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katyshannon

China and Taiwan leaders hail historic talks - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-34742680

china taiwan leaders talks politics history

shared by katyshannon on 09 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The leaders of China and Taiwan have held historic talks in Singapore - their first in more than 60 years.Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou shook hands at the start of the talks, which were seen as largely symbolic.
  • China views Taiwan as a breakaway province which will one day be reunited with the mainland. But many Taiwanese see it as independent and are concerned at China's growing influence.
  • The meeting "has opened a historic chapter in the cross-Strait relations, and history will remember today", he added.The meeting took place in neutral territory on the sidelines of a state visit by Mr Xi to Singapore. Relations between China and Taiwan have improved under Mr Ma since he took office in 2008, with better economic ties, improving tourism links, and a trade pact signed.
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  • The two sides split in 1949 when the Kuomintang lost to the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war and set up a new government in Taiwan.
  • Mr Ma proposed reducing hostility across the Taiwan Strait, expanding exchanges and establishing a cross-strait hotline, according to Taiwan's central news agency. He said this was part of consolidating the "1992 consensus" - the agreement under which both sides recognise the principle of "one China" but define it in their own ways.Similar remarks were made by Mr Xi, who said upholding the consensus would help "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation".
Javier E

The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...f-nudges-for-good-and-bad.html

behavioral economics nudge

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Nudges, small design changes that can markedly affect individual behavior, have been catching on. These techniques rely on insights from behavioral science
  • when used ethically, they can be very helpful. But we need to be sure that they aren’t being employed to sway people to make bad decisions that they will later regret.
  • Three principles should guide the use of nudges:■ All nudging should be transparent and never misleading.■ It should be as easy as possible to opt out of the nudge, preferably with as little as one mouse click.■ There should be good reason to believe that the behavior being encouraged will improve the welfare of those being nudged.
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  • the government teams in Britain and the United States that have focused on nudging have followed these guidelines scrupulously.
  • the private sector is another matter. In this domain, I see much more troubling behavior.
  • Many companies are nudging purely for their own profit and not in customers’ best interests. In a recent column in The New York Times, Robert Shiller called such behavior “phishing.” Mr. Shiller and George Akerlof, both Nobel-winning economists, have written a book on the subject, “Phishing for Phools.”
  • Some argue that phishing — or evil nudging — is more dangerous in government than in the private sector. The argument is that government is a monopoly with coercive power, while we have more choice in the private sector over which newspapers we read and which airlines we fly.
  • I think this distinction is overstated. In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.
  • One example is the mortgage industry in the early 2000s. Borrowers were encouraged to take out loans that they could not repay when real estate prices fell. Competition did not eliminate this practice, because it was hard for anyone to make money selling the advice “Don’t take that loan.”
Javier E

How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...contemplation-therapy

meditation brain results psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • a study published in Biological Psychiatry brings scientific thoroughness to mindfulness meditation and for the first time shows that, unlike a placebo, it can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health.
  • One difficulty of investigating meditation has been the placebo problem. In rigorous studies, some participants receive treatment while others get a placebo: They believe they are getting the same treatment when they are not. But people can usually tell if they are meditating. Dr. Creswell, working with scientists from a number of other universities, managed to fake mindfulness.
  • Half the subjects were then taught formal mindfulness meditation at a residential retreat center; the rest completed a kind of sham mindfulness meditation that was focused on relaxation and distracting oneself from worries and stress.
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  • follow-up brain scans showed differences in only those who underwent mindfulness meditation. There was more activity, or communication, among the portions of their brains that process stress-related reactions and other areas related to focus and calm. Four months later, those who had practiced mindfulness showed much lower levels in their blood of a marker of unhealthy inflammation than the relaxation group, even though few were still meditating.
  • Dr. Creswell and his colleagues believe that the changes in the brain contributed to the subsequent reduction in inflammation, although precisely how remains unknown.
  • When it comes to how much mindfulness is needed to improve health, Dr. Creswell says, ‘‘we still have no idea about the ideal dose.”
redavistinnell

Tragedy Forges Alliance for Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ge-in-concussion-protocol.html

tragedy alliance change new york times

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Tragedy ForgesAlliance for Change After a young rugby player died in Northern Ireland, his family anda brain expert set about to establish concussion guidelines in Britain.
  • As a heartbroken Mr. Robinson and his family left the Old Townhall Courthouse in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that day in September 2013, they were told they could slip out the back to avoid the news media. But Mr. Robinson was determined that his son should not die in vain, so he, along with his ex-wife, Karen Walton, and their families, exited through the front, spoke to a scrum of reporters and instantly landed among the most vocal advocates for concussion safety standards in Britain.
  • Within months, Mr. Robinson was meeting with politicians, sports executives, professional athletes and, most important, Dr. Willie Stewart, the foremost scientist on the subject in Britain who formed a bond with Mr. Robinson that has helped produce some of the most comprehensive concussion guidelines in the world.
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  • “It took something high profile to get people to understand, and it needed something in the media to make people aware,” Dr. Stewart said, referring to Benjamin’s death. “Even if it just means we’re preventing another Ben Robinson and not addressing dementia, that’s still very important. We’ve got to get things to change.”
  • Much of what Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart have accomplished is second nature in the United States, where concussions have been a growing part of the public dialogue for several years. Coaches and players in many sports are now taught that concussions, brain injuries resulting from a blow to the head or whiplash, can lead to headaches, memory loss, dizziness, sensitivity to light and other problems.
  • After an outcry from scientists, retired players and family members of injured and deceased athletes, the N.F.L. and other leagues have adopted protocols during games to detect concussions, pull players from the field, administer on-the-spot tests and detail when they can return to play.
  • hris Nowinski, a co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, an American nonprofit group that pushes for safe sports, said that concussion management in Britain lags five to six years behind the United States. Photo
  • “Scotland is a great example of a team of passionate advocates creating change in their community,” he said. “It’s a template that I hope others follow.”
  • Concussions were far from Mr. Robinson’s mind when his son joined his teammates from Carrickfergus Grammar School to play their rivals from Dalriada that day.
  • Soccer was Benjamin’s first love, but when he was 11, he took up rugby, which was mandatory at his new school. Initially, he did not enjoy the sport. But he warmed to it after winning the award for most improved player. He did strength and conditioning drills to add muscle, and arm wrestled with his father.
  • The night before the game, his son watched “Invictus,” the film about South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. He slept that night in his uniform. When his mother dropped him off at the field the next day, Benjamin flashed a thumbs-up sign.
  • But just minutes into the second half, Benjamin collided with another player, whose shoulder hit him in the chest, according to Mr. Robinson, who obtained a DVD of the match from the police. His son’s head whipped back, and he fell. The coach came to look at Benjamin, who was on the ground for about 90 seconds, and helped him to his feet. A doctor who was watching his son play for Dalriada briefly walked onto the field but then turned back.
  • As time ran down, Benjamin made a tackle and then collapsed. The game was stopped. Ms. Walton ran onto the field, where Benjamin’s teammate told her that he was out cold. He was rushed to Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.
  • When Mr. Robinson and his wife, Carol, arrived at the hospital, he knew the situation was dire from the faces of the staff. His son was on life support. The doctors said that his brain injury looked like it was sustained in a car accident and that he had a slim chance of surviving.
  • Initially, though, a police investigator deferred to the schools when it came to gathering comments from Benjamin’s teammates and opponents. Officials at Carrickfergus declined to discuss the case.
  • Ms. Walton and Mr. Robinson, though, had to piece together much of what happened on their own. One break came while Ms. Walton was visiting her son’s grave — which she said she did every day — and met one of his teammates, who was out jogging. He told her that Benjamin had been knocked out during the match, not just hit at the end, as had been contended.
  • The big break came when a police officer gave Mr. Robinson a copy of a video taken of the match by a student. Mr. Robinson watched the shaky footage repeatedly and confirmed that his son suffered not one big blow, but at least three, and that the coach attended to him several times.
  • Yet she effectively absolved the coach and referee, who were not “made aware of Benjamin’s neurological complaints,” even though the coach can be seen on the video checking on him after a hit during the match. She implied that Benjamin could have let them know about his condition, even though experts say concussion victims often cannot adequately communicate what they are experiencing.
  • Soon after, Mr. and Ms. Robinson, Dr. Stewart and James Robson, the chief medical officer of Scottish Rugby, met with Scotland’s sport and education officials to lobby for change. A concussion-awareness leaflet was produced at the beginning of 2014.
  • It has been an unlikely road for Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart, an avid bike rider with no experience as a sideline doctor. But about five years ago, even before Benjamin’s death, Dr. Stewart began to get calls from former professional players and had conversations with Scottish Rugby as it tried to address brain trauma and degenerative brain disease.
  • Still, some sports executives have anonymously challenged Dr. Stewart. In one match in April in London, Oscar, the Brazilian star player on Chelsea who is known by one name, collided violently with the goalkeeper yet was not immediately taken out of the game. There are no concussion spotters at Premier League matches, but team and league officials could watch a replay of the game later. That is why Dr. Stewart — an adviser to the Football Association — was dismayed that Oscar was in uniform three days later, violating the league’s return-to-play guidelines that require at least six days of rest.
  • “I don’t need to stand up in front of a conference of sports medicine and be personally criticized,” he said. “But then I’ll get a call from Peter, who is enthused about something we’ve done with the leaflets, or some research collaborators who are keen to move forward, and I say, ‘Ah, for all the small minds that are critical and obviously trying to deny the inevitable signs, there are a whole bunch of people who are having a positive effect on it.’
  • On a chilly evening in late October, with teenagers practicing on a nearby field, Lianne Brunton, the club’s physical therapist, showed off the test on a tablet computer. At the start of the season, hundreds of youth and adult players are timed as they read aloud a series of numbers on several screens. If a player is suspected of having a concussion during a match, he or she is taken off and asked to read the numbers again. Players who take longer are evaluated further.
  • The test, which is widely used in the United States, is another example of how the grass-roots campaign to improve safety standards after Benjamin’s death has changed attitudes.
redavistinnell

Senate scraps No Child Left Behind; education battle moves to states - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...o-child-left-behind-law-216595

senate child behind education battle moves states

shared by redavistinnell on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Senate scraps No Child Left Behind; education battle moves to states
  • The Senate sent a bill to the president’s desk Wednesday that replaces much of the widely disliked No Child Left Behind Act and shifts more power over education to states and school district
  • The bill — which the president is scheduled to sign Thursday — would dump the current law’s intense focus on test scores and the well-intentioned but impossible goal of having all students reading and calculating at grade level.
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  • The Every Student Succeeds Act (S.1177) allows states to set their own guidelines for rating schools and improving them, with federal oversight and restrictions.
  • The bill would “put education back in the hands of those who understand their needs best: parents, teachers, states and school boards,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday. “It’s conservative reform designed to help students succeed instead of helping Washington grow.”
  • Senate Republicans supported the bill, with the exception of a handful of conservatives including 2016 presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who don’t think it walks back the federal role in education far enough.
  • August 2016. States would have more than a year to shift to the new system, which would take hold starting in the 2017-18 school year.
  • For example, the department could place broad parameters on when a group of students would be considered “consistently” low-performing, signaling a need for intervention.
  • Since the bill returns power to states, advocates plan on waging state-by-state battles over education policy that were previously fought in Washington.
  • “With all of this wonderful flexibility comes great responsibility” for states, said Cheryl Oldham, vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is highlighting the need to continue to focus on minorities this week with a conference it is co-hosting with the NAACP on African-American student achievement.
  • Unions pushed all year to ditch No Child Left Behind’s embrace of testing, which they’ve dubbed a “test-and-punish” approach.
  • “This is a vast improvement over what we have right now.”
  • The Obama administration, too, has begun positioning itself for an intense new phase — designing regulations to implement the law.
  • Senators celebrated the bill’s passage, but the next steps already loom on the horizon. Senate HELP Committee ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pledged Tuesday to keep close watch on implementation now that the work in Congress is done.
Javier E

History News Network | This Is What Oliver Stone's Movie About Nixon Got Right - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...161187

nixon movie history politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • When a Hollywood filmmaker portrays a famous figure from the past, critics often express outrage over the portrayal. They denounce the filmmaker for taking too many artistic liberties and distorting the historical record. Oliver Stone came under that kind of attack in 1995 when he released Nixon, a dark and disturbing portrayal featuring actor Anthony Hopkins as President Richard M. Nixon.
  • In the years following Watergate, Richard Nixon worked assiduously to improve his public image. To a considerable degree, he succeeded in shaping a revised perspective on his place in history. By 1995, many Americans remembered Richard Nixon as the architect of bold foreign policies and as a surprisingly liberal leader in domestic affairs, exemplified by his support of environmental reforms.
  • In view of the late President’s improved standing since his embarrassing resignation, Oliver Stone’s movie struck many viewers as heavy-handed and disrespectful.
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  • So much information has come out since 1995 about Richard Nixon’s responsibility for criminal conspiracies, expanding death and destruction unnecessarily in the Vietnam War, and much more, that Rutgers historian David Greenberg concluded the new evidence renders “the pro-Nixon hagiography of yesteryear a musty artifact.
  • Several important books resulted, analyses that describe a duplicitous politician. Kenneth Hughes’s Chasing Shadows describes Nixon’s interference in President Lyndon Johnson’s negotiations with North Vietnam shortly before the 1968 presidential election. The Nixon Tapes, edited and discussed by Douglas Brinkley (Rice University) and Luke A. Nichter (Texas A & M University – Central Texas) shows diverse examples of mischief at the White House, and One Man Against the World by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner connects much of the President’s lying and criminal behavior to his struggles with the Vietnam War.
  • Some of the most intriguing evidence about Richard Nixon that fortifies Oliver Stone’s portrayal can be found in Bob Woodward’s recent book, The Last of the President’s Men. That publication is based on lengthy interviews with Alexander Butterfield, a Nixon aide
  • Butterfield characterizes the Nixon White House as “a cesspool.” He reports that the President encouraged sycophants to attack “enemies” (politicians, print and television journalists, and antiwar protesters, among others). Alexander Butterfield describes Nixon’s efforts to remove the “infestation” of portraits of John F. Kennedy in the staff’s offices (which backs up Stone’s speculation about the President’s obsession with the Kennedys). As for drinking and swearing, evidence from Butterfield and other sources indicates that the President was much more engaged in these excesses than biographer Stephen Ambrose recognized
  • Woodward said the recordings “depict a White House full of lies, chaos, distrust, speculation, self-protection, maneuver and counter-maneuver, with a crookedness that makes Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ look unsophisticated.”
johnsonma23

Robust Hiring in December Caps Solid Year for U.S. Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-unemployment-december.html

caps new york times economics

shared by johnsonma23 on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Robust Hiring in December Caps Solid Year for U.S. Jobs
  • In an impressive sprint at 2015’s end, employers added 292,000 workers to their payrolls in December
  • The unemployment rate stayed at 5 percent last month, the Labor Department said, but that was mostly because large numbers of people went looking for work.
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  • adding 50,000 more jobs to last year’s total
  • economy added 2.65 million jobs for the year, capping a two-year gain that was the best since the late 1990s.
  • The jobless rate, which has declined since topping the 10 percent mark in October 2009, continues to hover just above what economists consider full employment
  • Despite the improving job market, sluggish wage growth remains a persistent thorn
  • Wages remained flat in December
  • biggest question is whether overall growth will remain strong enough to keep hiring steady, or whether turmoil in China and elsewhere in the global economy will weigh on the United States economy
  • ertainly see the impact of global conditions in the manufacturing sector, where the strong dollar and weak commodities prices have diminished momentum substantially,”
  • The pain of a disappointing paycheck has been blunted by the continued decline in oil prices, which has lowered the cost of heating a home or filling up a car.
  • We’re getting at least 200,000 jobs per month on a consistent basis. That’s quite an achievement.”
  • The country’s economic fortunes will figure largely in this year’s presidential campaign
  • Republican candidates have attacked President Obama and other Democrats’ economic policie
  • Cautious optimism about the labor market contributed to the Federal Reserve’s decision a few weeks ago to raise interest rates from their near-zero levels
  • Mr. Chamberlain said worker benefits like paid parental leave and free catered lunches had significantly outpaced wage increases over the past decade.
  • “The remarkable thing is how consistent employment growth has been over the past three or four years
  • in addition to fundamental shifts in the economy, continuing slack in the labor market is partly responsible for the lack of improvement on wages
  • Employment in nonroutine occupations — both cognitive and manual — has been increasing steadily for several decades,
  • end of last year were the balmy temperatures in the Northeast and elsewhere. That clearly hurt retailers like Macy’s, which announced this week it was laying off 4,500 employees, largely because of a sharp decline in sales of coats and other winter wear,
  • The job hunting outlook varies significantly depending on the region of the country.
proudsa

Introducing Sleep + Wellness | Arianna Huffington - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...sleep--wellness_b_8834258.html

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Introducing Sleep + Wellness
  • no better time to put a spotlight on all the innovations in the world of sleep health. Technology has given us an unprecedented ability to learn more about ourselve
  • Sleep Number is known for its SleepIQ bed technology, with sensors that track and monitor your sleep and then offer suggestions to improve it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • . Scientists are confirming what our ancestors knew instinctively: that our sleep is not empty time.
  • , 43 percent of those polled said they've tracked their exercise workouts and 41 percent have tracked their diet.
  • Sleep + Wellness has already kicked off with a range of perspectives on sleep and how it can improve our lives.
Javier E

Uber Eats Is Killing the Sociable Restaurant Experience - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...577012

restaurant eating privacy public space

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Like so many in 18th-century Europe, the self-styled inventor of restaurants, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, believed that improving circulation—of food through people’s bodies or of money, goods, and information through society—would bring benefits to all
  • restaurants also promised new levels of personal service. Separate tables, flexible mealtimes, and menus distinguished dinner in a restaurant from the more collective, communitarian experience of an innkeeper’s or caterer’s table d’hôte.
  • By promising to restore circulation and facilitate personal well-being, restaurants offered both pleasure and profit: profit for the restaurateur, to be sure, but also for the individual customer and, by extension, for the public at large. Public benefits could come from private appetites.
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  • In his essay “On Refinement in the Arts,” the philosopher and historian David Hume traced a similar logic, positing that improvements in production (what we today call the Industrial Revolution) and ideas (the Enlightenment) would necessarily spur greater sociability. What was good for one was good for all. “The more these refined arts advance,” Hume wrote, “the more sociable men become … enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation … both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace … Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain.”
  • If brick-and-mortar restaurants become mere storefronts for delivery services, they will cease to be public spaces in any sense of the term. When dinner from a restaurant replaces dinner in a restaurant, we lose track of all the other people who are dining as well
  • this hyper-individualization of consumption may bring a new political revolution as well
  • The way we shop and eat now forms a feedback loop with the general discrediting of the idea of “public good”—and, with it, of public spaces and shared civility.
  • Cell phones, charter schools, the rhetoric of “taxpayer” dollars (as if the money, once paid, still belonged to those who paid it): all make for a political climate and lived reality where very little that is “public,” in the sense of shared and common, remains.
Javier E

Opinion | A Better Path to Universal Health Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...health-care-germany.html

universal health-care germany

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Germany offers a health insurance model that, like Canada’s, results in far less spending than in the United States, while achieving universal, comprehensive coverage
  • this model, pioneered by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883, was the first social health insurance system in the world. It has since been copied across Europe and Asia, becoming far more common than the Canadian single-payer model.
  • Germans are required to have health insurance, but they can choose between more than 100 private nonprofit insurers called “sickness funds.” Workers and employers share the cost of insurance through payroll taxes, while the government finances coverage for children and the unemployed.
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  • Insurance plans are not tied to employers. Services are funded through progressive taxation, so access is based on need, not ability to pay, and financial contributions are based on wealth, not health.
  • Contributions to sickness funds are centrally pooled and then allocated to individual insurers using a per-beneficiary formula that factors in differences in health risks.
  • Editors’ PicksYou Know the Lorena Bobbitt
  • The United States has the foundation for this kind of system. Its Social Security and Medicare systems use taxation to pay for social insurance policies, and the health care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act provide marketplaces for insurance policies.
  • In Germany, for example, insurers can charge only small out-of-pocket fees limited to 2 percent or less of household income annually
  • Compared with the mostly fee-for-service, single-payer arrangements in Canada or the Medicare system, enrolling Americans in managed care plans paid on a per-patient basis would offer greater incentives to increase efficiency, improve quality of care and promote coordination of care.
  • Under a German-style plan, states could still be given flexibility in regulating nonprofit insurers to reflect regional priorities, similar to the flexibility offered to states in managing Medicaid and the A.C.A. exchanges.
  • Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and other countries with similar systems vastly underspend the United States.
  • Americans may be concerned that lower spending reflects rationing of care, but research has consistently found that not to be the case
  • Administrative and governance costs in multipayer systems are higher than in single-payer systems — 5 percent of health spending in Germany compared with 3 percent in Canada.
  • While recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans support so-called Medicare for all, approval diminishes when the plan is explained or clarified.
  • Americans have long valued choice and competition in their health care. The German model offers both: Patients choose private insurers that compete for enrollees, in the process driving innovation and improving quality.
  • Advocates and policymakers should pick carefully among these paths, choosing one that strikes a balance between what is possible and what is ideal for the United States health system
  • While the single-payer model serves Canada well, transitioning the United States to a multipayer model like Germany’s would require a far smaller leap. And that might encourage Americans to finally make the jump
knudsenlu

The Missing Piece in Italian Politics: Women - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555260

italian politics history culture

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • I lived in Rome for many years but moved away in 2013. Maybe I’ve changed since then, maybe it’s the #MeToo moment, but coming back to Italy this time, what struck me most wasn’t the political chaos, the populism, the dysfunction, or even the beauty, since a person can get used to all that. It was the fact that there were barely any women playing leading roles in the election coverage.
  • As the returns came in, the main talk shows had all-male panels of experts. Some of the reporters in the field were women, and some of the interviewers, too. But men dominated the debate.
  • Is it really possible that in a country of 60 million people, there were barely any women weighing in on the results on the front pages of the country’s most prominent newspapers, and barely any woman there with regular political columns?
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  • I recently interviewed Sofia Ventura, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, about Silvio Berlusconi, and whether the image of women had improved in Italy since he had left power, after shaping a culture of trashy television. “The image of women hasn’t really improved in Italy. It’s still rare to find women who have authoritative roles in the media and political system. On the contrary, things have gone backwards,” she told me. “The evening talk shows are frightening,” she continued. “When they discuss politics and call on an authoritative voice, women are never called on.”
  • The #MeToo movement barely caught on in Italy, except coverage of developments in the States. Women were afraid to come forward in Italy for fear of being humiliated, excoriated, or sued for defamation. In the States, the #MeToo movement took off “because there was already a culture that allowed these people to be heard with respect,” the novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano told me. “Here, we’re so far behind that we still need to build that.”
  • In every country where populists have won, including the United States, it’s been followed by soul-searching about the role of the press in a democracy. Maybe it’s time for Italy to have the same debate.
Javier E

Steven Pinker Thinks the Future Is Looking Bright - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ven-pinker-future-science.html

future progress enlightenment science

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • What’s behind all this good news?The most overarching explanation would be that the Enlightenment worked. The idea that if we — we being humanity — set ourselves the goal of improving well-being, if we try to figure out how the world works using reason and science, every once in a while we can succeed.
  • You have argued that there is such a thing as human nature. Do you think we can transcend it?Part of human nature allows us to control the other part of our human nature. Even though humans tend to be unreasonable, it can’t be the case that we’re incapable of reason — otherwise, you’d never be able to make the argument that we’re being unreasonable. Even if we tend to backslide to irrationality, that doesn’t mean we should indulge that when we are deliberating how to run a society.
  • I was surprised by how much interest there’s been from centrist politicians, who are desperate for a coherent narrative to defend centrist liberalism, cosmopolitanism, open society, from the threats both by populists and by the hard left. I think there is a hunger for a coherent worldview that isn’t just the status quo, the un-Trumpism. We can do better than that. We ought to use reason and science to enhance human well-being.
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  • The value of science is not the value of a bunch of people who call themselves scientists. It’s the concept. It’s also the value of science that tells us when there’s been a failure of reasoning, that identifies the biases and distortions and also points the way to overcome them.
  • So, we need institutions like government to keep us acting rationally?None of us is anywhere close to perfect. Scientists themselves are not terribly, not completely rational. We can set up institutions that result in greater rationality than any of us is capable of individually, like peer review, like free speech, like a free press, like empirical testing — norms and institutions that make us collectively more rational than any of us is individually.
  • Why do you think people continue to hold on to demonstrably unscientific beliefs?It looks like the biggest reason is not because they don’t know the science, but because of their political ideology. The reason that people deny human-made climate change is not that they’re ignorant of climate science, but because they’re on the political right. Conversely, people who accept human-made climate change don’t necessarily understand what’s causing it
  • My own view of the world was radically altered when I looked at data instead of headlines.If history is about all the wars, all the disasters, you’re missing all this incremental improvement that can only be ascertained through data
malonema1

New alarm among Republicans that Democrats could win big this year - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html

US politics

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A raft of retirements, difficulty recruiting candidates and President Trump’s continuing pattern of throwing his party off message have prompted new alarm among Republicans that they could be facing a Democratic electoral wave in November.
  • But the trends have continued, and perhaps worsened, since that briefing, with two more prominent Republican House members announcing plans to retire from vulnerable seats and a would-be recruit begging off a Senate challenge to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota despite pressure from Trump to run.
  • In the Camp David presentation, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) described scenarios to the president ranging from a bloodbath where Republicans lost the House “and lost it big,” in the words of one official, to an outcome in which they keep control while losing some seats. McCarthy outlined trends over recent decades for parties in power and spotlighted vulnerable Republican seats where Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Eight years ago, before the 2010 midterms swept the GOP to power, he had drafted a similar presentation with the opposite message for his party. Republicans hold the advantage of a historically favorable electoral map, with more House seats than ever benefiting from Republican-friendly redistricting and a Senate landscape that puts 26 Democratic seats in play, including 10 states that Trump won in 2016, and only eight Republican seats.
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  • At least 29 House seats held by Republicans will be open in November following announced retirements, a greater number for the majority party than in each of the past three midterm elections when control of Congress flipped.
  • Who knows what 2018 will be like? Nobody called 2016, right?” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the second-ranking Republican in that chamber. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to get elected and that Chuck Schumer was going to be the majority leader. And none of that turned out to be true.”
  • In private conversations, Trump has told advisers that he doesn’t think the 2018 election has to be as bad as others are predicting. He has referenced the 2002 midterms, when George W. Bush and Republicans fared better after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, these people said.
  • Trump continually reminds advisers that he remains popular in a number of states, including West Virginia, Montana and North Dakota, according to aides. But slow fundraising and anemic candidate recruitment have caused tensions between the White House and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, White House advisers said. Still, two people with direct knowledge of that relationship said it has improved considerably in recent months. One person said “there is an active effort to professionalize the operation,” and “coordination has improved.”
  • White House officials said they expect a full plunge in upcoming weeks into a special House race in Pennsylvania, with trips from Trump, Vice President Pence and Cabinet members. The race has taken on a larger-than-life role in the White House because officials want to stem the tide of the losses they suffered last year in Virginia and Alabama.
  • But maintaining that message can be a challenge, as the president showed this week when his vulgar comments about some developing countries sparked international outrage. Dave Hansen, a political adviser to Love, the Utah congresswoman, said such conflicts are unavoidable during the Trump presidency. “It’s certainly not like running with Ronald Reagan, that’s for sure,” Hansen said. “What a candidate has to do in a situation like this is, you can’t be all in for the guy. Basically, you support him when you think he’s right and oppose him when you think he’s wrong.”
manhefnawi

Napoleon III, Lord Palmerston and the Entente Cordiale | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...almerston-and-entente-cordiale

Napoleon III France Britain Political Relationships

shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • In July 1830, the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in France ousted Charles X and the Second Bourbon Restoration, and a new era in Anglo-French relations ensued. The terms set down at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 following Napoleon’s defeat were now considered academic. Britain, as victor against France, had been obliged to uphold the articles of the various treaties, designed, as one of them stated, for the purpose of ‘maintaining the order of things re-established in France’. The quasi-constitutional Orleans monarchy of Charles X’s successor Louis-Philippe was therefore recognised by Britain
  • In a diplomatic dispatch of 1832, Lord Granville, British ambassador in Paris, noted that Perier, then president of the Council, believed that ‘the welfare of France and England and the peace of Europe depended upon an intimate alliance and concert between the two governments’
  • By 1848, once more heading foreign affairs (June 1846 to December 1851), the ‘Jupiter Anglicanus of the Foreign Office’ allowed Anglo-French relations to sink to a level not witnessed since 1814. He had orchestrated the creation of Belgium in 1831, a supposedly neutral country but one which would naturally  be pro-British and often anti-French
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  • Five years later he had attempted to manipulate the outcome of the marriage of Isabella II of Spain against French interests in order to align Britain with a liberal Spain
  • In February 1848, a new revolution in Paris threatened to upset Anglo-French relations altogether
  • he Second Republic was therefore seen as unstable and potentially militaristic, and Palmerston’s reaction was to issue a confidential  paper outlining government preparations for an imminent invasion of Britain
  • There was considerable relief in London, then, when in October the political body in France agreed to usher in a republic under the authority of a president elected for four years by universal adult manhood suffrage. The future of Anglo-French relations would now hinge  on the identity of the new president
  • In December, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the great defeated enemy of England, was elected first president of the Second Republic, gaining 74.3 per cent of the 7,449,471 votes cast in metropolitan France
  • In Britain, initial reaction to the news was mixed. Louis-Napoléon had spent three years in exile in England between 1831 and 1848, and over five separate visits had acquired a respect for, and knowledge of, the country unrivalled among European heads of state
  • The sepoy revolt in India in May 1857 could hardly be blamed on Napoleon III, but in some quarters the suggestion was made that he was secretly helping them. A short visit to Osborne in August to meet the Queen and Palmerston put the matter straight (though none there had believed it).
  • When the French navy was not seen to be steaming up the Thames the panic dissipated, but the fears were resurrected after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 2nd, 1851, dissolving the National Assembly and declaring a new constitution. Opinion polarised both in France and Britain; on the one hand Louis-Napoléon was declared a ‘saviour of society’ and on the other the ‘Antichrist’
  • even the Queen hoped that Louis-Napoléon’s enemies abroad would remain ‘perfectly passive’. But the press and its public were united in bitter condemnation. By January 1852, the poet Coventry Patmore had persuaded nineteen friends to form the first Rifle Club as part of a nation-wide army of volunteers to repel, as he put it later, ‘the threats of the French colonels and by suspicions of the intentions of Louis-Napoléon
  • The second invasion panic did not subside until a formal alliance was established in March 1854, preceding the Crimean War. In April 1855 the Emperor Napoleon III (as Louis-Napoléon had declared himself in December 1852) enjoyed a successful state visit to Britain, reciprocated by an equally successful visit by Victoria to Paris in August. Throughout the Crimean War, Napoleon III allowed Britain to lead affairs
  • personal relations between Palmerston and Napoleon III continued to deteriorate throughout the early 1860s
  • The incident most dangerous to Franco-British relations occurred on January 14th, 1858, when an attempt was made to assassinate Napoleon III in the streets of Paris, the plot hatched in London by political refugees
  • But popular opinion in England remained suspicious of the Second Republic, and the economic upturn was accompanied by the first of three intense ‘invasion panics’, which recalled to mind those set in motion many years earlier by Napoleon I
  • Outright war between France and England might have resulted had two different players been involved: Napoleon III apologised to Lord Cowley, Britain’s ambassador in Paris, for having overlooked the jingoistic pronouncements in Le Moniteur universel, while Palmerston attempted to introduce a Conspiracy Bill, which would have elevated the crime of conspiring to murder persons abroad from a misdemeanour to a felony.
  • To Napoleon III from Queen Victoria’ promised to him in 1855 but somehow ‘forgotten’. The entente had been saved by an imperial whisker
  • In the wake of the assassination attempt Napoleon III was keen to demonstrate that his improvements to the naval base at Cherbourg were not a threat to Britain, and in August 1858 he invited Victoria and Albert, several politicians and naval men, to inspect them as a mark of trust.
  • The third invasion panic, the following year, originated in Napoleon III’s military attempt in May 1859 to oust Habsburg influence in Italy and prepare the peninsula for some form of unification and self-government
  • France’s annexation of Nice and Savoy in 1860 as a reward from Piedmont-Sardinia following the war in Italy was wholeheartedly approved by the local populace in a referendum
  • Napoleon III’s attempt to set up by direct intervention a European monarchy in Mexico from October 1861 (when a French, Spanish and British naval fleet worked in concert to extract the payment of debts from a corrupt Mexican administration) was approved by Palmerston but again vigorously opposed by Albert and all the royal family – and was unpopular in Britain, although offset by several other actions. Napoleon III’s vigorous support of free trade resulted in the pioneering Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 which, while it undoubtedly harmed a minority of trades, vastly improved the majority, increasing prosperity and mutual trust
  • Napoleon III was careful to appear subservient, enabling Palmerston to acknowledge that the British ‘throughout had their own way and ... led the way’
  • The Duruz were the aggressors in this instance, and thousands of Christians were killed during a period resolved only through French diplomacy, Turkish aid and Algerian sympathy
  • Napoleon III reacted by sighing that once he used to say ‘avec Lord Palmerston on peut faire les grandes choses’ but now he seemed determined to prevent him doing anything at all
  • The most bizarre was that Napoleon III was looking for the nephew of Marie Cantillon, a man who had attempted to assassinate the Duke of Wellington in Paris in 1818, to pay him money Napoléon I had bequeathed Cantillon in his recently published will
  • Napoleon III’s attempt to set up a European monarchy in Mexico was his only independent action undertaken in the 1860s to meet with Palmerston’s general approval, but only for what the scheme potentially meant for British trade
  • Following military defeat by Prussia and deposition by Parisian ideologues in 1870, Napoleon III died in England on January 9th, 1873.
  • Gladstone soon came to terms with the new Third French Republic, and the rest of Europe again took Britain’s lead in officially recognising the new French regime
  • The Napoleonic wars did not end at Waterloo, but in Paris in the hands of Napoleon III. Punch stated why on January 18th, 1873
Javier E

What if there was a miracle treatment for world poverty? It might already exist. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...poverty-it-might-already-exist

poverty world treatment cash policy

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Study after study shows cash improves the lives of the poorest with next to no negative side effects.
  • A recent review of 19 separate studies shows that, despite early fears, cash transfers very seldom increase spending on temptation goods like alcohol or gambling. Nor do they induce people to work fewer hours.
  • The mechanisms through which cash achieves these results aren’t clear, but one study in Kenya finds important reductions in the stress hormone cortisol in some groups who receive cash transfers. These are accompanied by large improvements in self-reported psychological well-being, with larger transfers associated with bigger effects.
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  • Direct cash aid is also amazingly cost-efficient. A 2016 study by Innovations for Poverty Action looked at 48 separate anti-poverty programs and found that one-time cash transfers have the highest cost-benefit ratio compared to a range of other anti-poverty measures
  • So why aren’t cash transfers being used more widely? Perversely, their own cost effectiveness might be part of the reason
  • As many as 94 cents of every donor dollar spent on direct transfers to the extreme poor reach them directly
  • a sprawling international aid bureaucracy — which, like all bureaucracies — feels threatened by newer, cheaper, more effective ways of delivering its mandate.
  • For the last decade, one small aid organization — GiveDirectly — has worked out all the kinks, documented results and proved the idea can work at scale.
Javier E

No, radical policies won't drive election-winning turnout - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html

radical policies turnout election campaign history politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • No myth is stronger in progressive circles than the magical, wonderworking powers of voter turnout. It’s become a sort of pixie dust that you sprinkle over your strenuously progressive positions to ward off any suggestion that they might turn off voters.
  • Sanders’s explanation of why this is not a problem is simple, and he has repeated it endlessly. When a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked him whether “a candidate as far to the left as you” would “alienate swing voters and moderates and independents,” the senator replied: “The only way that you beat Trump is by having an unprecedented campaign, an unprecedentedly large voter turnout.”
  • Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, adds: “Bernie Sanders has very unique appeal amongst [the younger] generation and can inspire, I think, a bunch of them to vote in percentages that they have never voted before.”
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  • This has remarkably little empirical support. Take the 2018 midterm elections, in which the Democrats took back the House (a net 40-seat gain), carried the House popular vote by almost nine points and flipped seven Republican-held governorships. Turnout in that election was outstanding, topping 49 percent — the highest midterm turnout since 1914 and up 13 points over the previous midterm, in 2014 — and the demographic composition of the electorate came remarkably close to that of a presidential election year
  • Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of the Democrats’ improved performance came not from fresh turnout of left-of-center voters, who typically skip midterms, but rather from people who cast votes in both elections — yet switched from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2018
  • 89 percent of the Democrats’ improved performance came from persuasion — from vote-switchers — not turnout. In its analysis, Catalist notes, “If turnout was the only factor, then Democrats would not have seen nearly the gains that they ended up seeing … a big piece of Democratic victory was due to 2016 Trump voters turning around and voting for Democrats in 2018.”
  • Democrats in 2018, especially the successful ones, did not run on particularly radical programs but rather on opposition to Trump himself, and to unpopular GOP actions on economic policy and health care (tax cuts for the rich and efforts to repeal Obamacare’s protections, for example)
  • the 2018 results do not support Sanders’s theories — not the central importance of high turnout, nor the supposed non-importance of changing mainstream voters’ minds, nor the most effective issues to run on.
  • an analysis using data from the States of Change project, sponsored by, among others, the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress, indicates that, even if black turnout in the 2016 election had matched that of 2012 (it dropped from 62 to 57 percent), Clinton would have still lost. On the other hand, if she had managed to reduce her losses among white noncollege voters by a mere one-quarter, she’d be president today. That’s an issue of persuasion, not turnout.
  • States of Change data does not suggest that youth turnout, which Sanders promises to increase so significantly, was a particular Democratic problem in 2016. In fact, young voters (ages 18 to 29) increased their turnout more than any other age group in that election, from 42 percent in 2012 to 44 percent in 2016. They also increased — if only slightly — their margin of support for the Democratic candidate
  • In 2016, the age cohort that really killed Democrats was voters ages 45 to 64, who had split evenly in 2012 but leaned Republican by six percentage points four years later.
  • after scrutinizing the data, it’s a mistake to assume that Democrats would benefit disproportionately from high turnout. Trump is particularly strong among white noncollege voters, who dominate the pool of nonvoters in many areas of the country, including in key Rust Belt states. If the 2020 election indeed has historically high turnout, as many analysts expect, that spike could include many of these white noncollege voters in addition to Democratic-leaning constituencies such as nonwhites and young voters. The result could be an increase in Democrats’ popular-vote total — and another loss in the electoral college.
  • This analysis shreds an implicit assumption of Sanders and other members of the turnout-will-solve-everything crowd: that if they polarize the election by highlighting progressive issues, “their” nonvoters will show up at the polls, but none of the nonvoters from the other side will
  • Stanford political scientists Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson, for example, studied House races between 2006 and 2014 and found that highly ideological candidates who beat moderates for a party nomination indeed increased turnout in their own party in the general election — but they increased the opposition turnout even more. (The difference was between three and eight percentage points.) Apparently, their extreme political stances did more to turn out the other side to vote against them than to turn out their own side to vote for them.
johnsonel7

Campaign live updates: Democrats jockey for support ahead of S.C. primary - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...democratic-debate

Democratic debate 2020 campaign politics

shared by johnsonel7 on 27 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The Democratic presidential candidates jockeyed for position in South Carolina on Wednesday after a contentious debate the night before in Charleston in which they sparred over key policy areas including health-care costs, gun control and foreign affairs in a testy debate — and talked over one another a lot
  • Seven Democrats took the stage for the 10th Democratic debate: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); former vice president Joe Biden; former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.); Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.); investor Tom Steyer; and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. Several candidates attacked Sanders for the costs of his health-care proposals, and others squared off with Bloomberg over a range of policy matters, including his massive wealth.
  • Rep. Clyburn endorses Biden, offering a boost ahead of S.C. primarySanders takes fire in an unruly debate that left no candidate truly enhanced
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  • Bernie Sanders refuses to get bogged down – or pinned down – on specifics during Democratic debate
  • Bloomberg improves from his last debate — but is it enough?
Javier E

iHeartMedia laid off hundreds of radio DJs. Is AI to blame? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...io-artificial-intelligence-djs

automation radio media robot culture communications

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • When iHeartMedia announced this month it would fire hundreds of workers across the country, the radio conglomerate said the restructuring was critical to take advantage of its “significant investments … in technology and artificial intelligence.” In a companywide email, chief executive Bob Pittman said the “employee dislocation” was “the unfortunate price we pay to modernize the company.
  • But laid-off employees like D’Edwin “Big Kosh” Walton, who made $12 an hour as an on-air personality for the Columbus, Ohio, hip-hop station 106.7 the Beat, don’t buy it. Walton doesn’t blame the cuts on a computer; he blames them on the company’s top executives, whose “coldblooded, calculated move” cost people their jobs.
  • It “ripped my [expletive] heart out,” Walton said. “The people at the top don’t know who we are at the bottom. They don’t understand the relationships and the connections we had with the communities. And that’s the worst part: They don’t care.”
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  • The dominant player in U.S. radio, which owns the online music service iHeartRadio and more than 850 local stations across the United States, has called AI the muscle it needs to fend off rivals, recapture listeners and emerge from bankruptcy
  • The company, which now uses software to schedule music, analyze research and mix songs, plans to consolidate offices around what executives call “AI-enabled Centers of Excellence.”
  • The company’s shift seems in line with a corporate America that is increasingly embracing automation, using technological advances to take over tasks once done by people, boosting profits and cutting costs
  • While the job cuts may sound “inhumane,” she added, they made sense from a Wall Street perspective, given the company’s need to trim costs and improve its profit margins.
  • “This is a typical example of a dying industry that is blaming technology for something that is just absolutely a reduction in force,”
  • iHeartRadio spokeswoman Wendy Goldberg declined to make executives available for comment or provide a total layoff count, saying only that the job cuts were “relatively small” compared with the company’s overall workforce of 12,500 employees
  • Del Colliano estimated that more than 1,000 people would lose their jobs nationwide.
  • iHeartMedia was shifting “jobs to the future from the past,” adding data scientists, podcast producers and other digital teams to help transform the radio broadcaster into a “multiplatform” creator and “America’s #1 audio company.
  • the long-running medium remains a huge business. In November, iHeartMedia reported it took in more than $1.6 billion in broadcast-radio revenue during the first nine months of 2019, and company filings claim that a quarter of a billion listeners still tune in every month to discover new music, catch up on the news or hear from their local DJs.
  • Executives at the Texas-based company have long touted human DJs as their biggest competitive strength, saying in federal securities filings last year that the company was in the “companionship” business because listeners build a “trusted bond and strong relationship” with the on-air personalities they hear every day.
  • The system can transition in real time between songs by layering in music, sound effects, voice-over snippets and ads, delivering the style of smooth, seamless playback that has long been the human DJ’s trade.
  • its “computational music presentation” AI can help erase the seconds-long gaps between songs that can lead to “a loss of energy, lack of continuity and disquieting sterility.”
  • One song wove cleanly into the other through an automated mix of booming sound effects, background music, interview sound bites and station-branding shout-outs (“Super Hi-Fi: Recommended by God”). The smooth transition might have taken a DJ a few minutes to prepare; the computer completed it in a matter of seconds
  • Much of the initial training for these delicate transitions comes from humans, who prerecord voice-overs, select songs, edit audio clips, and classify music by genre, style and mood. Zalon said the machine-learning system has been further refined by iHeartMedia’s human DJs, who have helped identify clumsy transitions and room for future improvements.
  • “To have radio DJs across the country that really care about song transitions and are listening to find everything wrong, that was awesome,” Zalon said. “It gave us hundreds of the world’s best ears. … They almost unwittingly became kind of like our QA [quality assurance] team.”
  • he expects that, in a few years, computer-generated voices could automatically read off the news, tee up interviews and introduce songs, potentially supplanting humans even more. The software performed 315 million musical transitions for listeners in January alone.
  • The company’s chief product officer, Chris Williams, said last year in an interview with the industry news site RadioWorld that “virtual DJs” that could seamlessly interweave chatter, music and ads were “absolutely” coming, and “something we are always thinking about.”
  • That has allowed the company, she said, to free up programming people for more creative pursuits, “embedding our radio stations into the communities and lives of our listeners better and deeper than they have been before.”
  • In 2008, to gain control of the radio and billboard titan then known as Clear Channel, the private-equity firms Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners staged a leveraged buyout, weighing the company down with a mountain of borrowed cash they needed to seal the deal.
  • The audacious move left the radio giant saddled with more than $20 billion in debt, just as the Great Recession kicked off and radio’s strengths began to rust. The debt would kneecap the company for the next decade, forcing it to pay more toward interest payments some years than it earned in revenue.
  • In the year the company filed for bankruptcy, Pittman, the company’s chief and a former head of MTV and AOL, was paid roughly $13 million in salary and bonus pay, nearly three times what he made in 2016
  • The company’s push to shrink and subsume local stations was also made possible by deregulation. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission ditched a rule requiring radio stations to maintain a studio near where they were broadcasting. Local DJs have since been further replaced by prerecorded substitutes, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.
  • Ashley “Z” Elzinga, a former on-air personality for 95.6 KISS FM in Cleveland, said she was upbeat about the future but frustrated that the company had said the layoffs touched only a “relatively small” slice of its workforce. “I gave my life to this,” she said. “I moved my life, moved my family.
  • Since the layoffs, they’ve been inundated with messages from listeners who said they couldn’t imagine their daily lives without them. They said they don’t expect a computer-generated system will satisfy listeners or fill that void.
  • “It was something I was really looking forward to making a future out of. And in the blink of an eye, all of that stopped for me,” he said. “That’s the painful part. They just killed what I thought was the future for me.”
Javier E

How the Coronavirus Will Change Young People's Lives - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609862

social effects pandemic crisis culture politics financial youths Generation C

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
  • With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.
  • “Epidemics are really bad for economies,”
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  • “We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”
  • People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help
  • To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.
  • Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.
  • investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.
  • Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
  • Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.
  • Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.
  • American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,
  • The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.
  • Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
  • as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.
  • there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.
  • those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.
  • Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.
  • there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.
  • What will become of Generation C?
  • Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.
  • “People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”
  • Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.
  • Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others
  • Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.
  • in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.
  • For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
  • This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward
  • When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game
  • the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
  • “There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”
  • The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.
  • Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”
  • a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.
  • the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.
  • But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
  • Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.
  • As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know
Javier E

Government Needs to Get Its Coronavirus Message Straight - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-message-straight-11585694702

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Eight hours after President Trump made his off-the-cuff remarks about an “enforced” quarantine for the region, he walked them back. But the episode is illustrativ
  • They have been holed up at home, waiting patiently for public officials to explain what exactly is going on and when the situation will improve.
  • At a time when it has never been easier to communicate with the public, and perhaps never more important to do so, the people in charge of addressing the coronavirus crisis seem incapable of speaking with anything close to a united voice
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  • People want to feel safe. They expect those in charge to be competent and working in unison, even in an election year. And they want to know how to tell when we’ve turned a corner. Will it be a decline in the infection rate? The hospitalization rate? The mortality rate?
  • Why can’t our public officials—with a few exceptions—spell out these answers with any clarity or consistency?
  • How tough can it be for the politicians and their public health advisers to get on the same page before sounding off on, say, the promise and efficacy of repurposing antimalarial drugs to fight the pandemic?
  • Can’t the president and the governors consult on major announcements in private before they go public in a manner that sends residents of three states into a panic? And must officials lay bare their differences each evening on cable news?
  • We can’t even get a straight answer from the government on whether we should be covering our faces in public
  • it would help tremendously if the White House and its public-health experts could improve their messaging. We’re already on pins and needles. Don’t make it worse. In the short run, beating back the virus will require hundreds of millions of Americans to engage in certain unusual behaviors voluntarily. And the element of trust goes a long way toward getting people to cooperate.
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