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Javier E

Opinion | The Green Transition Is Happening Fast. The Climate Bill Will Only Speed It Up. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uction-act-climate-change.html

bill law 2022 IRA climate change response energy politics policy economics

shared by Javier E on 18 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Among the first things you likely heard about the Inflation Reduction Act was its size.The bill, signed into law by President Biden on Tuesday, makes $369 billion in climate and energy investments — by far the largest such investment in American history.
  • But there are several ways to measure the size of a bill, and given how high the country’s emissions targets are, even many of the I.R.A.’s supporters will openly concede that it is, on its own, inadequate
  • it is ultimately how much carbon we put into the atmosphere and not how much solar power we produce that determines the future of warming. But the power of carrots also just reflects some new realities: To simplify radically, a 90 percent reduction in the cost of solar power over the last decade means that the same amount of money now goes ten times as far.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • the broader economic and cultural landscape is so different now than it was just a few years ago that public investments of even this somewhat smaller scale appear poised to make an enormous difference.
  • That’s because those public investments are being made not against dirty-energy headwinds but with the support of much broader tailwinds
  • Thanks to technological change and the plunging cost of renewables, a growing political and cultural focus on decarbonization and increasing awareness of the public health costs of pollution and market trends for things like electric vehicles and heat pumps, it’s genuinely a whole new world out there. Not that long ago, the upfront cost of a green transition looked almost incalculably large. Today it seems plausible that quite dramatic emissions gains can be achieved for just, say, $369 billion
  • For 90 percent of the world, clean energy is now cheaper than dirty alternatives, and while countries like Spain are boasting about more than tripling solar power capacity by 2030, in Texas, solar output has grown 39-fold in just six years. Globally, renewable output has grown fourfold in the past decade
  • Ten years ago, when the United States endeavored to tackle the problem of climate change, it tried to do so largely by punishing the cost of dirty energy with a cap-and-trade system. This time, it’s giving a kick-start, or a boost of momentum, to an already ongoing green transition.
  • this strategic choice of carrots rather than sticks has received some deserved praise: It’s better and more popular to subsidize cheap, clean energy than it is to make the bad stuff more expensive
  • A “fair share” analysis suggests the United States — today the world’s second largest emitter, and historically the largest by far — should be moving faster than any nation in the world.
  • The models may ultimately prove optimistic, given the complications of infrastructure build-out
  • it is fair to wonder about the uncertain economics of some of the bill’s technological bets, like carbon capture and storage, which could allow emissions from industry and power generation to be trapped and sequestered, and which some climate activists and environmental justice advocates distrust
  • Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project, says he believes that the tech problems of C.C.S. have been solved and that, with tax credits, the bill will address its cost problem, leading to a dramatic scale-up in use. Julio Friedmann, a former Obama-era Energy Department official turned carbon removal advocate, says that a rapid scale-up of C.C.S. would be, while miraculous, also plausible.
  • the fact that this much climate progress appears even remotely possible for less than the annualized budget of the State Department, as Ben Dreyfuss recently put it, is a remarkable reflection of the state of green energy today, even without the new law. When it comes to emissions, we are no longer fighting an uphill battle, at least in the United States and many other countries like it. We are deciding how quickly to race downhill.
  • at the risk of playing Pollyanna, I think it is also possible to see the size of the bill — its relative smallness — as at least a mark of good news
  • The headline projection of the I.R.A. impact appears, if inadequate by the standards of the Paris agreement, nevertheless impressive: a 40 percent reduction in just eight years
  • already today the United States has reduced emissions 20 percent from 2005 levels, and was projected to reduce them further even without the benefit of the I.R.A. As recently as a few weeks ago, before the bill was revived, it might have felt like the United States was permanently stalled on climate action, but in fact the country was already moving to decarbonize, if not fast enough.
  • peed really matters; as the writer and activist Bill McKibben put it, when it comes to warming, “winning slowly is the same as losing.” Simply moving in the right direction isn’t enough, and too much time has been squandered — within the United States and globally — to avoid what was once described as a catastrophic climate future.
  • If the United States achieves that 40 percent reduction, that’s still well short of the country’s target of a 50-52 percent reduction by 2030. The gap may seem relatively small, but it represents more than half a billion tons of carbon each year. That’s a lot.
  • the I.R.A. is a compromise, obviously and outwardly, tying new leases for wind power development to new ones for oil and gas, only moderately reducing the country’s demand for oil and gas over the next decade and investing less in environmental justice measures than Biden himself promised not too long ago
  • But its basic bet — that many of these markets and technologies are close enough to tipping points that relatively small public support can get them racing toward inevitability — also means the ultimate impacts could be larger and far-reaching.
  • The effects on prices and markets could make state and local action cheaper and easier, and even federal regulation more palatable
  • the bill includes some unheralded provisions to help retire coal power more quickly, as Keane Bhatt, the policy director for the Progressive Caucus, has pointed out, as well as an under-discussed “stick” in the form of a fee for methane
  • The impact of its “green bank” and Energy Department loans could be quite large — some estimates have suggested they could run into the hundreds of billions, and the $27 billion handed to the Green Bank could catalyze ten times as much private capital
  • because much of the I.R.A.’s top-line “investment” comes in the form of tax credits, its outlays — and impacts — could ultimately grow substantially if certain sectors (wind, solar and C.C.S., for instance) really do take off.
  • This might not ultimately be just a $369 billion package, in other words, but something quite a bit bigger. Enough to get us to 50 percent by 2030? “I think we have a pretty good chance,” Jenkins says.
  • it is striking that, given where we were not that long ago, such a proposition seems credible at all. Here’s hoping.
  • The provisions tying future auctions for wind power to leases for oil and gas development have been called “poison pills,” because they appear to lock in future emissions. But the ultimate impact is likely to be quite small. (Energy Innovation estimates at most 50 million tons of additional annual carbon emissions, compared with a billion in reductions from other measures in the bill.)
Javier E

An Unholy Alliance Between Ye, Musk, and Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671816

social media musk trump oligarchs ego grievance conflict free speech tech

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Musk, Trump, and Ye are after something different: They are all obsessed with setting the rules of public spaces.
  • An understandable consensus began to form on the political left that large social networks, but especially Facebook, helped Trump rise to power. The reasons were multifaceted: algorithms that gave a natural advantage to the most shameless users, helpful marketing tools that the campaign made good use of, a confusing tangle of foreign interference (the efficacy of which has always been tough to suss out), and a basic attentional architecture that helps polarize and pit Americans against one another (no foreign help required).
  • The misinformation industrial complex—a loosely knit network of researchers, academics, journalists, and even government entities—coalesced around this moment. Different phases of the backlash homed in on bots, content moderation, and, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy
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  • the broad theme was clear: Social-media platforms are the main communication tools of the 21st century, and they matter.
  • With Trump at the center, the techlash morphed into a culture war with a clear partisan split. One could frame the position from the left as: We do not want these platforms to give a natural advantage to the most shameless and awful people who stoke resentment and fear to gain power
  • On the right, it might sound more like: We must preserve the power of the platforms to let outsiders have a natural advantage (by stoking fear and resentment to gain power).
  • They embrace a shallow posture of free-speech maximalism—the very kind that some social-media-platform founders first espoused, before watching their sites become overrun with harassment, spam, and other hateful garbage that drives away both users and advertisers
  • Crucially, both camps resent the power of the technology platforms and believe the companies have a negative influence on our discourse and politics by either censoring too much or not doing enough to protect users and our political discourse.
  • one outcome of the techlash has been an incredibly facile public understanding of content moderation and a whole lot of culture warring.
  • Musk and Ye aren’t so much buying into the right’s overly simplistic Big Tech culture war as they are hijacking it for their own purposes; Trump, meanwhile, is mostly just mad
  • Each one casts himself as an antidote to a heavy-handed, censorious social-media apparatus that is either captured by progressive ideology or merely pressured into submission by it. But none of them has any understanding of thorny First Amendment or content-moderation issues.
  • the political world realized that platforms and content-recommendation engines decide which cultural objects get amplified. The left found this troubling, whereas the right found it to be an exciting prospect and something to leverage, exploit, and manipulate via the courts
  • for those who can hit the mark without getting banned, social media is a force multiplier for cultural and political relevance and a way around gatekeeping media.
  • Musk, Ye, and Trump rely on their ability to pick up their phones, go direct, and say whatever they wan
  • the moment they butt up against rules or consequences, they begin to howl about persecution and unfair treatment. The idea of being treated similarly to the rest of a platform’s user base
  • is so galling to these men that they declare the entire system to be broken.
  • they also demonstrate how being the Main Character of popular and political culture can totally warp perspective. They’re so blinded by their own outlying experiences across social media that, in most cases, they hardly know what it is they’re buying
  • These are projects motivated entirely by grievance and conflict. And so they are destined to amplify grievance and conflict
Javier E

Housing markets face a brutal squeeze | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-markets-face-a-brutal-squeeze

housing markets effects market

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • interest-rate rises have now returned mortgage rates to levels not seen for decades. A year ago the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in America was below 3%. Today it is only a little shy of 7%
  • Three factors will determine where the pain is most acute, and thus where these consequences are most likely. The first is recent price growth. Housing markets where prices have surged since the pandemic are especially vulnerable to cooling demand
  • Borrowing levels are the second factor. The higher household debt is as a share of income, the more vulnerable owners are to higher mortgage payments and defaults.
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  • The third factor is the speed with which higher interest rates pass through to homeowners. The biggest risk is to borrowers on floating-rate mortgages
  • not all fixed-term loans are alike. In America the bulk of them are fixed for two or three decades. In other countries, even fixed-rate borrowers will face soaring mortgage costs soon enough
  • all the ingredients for a deep housing slump are in place. This time, though, it is likely to be led not by America, but by Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Norway
  • First-time buyers and recent borrowers are especially vulnerable. Many stretched their finances to buy a home, leaving less spare cash to cover a jump in mortgage costs
  • First-time buyers have also had less time to accumulate equity. Oxford Economics estimates that a 15% drop in house prices in America over a year would cancel out two-thirds of the housing equity they have accumulated since the start of the pandemic
  • the housing squeeze will have profound consequences. “The housing cycle IS the business cycle”, wrote Edward Leamer of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a paper published in 2007
  • The link between the two cycles arises because housing confers “wealth effects” on owner occupiers. When house prices rise, people feel good about their financial situation, so borrow and spend more.
  • It noted that housing slowdowns had preceded eight of the past ten recessions in America
  • 2019 research by the Bank of England found that a 10% increase in house prices raises consumption by 0.35–0.5%
  • Another important channel between the housing market and the rest of the economy is investment. Capital spending associated with housing, especially house building, can be extremely volatile—and is often the difference between a growing or shrinking economy.
  • Some people see an upside to a housing crash. They hope lower prices will allow young folk to buy their first houses. These hopes are almost certain to be dashed. In housing corrections, and sometimes for years after, home ownership rates tend to fall, rather than rise
  • Economic conditions that cause house prices to fall simultaneously imperil the chances of would-be homeowners. Unemployment rises and wages decline. If interest rates jump, people are able to borrow less and mortgage lenders tend to become more skittish about lending
  • The biggest effect of a housing downturn may be in politics
  • In countries where home ownership is seen as a rite of passage, lower prices without any increase in affordability will rub salt in already sore wounds. “Falling to what? Falling to absurdly grotesque prices instead of just unthinkable?”
  • For years more established homeowners took comfort in the thought that, even if real-wage growth was terrible, at least the price of their house was rising. Those days are over. Even baby-boomers, the great winners from a decade of price growth, now face the prospect of living off a smaller nest-egg in retirement, as downsizing becomes less lucrative
  • All this means rising interest rates will have unpredictable political repurcussions, as people who once benefited from the status quo discover what it feels like to lose out.
  • Do not be surprised, then, if policymakers launch enormous rescue operations
Javier E

Will Elon Musk-owned Twitter end up as a "deal from hell"? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ter-end-up-as-a-deal-from-hell

musk deal twitter economist

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • mergers and acquisitions that end happily do so for a variety of reasons. It’s the unhappy ones that are alike. This is particularly true of m&a deals done at the top of the business cycle, when hubris runs amok, lofty valuations make acquirers sloppy with their money and the most radical ideas are made to sound plausible. In this category sits Elon Musk’s shotgun wedding to Twitter
  • Mr Musk’s latest attempt to justify it is to describe it as a step towards a Chinese-style “everything app”. It is just as likely to go down in history as a top-of-the-market “deal from hell”.
  • the stock phrases that sum up such debacles—wrong target, wrong time, wrong price tag—already seem applicable to his pursuit of Twitter, and may explain why he has spent so long trying to wriggle out of the deal
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  • the first hints of hell come from hubris. The self-styled “Technoking” has every reason for self-belief. Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker. SpaceX is literally rocket science in action. Yet for executives like him it’s a fine line from that to overconfidence. Sony’s Morita Akio crossed it. So did AOL’s Steve Case and RBS’s Fred Goodwin
  • The corollary of hubris is sloppy financing, another attribute of top-of-the-market megaflops. This is particularly true at the tail end of bull markets
  • as with many M&A deals, deteriorating markets can turn a flawed acquisition into a disaster. That possibility must haunt Mr Musk. The digital-advertising market on which Twitter depends has crumbled. Tesla’s own shares, the source of most of his wealth, have lost a third of their value since he made the bid (don’t cry for him, he is still worth $220bn). The deal financing includes $13bn of high-risk debt and spreads on this kind of instrument have soared
  • the repercussions are likely to be troubling. Either banks are stuck with hard-to-sell debt and suffer hefty losses or, in the unlikely event that they abandon the deal, a superhero of 21st-century capitalism faces a $44bn day of reckoning
  • Finally there is strategy. In Mr Bruner’s analysis, the worst M&A deals are done when the target is in an industry far beyond the acquirer’s “domain knowledge”. That is surely true of Mr Musk and Twitter
  • it also has a hellish side. It could pit the world’s most powerful businessman against tech regulators. It could stir up trouble geopolitically (imagine a reinstated Donald Trump weighing in, as Mr Musk has done, on Russia and Ukraine). And it could enrage China, thwarting Tesla’s prospects there. Another deal for the history books, no doubt
Javier E

The Liz Truss Travesty Becomes Britain's Humiliation - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671738

uk decline poverty institutions humiliation pm crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain—a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers
  • Over the past three weeks, the U.K. has been gripped by a crisis of crushing stupidity, one that has gone beyond all the turmoil of Brexit, Boris, even the great bank bailouts of 2007, and touched that most precious of things: core national credibility.
  • Never before has Britain found itself in such a humiliatingly risible position. It is the stuff of nightmares: the national equivalent of getting caught short onstage in front of your entire school because you chose not to go to the bathroom when you had the chance.
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  • What’s happening now is entirely new: the very real prospect that the markets will force a change of prime minister before an election. They have already forced a change in policy.
  • Those considering this drastic course are doing so, in large part, to restore calm and confidence to the markets, not simply to voters. This has not happened before and would surely act like a knife to the body politic, leaving a permanent scar on the country’s reputation.
  • We are now almost 15 years past the seismic financial crisis of 2008 and on to our fifth prime minister. Britain was once a rich country, seemingly well governed with institutions that sat like sedimentary rock on its surface, solid and everlasting. Today it is very obviously not a rich country or well governed, but a poor country, badly governed, with weak institutions. In trying to reverse this reality, Truss has made it visible for all to see.
Javier E

Opinion | Reflections on Stephen L. Carter's 1991 Book, 'Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ive-action-stephen-carter.html

affirmative action racism essentialism preference race reflections

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.”
  • “I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”
  • The fact that Thomas was very likely nominated because he was Black and because he opposed affirmative action posed a conundrum for many supporters of racial preferences. Was being Black enough? Or did you have to be “the right kind” of Black person? It’s a question Carter openly wrestles with in his book.
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  • A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.
  • The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face
  • The demise of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”
  • Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.
  • What immediately struck me on rereading it was how prescient Carter was about these debates 32 years ago. What role affirmative action should take was playing out then in ways that continue to reverberate.
  • But the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.
  • An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”
  • Carter took issue with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race consciousness would be central to overcoming racism
  • , it’s hard to imagine Carter welcoming the current vogue for white allyship, with its reductive assumption that all Black people have the same interests and values
  • He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”
  • Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”
  • In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.”
  • However well intentioned you may be, when you reduce people to their race-based identity rather than view them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you risk making sweeping assumptions about who they are. This used to be called stereotyping or racism.
  • he rejected all efforts to label him, insisting that intellectuals should be “politically unpredictable.
  • “Critics who attempt to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the Black right wing will be making a mistake. He is not a conservative, neo- or otherwise. He is an honest Black scholar — the product of the pre-politically correct era — who abhors the stifling of debate by either wing or by people of any hue.”
  • This strikes me as the greatest difference between reading the book today and reading it as an undergrad at a liberal Ivy League college: the attitude toward debating controversial views. “Reflections” offers a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas, something academia, media and the arts still prized in 1991.
  • Today, a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away
Javier E

Lina Khan Fires a Crooked CEO - BIG by Matt Stoller - 0 views

www.thebignewsletter.com/...lina-khan-fires-a-crooked-ceo

antitrust monopoly merger economics

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • More than any other possible penalty, the prospect for CEOs that they could lose their job is going to change corporate behavior.
  • again, you may not have heard of Illumina and this board room drama. But I guarantee you that every CEO thinking of taking a risky gamble on an acquisition has. So going forward, when an investment banker pitches a CEO on a potential merger, that executive may no longer see the point. After all, as Upton Sinclar once noted, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Javier E

Timothy Keller: Becoming Stewards of Hope-Part 1 - outreachmagazine.com - 0 views

outreachmagazine.com/...g-stewards-of-hope-part-1.html

hope christianity peace liberal conservative god anxiety

shared by Javier E on 19 May 23 - No Cached
  • Imagine if you were middle-aged in 1948. You’d have lived through a worldwide influenza pandemic, two world wars and an economic depression all within the space of about 40 years. Life seemed fragile. It felt like anything could happen. Nothing seemed secure.
  • I was born two years after Auden’s Pulitzer, in 1950. The feeling was that even if there were, say, an economic downturn, things would be better afterward than they had been before. We just assumed that our lives and society were going to get better and better. There was a long period in the second half of the 20th century, in which the anxiety that had defined the first half went away. For a couple generations we lived largely free of insecurity about the world in which we lived.
  • Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, observes that empirically we are living healthier and longer lives. Nevertheless, people feel more culturally and emotionally dislocated than ever. Younger generations are experiencing far more depression and anxiety than those that came before them. We can feel the cultural anxiety today. There’s a real pessimism about the future that I’ve not seen in my lifetime. We find ourselves in a new age of anxiety.
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  • That was a very new idea, this idea of progress. It is not the way most people in history have understood their times. Most ancient peoples either saw history as cyclical or as declining from a past golden age. Nobody thought that humanity’s best years were ahead. Nisbet said that this idea came originally out of Christianity, but then during the Enlightenment it had been secularized.
  • Instead of seeking to ground that optimism in the fact that God has the future in his hands, we collectively said, “No, we’ve got the future in our hands.” That particular story about the human race, which is a modern and Western story, started to lose altitude in the first part of the 20th century. Although there was a small uptick, it went on life support as decades passed. I would say it’s really dying now.
  • Mark Lilla has written a couple of interesting books, one on the conservative mind and one on the liberal mind
  • conservatives have a nostalgia for the past. They feel like things are getting worse. Liberals and progressives have the opposite perspective. They see the past as being horrible. They think our hope is in the future. Even Lilla, who is not a believer, noted that Christianity had a different story than either. He observed that Saint Augustine’s book The City of God rejected both conservative and liberal perspectives.
  • Augustine believed that “the city of man” is bad and “the city of God” is good, and that eventually the city of God is going to supplant the city of man. He said you cannot identify any particular political order or any particular city of man with the city of God, and that our true hope lies in the new heavens and earth of the future. That gets rid of the conservative idea that that everything in the past was better and there is no hope. However, it also gets rid of the liberal idea that if we all just pull ourselves together we can bring about the city of God on earth. It gives us a chastened hope for the future rather than a utopian one.
  • Christian distinctives push against culture. But then we go into the culture with our hope. We simply try to be Christians in the culture, living with integrity and compassion
  • The gospel creates virtues in Christians. If Christians multiply in the culture, we can work for a more just society. And even if we do not immediately bring about a perfectly just society, we have the hope that eventually that’s going to be established on earth by God.
  • We do not have to become the darkness to bring this about. We do not have to say, “Well, we have to break eggs to make an omelet.” We do not have to trample on people because we think that is our only hope for a better world. It is not
  • We can remain faithful in our hope, even if it means that we ourselves do not necessarily see the immediate success we want. To be hopeful means to do what we are supposed to do because our eventual prospects are certain.
  • There is a famous short story by J.R.R. Tolkien called “Leaf by Niggle.” Niggle is a painter who spends his entire life trying to paint a mural of a tree. By the end of his life, he has only gotten one leaf completed. Then he dies. But when he gets to heaven, he sees the tree that was always there in his mind. That is the way of the Christian
  • My son Jonathan is an urban planner. In his mind, he has all these exciting ideas about what a great city would look like. Well, as a Christian, he realizes that in his entire life he may only get one “leaf” done of his beautiful vision. We all face that reality. Nevertheless, we live with the hope that there will be a tree. There will be a city. There is going to be a just society. Beauty will be here. Poverty and war will be gone. We are not the saviors. Instead, hope can set us free from both the despair of nihilism and the naivety of utopianism.
  • The word hope in English has declined in meaning. We use it as if it were a pleasant wish. What you are describing, like the Bible’s definition, is obviously richer.
  • We have a translation problem. Like the word shalom, which is usually translated into English as “peace.
  • In English, hope can mean the opposite of the biblical sense—to be uncertain. If you say, “I know it’s going to happen,” that is certainty. If you say, “I hope it will happen,” that is uncertainty
  • The Greek word elpis means assurance of the future—assured anticipation. You are sure of your hope. Quite the opposite of how we typically use the word in English.
  • Eventually everybody will get to the place where it matters personally whether the resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened. Because if it did, then there is hope for you, no matter what happens
  • I did not want to try to redo what N.T. Wright did. He wrote what is in my opinion the best book on the resurrection in the last 100 years, The Resurrection of the Son of God. He traces significant evidence that the resurrection accounts were not merely made up. They have all the marks of historic eyewitness testimony—including bizarre details no one would include in a fictional account.
  • Wright said there were only two ways that people had ever thought of resurrection before Jesus. The first was as resuscitation—like Lazarus. The person was dead, then something miraculous happens and he gets up out of the tomb, in which case you recognize him because he still looks the same, right? The second idea of resurrection is of the transformation of the person into an angelic or radiant being. But the idea that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead as recognizable, yet somehow different from the way he had looked before his death (so much so that even his closest friends didn’t at first recognize him) is so utterly counterintuitive. No one would have made that up.
  • Why does the resurrection matter? Well, as one reason among billions, because I have cancer. Because one of the things you do when you have cancer is ask how you are going to deal with it. That experience has required that I increase my hope, by reading the Word, especially on the resurrection of Jesus. Because if he were raised from the dead, then basically, it is going to be OK. If he were raised from the dead, then Christianity is basically right, and the hope it gives is an infallible hope.
  • as a mortal person facing his own death, the resurrection brings perspective to our theology. At this stage in my life, I am looking at the big things of which I can be sure
  • when it comes to the resurrection? If I am sure of that, then I am OK. I can handle anything that life—or death—throws at me.
Javier E

Where We Went Wrong | Harvard Magazine - 0 views

www.harvardmagazine.com/...montage-where-we-went-wrong

DeLong prosperity roots 20th century social history economic Galbraith contingent choice public growth crisis culture policy economics

shared by Javier E on 07 May 23 - No Cached
  • John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so
  • One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks
  • nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.
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  • economist J. Bradford DeLong ’82, Ph.D. ’87, looking back on the twentieth century two decades after its end, comes to a similar conclusion but on different grounds.
  • DeLong, professor of economics at Berkeley, looks to matters of “contingency” and “choice”: at key junctures the economy suffered “bad luck,” and the actions taken by the responsible policymakers were “incompetent.”
  • these were “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.” The changes they saw, while in the first instance economic, also “shaped and transformed nearly everything sociological, political, and cultural.”
  • DeLong’s look back over the twentieth century energetically encompasses political and social trends as well; nor is his scope limited to the United States. The result is a work of strikingly expansive breadth and scope
  • labeling the book an economic history fails to convey its sweeping frame.
  • The century that is DeLong’s focus is what he calls the “long twentieth century,” running from just after the Civil War to the end of the 2000s when a series of events, including the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s followed by likewise the most severe business downturn, finally rendered the advanced Western economies “unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870.
  • d behind those missteps in policy stood not just failures of economic thinking but a voting public that reacted perversely, even if understandably, to the frustrations poor economic outcomes had brought them.
  • Within this 140-year span, DeLong identifies two eras of “El Dorado” economic growth, each facilitated by expanding globalization, and each driven by rapid advances in technology and changes in business organization for applying technology to economic ends
  • from 1870 to World War I, and again from World War II to 197
  • fellow economist Robert J. Gordon ’62, who in his monumental treatise on The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth (reviewed in “How America Grew,” May-June 2016, page 68) hailed 1870-1970 as a “special century” in this regard (interrupted midway by the disaster of the 1930s).
  • Gordon highlighted the role of a cluster of once-for-all-time technological advances—the steam engine, railroads, electrification, the internal combustion engine, radio and television, powered flight
  • Pessimistic that future technological advances (most obviously, the computer and electronics revolutions) will generate productivity gains to match those of the special century, Gordon therefore saw little prospect of a return to the rapid growth of those halcyon days.
  • DeLong instead points to a series of noneconomic (and non-technological) events that slowed growth, followed by a perverse turn in economic policy triggered in part by public frustration: In 1973 the OPEC cartel tripled the price of oil, and then quadrupled it yet again six years later.
  • For all too many Americans (and citizens of other countries too), the combination of high inflation and sluggish growth meant that “social democracy was no longer delivering the rapid progress toward utopia that it had delivered in the first post-World War II generation.”
  • Frustration over these and other ills in turn spawned what DeLong calls the “neoliberal turn” in public attitudes and economic policy. The new economic policies introduced under this rubric “did not end the slowdown in productivity growth but reinforced it.
  • the tax and regulatory changes enacted in this new climate channeled most of what economic gains there were to people already at the top of the income scale
  • Meanwhile, progressive “inclusion” of women and African Americans in the economy (and in American society more broadly) meant that middle- and lower-income white men saw even smaller gains—and, perversely, reacted by providing still greater support for policies like tax cuts for those with far higher incomes than their own.
  • Daniel Bell’s argument in his 1976 classic The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Bell famously suggested that the very success of a capitalist economy would eventually undermine a society’s commitment to the values and institutions that made capitalism possible in the first plac
  • In DeLong’s view, the “greatest cause” of the neoliberal turn was “the extraordinary pace of rising prosperity during the Thirty Glorious Years, which raised the bar that a political-economic order had to surpass in order to generate broad acceptance.” At the same time, “the fading memory of the Great Depression led to the fading of the belief, or rather recognition, by the middle class that they, as well as the working class, needed social insurance.”
  • what the economy delivered to “hard-working white men” no longer matched what they saw as their just deserts: in their eyes, “the rich got richer, the unworthy and minority poor got handouts.”
  • As Bell would have put it, the politics of entitlement, bred by years of economic success that so many people had come to take for granted, squeezed out the politics of opportunity and ambition, giving rise to the politics of resentment.
  • The new era therefore became “a time to question the bourgeois virtues of hard, regular work and thrift in pursuit of material abundance.”
  • DeLong’s unspoken agenda would surely include rolling back many of the changes made in the U.S. tax code over the past half-century, as well as reinvigorating antitrust policy to blunt the dominance, and therefore outsize profits, of the mega-firms that now tower over key sectors of the economy
  • He would also surely reverse the recent trend moving away from free trade. Central bankers should certainly behave like Paul Volcker (appointed by President Carter), whose decisive action finally broke the 1970s inflation even at considerable economic cost
  • Not only Galbraith’s main themes but many of his more specific observations as well seem as pertinent, and important, today as they did then.
  • What will future readers of Slouching Towards Utopia conclude?
  • If anything, DeLong’s narratives will become more valuable as those events fade into the past. Alas, his description of fascism as having at its center “a contempt for limits, especially those implied by reason-based arguments; a belief that reality could be altered by the will; and an exaltation of the violent assertion of that will as the ultimate argument” will likely strike a nerve with many Americans not just today but in years to come.
  • what about DeLong’s core explanation of what went wrong in the latter third of his, and our, “long century”? I predict that it too will still look right, and important.
Javier E

The Crypto Detectives Are Cleaning Up - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...hain-tracking-chainalysis.html

crypto tracing

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Chainalysis is deeply enmeshed in the industry it’s trying to clean up. A third of its revenue comes from the private sector; other blockchain companies use its software to gather market information. The firm’s long-term prospects depend on crypto’s continued growth.
  • At the Links conference, Mr. Gronager clicked through a slide presentation full of graphs and statistics that he said showed the industry’s resilience during the market downturn. “We believe all value will move on the blockchain,” one slide read.
  • On the sidelines of the conference, some of the company’s guests privately expressed apprehension. By trying to legitimize crypto in the eyes of the government, was Chainalysis simply providing cover for companies that violate securities law or engage in widespread fraud
Javier E

Chartbook #165: Polycrisis - thinking on the tightrope. - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...rtbook-165-polycrisis-thinking

chart polycrisis system history crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • in April 2022 the Cascade Institute published an interesting report on the theme by Scott Janzwood and Thomas Homer-Dixon. They defined a polycrisis as follows:
  • We define a global polycrisis as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects.
  • A global polycrisis, should it occur, will inherit the four core properties of systemic risks—extreme complexity, high nonlinearity, transboundary causality, and deep uncertainty—while also exhibiting causal synchronization among risks.
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  • A systemic risk is a threat emerging within one natural, technological, or social system with impacts extending beyond that system to endanger the functionality of one or more other systems
  • “Polycrisis is a way of capturing the tangled mix of challenges and changes closely interact with one another, bending, blurring and amplifying each other.”
  • The FT essay was a short piece - originally drafted to run to only 750 words. In that short compass I focused on three aspects
  • (1) Defining the concept of polycrisis in simple and intuitive terms;
  • (2) Stressing the diversity of causal factors implied by the term “poly”;
  • (3) and emphasizing the novelty of our current situation.
  • There are two aspects to the novelty that I stress in the FT piece, one is our inability to understand our current situation as the result of a single, specific causal factor and secondly the extraordinary scale and breadth of global development, especially in the last 50 years, that makes it seem probable, according to the cognitive schemata and models that we do have at our disposal, that we are about to crash through critical tipping points.
  • Do we actually know what development or growth are?
  • As Bruno Latour forced us to recognize, it is not at all obvious that we do understand our own situation. In fact, as he convincingly argued in We Have Never Been Modern, modernity’s account of itself is built around blindspots specifically with regard to the hybrid mobilization of material resources and actors and the working of science itself, which define the grand developmental narrative.
  • t we have every reason to think that we are at a dramatic threshold point, but also that our need to reach for a term as unspecific as polycrisis indicates our flailing inability to grasp our situation with the confidence and conceptual clarity that we might once have hoped for.
  • What Beck taught us was that risk is no longer in any simple sense “natural” but a phenomenon of second nature.
  • A Beckian reading of polycrisis might look a bit like the version produced by Christopher Hobson and Matthew Davies summarized
  • A polycrisis can be thought of as having the following properties:(1) Multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously. This is the most immediate and comprehensible feature.
  • (2) Feedback loops, in which individual crises interact in both foreseeable and unexpected ways. This points to the ways that these separate crises relate to each other.
  • (3) Amplification, whereby these interactions cause crises to magnify or accelerate, generating a sense of lack of control. The way these separate problems relate and connect works to exacerbate and deepen the different crises.
  • (4) Unboundedness, in which each crisis ceases to be clearly demarcated, both in time and space, as different problems bleed over and merge. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish where one issue ends, and another commences.
  • (5) Layering, a dynamic Tooze attributes to Yixin’s analysis, whereby the concerns of interest groups related to each distinct crisis overlap ‘to create layered social problems: current problems with historical problems, tangible interest problems with ideological problems, political problems with non-political problems; all intersecting and interfering with one another’ (quoted in Tooze 2021, 18).
  • (6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.
  • (8) Emergent properties, the collection of these dynamics, which all exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, exceeds the sum total of its parts. The polycrisis is ultimately much more than a collection of smaller, separate crises. Instead, it is something like a socio-political version of the ‘Fujiwhara effect,’ a term used to describe when two or more cyclones come together, morph and merge.
  • (7) Cross purposes, whereby each individual crisis might impede the resolution of another crisis, in terms of demanding attention and resources, and the extent to which they have become tangled together makes it difficult to distinguish and prioritise.
  • We need to think “big”. Or rather we need to learn how to span the void between the very big and the very particular, the micro and the macro
  • What all this talk of grand social processes and movements of the mind should not obscure is the extent to which the current crisis is also a matter of identity, choice and action. As much as it is a matter of sociology, social theory and grand historical sweep, it is also a matter of psychology, both at the group and very intimate level, and of politics.
  • The issue of politics must however be flagged.
  • The polycrisis affects us at every level. And if you want to take seriously the problem of thinking in medias res you cannot bracket the matter of psychology.
  • The tension of the current moment is not, after all, simply the result of long-term processes of development, or environmental change. It is massively exacerbated by geopolitical tension resulting from strategic decisions taken by state elites. Some of those are elected. Some not.
  • What is characteristic of the current moment, and symptomatic of the polycrisis, is that the decisive actors in Russia, China and the United States, the three greatest military powers, are all defining their positions as though their very identities were on the line.
  • Can one really say that the Biden administration, the Chinese, Putin’s regime are crisis-fighting? Are they not escalating?
  • It is surely a matter of both, and in interdependence. Each of the major powers will insist that they are acting defensively (crisis-fighting in the extended sense). But what this entails, if you feel fundamental interests are at stake, is escalation, even to the point of engaging in open warfare or risking atomic confrontation.
  • It is like the classic Cold War but only worse, because everyone feels under truly existential pressure and has a sense of the clock ticking. If no one confidently believes that they have time on their side - and who has that luxury in the age of polycrisis? - it makes for a very dangerous situation indeed.
  • I found the idea of polycrisis interesting and timely because the prefix “poly” directed attention to the diversity of challenges without specifying a single dominant contradiction or source of tension or dysfunction.
Javier E

Opinion | The New Republican Party Isn't Ready for the Post-Roe World - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ohio-abortion-republicans.html

libertinism libertarian GOP pro-life analysis prospects

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The pro-life movement is in a state of electoral collapse, and I think I know one reason.
  • In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview.
  • t I’ve seen Republican libertinism with my own eyes. I know that it distorts the culture of the Republican Party and red America.
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  • a pro-life libertarian will recognize the humanity and dignity of both mother and child.
  • The entire philosophy of libertarianism depends on a healthy recognition of human dignity. A healthy libertarianism can still be individualistic, but it’s also deeply concerned with both personal virtue and the rights of others.
  • The difference between libertarianism and libertinism can be summed up as the difference between rights and desires. A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins
  • A libertine, by contrast, is dominated by his desires. The object of his life is to do what he wants, and the object of politics is to give him what he wants.
  • A libertarian is concerned with all forms of state coercion. A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.
  • Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.
  • Trump’s movement dismisses the value of personal character. It mocks personal restraint. And it’s happy to inflict its will on others if it achieves what it wants
  • Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.
  • I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic
  • Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.
  • Even worse, many of the same people demanded that the state limit the liberty of others so that they could live how they wanted
  • This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022.
  • Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.
  • It’s not just that libertinism robs Republicans of moral authority; it’s that libertinism robs Republicans of moral principle.
  • In each state, all the pro-life movement needed was consistent Republican support, and it would have sailed to victory. All the Democrats in the state could have voted to protect abortion rights, and they would have lost if Republicans held firm. But they did not.
  • “Do as I say and not as I do” is among the worst moral arguments imaginable.
  • A holistic pro-life society requires true self-sacrifice. It asks women to value the life growing inside of them even in the face of fear and poverty. It asks the community to rally beside these women to keep them and their children safe and to provide them with opportunities to flourish. It requires both individuals and communities to sublimate their own desires to protect the lives and opportunities of others.
  • An ethos that centers individuals’ desires will bleed over into matters of life and death. It did during Covid, and it’s doing so now, as even Republicans reject the pro-life cause.
  • The challenge is much more profound. Pro-life America has to reconnect with personal virtue. It has to model self-sacrifice. It has to show, not just tell, America what it would look like to value life from conception to natural death.
  • At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.
Javier E

Opinion | The Secret of America's Economic Success - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...american-economy-success.html

history economic success 2023

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • there was widespread concern that the pandemic would leave lasting economic scars. After all, the 2008 financial crisis was followed by a weak recovery that left real gross domestic product in many countries far below the pre-crisis trend even a decade later. Indeed, as we approach Covid’s four-year mark, many of the world’s economies remain well short of full recovery.
  • But not the United States. Not only have we had the strongest recovery in the advanced world, but the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook also points out that American growth since 2019 has actually exceeded pre-Covid projections.
  • let’s take a moment to celebrate this good economic news — and try to figure out what went right with the U.S. economy.
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  • Part of the answer, to be fair, is luck. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a major energy shock in Europe, which had come to rely on imports of Russian natural gas. America, which exports gas, was much less affected.
  • What about inflation? When you use comparable measures, America also has the lowest inflation rate among major economies.
  • It’s true that one recent poll found that a majority of Americans and 60 percent of Republicans say that unemployment is near a 50-year high. But it’s actually near its lowest level since the 1960s.
  • A second, probably more important factor was that the United States pursued aggressively expansionary fiscal policy
  • Many economists were extremely critical, warning that this spending would fuel inflation, which it probably did for a while. But inflation has subsided, while “Big Fiscal” helped the economy get to full employment — arguably the first time we’ve had truly full employment in decades.
  • A strong job market may in turn have had major long-term benefits, by drawing previously marginalized Americans into the work force.
  • the percentage of U.S. adults in their prime working years participating in the labor force is now at its highest level in 20 years. One number I find especially striking is labor force participation by Americans with a disability, which has soared.
  • One last thing: When Covid struck, all advanced countries took strong measures to limit economic hardship, but they took different approaches. European governments generally paid employers to keep workers on their payrolls, even if they were temporarily idle. America, for the most part, let layoffs happen but protected workers with expanded unemployment benefits.
  • There was a case for each approach. Europe’s approach helped keep workers connected to their old jobs; the U.S. approach created more flexibility, making it easier for workers to move to different jobs if the post-Covid economy turned out to look quite different from the economy before the pandemic.
  • is clear: We have been remarkably successful, even if nobody will believe it.
Javier E

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

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

china workers history economics

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

Two Wall Street titans on why the world is at its most precarious since 1938 - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...recarious-since-1938-kp5tth208

wall street 2023 inflation

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Israel’s war with Hamas and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have made the world a more “scary and unpredictable” place than at any other time since the Second World War, Dimon contended. “Here in the US, we continue to have a strong economy,” he said. “We still have a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the system. But these geopolitical matters are very serious — arguably the most serious since 1938.
  • What’s happening ... right now is the most important thing for the future of the world — freedom, democracy, food, energy, immigration. We diminish that importance when you say, ‘What’s it going to do to the market?’ Markets will be fine. Markets can deal with stuff. Markets go up and down. Markets fluctuate.”
  • That said, the conflict in the Middle East — in which at least 1,400 Israelis have been murdered and 9,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7 — has rattled a financial system already gulping at the prospect of inflation proving sticky and interest rates staying higher for longer. The region accounts for 48 per cent of global energy reserves and produced 33 per cent of the world’s oil last year. Previous crises, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, resulted in big price shocks — although so far, at about $86 a barrel, oil has roughly returned to its pre-October 7 level, while gas prices have risen only slightly.
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  • So fear creates recessions in the long run — and if we continue to have rising fear, the probability of a European recession grows and the probability of a US recession grows. Geopolitics is playing a bigger role in everyone’s equations.”
  • Geopolitical risk is a major component in shaping all our lives. We are having rising fear throughout the world, and less hope. Rising fear creates a withdrawal from consumption or spending more.
  • “When the Russian invasion occurred in Ukraine, we said that the peace dividend is over,” Larry Fink, chief executive of investment giant BlackRock, told The Sunday Times. “Now, with the instability in the Middle East, we’re going to almost a whole new future.
  • Dimon noted that inflation had “levelled off a little bit” overall, but said: “It’s not clear to me that long-term forces are not inflationary … And that’s why I’m saying rates could possibly go up from here. That’s life in the fast lane.”
  • Higher borrowing costs have started to hit debt-fuelled sectors that boomed in the zero-rates era — such as commercial property, where $80 billion (£65 billion) of assets across the US are in some form of financial distress, according to MSCI, and private equity.
  • [the legendary investor] Warren Buffett says you see who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out. Not everyone is really ready for 6 or 7 per cent rates, but I wouldn’t rule them out.”
  • Fink pointed out that the transmission of rate rises into the US economy was less direct than in the UK
  • “I’m a fundamental believer that we’re going to have higher inflation for longer, and it’s going to require the [Fed] to raise rates higher — probably one or two more tightenings — and that will ultimately be the way we get into recession.”
  • Many senior figures on Wall Street worry about the US government’s ability to finance itself in the medium term. As in the UK, the market for government debt was underpinned by huge waves of quantitative easing (QE) after the financial crisis, as the Federal Reserve, in effect, bought assets including Treasuries to boost the economy. Following a revival of the programme during Covid, it came to an end in March last year.
  • The withdrawal of QE, combined with lacklustre appetite for Treasuries among US banks and international investors such as China, could force the government to pay higher prices at a time of near-record borrowing.
  • “It might be a 20km headwind right now, but next year it’s going to be 25km and it’s going to grow,” a top investor said of the decreasing international demand for US government debt.
  • US stock market floats and fundraisings, the heartbeat of capital markets, slumped to their lowest level since 1998 last year as the spike in interest rates punctured valuations of growth stocks in sectors such as tech and healthcare.
  • The cautious mood on Wall Street comes against a backdrop of surprisingly strong US growth. The economy expanded by an astonishing 4.9 per cent in the third quart
  • the Biden administration is shovelling stimulus into the system via big pieces of legislation promising to accelerate America’s adoption of renewables, rebuild its advanced semiconductor industry and increase its spending on roads, bridges and broadband.
  • We have huge stimulus,” said Fink. “People are not factoring in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act, which are about $970 billion of stimulus. Those are the largest stimuluses ever when there’s not a pandemic or a financial crisis ... And it’s at a time when you can have unions win a 25 per cent labour increase … These are very inflationary, whether it’s the fiscal stimulus or these wage increases.”
  • It all comes back to that word. Unexpectedly high growth, massive government stimulus and now two wars that threaten to spill out into broader crises — it all spells inflation. The flurry of hope in markets that Fed and the Bank of England have reached the top of their rate-raising cycles may yet prove premature
Javier E

Opinion | Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...intellectuals-republicans.html

far right intellectual thinker conservative

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.
  • But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?
  • A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that
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  • — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.
  • The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024.
  • The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.
  • If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.
  • Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.
  • Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”
  • The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.
  • Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.
  • in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.
  • It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.
  • Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”
  • he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)
  • Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.
  • Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”
  • Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny
  • the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”
  • Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.”
  • “Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.
  • The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.
  • Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.
  • In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace i
  • in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianit
  • He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.
  • Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.
  • Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.
  • He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.
  • All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)
  • But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”
  • Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us.
  • “Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”
  • In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”
  • Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.
  • These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.
  • In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.
  • These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?”
  • Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.
  • It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.
  • The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.
  • In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.
Javier E

Opinion | How AI is transforming education at the University of Mississippi - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-chatgpt-universities-learning

chatbot writing thinking education evaluation

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Perplexity AI “unlocks the power of knowledge with information discovery and sharing.” This, it turns out, means “does research.” Type something into it, and it spits out a comprehensive answer, always sourced and sometimes bulleted. You might say this is just Google on steroids — but really, it is Google with a bibliography.
  • Caleb Jackson, a 22-year-old junior at Ole Miss studying part time, is a fan. This way, he doesn’t have to spend hours between night shifts and online classes trawling the internet for sources. Perplexity can find them, and he can get to writing that much sooner.
  • What’s most important to Ole Miss faculty members is that students use these tools with integrity. If the university doesn’t have a campuswide AI honor code, and so far it doesn’t, individual classes should. And no matter whether professors permit all applications of AI, as some teachers have tried, or only the narrowest, students should have to disclose just how much help they had from robots.
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  • “Write a five-paragraph essay on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Too generic? Well, how about “Write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of loss in ‘To the Lighthouse’”? Too high-schoolish? “Add some bigger words, please.” The product might not be ready to turn in the moment it is born, fully formed, from ChatGPT’s head. But with enough tweaking — either by the student or by the machine at the student’s demand — chances are the output can muster at least a passing grade.
  • Which of these uses are okay? Which aren’t? The harnessing of an AI tool to create an annotated bibliography likely doesn’t rankle even librarians the way relying on that same tool to draft a reflection on Virginia Woolf offends the professor of the modern novel. Why? Because that kind of contemplation goes closer to the heart of what education is really about.
  • the core of the question colleges now face. They can’t really stop students from using AI in class. They might not be able to notice students have done so at all, and when they do think they’ve noticed they’ll be acting only on suspicion. But maybe teachers can control the ways in which students use AI in class.
  • Figuring out exactly what ways those ought to be requires educators to determine what they care about in essays — what they are desperate to hear. The purpose of these papers is for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, from hard facts to compositional know-how, and for teachers to assess how their pupils are progressing. The answer to what teachers want to get from students in their written work depends on what they want to give to students.
  • ChatGPT is sort of in a class of its own, because it can be almost anything its users want it to be so long as they possess one essential skill: prompt engineering. This means, basically, manipulating the machine not only into giving you an answer but also into giving you the kind of answer you’re looking for.
  • The next concern is that students should use AI in a manner that improves not only their writing but also their thinking — in short, in a manner that enhances learning rather than bypasses the need to learn at all.
  • This simple principle makes for complicated practice. Certainly, no one is going to learn anything by letting AI write an essay in its entirety. What about letting AI brainstorm an idea, on the other hand, or write an outline, or gin up a counter-argument? Lyndsey Cook, a senior at Ole Miss planning a career in nursing, finds the brainstorming especially helpful: She’ll ask ChatGPT or another tool to identify the themes in a piece of literature, and then she’ll go back and look for them herself.
  • These shortcuts, on the one hand, might interfere with students’ learning to brainstorm, outline or see the other side of things on their own
  • But — here comes a human-generated counterargument — they may also aid students in surmounting obstacles in their composition that otherwise would have stopped them short. That’s particularly true of kids whose high schools didn’t send them to college already equipped with these capabilities.
  • Allow AI to boost you over these early hurdles, and suddenly the opportunity for deeper learning — the opportunity to really write — will open up. That’s how Caleb Jackson, the part-time student for whom Perplexity has been such a boon, sees it: His professor, he says , wanted them to “get away from the high-school paper and go further, to write something larger like a thesis.”
  • maybe, as one young Ole Miss faculty member put it to me, this risks “losing the value of the struggle.” That, she says, is what she is scared will go away.
  • All this invites the most important question there is: What is learning for?
  • Learning, in college, can be instrumental. According to this view, the aim of teaching is to prepare students to live in the real world, so all that really matters is whether they have the chops to field jobs that feed themselves and their families. Perhaps knowing how to use AI to do any given task for you, then, is one of the most valuable skills out there — the same way it pays to be quick with a calculator.
  • If you accept this line of argument, however, there are still drawbacks to robotic crutches. Some level of critical thinking is necessary to function as an adult, and if AI stymies its development even the instrumental aim of education is thwarted. The same goes for that “value of the struggle.” The real world is full of adversity, much of which the largest language model can’t tell you how to overcome.
  • more compelling is the idea, probably shared by most college professors, that learning isn’t only instrumental after all — that it has intrinsic value and that it is the end rather than merely a means to one.
  • Every step along the way that is skipped, the shorter the journey becomes, the less we will take in as we travel.
  • This glummest of outlooks suggests that AI will stunt personal growth even if it doesn’t harm professional prospects.
  • While that doesn’t mean it’s wise to prohibit every little application of the technology in class, it probably does mean discouraging those most closely related to critical thinking.
  • One approach is to alter standards for grading, so that the things the machines are worst at are also the things that earn the best marks: originality, say, or depth of feeling, or so-called metacognition — the process of thinking about one’s own thinking or one’s own learning.
  • Hopefully, these things are also the most valuable because they are what make us human.
  • Caleb Jackson only wants AI to help him write his papers — not to write them for him. “If ChatGPT will get you an A, and you yourself might get a C, it’s like, ‘Well, I earned that C.’” He pauses. “That might sound crazy.”
  • Dominic Tovar agrees. Let AI take charge of everything, and, “They’re not so much tools at that point. They’re just replacing you.”
  • Lyndsey Cook, too, believes that even if these systems could reliably find the answers to the most vexing research problems, “it would take away from research itself” — because scientific inquiry is valuable for its own sake. “To have AI say, ‘Hey, this is the answer …’” she trails off, sounding dispirited.
  • Claire Mischker, lecturer of composition and director of the Ole Miss graduate writing center, asked her students at the end of last semester to turn in short reflections on their experience in her class. She received submissions that she was near certain were produced by ChatGPT — “that,” she says as sarcastically as she does mournfully, “felt really good.
  • The central theme of the course was empathy.
Javier E

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

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

UK public service policy crisis history

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

How China's buses shaped the world's EV revolution - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...le-revolution-began-with-buses

china EV buses transport public response climate change history policy

shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • After around two decades of government support, China now boasts the world's largest market for e-buses, making up more than 95% of global stock. At the end of 2022, China's Ministry of Transport announced that more than three-quarters (77% or 542,600) of all urban buses in the country were "new energy vehicles", a term used by the Chinese government to include pure electric, plug-in hybrids, and fuel cell vehicles powered by alternative fuels such as hydrogen and methanol. In 2022, around 84% of the new energy bus fleet was pure electric.
  • . In 2015, 78% of Chinese urban buses still used diesel or gas, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI). The NGO now estimates that if China follows through on its stated decarbonisation policies, its road transport emissions will peak before 2030.
  • China is also home to some of the world's biggest electric bus manufacturers, such as Yutong, which has been raking up orders across China, Europe and Latin America.
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  • "China has really been at the forefront of success in conversion of all vehicles to electric vehicles, especially buses," says Heather Thompson, chief executive officer of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a non-profit focusing on sustainable transport solutions. "The rest of the world is trying to do the same, but I think China is really out ahead."
  • At the time of China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organisation, the international automotive industry was dominated by European, US and Japanese brands. These companies had spent decades perfecting internal combustion engine technology. To compete, Beijing decided to find a new track for its auto industry: making cars that did not use conventional engines.
  • That same year, the central government launched the so-called "863 plan" for EV research and development. There were numerous practical challenges, however, in the way of mass electrification. Not many manufacturers were making new energy vehicles, buyers were few and there was a lack of charging infrastructure in existence. The answer? Buses.
  • "The Chinese government adopted a very smart strategy," says Liu Daizong, ITDP's East Asia director. "They realised quite early on that they should drive [the EV industry] through electric buses," he notes, since their public service status meant Beijing "could have a strong hand on their electrification".
  • "Bus routes were fixed. This means when an electric bus finished a round, it could return to the depot to recharge," explains Xue Lulu, a mobility manager at the World Resources Institute (WRI) China. The typical daily mileage of a Chinese bus ­– 200km (120 miles) – was a realistic range for battery makers to meet.
  • The following year, the country began its large-scale rollout of new energy buses, with the "Ten Cities and Thousand Vehicles" programme. Over three years, the programme aimed to provide 10 cities with financial subsidies to promote 1,000 public-sector new energy vehicles in each, annually. Its goal was to have 10% new energy vehicles in the country by the end of 2012.
  • Strong policy support from both central and regional governments "gave manufacturers confidence in setting up production lines and stepping up research efforts," says Liu.
  • Together, these strong and consistent government signals encouraged Chinese manufacturers to expand their EV production capacity, bring down costs and improve their technologies. One such company was Build Your Dream, better known as BYD. The Shenzhen-based firm, the world's largest EV maker in 2022, ballooned its business a decade before by supplying electric buses and taxis for China's EV pilot cities.
  • "Back then, most buses used diesel, which was a main source of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions," says Xue, referring to the air pollution that smothered Beijing and other Chinese cities in the early 2010s. Yet in 2013, a new plan from central government cited tackling air pollution as one of the reasons for rolling out EVs.
  • This addition proved to be critical: it not only connected EV uptake with people's health, it also indirectly tied the e-bus campaign to local officials' political performance, as the central government would soon hand air-quality targets to all provinces.
  • The years 2013 and 2014 proved to be important for China's EV push. For the first time, the central government made EV purchase subsidies available to individual consumers, not just the public sector, opening the floodgate to private ownership. Additionally, it offered discounted electricity tariffs to bus operators to make sure the cost of running electric buses would be "significantly lower than" that of their oil or gas-powered equivalents.
  • The new economic push, plus local government's determination to battle air pollution, generated great enthusiasm for e-buses. By the end of 2015, the number of EV pilot cities rocketed from 25 to 88. In the same year, the central government set a target of 200,000 new energy buses on the road by 2020 and announced a plan to phase out its subsidies for fossil-fuel-powered buses.
  • To further stimulate the market, many cities devised various local policies on top of national incentives. For example, Shenzhen, a southern city with a population of more than 17 million, encouraged government agencies to work with private companies to create a full range of renting mechanisms for bus operators
  • Different cities' bus operators also designed different charging strategies. "Buses in Shenzhen had bigger batteries, so they normally charged overnight," says Xue, of WRI China. Between 2016 and 2020, Shanghai, another electric bus hub, subsidised the electricity e-buses used -- regardless of the hours of the day -- to give them more flexibility in charging.
  • Generous financial support did lead to problems. In 2016, an EV subsidy fraud shook China, with some bus operators found to have exaggerated the number of e-buses they had purchased. So that same year Beijing shifted its EV subsidy rules so bus operators could only receive financial support when a bus's mileage reached 30,000km (19,000 miles).
  • one year later, the government announced the so-called "dual-credit" policy. This allowed new energy vehicle makers to rake up credits which they could sell for cash to those needing to offset "negative credits" generated from making conventional cars.
  • it wasn't only China's buses that had benefitted.China's e-bus campaign helped create a big and stable market for its wider EV industry, brought down the costs and created economies of scale. In 2009, the year the e-bus campaign was rolled out, the total number of new energy vehicles sold stood at 2,300; by 2022, it was 6.9 million, analysis by Huang Zheng,
  • By 2022, the country had also built the world's largest EV charging network, with 1.8 million public charging stations – or two-thirds of the global total – and 3.4 million private equivalents. This means that on average, there is one charging pillar for every 2.5 of China's 13.1 million new energy vehicles.
  • Cold weather is a problem, too, as it can make a battery's charging time longer and its range shorter. The reason China has not achieved 100% electrification for its buses is its northern regions, which have harsh winters, says Xue.
  • To make e-buses truly "green", they should also be charged with renewable power, Wang says. But last year coal power still accounted for 58.4% of China's energy mix, according to the China Electricity Council, a trade body..
  • Globally, however, China is now in a league of its own in uptake of e-buses. By 2018, about 421,000 of the world's 425,000 electric buses were located in China; Europe had about 2,250 and the US owned around 300. A
  • But earlier this year, the European Commission announced a zero-emission target for all new city buses by 2030. And some countries are increasing their overall funding for the transition.
  • In 2020, the European Commission approved Germany's plan to double its aid for e-buses to €650m (£558m/$707m), then again in 2021 to €1.25 billion euros (£1.07m/$1.3bn). And the UK, which last year had the largest electric bus fleet in Europe with 2,226 pure electric and hybrid buses, has announced another £129m ($164m) to help bus operators buy zero-emissions fleets.
  • Countries have thus responded to China's manufacturing lead in divergent ways. "While the US has opted for a more competitive angle by fostering its own e-bus production, regions like Latin America are more open to trade with China due to a more friendly trading setup through [China's] Belt and Road Initiative,"
  • In order to avoid direct competition from Chinese manufacturers, the US has come up with a "school-bus strategy", says Liu. The Chinese don't make the iconic yellow vehicles, so this could ignite American e-bus manufacturing and create a local industry chain, he suggests. Backed by the US Environmental Protection Agency's $5bn (£3.9bn) Clean School Bus Programme, the national effort has so far committed to providing 5,982 buses.
  • In contrast, many Latin American cities, such as the Colombian capital of Bogota and the Chilean capital of Santiago, are greening their traditional bus sectors with the help of Chinese manufacturers, who are the largest providers to the region. In 2020, Chile became the country that had the most Chinese e-buses outside of China, and this year Santiago's public transport operator announced it has ordered 1,022 e-buses from Beijing-based Foton Motor, the biggest overseas deal the firm had received.
  • Chinese manufacturers are likely to receive a lot more orders from Chile and its neighbours in this decade. According to latest research by the global C40 Cities network, the number of electric buses in 32 Latin American cities is expected to increase by more than seven times by 2030, representing an investment opportunity of over $11.3bn (£8.9bn)
  • In June 2023, BloombergNEF forecast half of the world's buses to be entirely battery-powered by 2032, a decade ahead of cars. And by 2026, 36% and 24% of municipal bus sales in Europe and the US, respectively, are expected to be EVs as they begin to catch up with China
  • To meet the global climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, simply switching the world's existing bus fleets might not be enough. According to ITDP, the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from urban passenger transport globally must stay below the equivalent of 66 gigatonnes CO2 between 2020 and 2050 for the world to meet the 1.5C temperature goal. This emissions limit will only be possible when the world not only adopts electric buses, but goes through a broader shift away from private transport
  • "We can't just focus on [replacing] the buses that exist, we need to actually get many, many more buses on the streets," Thompson adds. She and her team estimate that the world would need about 10 million more buses through 2030, and 46 million more buses cumulatively through 2050, to make public transport good enough to have a shot at achieving the Paris Agreement. And all those buses will need to be electric.
  • In China therefore, even though EVs are being sold faster than ever, its central government has instructed cities to encourage public transport use, as well as walking and riding bikes.
  • In Wang's hometown, meanwhile, which has just over three million residents, the local government has gone one step further and made all bus rides free. All citizens need to do is to swipe an app, with no charge, to get onto the bus. "My aunt loves taking buses now," says Wang. "She says it is so convenient."
Javier E

Opinion | The Year the Millennials Handed the Internet Over to Zoomers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...internet-aging-gen-z.html

internet millennials genZ culture

shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. Twitter has been transformed under new management into an increasingly untenable social experiment called X. Instagram is evolving into a somehow-even-lower-rent TikTok, while TikTok itself continues to baffle and alienate me.
  • Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed
  • the main complaint I have heard is was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”
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  • it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.
  • we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and molded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.
  • There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.
  • millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.
  • The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z
  • Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness
  • I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.
  • The celebrities are unrecognizable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts
  • the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”
  • True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses
  • When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.
  • Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and aging internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humor and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.
  • Zoomer internet is, at least on the surface, quite different than ours.
  • The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around
  • Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.
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