupfish late last month. The men left behind beer cans, vomit and boxer shorts, according to National Parks Service surveillance footage.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • On Monday, May 9, the Center for Biological Diversity tripled the reward to $15,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.Initially, the parks service had offered a $5,000 reward
  • Authorities released surveillance video Monday showing the men climbing a fence guarding Devils Hole on April 30. They fired at least 10 rounds from a shotgun, shooting the locks off of two gates, and left beer cans and vomit
  • “The last thing they need are these idiots running amok in the last place on Earth where they still survive,” she said.
ecfruchtman

India's battle against three words that grant Muslims instant divorce - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 23 Feb 17
     
    Farha's husband instantly divorced her last year by saying "talaq, talaq, talaq" in a fit of anger after their 10-year-old daughter had asked him for five rupees (seven cents) to buy some firecrackers for a holiday celebration.
Javier E

Quinoa should be taking over the world. This is why it isn't. - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-the-world-this-is-why-it-isnt

quinoa industry

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Demand started to ramp up in 2007, when Customs data show that the U.S. imported 7.3 million pounds of quinoa. Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods began carrying the seed soon after, and the U.S. bought 57.6 million pounds in 2012, with 2013 imports projected at 68 million pounds
  • And yet, prices are skyrocketing; they tripled between 2006 and 2011, and now hover between $4.50 and $8 per pound on the shelf.
  • Part of it is that Peru itself, already the world’s biggest consumer of quinoa, patriotically started including the stuff in school lunch subsidies and maternal welfare programs.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Andean smallholders are trying to keep up with the demand. They’ve put more and more land into quinoa in recent years; Bolivia had 400 square miles under cultivation last year, up from 240 in 2009. The arid, cool land that quinoa needs was plentiful, since little else could grow there. And thus far, that trait has made it difficult to grow elsewhere.
  • U.S. industry has shown little interest in developing the ancient grain. Kellogg uses quinoa in one granola bar, and PepsiCo’s Quaker Oats owns a quinoa brand, but the biggest grain processors–Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland–say they’ve got no plans to start sourcing it. Monsanto, the world’s largest seed producer, has nothing either.
  • Instead, their research and development dollars are focused entirely on developing newer, more pest-resistant forms of corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar, and other staples. All of those crops have their own corporate lobbying associations, government subsidy programs, and academic departments devoted to maintaining production and consumption. Against that, a few researchers and independent farmers trying to increase quinoa supply don’t have much of a chance.
  • it’s hard for any new crop to make the transition from niche to mainstream.
  • For that reason, quinoa prices are likely to remain volatile for a long while yet. Brigham Young’s Rick Jellen says the lack of research funding for quinoa–relative to the other large crop programs–means that even if they come up with a more versatile strain, it won’t have the resilience to survive an infestation
Javier E

High Cost to the Economy From the Fiscal Impasse - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-from-the-fiscal-impasse.html

economy shutdown crisis government cost

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Even as the shutdown of the United States government and the threat of a default appear to be coming to an end, the cost of Congress’s gridlock has already run well into the billions, economists estimate. And the total will continue to grow after the shutdown ends and uncertainty persists
  • economists said that the intransigence of House Republicans would take a bite out of fourth-quarter growth, with knock-on effects for employment, business earnings and borrowing costs. Those effects would be global.
  • The two-week shutdown has trimmed about 0.3 percentage points from fourth-quarter growth
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The shutdown has already led to the biggest plunge in consumer confidence since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. And it has had ripple effects on many industries that rely on the federal government in one way or another. Import inspections, export financing and oil and gas permitting have come to a halt, in some cases.
  • Residential real estate, which has been one of the brightest points of the recovery, appears to be taking a hit.
  • The impasse over the debt ceiling has already raised the United States’ short-term borrowing costs, with investors demanding triple the interest payments they demanded just a few weeks ago,
  • The World Bank has estimated that a similar standoff in 2011 raised borrowing costs in poor countries by about 0.75 percentage point, and that those costs remained elevated for months.
  • “Regardless of whether we get a deal, there will be efforts to diversify away from the United States in terms of assets.”
  • continuing fiscal gridlock in Washington would take a toll on growth not just in the short term but in the long term as well. In the absence of a broad deal that addresses entitlement spending as well as the budget deficit, “you will have perpetual uncertainty,” he said. “And that will undermine the U.S. role in the world much more than a default.”
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