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Javier E

The Lesson of 1975 for Today's Pessimists - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-pessimists-new-year-3349098e

opportunities tech 2024

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • out of the depths of the inflation-riddled ’70s came the democratization of computing and finance. It feels to me as if we’re at a similar point. What’s going to be democratized next?
  • Start with quantum computing, autonomous vehicles and delivery drones. Even the once-in-a-generation innovation of machine learning and artificial intelligence is generating fear and doubt. Like homebrew computers, we’re at the rudimentary stage.
  • Especially in medicine. Healthcare pricing, billing and reimbursements are completely nonsensical. ObamaCare made it worse, but change is beginning. Pandemic-enabled telemedicine is a crack in the old way’s armor. Self-directed healthcare will grow. Ozempic and magic pills are changing lives. Crispr gene editing is also rudimentary but could extend healthy life expectancies. Add precision oncology, computational biology, focused ultrasound and more. The upside is endless.
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  • AI will usher in knowledgeable and friendly automated customer service any day now. But there is so much else on the innovation horizon: osmotic energy, geothermal, nuclear fusion, autonomous farming, photonic computing, human longevity. Plus all the stuff in research labs we haven’t heard of yet, let alone invented and brought to market.
  • Every industry is about to change, which will defy skeptics. Figure out how, and then, as Mr. Wozniak suggests, get your hands dirty. As always, the pain point is cost. Look for things that get cheaper—that’s the only way to clear the smoke and get new marvels into global consumer hands.
Javier E

Why Israelis Are So Happy - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...middle-east-lifestyle-e5be0e6a

history culture US happiness israel index ranking

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • You might have seen reports that America has fallen out of the top 20 countries on the 2024 World Happiness Index. They probably didn’t mention that Israel finished fifth, behind Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.
  • Don’t confuse “happiness” with “comfort” or “self-indulgence.” Israelis began 2023 polarized politically—only to be united by Hamas’s invasion. Amid unspeakable suffering, Israelis have found comfort in one another and a higher calling
  • That dance between the individual and the collective begins long before birth. It spawns Israelis’ high levels of “trust, benevolence, and social connections,” which, as the 2023 happiness report emphasized, nurture “well-being,” even “in times of crisis.”
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  • Israelis pursue happiness through family and community, by feeling rooted and having a sense of purpose. My son Yoni got married in Jerusalem midwar, while serving in the military reserves. He notes that “Israelis grow up with many outside influences, many adult role models, not just their parents. It starts with our large weddings, when you’re blessed to ‘build a faithful home in Israel.’ ”
  • Alexis de Tocqueville called families the backbone of healthy democracies. Family inculcates loyalty, commitment and self-sacrifice. Belonging to communities—extended families—teaches citizens to care about and cooperate with others.
  • Despite disagreeing passionately, Israelis live in an intimate society that runs on trust and generates hope. Israelis feel they’re never alone, and that their relatives and friends will never abandon them.
  • Living in what Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, called Altneuland, old-new land, Israelis don’t count in days and decades but in millennia and eternity. They feel part of a bigger story, Jews’ historical saga reaching back 3,500 years.
  • The pain punctuating this story helps transcend passing traumas. Even as most Israelis experienced Hamas’s Oct. 7 killing spree as a Jewish event, powered by centuries of Jew-hatred, Israelis recall many redemptive moments too. Israelis’ favorite holidays, including Hanukkah, Passover, and Independence Day, re-enact this reassuring oppression-to-liberation arc.
  • Compare anti-Israel progressive students with their Israeli soldier peers. Many protesters are the avatars of America’s lost generation. Their pinched ideology deems the U.S. systemically racist and is intent on sorting everyone by “gender identity” and skin color. Rather than optimistically expand America’s economy for all, they pessimistically compete for reparations and indulgences—their “restorative justice” is often more vengeful than just.
  • These illiberal liberals trash traditional families, religion and America’s noble story of a flawed nation becoming “a more perfect union.” These campus commissars are among the unhappy Americans the surgeon general sees in the depths of loneliness and despair.
  • Israelis didn’t seek this war—but when attacked, they unleashed a patriotism, idealism, self-sacrifice and grit that today’s regressive progressives scorn. Israelis’ resilience, duty and love of life explain how this often polarized and besieged society remains such a happy place
Javier E

Opinion | Jan. 6, America's Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...emory-memorial-forgetting.html

oblivion forgetting public accountability responsibility memory

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • This is not the first time our nation has survived a profound internal rupture, but it may be the first time in which the political ringleaders of the revolt may very well escape much accountability while hundreds of their followers serve jail time.
  • In previous times of national crisis, the same spirit of mercy that Mr. Biden conjured generally applied to lower-level offenders, while those who had committed the worst crimes were the first to be arrested and tried for their treasonous acts.
  • As a legal mechanism, oblivion promised the return to a past that still had a future, in which the battles of old would not predetermine those still to come. It did not always achieve its lofty aspirations, nor was it appropriate for all conflicts. But the ideals it grasped for had an enduring appeal.
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  • After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.
  • The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.
  • the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault
  • Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.
  • For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm
  • Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office
  • I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.
  • Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don
  • consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.
  • over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.
  • The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.
  • The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”
  • In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War
  • To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism
  • the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.
  • Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.
  • This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.
  • Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us
  • we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance
  • Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need
  • our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.
  • Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.
  • The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.
  • Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Can't College Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some Theories - and Fixes. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aduates-jobs-unemployment.html

inflation thinking assumptions fallacy history economics culture politics US policy

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • simply tossing your résumé and cover letter into a company’s job portal has a low probability of success, especially now. It’s so easy to submit applications that companies are being bombarded with thousands of them. Human beings can’t possibly review all of them, so they’re reviewed by computers, which simply search for keywords. They don’t understand in any deep way either the applicant’s qualities or the employer’s needs.
  • “The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won’t use keywords” the way the evaluation algorithm wants,
  • Personal contact is crucial, he said. Rather than spraying applications far and wide, he recommends focusing on a handful of companies, researching them in depth and contacting a wide range of people connected with them, even their suppliers and customers.
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  • Du Bois’s quote, “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States,” serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of education, understanding and open discourse in addressing societal challenges.
Javier E

Opinion | What Democrats Need to Do Now - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aga-trump-vance-democrats.html

Democratic party dynamism MAGA class struggle struggle class security 2024 platform culture politics policy

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Over the last eight years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends Donald Trump.
  • It has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters respect.
  • J.D. Vance is the embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview — with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements, free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration.
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  • MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.
  • If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.
  • In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators.
  • the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.
  • Americans have a zeal for continual self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone.”
  • “the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”
  • we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common futur
  • Americans can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like Vladimir Putin at bay.
  • Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.
  • MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.”
  • MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.
  • MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside
  • MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics.
  • MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.
  • If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century
  • My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from the psychologist John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.
  • The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness.
  • Americans can’t be secure if the border is in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a sense that the government has things under control.
  • Americans can’t be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that Democrats largely built are so important.
  • offer people a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete
  • champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.
  • If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric — elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business
  • They need to stand up to protectionism, not join the stampede.
  • Democrats need to throttle back the regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled innovation.
  • Democrats need to take on their teachers’ unions and commit to dynamism in the field of education.
  • tap back into the more traditional American aspiration: We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can create a fluid, mobile society.
  • The economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less
  • Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and dynamism.”
  • t aspiration is not like a brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that can be fed or dampened
  • “The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”
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