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Javier E

George Soros: Facebook and Google a menace to society | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...google-are-a-menace-to-society

fb social media google criticism democracy surveillance addiction innovation monopoly culture politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”
  • “Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.
  • In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”
  • There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”
  • Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.
  • “This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,”
  • “The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them,
  • He also echoed the words of world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he said the tech giants had become “obstacles to innovation” that need to be regulated as public utilities “aimed at preserving competition, innovation and fair and open universal access”.
  • Earlier this week, Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said that Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company because it’s addictive and harmful.
  • In November, Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook, described Facebook and Google as threats to public health.
delgadool

George P. Shultz and Ted Halstead: Carbon pricing is the winning Republican climate answer - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-bf30-ad313e4ec754_story.html

carbon pricing carbon

shared by delgadool on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The newfound Republican climate position can be summarized as follows: The climate problem is real, the Green New Deal is bad and the GOP needs a proactive climate solution of its own. Our big question is what form it should take.
  • There are essentially three ways to reduce emissions — regulations, subsidies and pricing. The first is the worst of all options for a party committed to free markets and limited government. Many Republican legislators are, therefore, gravitating toward the second option: tax credits and research-and-development spending to promote innovation. Those now introducing legislation along these lines deserve praise.
  • Republicans are correct to focus on clean-energy innovation as a crucial driver of climate progress.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • carbon pricing still encounters opposition among some GOP lawmakers, albeit a shrinking number.
  • The winning Republican climate answer is the third option: carbon pricing. Just as a market-based solution is the Republican policy of choice on most issues, so should it be on climate change.
  • Let’s start with the worry that a price on carbon would hurt working-class families and reduce living standards. We propose returning all the net revenue raised directly to the American people through equal quarterly checks. Under this model, the vast majority of American families would win financially. That makes carbon pricing quite popular
  • Thus, our carbon fee would be self-financing and revenue-neutral, making it the fiscally conservative choice while eliminating any risk of a fiscal drag. Instead of growing the size of government, our approach would “finance” the transition to a low-carbon future by harnessing the power of the market and leveraging the vast resources of the private sector for innovation and investment.
  • Finally, border carbon adjustments that extend the reach of domestic carbon pricing to imports and exports would protect the competitiveness of U.S.-based companies.
  • U.S. manufacturers would actually gain a competitive advantage. No other climate solution offers this benefit.
Javier E

The 1 Thing to Understand About Biden's Infrastructure Plan - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618587

biden infrastructure plan climate policy crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • one number in particular has stood out to me. It underlines the plan’s importance, its ambition, and its scope. It also helps explain the almost low-key political approach taken by the Biden team.
  • There is only one serious vehicle to pass climate policy through Congress during the Biden administration—and it’s this infrastructure plan. If recent history is any guide, the bill is the country’s one shot to pass meaningful climate legislation in the next few years, if not in the next few decades.
  • Also significant are the plan’s fledgling attempts at industrial policy—it aims to set up 10 “pioneer facilities” that will show how large steel, chemical, and cement makers can decarbonize through carbon capture and storage technology.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The infrastructure plan is what’s supposed to put the better in the White House’s “Build Back Better” agenda. It’s meant to push the American economy toward decarbonization and climate-friendly growth.
  • Many articles have tried to answer what, exactly, the word infrastructure means. Yet the centrality of the bill has never quite been clearly stated. This is the climate bill.
  • I regularly hear from Americans of all ages and occupations that Congress should do something about climate change. This plan … well, it’s something. In the months to come, climate-concerned Americans will have to ask themselves: Should Congress do it?
  • Its marquee policy is probably its clean-energy standard for the electricity sector, which aims to zero out carbon emissions from power generation by 2035
  • this bill hurls several different and mostly sensible tools at the climate problem.
  • But nearly as important is its extension of certain key green-energy tax credits; it also converts these into direct payouts from the IRS, which should make them simpler, cheaper, and more equitable to implement.
  • Others may be peeved that it isn’t labeled a Green New Deal, even though it borrows that policy’s love of public investment (while omitting its populist theory of change)
  • In short: If you want the United States to act at a national level to fight climate change, this bill is it. This is the climate bill.
  • He also somewhat infamously said that climate policy was “like a Christmas tree,” in that you could hang any other policy you wanted on it. Police reform, land-use regulation, monetary policy—these are all (to varying degrees of plausibility) climate policy.
  • There are worse strategies. Given the acrimony that greeted previous climate plans, the new strategy seems to be keeping these moves as low-key as possible—working to pass historic climate legislation while not making a huge deal of it.
  • The House of Representatives will take up the bill this week. Now that Congress has brought back earmarks, which allow individual lawmakers to flag budget lines for specific projects or nonprofits, representatives are likely to ladle all sorts of goodies into the bill. Then it will go to the Senate, where the buffet will be piled even higher than before, and then, if all goes well, Biden will sign it.
  • The proposal has flaws. A foretaste of the criticism:
  • Many climate activists, for instance, allege that it does not spend enough money on a problem as existential as climate change
  • it does not adopt a revenue-neutral carbon tax (even though—I must add—the Senate has no appetite for such a policy)
  • One of the intellectual fathers of this strategy was Steve Rayner, a social scientist at Oxford University who died last year at age 66.
  • The bill funds its work by raising taxes on corporations; in the eyes of many economists, infrastructure improvements are better funded through deficit spending, because public works boost the economy so much that they raise the amount of money collected by other taxes, meaning infrastructure essentially pays for itself.
  • And yet. This bill is the only policy on the table. Congress will modify it, but lawmakers are not going to draft another legislative vehicle. The U.S. is not getting a carbon tax, a Green New Deal, or a new Department of Climate Change. We’re getting this proposal. It’s something. I think respect for our role as democratic citizens compels climate-concerned Americans to ask ourselves: Is this long-awaited something better than nothing?
Javier E

Costa Rica Set To Become The Worlds First Plastic-Free And Carbon-Free Country By 2021 - 0 views

www.intelligentliving.co/-rica-plastic-carbon-free-2021

sustainability environment politics history Costa Rica

shared by Javier E on 27 May 19 - No Cached
  • Costa Rica is in the top 5 of countries that are leading the way into renewable resources. It might seem small but it has a really big environmental impact. Since 2014 the country’s energy has been coming from 99% renewable sources, and it has been running on 100% renewable energy for over two months twice in the last two years. Then, since June 2017 they have been set on eradicating single-use plastic by 2021. The first be the first country in the world to do this. And most recently, in the summer of 2018, the country announced its aims to become completely carbon-neutral by the year 2021 – The first completely carbon-free country in the whole world.
  • Earlier this year, Carlos Alvarado Quesada was elected as Costa Rica’s new president. His first act in the office was to take a giant leap forward into reducing carbonization. During his inauguration as a world leader he announced his initiative to ban fossil fuels and become the world’s first decarbonized society.
  • The plastic dilemma came next. So, last year on World Environment Day the country announced its new national plan to eradicate all single-use plastics by 2021. From that day on, plastic has to be replaced by alternatives that are 100% recyclable or biodegradable and not petroleum-based.
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  • Since the 1980s, the government recognized that nature is Costa Rica’s strongest asset and has therefore made every effort to protect it: including, among other things, zoo closures, reforestation, and establishing protected areas (25% of the total surface area of the country). “With its rich biodiversity, Costa Rica has also demonstrated far-sighted environmental leadership by pursuing reforestation, designating a third of the country protected natural reserves, and deriving almost all of its electricity from clean hydro power.” – Joseph Stiglitz
  • “Decarbonization is the great task of our generation and Costa Rica must be one of the first countries in the world to accomplish it, if not the first.”
  • it is also conscious of the well-being of its citizens. It is part of the Wellbeing Economies Alliance—a coalition that includes Scotland, New Zealand, and Slovenia—which instead of emphasizing countries’ GDP, “seeks to ensure that public policy advances citizens’ wellbeing in the broadest sense, by promoting democracy, sustainability, and inclusive growth,” according to a recent column by economist Joseph Stiglitz.
anonymous

E.U. Agrees to Cut Emissions by 2030 in New Climate Deal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eu-climate-emissions.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • After an all-night negotiating session, European Union leaders agreed on Friday morning to cut net carbon emissions by 55 percent in the next decade from levels measured in 1990
  • European leaders, who are keen to position themselves as at the forefront of the global fight against climate change, had failed in October to reach a deal on an even less ambitious target of 40 percent.
  • “Europe is the leader in the fight against climate change,”
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  • The decision on the new target comes just in time for the United Nations climate summit this Saturday
  • Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said it was “worth losing a night’s sleep” over the climate deal. “I don’t want to imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t been able to achieve such a result,”
  • the details and language in the agreement were kept vague after many hours of often tense negotiations, leaving it up to the commission to hammer out the specifics.
  • The overnight discussions on climate, which has been declared as one of the European Union’s top priorities, have been obstructed by the familiar divisions between the wealthier Western European countries pushing for more ambitious targets, and a handful of Eastern European states, led by Poland, that depend heavily on coal.
  • In a gesture toward Eastern European governments, the E.U. leaders decided the target has to be reached by the bloc collectively — effectively giving coal-dependent countries more time to transition their energy consumption.
  • Five years after the Paris climate accords first brought together rich and poor countries in a politically binding agreement pledging to stem the rise of global temperatures, the European Commission laid out plans in March for a climate law that would make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.
  • some climate activists expressed skepticism at the time, saying that it lacked intermediate goals and key details as to how the target would be turned into reality.
  • “European leaders have agreed a new target, with new money, and an outline of what will be needed to deliver,”
  • In the climate talks, Poland and Hungary — along with the Czech Republic and other heavily coal-dependent nations — said it was unfair that they be held to the same standard as other nations whose economies already drew on a wider mix of energy sources.
  • “We have an agreement which on the one hand allows us to realize the E.U. target, and on the other creates conditions for a just transition of the Polish economy and the energy sector,”
Javier E

Bibi Netanyahu's Divisive Policies Are Behind Israel's Catastrophic National Security Failure - 0 views

www.theunpopulist.net/...i-netanyahus-divisive-policies

netanyahu israel security hamas invasion 2023

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • This is broadly what we know happened: Shortly after launching the intensive early-morning rocket attack, elite Hamas units simultaneously rushed multiple military outposts on the Gaza-Israel border. They quickly overwhelmed the posts, killing or kidnapping virtually all the soldiers in them. They then destroyed the observation and communications networks on which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) depended for identifying breaches of the border fence.
  • In parallel, Hamas launched an aerial and naval attack using several dozen motor-powered hang gliders, armed drones, and small speed boats. In the ensuing chaos, the fence was breached by bulldozers, explosives, and wire-cutters in up to 80 spots along the northern and eastern border between Gaza and Israel, facilitating the main thrust of the attack.
  • Over 1,500 armed militiamen on pickup trucks, motorbikes, and SUVs rushed across the border into adjacent Israeli kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns. Several dozen militiamen also headed to the scene of a youth music festival where around 3,500 revelers were camped in tents and cars. This became the epicenter of a massacre.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Over the next several hours, militants rampaged through around two dozen Israeli towns—killing, looting, burning, kidnapping, and reportedly raping civilians. They managed to penetrate as far as Ofakim, 20 miles into Israel. They effectively controlled several main roads, on which they gunned down passing traffic. It took the IDF 6 hours to begin seriously engaging the militants. 18 hours after the incursion began, fighting was taking place in 22 spots. It took over 48 hours before the last of the major clashes with this first wave of the militants’ incursion was over and the militants neutralized.
  • In total, as of the morning of October 11th, over 1,200 Israelis are confirmed killed, almost 3,000 wounded (hundreds critically), and somewhere between 100 and 150 kidnapped, including whole families with toddlers and senior citizens.
  • For months, Netanyahu has been cautioned that his divisive “governance reforms” represented a reckless gamble with the country’s national security. He received numerous private (and then public) warnings from every major security chief that his policies were eroding IDF preparedness and provoking Israel’s enemies to test its readiness. Netanyahu ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed every one of these warnings. He and his acolytes have systematically castigated those who voiced concern as disloyal “agents of the deep state” or, worse, “leftist traitors.”
  • The events of October 7th represented a colossal intelligence failure. With or without substantial Iranian assistance, it is now clear that Hamas had been preparing the attack for over a year. Astonishingly, it apparently did so without major leaks. The few tell-tale signs of an impending attack that did surface appear to have been ignored.
  • Taken by surprise, and made to fight for their lives in understaffed outposts, the IDF was operationally incapable of adequately responding to the militants’ land maneuver. Unarmed civilians were left to fend for themselves for long hours, with horrific consequences.
  • What will make October 7th uniquely egregious in the eyes of many Israelis (perhaps most) is the fact that events of this sort were not only reasonably foreseeable but were repeatedly foreseen and repeatedly ignored by Israel’s current leadership.
  • at least 950 Palestinians have been killed in retaliatory IAF air strikes.
  • As long as Israel faces immediate danger, all hands will be on deck and party politics largely put aside.
  • As long as the emergency continues, therefore, Netanyahu won’t have to face the pressure of public protests against his program to weaken the Israeli judiciary.          
  • But in the longer term, it is difficult to see how Netanyahu, the great political survivor, will survive the events of October 7th. His reputation as “Mr. Security” is in tatters and it is impossible to see how it could possibly recover.
  • Analysts keen to convey the magnitude of October 7th to American audiences have already tagged it Israel’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Neither label adequately captures the day’s true significance.
  • A more accurate name might be something like “Israel’s civic Yom Kippur.” Why? Because the very existence of the State of Israel was supposed to guarantee that a day like this would never happen. In the Yom Kippur War of October 1973—when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault—Israel lost some 2,700 soldiers, but it managed to effectively protect its civilian population. No Israeli towns or villages were ever breached. The social contract was honored, albeit at a terrible price.
  • On October 7, 2023, it was primarily civilians who were killed, maimed, and kidnapped. This was the day when the IDF wasn’t there to defend the people it was created to protect. This was the day when—livestreamed on social media—distraught family members saw their loved ones carried away, like livestock, into Hamas captivity in Gaza. This was the day when—in a horrifying echo of the Holocaust—defenseless Jewish mothers, citizens of a sovereign Jewish State, tried to keep their babies from crying as armed men lurked outside, listening to ascertain whether anyone was alive inside the home, before setting it on fire.
  • many Israelis, already mistrustful of their elected representatives and worn out by internal divisions, may have finally lost faith in their national leaders or, worse, in the core institutions of their nation state. Where was the army when murderous gunmen broke into our homes deep inside Israel itself?
  • Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel appeared broken, internally torn, and internationally isolated. Yet, it proved itself remarkably resilient. Can Israel gather itself again from the terrible blow it sustained on October 7th? I have no doubt that it can.
Javier E

Sick and Tired of the News? - by John Halpin - 0 views

www.liberalpatriot.com/...sick-and-tired-of-the-news

news trust attention fatigue decline reader Pew Research

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Most Americans are fed up with the news media itself or simply don’t care enough to tune into the regular bad news, violence, corruption, and political divisions that constitute most media coverage these days.
  • Professional politics and many actions by the government—as covered endlessly by the media—are essentially of little to no interest to large percentages of Americans.
  • From March 2016 to August 2022, the percentage of American adults who reported following the news “all or most of the time” dropped from 51 percent to 38 percent, according to the Pew stud
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The largest declines in news attention over this period were found among working-age and pre-retirement Americans—for example, more than six in ten Americans ages 50-64 paid close attention to the news in 2016 compared to less than half in 2022.
  • around two-thirds of those ages 65 or older say they follow the news “all or most of the time” (down from a high of 81 percent in 2018) compared to less than one-fifth of those ages 18 to 29.
  • One-third of U.S. adults in 2022 said they follow the news at least “some of the time” while just under three in ten said they pay attention to the news “only now and then” or “hardly at all”.
  • it occurs in conjunction with shifts in media consumption towards digital devices, overall declining trust in the media and other institutions, and “high levels of news fatigue” across demographic groups.
  • It’s easier for people to do something else with their time and find more enjoyable distractions that don’t involve keeping up with the latest implosion in the House of Representatives, fights between dumb politicians, or what new conflict is flaring up in another part of the world.
  • Even as fewer people than ever are paying close attention to what is actually going on in America and the world, more and more Americans (and politicians) are piping off routinely—online, in the workplace, and in family gatherings—with hard-and-fast opinions about what it all means.
  • the net result is a more divisive and less informed citizenry coupled with a clear inability of major institutions and political parties in America to do anything cooperative on common economic, security, and social problems.
  • In a pluralistic society like ours—with important rights to freedom of speech and individual beliefs—it is not the job of government or others to coerce people into paying more or closer attention to what is going on.
  • But media companies, government bodies, and philanthropists could certainly put more money and effort into creating trustworthy news platforms for reporting important facts, presenting neutral analyses, exploring successes and failures in public policy, and hosting civil discussions about the important issues shaping the country.
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