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Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses.

Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills

poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.

An estimated 100 million Americans have medical debts. Their bills make up about half of all outstanding debt in the country.

About 20 percent of hospitals nationwide have debt-collection policies that allow them to cancel care, according to an investigation last year by KFF Health News. Many of those are nonprofits. The government does not track how often hospitals withhold care

Under federal law, hospitals are required to treat everyone who comes to the emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. But the law — called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — is silent on how health systems should treat patients who need other kinds of lifesaving care, like those with aggressive cancers or diabetes.

perhaps we could consider what this means about the larger moment. That is indeed what liberatory politics amount to, now: a joke. It’s a LARP, cosplay, kayfabe. Self-parody. The theater of the absurd. A pastime, a shared bit of gallows humor. Nobody believes in the capacity for actual liberation, in any meaningful sense. It resides entirely in the world of wistful humor. People are defensive about the orcas because they have no actual movement to be defensive about.

Though we still live in the same world of rabidly emotional politics, the notion that the unrest of 2020 might lead to lasting material change is now so quaint as to be actively embarrassing.

BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a font of petty corruption and chronic mismanagement of funds, while the organic energy it cultivated three years ago has been dispersed into a series of nonprofit jobs and elite college scholarships, into diversity statements and language codes, which obviously don’t threaten the edifice of racial inequality

One of the most striking positive trends in the world these days can be found in the democratic strength, character and leadership of Germany.

This came to mind as I was reading German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s speech this week in Prague, in which he promised that his country would support Ukraine “reliably and for as long as it takes.” He explained that Germany had “undergone a fundamental change” on providing military aid to Ukraine. He affirmed Germany’s support for a stronger, more integrated Europe — one that would welcome new members that aspire to Europe’s democratic values and ideals.

This is all part of what he calls a Zeitenwende in German foreign policy, a “turning of the times.”

hen Prime was introduced, in 2005, Amazon was relatively small, and still known mostly for books. As the company’s former director of ordering, Vijay Ravindran, told Recode’s Jason Del Rey in 2019, Prime “was brilliant. It made Amazon the default.”

It created incentives for users to be loyal to Amazon, so they could recoup the cost of membership, then $79 for unlimited two-day shipping. It also enabled Amazon to better track the products they buy and, when video streaming was added as a perk in 2011, the shows they watch, in order to make more things that the data indicated people would want to buy and watch, and to surface the things they were most likely to buy and watch at the very top of the page.

And most important, Prime habituated consumers to a degree of convenience, speed, and selection that, while unheard-of just years before, was made standard virtually overnight.

The shift to thrift is a worrying sign for China’s leaders, who need people to spend more. To stimulate growth, policymakers are banking on an increase in domestic consumption as an alternative to the boom-or-bust cycle of infrastructure spending and real estate investment that has left local governments and developers awash in debt.

“Chinese people actually don’t have a lot of money in their pockets, so the policy of relying on people’s consumption to promote China’s economy hasn’t been successful,” said He-Ling Shi, an associate economics professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “With people cutting back on spending, it’s even less likely to succeed.”

Instead of buying coffee at Starbucks, Ms. Chen said, she chooses between Luckin and Cotti based on “whichever is cheaper.” She used to use an expensive Japanese skin toner, but she switched to a Chinese brand that is 90 percent cheaper. She also stopped shopping at Victoria’s Secret for bras and underwear, choosing a no-name brand that costs $3 each.

Income is one vital indicator of well-being, but it is not the only one: Things like health outcomes and social mobility matter too.

we should shift our focus from poverty to disadvantage. Disadvantage is a more useful term than poverty because we aren’t just talking about income—we’re trying to capture the complexity of a person’s life chances being hindered by multiple circumstances

Disadvantage is more accurate because it implies an injustice. People are being held back—unfairly.

Health care

before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.

Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.

Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 

When it comes to the future, Elon Musk’s best-case scenario for humanity sounds a lot like Sci-Fi Socialism.

“We will be in an age of abundance,” Musk said this month.

Sunak said he believes the act of work gives meaning, and had some concerns about Musk’s prediction. “I think work is a good thing, it gives people purpose in their lives,” Sunak told Musk. “And if you then remove a large chunk of that, what does that mean?”

Now, the tone used to discuss the United States has suddenly shifted

Xinhua, the state news agency, on Monday published a lengthy article in English about the “enduring strength” of Mr. Xi’s affection for ordinary American

“More delightful moments unfolded when Xi showed up to watch an N.B.A. game,” the article continued, describing a visit by Mr. Xi to the United States in 2012. “He remained remarkably focused on the game.”

Zoning, NIMBYism and regulations — “all those things matter” when you’re trying to build housing, Herbert said. But land scarcity is the most important.

So what’s happening now “is a lot more infill of single-family housing in closer-in communities, where you’re not going to have room for large-scale developments and where the land is going to be worth a lot more,” Herbert said. Single-family land scarcity, he said, “has been a big factor keeping the supply down.”

In a blockbuster 2010 paper, Albert Saiz, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzed satellite data to estimate how much land was actually available for development within a 50-kilometer (31-mile) radius of each major U.S. city. He found that available land, when combined with measures of land-use regulation, could go “very far to explain the evolution of prices” from 1970 to 2000.

The mission of a for-profit company is, well, profit, the greatest return for investors. That’s the profound ethical crisis at the heart of artificial general intelligence development (“Capitalism Works, Says ChatGPT” by Holman Jenkins, Jr., Business World, Nov. 22).

it can sound naive to say that AI “won’t soon replace the human knack for synthesizing the most valuable insight from a welter of facts.” This seems to be exactly the goal of many transhumanists and the global elite. The speed at which this technology is developing means that it could be a dream or a nightmare in five years. If the controlling factor is mere profit, look for the nightmare.

One reason that the idea of free trade has fallen out of fashion in recent years is the perception that trade agreements reflect the wishes of big American corporations, at everybody else’s expense.

U.S. officials fought for trade agreements that protect intellectual property — and drug companies got the chance to extend the life of patents, raising the price of medicine around the world. U.S. officials fought for investor protections — and mining companies got the right to sue for billions in “lost profit” if a country moved to protect its drinking water or the Amazon ecosystem. And for years, U.S. officials have fought for digital trade rules that allow data to move freely across national borders — prompting fears that the world’s most powerful tech companies would use those rules to stay ahead of competitors and shield themselves from regulations aimed at protecting consumers and privacy.

That’s why the Biden administration, which came into office promising to fight for trade agreements that better reflect the interests of ordinary people, has dropped its advocacy for tech-friendly digital trade rules that American officials have championed for more than a decade.

Recycling has been called a myth and beyond fixing as we’ve learned that recyclables are being shipped overseas and dumped (true), are leaching toxic chemicals and microplastics (true) and are being used by Big Oil to mislead consumers about the problems with plastics.

Recycling is real. I’ve seen it. For the past four years, I’ve traveled the world writing a book about the waste industry, visiting paper mills and e-waste shredders and bottle plants. I’ve visited all kinds of plastics recycling facilities, from gleaming new factories in Britain to smoky, flake-filled shredding operations in India

While I’ve seen how recycling has become inseparable from corporate greenwashing, we shouldn’t be so quick to cast it aside. In the short term, at least, it might be the best option we have against our growing waste crisis.

Several factors may explain the phenomenon, analysts say. “We really should be careful about assuming a cultural or ideological alignment between young voters and the far right,”

“We know in many countries young people are more pro-immigration than older voters. They have not become xenophobic. But their lives are more precarious. These are often votes for what in this Dutch election was called ‘livelihood security’.”

The Dutch word bestaanszekerheid translates roughly as an existence with a sufficient and predictable income, a satisfactory home, adequate access to education and healthcare, and a cushion against unexpected eventualities.

Germany occupies a special place in the international imagination. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the difficulties of reunification, the country acquired a reputation as a leader of the free world. Economically prosperous, politically stable and more welcoming to immigrants than most other countries, the Germans — many thought — had really learned their lesson.

The past few months have been a bit of a rude awakening. The economy is stuttering and a constitutional court ruling has upended the government’s spending plans

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, fresh from success in two regional elections, is cementing itself as the country’s second-most-popular party.

“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.

Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”

what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind

, anti-“woke” backlash and high-profile politics are increasingly making the suggestion of owning an EV a political cudgel. Or, as Ford Motor Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley recently lamented: “They have become a political football.” 

President Biden’s support of the transition, through subsidizing manufacturing, extending tax credits for EVs and giving money for charging stations, has come under attack from Republican rivals seeking to challenge him for the White House next year. 

As the Democrat talks about trying to protect automotive jobs and help the environment with green technology, they raise concerns about losing work and question whether the governments should subsidize them or mandate future zero-emission vehicle sales, as California has done.  

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.