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Javier E

Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...americas-neo-nazi-terror-group

leader white supremacy group terror

shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Using encrypted apps, members of the highly organized group planned terror campaigns; vandalized synagogues; established armed training camps and recruited new members.
  • The US attorney for Maryland, Robert K Hur, speaking after the recent arrest of three members of the Base, said that they “did more than talk – they took steps to act and act violently on their racist views”.
  • Rinaldo Nazzaro has maintained a decidedly low profile: he has no visible presence on any major social media platforms, no published writings under his own name, and no profile in local or national media.
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  • The Guardian was able to unravel Nazzaro’s identity due to his 2018 activities in a remote corner of the Pacific north-west.
  • Last August, an Oregon-based antifascist group, Eugene Antifa, warned that the Base was planning a “hate camp” in the neighboring state of Washington, and claimed Nazzaro (operating under the alias of “Spear”) had purchased land in Stevens county for training purposes. This warning came after a leak of the Base’s internal chats.
  • Property record searches revealed that three 10-acre blocks of undeveloped land were purchased in December 2018 for $33,000 in the name of a Delaware LLC called “Base Global”. In a telephone conversation in late November, Manke confirmed that this was the block of land he had been referring to.
  • The location of the land is consistent with “Norman Spear’s” advocacy of a white supremacist strategy called the Northwest Territorial Imperative (NTI), which was promoted by the deceased white supremacist Harold Covington.
  • The strategy argues for the creation of a separatist ethnostate in the Pacific north-west and encourages white supremacists to move to the region.
  • The plan, he said, would trigger the relocation to the Pacific north-west of the white population in the United States.
  • Under the motto “there is no political solution”, the Base embraces an “accelerationist” ideology, which holds that acts of violence and terror are required in order to push liberal democracy towards collapse, preparing the way for white supremacists to seize power and institute an ethnostate.
  • Materials inspected and sources consulted by the Guardian indicate that Nazzaro, as “Spear”, has faced persistent suspicions from current and former members of the group that he is a “fed”, or the agent of a foreign government, or that the Base is a “honeypot” intended to lure neo-Nazis out into the open for the benefit of law enforcement agencies.
  • The Guardian has discovered that all of the business addresses associated with Nazzaro’s OSI LLCs are “virtual offices”. This describes a situation where a second company provides a business address, and sometimes meeting rooms and greeting services, for businesses who do not wish to maintain their own premises.
Javier E

Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...irus-cases-europe-genomes.html

Covid-19 mutation genome tracking

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia.
  • The research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.
  • It would not be until late February that Italy would begin locking down towns and cities, and March 11 when Mr. Trump said he would block travelers from most European countries. But New Yorkers had already been traveling home with the virus.
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  • While conspiracy theories might falsely claim the virus was concocted in a lab, the virus’s genome makes clear that it arose in bats.
  • Sophisticated computer programs can then figure out how all of those mutations arose as viruses descended from a common ancestor. If they get enough data, they can make rough estimates about how long ago those ancestors lived. That’s because mutations arise at a roughly regular pace, like a molecular clock.
  • Tracking viral mutations demands sequencing all the genetic material in a virus — its genome. Once researchers have gathered the genomes from a number of virus samples, they can compare their mutations.
  • In January, a team of Chinese and Australian researchers published the first genome of the new virus. Since then, researchers around the world have sequenced over 3,000 more. Some are genetically identical to each other, while others carry distinctive mutations.
  • The most closely related coronavirus is in a Chinese horseshoe bat, the researchers found. But the new virus has gained some unique mutations since splitting off from that bat virus decades ago.
  • Dr. Boni said that ancestral virus probably gave rise to a number of strains that infected horseshoe bats, and perhaps sometimes other animals.
  • It’s entirely possible, Dr. Boni said, in the past 10 or 20 years, a hybrid virus arose in some horseshoe bat that was well-suited to infect humans, too. Later, that virus somehow managed to cross the species barrier.
  • already, the genomes of the virus are revealing previously hidden outlines of its history over the past few months.
  • While the coronavirus mutations are useful for telling lineages apart, they don’t have any apparent effect on how the virus works.
  • The deepest branches of the tree all belong to lineages from China. The Nextstrain team has also used the mutation rate to determine that the virus probably first moved into humans from an animal host in late 2019.
  • In January, as the scope of the catastrophe in China became clear, a few countries started an aggressive testing program. They were able to track the arrival of the virus on their territory and track its spread through their populations.
  • But the United States fumbled in making its first diagnostic kits and initially limited testing only to people who had come from China and displayed symptoms of Covid-19.“It was a disaster that we didn’t do testing,”
  • As new cases arose in other parts of the country, other researchers set up their own pipelines. The first positive test result in New York came on March 1, and after a couple of weeks, patients surged into the city’s hospitals.
  • Dr. Heguy and her colleagues found some New York viruses that shared unique mutations not found elsewhere. “That’s when you know you’ve had a silent transmission for a while,”
  • And researchers at Mount Sinai started sequencing the genomes of patients coming through their hospital. They found that the earliest cases identified in New York were not linked to later ones.“Two weeks later, we start seeing viruses related to each other,”
  • Dr. Gonzalez-Reiche and her colleagues found that these viruses were practically identical to viruses found around Europe.
  • hey write that the viruses reveal “a period of untracked global transmission between late January to mid-February.”
  • Dr. van Bakel and his colleagues found one New York virus that was identical to one of the Washington viruses found by Dr. Bedford and his colleagues. In a separate study, researchers at Yale found another Washington-related virus. Combined, the two studies hint that the coronavirus has been moving from coast to coast for several weeks.
  • Dr. Boni and his colleagues found that the genome of the new virus contains a number of mutations in common with strains of coronaviruses that infect bats.
  • Some viruses evolve so quickly that they require vaccines that can produce several different antibodies. That’s not the case for Covid-19. Like other coronaviruses, it has a relatively slow mutation rate compared to some viruses, like influenza.
Javier E

Taiwan Is Beating the Coronavirus. Can the US Do the Same? | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...navirus-can-the-us-do-the-same

taiwan pandemic response strategies

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • it is natural enough to look at Taiwan’s example and wonder why we didn’t do what they did, or, more pertinently, could we have done what they did?
  • we keep seeing the culturally embedded assumption that East Asian-style state social control just won’t fly in the good old, individualist, government-wary, freedom-loving United States.
  • The New York Times: People in “places like Singapore … are more willing to accept government orders.” Fortune: “There seems to be more of a willingness to place the community and society needs over individual liberty.” Even WIRED: “These countries all have social structures and traditions that might make this kind of surveillance and control a little easier than in the don’t-tread-on-me United States.”
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  • we see the classic “Confucian values” (or “Asian values”) argument that has historically been deployed to explain everything from the economic success of East Asian nations to the prevalence of authoritarian single-party rule in Asia, and even, most recently, China’s supposed edge in AI research.
  • So, yeah, kudos to Taiwan for keeping its people safe, but here in America we’re going to do what we always do in a crisis—line up at a gun store and accuse the opposing political party of acting in bad faith. Not for us, those Asian values.
  • But the truth is that Taiwan, one of Asia’s most vibrant and boisterous democracies, is a terrible example to cite as a cultural other populated by submissive peons
  • Taiwan’s self-confidence and collective solidarity trace back to its triumphal self-liberation from its own authoritarian past, its ability to thrive in the shadow of a massive, hostile neighbor that refuses to recognize its right to chart its own path, and its track record of learning from existential threats.
  • There is no doubt that in January it would have been difficult for the US to duplicate Taiwan’s containment strategy, but that’s not because Americans are inherently more ornery than Taiwanese
  • It’s because the United States has a miserable record when it comes to learning from its own mistakes and suffers from a debilitating lack of faith in the notion that the government can solve problems—something that dates at least as far back as the moment in 1986 when Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
  • The Taiwan-US comparison is the opposite of a clash of civilizations; instead, it’s a deathly showdown between competence and incompetence.
  • To be fair, there are some cultural aspects of East Asian societies that may work in Taiwan’s favor
  • There is undeniably a long tradition in East Asia of elevating scholars and experts to the highest levels of government,
  • The country’s president Tsai Ingwen, boasts a PhD from the London School of Economics, and the vice president, Chen Chien-jen, is a highly regarded epidemiologist
  • The threat of SARS put Taiwan on high alert for future outbreaks, while the past record of success at meeting such challenges seems to have encouraged the public to accept socially intrusive technological interventions.
  • First, and most important was Taiwan’s experience battling the SARS outbreak in 2003, followed by the swine flu in 2009
  • “Taiwan actually has a functioning democratic government, run by sensible, well-educated people—the USA? Not so much.”)
  • Taiwan’s commitment to transparency has also been critical
  • In the United States, the Trump administration ordered federal health authorities to treat high-level discussions on the coronavirus as classified material.
  • In Taiwan, the government has gone to great lengths to keep citizens well informed on every aspect of the outbreak, including daily press conferences and an active presence on social media
  • “Do not forget that Taiwan has been under China’s threat constantly,” wrote Wang Cheng-hua, a professor of art history at Princeton, “which has raised social consciousness about collective action. When the collective will supports government, then all of the strict measures implemented by the government make sense.”
  • Over the past quarter-century, Taiwan’s government has nurtured public trust by its actions and its transparency.
  • The democracy activists who risked their lives and careers during the island nation’s martial law era were not renowned for their willingness to accept government orders or preach Confucian social harmony
  • some of the current willingness to trust what the government is telling the people is the direct “result of having experienced the transition from an authoritarian government that lied all the time, to a democratic government and robust political dialogue that forced people to be able to evaluate information.”
  • Because of the opposition of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations or the World Health Organization
  • “The reality of being isolated from global organizations,” wrote Tung, “also makes Taiwanese very aware of the publicity of its success in handling a crisis like this. The more coverage from foreign media, the more people feel confident in government policy and social mobilization.”
  • Given what we know about Taiwan’s hard-won historical experience, could the US have implemented a similar model?
  • The answer, sadly, seems to be no
  • it would be impossible for the US to successfully integrate a health care database with customs and travel records because there is no national health care database in the United States. “The US health care system is fragmented, making it difficult to organize, integrate, and assess data coming in from its various government and private-sector parts,”
  • more tellingly, continued Fidler, “the manner in which the United States has responded to Covid-19 demonstrates that the United States did not learn the lessons from past outbreaks and is struggling to cobble together a semblance of a strategy. ”
  • There’s where the contrast between the United States and Taiwan becomes most salient. The US is not only bad at the act of government but has actively been getting worse.
  • But Taiwan’s own success at building a functional democracy is probably the most potent rebuke to the Asian values thesis.
  • But over that same period, powerful political and economic interests in the US have dedicated themselves to undermining faith in government action, in favor of deregulated markets that have no capacity to react intelligently or proactively to existential threats.
  • And instead of learning from history, US leaders actively ignore it, a truth for which there could be no better symbolic proof than the Trump administration’s dismantling of the National Security Council pandemic office created by the Obama administration in the wake of the Ebola outbreak
  • Finally, instead of seeking to keep the public informed to the best of our ability, some of our political leaders and media institutions have gone out of their way to muddy the waters.
  • In Taiwan, one early government response to the Covid-19 outbreak was to institute a fine of $100,000 for the act of spreading fake news about the epidemic.
  • In the US the most popular television news network in the country routinely downplayed or misrepresented the threat of the coronavirus, until the severity of the outbreak became too large to ignore.
  • If there is any silver lining here, it’s that the disaster now upon us is of such immense scope that it could finally expose the folly of the structural forces that have been wreaking sustained havoc on American governmental institutions
  • So maybe we are finally about to learn that competence matters, that educated leaders are a virtue, and that telling the truth is a responsibility
  • Americans might have to learn this the hard way, like we did in Hong Kong and Singapore.”
  • We’re about to find out how hard it’s going to be. But will we learn?
Javier E

Opinion | Who Goes Alt-Right In a Coronavirus Quarantine? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-isolation-radicalization.html

culture crisis politics radicalization alt-right media disinformation

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • radicalization is often built out of very real and understandable dissatisfactions. Moreover, isolation can be a strong contributing factor, as can personal uncertainty and political instability — both of which will be widespread in any society facing a rising death rate, extreme unemployment and extensive governmental failures.
  • it is my fear, as a researcher of far-right and anti-feminist digital spaces, that continuing mass anxiety and material depression will combine with the contemporary digital landscape in an ugly fashion
  • the reality that this post captured is that the internet is a very dark window through which to view the world. Yet more and more people will be doing so for the next few months
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  • It is undeniable that crises like a pandemic demand radical solutions. There is nothing wrong with pointing out the failures in the systems that led to so many dire consequences, or even being angry about them — as many are — and pushing for change
  • the subcultural aspects of the internet — the communities we go to for support, or to talk to people going through similar things, can make us feel less lonely in the short term but often end up entrenching us further into certain fatalistic and misanthropic ways of thinking.
  • the best thing we can probably do at this time is seek to better understand how digital radicalization and the far right works, so that we can be better prepared to counter it.
  • We tend to overestimate our own ability to scan through, comprehend and categorize information we read online. The human brain is remarkable for its ability to adapt to new technologies, but not all of these adaptations are beneficial, either for us as individuals or collectively.
  • As we retreat to online enclaves and obsessively check the news, our vision of reality is bound to become distorted
  • Some psychologists have theorized that when reminded of our own mortality, we retreat to familiar institutions and more vehemently reject what we perceive as different and strange
  • it’s worth noting that secular societies struggle with providing mechanisms to resolve feelings of guilt. The contemporary radical right has been particularly successful in encouraging its followers to redirect any societal guilt they might feel about past historical wrongs or current states of injustice into rage at those groups who would make them feel guilty: women, people of color, Jews.
  • What could happen as a result is our being bombarded with tempting offers to rechannel our guilt into anger at those who were most affected, who serve as a reminder of our relative good luck: undocumented immigrants, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, even the dead.
  • These ideas could even be promoted by those in power, who will no doubt be grateful for the transference of accountability.
  • we can already see these forces mobilizing — see, for instance, arguments on the far right that discussions of Chinese culpability for the virus are being suppressed in the name of “political correctness,”
  • To understand how such a spiral of anger and guilt might work, we desperately need to update our understanding of how internet subcultures function.
  • we often think of radicalization as something the radicalized passively fell into and got swept up in.
  • In fact, the internet — for good and for ill — is a collaborative and imaginative space, rather than somewhere one group of people talks and another listens. We can be both influencer and influenced
  • “audiences often demand ” increasingly radical content from their preferred creators. Then, as far-right content continues to get enormous engagement, we see the numbers, and our understanding of this content as beyond the pale naturally decreases.
  • before we have even made the decision to watch a video or read an article, our perception of it has already been altered almost imperceptibly by the various tiny signals surrounding it. Whatever social media platform you use to engage with the world, your timeline is almost certainly the greatest source of unchecked and frequently subconscious influence.
  • In this age of isolation, we need to be aware of how far-right actors will attempt to exploit this unprecedented situation — and we need to be prepared for the fact that it may very well work.
Javier E

Bill Gates: Here are the innovations we need to reopen the economy - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...vations-we-need-reopen-economy

innovation crisis pandemic

shared by Javier E on 02 May 20 - No Cached
  • Before the United States and other countries can return to business and life as usual, we will need some innovative new tools that help us detect, treat and prevent covid-19.
  • It begins with testing. We can’t defeat an enemy if we don’t know where it is. To reopen the economy, we need to be testing enough people that we can quickly detect emerging hotspots and intervene early.
  • having patients do the swab themselves produces results that are just as accurate. This self-swab approach is faster and safer, since regulators should be able to approve swabbing at home or in other locations rather than having people risk additional contact.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Another diagnostic test under development would work much like an at-home pregnancy test. You would swab your nose, but instead of sending it into a processing center, you’d put it in a liquid and then pour that liquid onto a strip of paper, which would change color if the virus was present. This test may be available in a few months.
  • We need one other advance in testing, but it’s social, not technical: consistent standards about who can get tested. If the country doesn’t test the right people — essential workers, people who are symptomatic and those who have been in contact with someone who tested positive — then we’re wasting a precious resource and potentially missing big reserves of the virus.
  • identifying the antibodies that are most effective against the novel coronavirus, and then manufacturing them in a lab. If this works, it is not yet clear how many doses could be produced; it depends on how much antibody material is needed per dose. In 2021, manufacturers may be able to make as few as 100,000 treatments or many millions.
  • An even better solution would be the broad, voluntary adoption of digital tools. For example, there are apps that will help you remember where you have been
  • treatment options
  • giving the plasma (and the antibodies it contains) to sick people. Several major companies are working together to see whether this succeeds.
  • The second area where we need innovation is contact tracing
  • Unfortunately, based on the evidence I’ve seen, they’ll likely find a good treatment, but not one that virtually guarantees you’ll recover.
  • making a vaccine.
  • The new approach I’m most excited about is known as an RNA vaccine.
  • an RNA vaccine gives your body the genetic code needed to produce viral fragments on its own.
  • n RNA vaccine essentially turns your body into its own vaccine manufacturing unit.
  • World War II was the defining moment of my parents’ generation. Similarly, the coronavirus pandemic — the first in a century — will define this era
  • here is one big difference between a world war and a pandemic: All of humanity can work together to learn about the disease and develop the capacity to fight it. With the right tools in hand, and smart implementation, we will eventually be able to declare an end to this pandemic
Javier E

Why Americans Are Dying from Despair | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ericans-are-dying-from-despair

despair crisis death rate mortality economic inequality income health-care

shared by Javier E on 01 May 20 - No Cached
  • Outside of wars or pandemics, death rates for large populations across the world have been consistently falling for decades
  • Yet working-age white men and women without college degrees were dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease at such rates that, for three consecutive years, life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole had fallen. “The only precedent is a century ago, from 1915 through 1918, during the First World War and the influenza epidemic that followed it,”
  • Between 1999 and 2017, more than six hundred thousand extra deaths—deaths in excess of the demographically predicted number—occurred just among people aged forty-five to fifty-four.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • their explanation begins by dismantling several others.
  • Was the source of the problem America’s all-too-ready supply of prescription opioids?
  • About a million Americans now use heroin daily or near-daily. Many others use illicitly obtained synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
  • As Case and Deaton note, most people who abuse or become addicted to opioids continue to lead functional lives and many eventually escape their dependence
  • The oversupply of opioids did not create the conditions for despair. Instead, it appears, the oversupply fed upon a white working class already adrift.
  • although opioid deaths plateaued, at least temporarily, in 2018, suicides and alcohol-related deaths continue upward.
  • Could deaths of despair be related to the rising incidence of obesity?
  • Case and Deaton report that we’re seeing the same troubling health trends “among the underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese.”
  • Is the problem poverty?
  • Overdose deaths are most common in high-poverty Appalachia and along the low-poverty Eastern Seaboard, in places such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut. Meanwhile, some high-poverty states, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, have been less affected. Black and Hispanic populations are poorer but less affected, too.
  • How about income inequality? Case and Deaton have found that patterns of inequality, like patterns of poverty, simply don’t match the patterns of mortality by race or region.
  • A consistently strong economic correlate, by contrast, is the percentage of a local population that is employed
  • In the late nineteen-sixties, Case and Deaton note, all but five per cent of men of prime working age, from twenty-five to fifty-four, had jobs; by 2010, twenty per cent did not.
  • What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.
  • Conservatives tend to offer cultural explanations
  • People are taking the lazy way out of responsibilities, the argument goes, and so they choose alcohol, drugs, and welfare and disability checks over a commitment to hard work, family, and community. And now they are paying the price for their hedonism and decadence—with addiction, emptiness, and suicide.
  • Yet, if the main problem were that a large group of people were withdrawing from the workforce by choice, wages should have risen in parallel.
  • Case and Deaton argue that the problem arises from the cumulative effect of a long economic stagnation and the way we as a nation have dealt with it
  • For the first few decades after the Second World War, per-capita U.S. economic growth averaged between two and three per cent a year. In the nineties, however, it dipped below two per cent. In the early two-thousands, it was less than one per cent. This past decade, it remained below 1.5 per cent.
  • Different populations have experienced this slowdown very differently
  • Anti-discrimination measures improved earnings and job prospects for black and Hispanic Americans. Though their earnings still lag behind those of the white working class, life for this generation of people of color is better than it was for the last.
  • Not so for whites without a college education. Among the men, median wages have not only flattened; they have declined since 1979. The work that the less educated can find isn’t as stable: hours are more uncertain, and job duration is shorter
  • Among advanced economies, this deterioration in pay and job stability is unique to the United States.
  • In the past four decades, Americans without bachelor’s degrees—the majority of the working-age population—have seen themselves become ever less valued in our economy. Their effort and experience provide smaller rewards than before, and they encounter longer periods between employment.
  • The problem isn’t that people are not the way they used to be. It’s that the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be
  • Today, about seventy-five per cent of college graduates are married by age forty-five, but only sixty per cent of non-college graduates are
  • Nonmarital childbearing has reached forty per cent among less educated white women.
  • Religious institutions previously played a vital role in connecting people to a community. But the number of Americans who attend religious services has declined markedly over the past half century, falling to just one-third of the general population today.
  • Case and Deaton see a picture of steady economic and social breakdown, amid over-all prosperity.
  • climate—the amount of social and economic instability not only in your life but also in your family and community—matters, too. Émile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago that despair and then suicide result when people’s material and social circumstances fall below their expectations.
  • why has the steep rise in deaths of despair been so uniquely American
  • The United States has provided unusually casual access to means of death.
  • The availability of opioids has indeed played a role, and the same goes for firearms
  • The U.S. has also embraced automation and globalization with greater alacrity and fewer restrictions than other countries have. Displaced workers here get relatively little in the way of protection and support.
  • And we’ve enabled capital to take a larger share of the economic gains. “Economists long thought that the ratio of wages to profits was an immutable constant, about two to one,” Case and Deaton point out. But since 1970, they find, it has declined significantly.
  • A more unexpected culprit identified by Case and Deaton is our complicated and costly health-care system.
  • The focus of Case and Deaton’s indictment is on the fact that America’s health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance.
  • As they show, the premiums that employers pay amount to a perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers.
  • According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019 the average family policy cost twenty-one thousand dollars, of which employers typically paid seventy per cent.
  • “For a well-paid employee earning a salary of $150,000, the average family policy adds less than 10 percent to the cost of employing the worker,” Case and Deaton write. “For a low-wage worker on half the median wage, it is 60 percent.”
  • between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to include the cost of their benefits (in particular, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below the median income.
  • this makes American health care itself a prime cause of our rising death rates.
  • we must change the way we pay for health care. Instead of preserving a system that discourages employers from hiring, retaining, and developing workers without bachelor’s degrees, we need to make health-care payments proportional to wages—as with tax-based systems like Medicare.
  • So far, the American approach to the rise in white working-class mortality has been to pour resources into addiction-treatment centers and suicide-prevention programs. Yet the rates of suicide and addiction remain sky-high. It’s as if we’re using pressure dressings on a bullet wound to the chest instead of getting at the source of the bleeding.
  • Case and Deaton want us to recognize that the more widespread response is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. And here culture does play a role.
  • When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you
  • We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest. But that’s exactly the situation, and “Deaths of Despair” shows how the immiseration of the less educated has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, even as the economy has thrived and the stock market has soared.
  • capitalism, having failed America’s less educated workers for decades, must change, as it has in the past. “There have been previous periods when capitalism failed most people, as the Industrial Revolution got under way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and again after the Great Depression,” they write. “But the beast was tamed, not slain.”
  • Today, the battles are over an employer-based system for financing health care, corporate governance that puts shareholders’ interests ahead of workers’, tax plans that benefit capital holders over wage earners.
  • We are better at addressing fast-moving crises than slow-building ones. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, if we simply absorbed current conditions as the new normal.
Javier E

Coronavirus Exposes a G.O.P. Divide: Is the Market Always Supreme? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...blicans-coronavirus-trump.html

market fundamentalism market conservatism GOP debate government intervention

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • Questions over whether the government should play a more active role in protecting Americans from global shocks like the coronavirus pandemic have exposed a widening divide in the Republican Party over whether the small-government, free-market brand of conservatism at the heart of its agenda — and a top priority of its biggest donors — is out of step with the times.
  • In one of the most ambitious proposals from this group of new nationalists who are challenging a generation of Republican orthodoxy, Congress would mandate that certain products deemed essential to the national interest — like medicine, protective equipment including masks, and materials used to build telecommunications infrastructure — are manufactured in the United States.
  • Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marco Rubio of Florida, who argue in essays in a new online journal that the coronavirus has exposed the nation’s need to be more aggressive and innovative with its laws so it can better protect itself from adversarial powers like China.
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  • In reality, Mr. Rubio added, the heavy hand of the government can be helpful in cases like this, where it is clear that the United States has become too reliant on Chinese manufacturing. “If in our public policy we are going to incentivize certain behavior, certain activities, it should be behavior and activities that are good for the country,” he said.
  • this moment of national crisis was “almost kind of tailor-made to bring a lot of these issues to the fore.”
  • Conservatives like Mr. Cass believe that the traditional Republican economic view is not only hamstringing the country’s ability to protect itself, but also hurting the party with the voters whom Mr. Trump brought in — and who are not sharing in the vast wealth gains at the very top of the ladder.
  • Over the past 30 years, the American right has developed a misguided notion about what prosperity really is by having an “obsession with consumption,” Mr. Cass said, adding: “As long as the pie keeps growing, everyone can have pie. And who doesn’t love pie?”
  • “It seemed to me what that missed was that the components of prosperity are a whole lot more complex than consumption,” Mr. Cass said.
  • These kinds of statements are considered an apostasy in certain conservative circles, where the belief that capitalism and the free market will almost always arrive at the best and most efficient outcome is inviolable
  • For years, Republicans have hewed to the idea that businesses generally know what is best for them and the economy, and that the best public policy leaves decisions largely to business owners and the free market. This has guided a generation of policy that favors deregulation and free trade.
  • many Republicans have pushed their party to embrace the more nationalist elements of the president’s economic agenda.
  • American Compass will try to address what some conservatives see as the failure on the part of the right’s biggest think tanks and interest groups to embrace Mr. Trump’s skepticism of unfettered trade, and his willingness to use the power of the government to give American companies a competitive advantage.
  • “I think that a number of people have been trying to make sense of their own worldviews about politics and how that intersects with economic policy after Trump was elected,” he said. “And that is definitely affecting this debate.”
  • the work being done at American Compass, where he is a contributing writer, was ultimately part of the larger debate over what happens to the Republican Party once Mr. Trump is no longer leading it.
  • “Among a type of establishment Republican, there’s definitely been this hope that when Trump goes, all of this stuff will disappear,” Mr. Vance said. “But if the trends in American politics continue, there’s just no way to imagine a Republican Party that doesn’t have a substantially different platform in 20 years.”
Javier E

How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ng-rates-of-infectious-disease

climate change pandemic origins effects change disease

shared by Javier E on 07 May 20 - No Cached
  • The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.
  • Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed.
  • A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • until now, the planet’s natural defense systems were better at fighting them off.
  • Today, climate warming is demolishing those defense systems, driving a catastrophic loss in biodiversity that, when coupled with reckless deforestation and aggressive conversion of wildland for economic development, pushes farms and people closer to the wild and opens the gates for the spread of disease.
  • ignoring how climate and rapid land development were putting disease-carrying animals in a squeeze was akin to playing Russian roulette.
  • the virus is believed to have originated with the horseshoe bat, part of a genus that’s been roaming the forests of the planet for 40 million years and thrives in the remote jungles of south China, even that remains uncertain.
  • China for years and warning that swift climate and environmental change there — in both loss of biodiversity and encroachment by civilization — was going to help new viruses jump to people.
  • . Roughly 60% of new pathogens come from animals — including those pressured by diversity loss — and roughly one-third of those can be directly attributed to changes in human land use, meaning deforestation, the introduction of farming, development or resource extraction in otherwise natural settings
  • Vector-borne diseases — those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people — are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion.
  • Climate is even bringing old viruses back from the dead, thawing zombie contagions like the anthrax released from a frozen reindeer in 2016, which can come down from the arctic and haunt us from the past.
  • It is demonstrating in real time the enormous and undeniable power that nature has over civilization and even over its politics.
  • it also makes clear that climate policy today is indivisible from efforts to prevent new infectious outbreaks, or, as Bernstein put it, the notion that climate and health and environmental policy might not be related is “a ​dangerous delusion.”
  • The warming of the climate is one of the principal drivers of the greatest — and fastest — loss of species diversity in the history of the planet, as shifting climate patterns force species to change habitats, push them into new regions or threaten their food and water supplies
  • What’s known as biodiversity is critical because the natural variety of plants and animals lends each species greater resiliency against threat and together offers a delicately balanced safety net for natural systems
  • As diversity wanes, the balance is upset, and remaining species are both more vulnerable to human influences and, according to a landmark 2010 study in the journal Nature, more likely to pass along powerful pathogens.
  • even incremental and seemingly manageable injuries to local environments — say, the construction of a livestock farm adjacent to stressed natural forest — can add up to outsized consequences.
  • Coronaviruses like COVID-19 aren’t likely to be carried by insects — they don’t leave enough infected virus cells in the blood. But one in five other viruses transmitted from animals to people are vector-borne
  • the number of species on the planet has already dropped by 20% and that more than a million animal and plant species now face extinction.
  • Americans have been experiencing this phenomenon directly in recent years as migratory birds have become less diverse and the threat posed by West Nile encephalitis has spread. It turns out that the birds that host the disease happen to also be the tough ones that prevail amid a thinned population
  • as larger mammals suffer declines at the hands of hunters or loggers or shifting climate patterns, smaller species, including bats, rats and other rodents, are thriving, either because they are more resilient to the degraded environment or they are able to live better among people.
  • It is these small animals, the ones that manage to find food in garbage cans or build nests in the eaves of buildings, that are proving most adaptable to human interference and also happen to spread disease.
  • Warmer temperatures and higher rainfall associated with climate change — coupled with the loss of predators — are bound to make the rodent problem worse, with calamitous implications.
  • As much as weather changes can drive changes in species, so does altering the landscape for new farms and new cities. In fact, researchers attribute a full 30% of emerging contagion to what they call “land use change.”
  • As the global population surges to 10 billion over the next 35 years, and the capacity to farm food is stressed further again by the warming climate, the demand for land will only get more intense.
  • Already, more than one-third of the planet’s land surface, and three-quarters of all of its fresh water, go toward the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock. These are the places where infectious diseases spread most often.
  • The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that fully three-quarters of all new viruses have emerged from animals
  • Almost every major epidemic we know of over the past couple of decades — SARS, COVID-19, Ebola and Nipah virus — jumped to people from wildlife enduring extreme climate and habitat strain, and still, “we’re naive to them,” she said. “That puts us in a dangerous place.”
  • A 2008 study in the journal Nature found nearly one-third of emerging infectious diseases over the past 10 years were vector-borne, and that the jumps matched unusual changes in the climate
  • Ticks and mosquitoes now thrive in places they’d never ventured before. As tropical species move northward, they are bringing dangerous pathogens with them.
  • by 2050, disease-carrying mosquitoes will ultimately reach 500 million more people than they do today, including some 55 million more Americans.
  • In 2013, dengue fever — an affliction affecting nearly 400 million people a year, but normally associated with the poorest regions of Africa — was transmitted locally in New York for the first time.
  • “The long-term risk from dengue may be much higher than COVID,
  • only 15% of the planet’s forests remain intact. The rest have been cut down, degraded or fragmented to the point that they disrupt the natural ecosystems that depend on them.
  • it’s only a matter of time before other exotic animal-driven pathogens are driven from the forests of the global tropics to the United States or Canada or Europe because of the warming climate.
  • it will also shape how easily we get sick. According to a 2013 study in the journal PLOS Currents Influenza, warm winters were predictors of the most severe flu seasons in the following year
  • Even harsh swings from hot to cold, or sudden storms — exactly the kinds of climate-induced patterns we’re already seeing — make people more likely to get sick.
  • The chance of a flu epidemic in America’s most populated cities will increase by as much as 50% this century, and flu-related deaths in Europe could also jump by 50%.
  • Slow action on climate has made dramatic warming and large-scale environmental changes inevitable, he said, “and I think that increases in disease are going to come along with it.”
  • By late 2018, epidemiologists there were bracing for what they call “spillover,” or the failure to keep a virus locally contained as it jumped from the bats and villages of Yunnan into the wider world.
  • In late 2018, the Trump administration, as part of a sweeping effort to bring U.S. programs in China to a halt, abruptly shut down the research — and its efforts to intercept the spread of a new novel coronavirus along with it. “We got a cease and desist,” said Dennis Carroll, who founded the PREDICT program and has been instrumental in global work to address the risks from emerging viruses. By late 2019, USAID had cut the program’s global funding.
  • The loss is immense. The researchers believed they were on the cusp of a breakthrough, racing to sequence the genes of the coronaviruses they’d extracted from the horseshoe bat and to begin work on vaccines.
  • They’d campaigned for years for policymakers to fully consider what they’d learned about how land development and climate changes were driving the spread of disease, and they thought their research could literally provide governments a map to the hot spots most likely to spawn the next pandemic.
  • They also hoped the genetic material they’d collected could lead to a vaccine not just for one lethal variation of COVID, but perhaps — like a missile defense shield for the biosphere — to address a whole family of viruses at once
  • Carroll said knowledge of the virus genomes had the potential “to totally transform how we think about future biomedical interventions before there’s an emergence.
  • PREDICT’s staff and advisers have pushed the U.S. government to consider how welding public health policy with environmental and climate science could help stem the spread of contagions.
  • Since Donald Trump was elected, the group hasn’t been invited back.
  • What Daszak really wants — in addition to restored funding to continue his work — is the public and leaders to understand that it’s human behavior driving the rise in disease, just as it drives the climate crisis
  • “We turn a blind eye to the fact that our behavior is driving this,” he said. “We get cheap goods through Walmart, and then we pay for it forever through the rise in pandemics. It’s upside down.”
lenaurick

Child poverty rate to hit 30% in Britain after Brexit - Mar. 2, 2017 - 0 views

money.cnn.com/...index.html

politics economics economic policy crisis

shared by lenaurick on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The number of children living in poverty in the U.K. will spike to around 30% over the next five years because of government welfare cuts, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
  • because Britain's exit from the European Union is forecast to hurt the economy.
  • IFS consider a couple with one child to be in poverty if they're left with less than £288 ($350) per week after paying for housing.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • There's more bad news: IFS found that growth in average incomes will be close to zero -- once inflation is taken into account -- over the next two years,
  • Britain voted in June to leave the EU, setting off a period of tremendous economic and political uncertainty. While the pound immediately plummeted, the most dire economic scenarios envisioned by analysts prior to the referendum have failed to materialize. But growth over the next five years is expected to be 2.4% lower than it would have been had Britain remained a member of the EU.
  • Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to start formal Brexit negotiations with the EU in the coming weeks. The most likely scenario is that Britain will end up leaving Europe's unified trading market and be forced to negotiate new terms of trade with its biggest partners.
lenaurick

US slams Russian veto of UN resolution on Syria - CNN.com - 0 views

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

syria politics history crisis culture

shared by lenaurick on 03 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The latest attempt to punish Syrian regime leaders failed after the two permanent members voted against a resolution to impose sanctions for Damascus' use of chemical weapons, the first vetoes by Russia and China before US Ambassador Nikki Haley.
  • "Russia and China made an outrageous and indefensible choice today," Haley said, speaking in the Security Council chamber after the vote. "It is a sad day on the Security Council when members start making excuses for other member states killing their own people."
  • The veto was the seventh time Russia has blocked a Security Council resolution aimed at the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the past five years, protecting its Syrian ally from any diplomatic action
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  • He demanded the council act, asking, "Who couldn't condemn today those attacking innocent women and children ... with chemical weapons?"The vote was 9 in favor, 3 against as Bolivia joined Russia and China, and 3 abstentions, from Egypt, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia.
  • The resolution would have condemned the use of chemical weapons in Syria, a violation of international law, and placed UN sanctions on 21 Syrian scientists, military commanders and entities alleged to be involved in their use.
  • It also outlined an embargo on the sale of certain chemical substances as well as materials that could be used to transport the weapons, including helicopters.
  • "It is very difficult to see how the Security Council can ever play our rightful role in setting up mechanisms that will allow accountability in Syria given that Russia now for the seventh time has backed a brutal dictator rather than backing justice and accountability and the Syrian people," Rycroft said.
  • ecfruchtman on 03 Mar 17
     
    The latest attempt to punish Syrian regime leaders failed after the two permanent members voted against a resolution to impose sanctions for Damascus' use of chemical weapons, the first vetoes by Russia and China before US Ambassador Nikki Haley. "Russia and China made an outrageous and indefensible choice today," Haley said, speaking in the Security Council chamber after the vote.
Javier E

The real reason working-class whites continue to support Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ites-continue-to-support-trump

working class white despair trump crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 06 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • “So much of Donald Trump’s politics is symbolic,” Gest explained. “They’re symbolic in the sense that this is what people want to hear and if it doesn’t get done, it’s almost beside the point because he’s elevating the prerogatives of his constituents to the national stage after having been relegated to the fringes of American politics for decades.”
  • “The sense of having a voice suddenly, after feeling voiceless for so long is powerful. It’s not in their cultural interests to vote against him, no matter how little he has delivered to actually help them in any kind of material way.”
  • Working-class whites feel not only voiceless, but also silenced, especially in matters involving race. “The way they understood racism is different from the way we understand racism,” said Gest. “For them, racism has become an instrument of silence. It is a way of invalidating people. By saying someone is a racist, it means they cease to matter.
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  • “So, when people said to me, ‘Now, I’m not a racist but …,’ what they were actually saying to me was, ‘Listen to what I’m about to tell you, and don’t dismiss me.’ ”
  • That doesn’t mean race doesn’t play a major role for the white working class. “Much of white working-class politics has been to create distinction with a group that they thought they were above,” Gest told me. “So much of American history has been white voters seeking to reinstate ways to subordinate people of ethno-religious and ethno-racial difference.”
  • While Gest says that both Republicans and Democrats have exploited these voters, he sees a way forward. “The only way of addressing their plight is a form of political hospice care,” he said. “These are communities that are on the paths to death. And the question is: How can we make that as comfortable as possible?”
Javier E

Green Beer and Rank Hypocrisy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-beer-and-rank-hypocrisy.html

ireland immigration history

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • this year’s St. Patrick’s Day jamboree at the White House will be a breathtaking celebration of double standards and the willful forgetting of America’s recent past.
  • The president will salute the legacy of one wave of immigrants even as he deploys against other immigrants the same calumnies once heaped upon the Irish.
  • The Irish Catholic immigrants who washed up in the United States after the potato famine of the 1840s were, on the whole, the most destitute national group ever to arrive on American shores.
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  • The typical Irish Catholic arrival in New York or Boston was a peasant with little formal education and few material resources.
  • In the Trump era, there are only two ways to toast the achievements of the Irish in America. One of them is tacitly racist. It relies on a silent distinction, an assumption that the Irish are somehow different from, say, today’s migrants from Latin America. But what is that distinction? It is not that the Irish were wealthier or better educated by contemporary standards, or more highly skilled or harder working. It is simply that they were white and their whiteness gave them a right to be in the United States.
  • people of Irish descent must celebrate their heritage in a radically different way: as the ultimate rebuke to a paranoid frenzy about immigration. We Irish are not Know Nothings. We know something important: what it’s like to be feared, to be discriminated against, to be stereotyped. We know from our own family histories that anti-immigrant hysteria is founded on lies. And we know that, over time, those lies are exposed. Yesterday’s alien is today’s workmate; yesterday’s pariah is today’s patriot.
  • The Irish belong, not because they are better or worse than any other group of migrants, now or in the past. They belong because they are exactly the same: hopeful people doing their best to build dignified lives.
Javier E

Our dangerous, idiotic national conversation - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html

free speech social media cheap speech conversation culture media politics

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Technologies that radically reduce intermediaries and other barriers to entry into society’s conversation mean that ignorance, incompetence and intellectual sociopathy are no longer obstacles.
  • One result is a miasma of distrust of all public speech.
  • He warned about what has come about: odious groups cheaply disseminating their views to thousands of the like-minded. Nevertheless, he stressed the danger of letting “government intervene when it thinks it has found ‘market failure.’ ”
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  • cheap speech is reducing the relevance of political parties and newspapers as intermediaries between candidates and voters, which empowers demagogues.
  • Voters are directly delivered falsehoods such as the 2016 story of Pope Francis’s endorsement of Donald Trump, which Hasen says “had 960,000 Facebook engagements.” He cites a study reporting approximately three times more pro-Trump than pro-Hillary Clinton fake news stories, with the former having four times more Facebook shares than the latter.
  • because “counterspeech” might be insufficient “to deal with the flood of bot-driven fake news,” Hasen thinks courts should not construe the First Amendment as prohibiting laws requiring “social media and search companies such as Facebook and Google to provide certain information to let consumers judge the veracity of posted materials.”
  • Hasen errs. Such laws, written by incumbent legislators, inevitably will be infected with partisanship. Also, his progressive faith in the fiction of disinterested government causes him to propose “government subsidizing investigative journalism” — putting investigators of government on its payroll.
g-dragon

How Did North Korea's Weapons Tech Get So Good So Fast? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...538959

north korea weapons missils nuclear

shared by g-dragon on 10 Sep 17 - No Cached
    • g-dragon
      g-dragon on 10 Sep 17
       
      ~ North Korea has made rapid progress over the year considering their state of sanctions and being a closed off country. ~ Their progress is not the best, but it is good in terms of their condition ~ North Korea is becoming more independant, relying less on the black market and being able to produce their own materials domestically
  • So far in 2017, the North has carried out a dozen successful missile tests, and is well on its way to surpassing last year’s 14 successful launches
  • Two of this year’s tests were of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that are capable of reaching the United States
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  • North Korea has also been assessed as possessing a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can be fitted onto an ICBM
  • it stunned the world by testing what it called a hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than anything the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki
  • It used to be that they emphasized the importance of the military in their politics. Now they’ve begun de-emphasizing that and they’ve begun to emphasize the role of scientists in society both for advancing their economy and, even more than that, for advancing their nuclear weapons and missile technology
  • Kim, like his father Kim Jong Il, “threatened these scientists with their lives if they don’t make progress. That can be a very powerful motivator
  • The fact that they are willing to test missiles so frequently suggests they are not really worried about suppl
  • There’s evidence to suggest that North Korea is, in fact, accelerating its push toward the domestic manufacturing of parts needed for its missile and nuclear programs, turning slowly away from the international black market on which it had traditionally relied
  • That’s not to say that North Korea’s missile and nuclear technology is state-of-the-art. Many of the designs date back to the Cold War, when the North received nuclear technology from the Soviet Union. Over the years, it acquired weapons technology from China, Iran, Pakistan, and others, and through what can only be described as perseverance cobbled together successful programs
  • they are willing to have higher tolerances for failure and for less reliability.” That, ultimately, might be North Korea’s biggest advantage in the current standoff with the U.S. and its allies
  • Narang pointed out that the probability that North Korea is able to deliver a nuclear warhead over San Francisco, or Chicago, or a city on the U.S. East Coast, is not 100 percent—because its technology is not yet that accurate. “But to deter the United States or really induce risk, what percentage is necessary before you cause Washington to have some pause: Is 5 percent acceptable? Are you willing to lose 5,000 to 50,000 Americans, on average? Probably not, right?
  • The larger the warhead, the less accurate it needs to be
Javier E

This American Land - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...this-american-land.html

culture American idea nature ideal

shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • The biggest thing nature did was offer ideals. Different Americans came up with different character types for how to engage with nature. Each type offered a model for how to live an admirable life.
  • According to one type, character was forged by tilling the land; according to another it was forged by being tested by the land; and in another it was formed by being cleansed by the land. These types wove together to form the American mythos.
  • The first ideal was the Steward. This is the small yeoman farmer and craftsman who lives close to the soil — self-reliant, upright, humble before creation and bonded to his local community.
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  • The second ideal was the Pioneer. This is the person who pushes against the wilderness and develops skill, courage and virility
  • The third ideal was the Elevated Spirit. This is the person who slips off the conformist materialism of commercial society and is both purified and enlarged by nature’s grandeur
Javier E

Jeremy Corbyn and the bourgeois dream - 0 views

www.economist.com/...emy-corbyn-and-bourgeois-dream

UK politics crisis young demographics leftist populism

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • John Gray in the New Statesman. Mr Gray argues that Corbynism is “populism for the middle classes, serving the material and psychological needs of the relatively affluent and the well-heeled”. Far from being a repudiation of Tony Blair’s policies, Corbynism represents the completion of the takeover of Labour by middle-class people who put their own interests (such as free university education) above those of the working class.
  • most young Corbynistas are not so much settled members of the middle class as frustrated would-be members. Ben Judah, a millennial-generation journalist and author of “This is London”, points out that members of his generation are angry that they have done everything they were told, from studying hard at school to going to university to trying to get a respectable job, but are still holding on by their fingertips.
  • They are magnified by the London effect. Young people flock to the capital, where the best professional jobs are concentrated, but exorbitant property prices force them to migrate to the farthest corners of the city or to share with strangers.
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  • The young have been on the sharp end of two economic shocks: the 2008 crisis, which squeezed living standards, and a technological revolution, which is doing for middle-class jobs what mechanisation did for working-class ones. Automation is hollowing out entry-level positions
  • It is getting ever harder for young people to get a foot on the property ladder or find somewhere decent to rent.
  • Browse the Facebook pages where young Corbynistas hang out and you do not find hymns of praise to the workers’ control of the means of production, but laments for the indignities of modern metropolitan life and jeremiads against baby boomers who grabbed all the cheap houses and got free university education into the bargain.
  • Far from democratising the bourgeois dream, Mr Corbyn’s policies would quickly kill it. Empowering trade unions would produce disruption, particularly of public services. Abolishing university fees would make it harder for Britain to compete as a knowledge economy. And drastically increasing public spending would damage international confidence and risk capital flight.
  • the political class as a whole ignores the deeper causes of Britain’s stagnation, from stalled productivity to a failure to produce high-growth companies. The most likely outcome is that Britain will add an experiment with hardcore socialism to its experiment with Brexit. Then, the relative deprivation suffered by Mr Corbyn’s middle-class fans will be the least of the country’s problems.
Javier E

Centuries of trial and error | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21528581

economist economics theory history

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • The author demonstrates that there is far more to economics than Thomas Carlyle's “dismal science”. And she does so with all the style and panache that you would expect from the author of the 1998 bestseller, “A Beautiful Mind”
  • In lesser hands Ms Nasar's story might have degenerated into a series of pen portraits: tittle-tattle for the middlebrow. But she unifies her account with a series of big questions. How, for example, did humanity escape from the grinding poverty that has been its lot through most of human history? Why was a static society replaced by a dynamic one? And how best to cope with the booms and busts that have been capitalism's peculiar contribution to human life?
  • In Marx's view the capitalist system, for all its ability to unleash productive power, was haunted by a contradiction: the drive to increase profits would immiserate the poor and lead to crises of overproduction
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  • But Marshall demonstrated that capitalism advances not by immiserating the poor, but by boosting productivity. Factory owners make relentless small improvements that allow them to produce both higher wages and lower prices, thereby spreading the gains of material progress throughout society.
  • Schumpeter further expanded the idea of productivity increases. The economy doesn't simply get bigger and bigger. It goes through a constant process of discombobulation as entrepreneurs invent new products and processes.
  • Marx got it upside down: capitalism's recurrent crises actually make it stronger.
Javier E

How to Prepare for an Automated Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-for-an-automated-future.html

automation job economic culture education technology

shared by Javier E on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s jobs, or how many they’ll take, but we know it’s happening — not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers.
  • The logical response seems to be to educate people differently, so they’re prepared to work alongside the robots or do the jobs that machines can’t. But how to do that, and whether training can outpace automation, are open questions.
  • Pew Research Center and Elon University surveyed 1,408 people who work in technology and education to find out if they think new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for the future. Two-thirds said yes; the rest said n
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • People still need to learn skills, the respondents said, but they will do that continuously over their careers. In school, the most important thing they can learn is how to learn.
  • At universities, “people learn how to approach new things, ask questions and find answers, deal with new situations,”
  • Schools will also need to teach traits that machines can’t yet easily replicate, like creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and collaboration.
  • these are not necessarily easy to teach.
  • “Many of the ‘skills’ that will be needed are more like personality characteristics, like curiosity, or social skills that require enculturation to take hold,
  • “I have complete faith in the ability to identify job gaps and develop educational tools to address those gaps,” wrote Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data and Society, a research institute. “I have zero confidence in us having the political will to address the socioeconomic factors that are underpinning skill training.”
  • Andrew Walls, managing vice president at Gartner, wrote, “Barring a neuroscience advance that enables us to embed knowledge and skills directly into brain tissue and muscle formation, there will be no quantum leap in our ability to ‘up-skill’ people.
  • many survey respondents said a degree was not enough — or not always the best choice, especially given its price tag.
  • Many of them expect more emphasis on certificates or badges, earned from online courses or workshops, even for college graduates.
  • One potential future, said David Karger, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., would be for faculty at top universities to teach online and for mid-tier universities to “consist entirely of a cadre of teaching assistants who provide support for the students.”
  • Portfolios of work are becoming more important than résumés.
  • “Three-dimensional materials — in essence, job reels that demonstrate expertise — will be the ultimate demonstration of an individual worker’s skills.”
  • Consider it part of your job description to keep learning, many respondents said — learn new skills on the job, take classes, teach yourself new things.
  • Focus on learning how to do tasks that still need humans, said Judith Donath of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: teaching and caregiving; building and repairing; and researching and evaluating
  • The problem is that not everyone is cut out for independent learning, which takes a lot of drive and discipline.
  • People who are suited for it tend to come from privileged backgrounds, with a good education and supportive parents,
  • “The fact that a high degree of self-direction may be required in the new work force means that existing structures of inequality will be replicated in the future,”
  • “The ‘jobs of the future’ are likely to be performed by robots,” said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, an email company. “The question isn’t how to train people for nonexistent jobs. It’s how to share the wealth in a world where we don’t need most people to work.”
Javier E

House Republicans Go Off the Cliff - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ublicans-go-off-the-cliff.html

GOP trump policy health-care politics crisis rich plutocracy

shared by Javier E on 07 May 17 - No Cached
  • The Republicans were given a gift by Trump’s campaign, a grace they did not merit: the gift of freedom from the trap of dogma, from the pre-existing condition of zombie Reaganism, from an agenda out of touch with the concerns of their actual constituents. Nominating Trump wasn’t as suicidal as it seemed only because he had the political cunning to run against the party’s ideological enforcers, while promising working-class voters not just cultural acknowledgment but material support.
  • As written, the A.H.C.A. basically takes Trump’s gift to the party and hurls it off the highest possible cliff. It is not just the scale of the likely insurance losses, or how much the rich benefit from repeal relative to everybody else. It’s also the gulf between that reality and what Trump and various Republican leaders explicitly promised — insisting that their plan would deliver better coverage, lower premiums, and a lot of other things that have since taken a back seat to making room in the budget for more tax cuts.
  • the A.H.C.A. should make the Democrats’ various internal dilemmas easier to resolve. Were Trump actually governing along the populist lines he promised, the intra-Democratic debate over “identity politics versus class politics versus making it all about Trump (and Russia?)” would be fraught and complicated, the best course of action murky.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • if the A.H.C.A. stands as the chief policy distillation of Trumpism, then the central Democratic argument in 2018 and 2020 should be entirely clear: Trump is not a populist but just another pro-plutocracy Republican, and everything his party promised you on health care was a sham.
krystalxu

Explicit Barton image raises possibility of 'revenge porn' - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

revenge barton US politics

shared by krystalxu on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Dodd told CNN that Barton did not release the image himself and does not know who did.
  • The woman told the Post she took that phone call as a threat, and she never had any intention to use the materials to retaliate against Barton.
  • sexually explicit images are posted online without consent -- was outlawed in Texas in 2015.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the Capitol Police reached out to me and offered to launch an investigation and I have accepted. Because of the pending investigation, we will have no further comment."
  • Dodd said that Barton is using her firm to handle this matter rather than his congressional office because "it's the holiday weekend" and there have been "a lot of calls" about the image and he needed the "extra help."
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