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The 'Black Hole' That Sucks Up Silicon Valley's Money - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560216 philanthropy silicon valley rich tax shelter money
shared by Javier E on 14 May 18 - No Cached
  • That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.
  • The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.
  • There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent.
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  • Donor-advised funds are categorized by law as public charities, rather than private foundations, so they have no payout requirements and few disclosure requirements.
  • And wealthy residents of Silicon Valley are donating large sums to such funds
  • critics say that in part because of its structure as a warehouse of donor-advised funds, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has not had a positive impact on the community it is meant to serve. Some people I talked to say the foundation has had little interest in spending money, because its chief executive, Emmett Carson, who was placed on paid administrative leave after the Chronicle’s report, wanted it to be known that he had created one of the biggest foundations in the country. Carson was “aggressive” about trying to raise money, but “unaggressive about suggesting what clients would do with it,”
  • “Most of us in the local area have seen our support from the foundation go down and not up,” he said.
  • The amount of money going from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the nine-county Bay Area actually dropped in 2017 by 46 percent, even as the amount of money under management grew by 64 percent, to $13.5 billion
  • “They got so drunk on the idea of growth that they lost track of anything smacking of mission,” he said. It did not help perceptions that the foundation opened offices in New York and San Francisco at the same time local organizations were seeing donations drop.
  • The foundation now gives her organization some grants, but they don’t come from the donor-advised funds, she told me. “I haven’t really cracked the code of how to access those donor-advised funds,” she said. Her organization had been getting between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from United Way that it no longer gets, she said,
  • Rob Reich, the co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, set up a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation as an experiment. He spent $5,000—the minimum amount accepted—and waited. He received almost no communication from the foundation, he told me. No emails or calls about potential nonprofits to give to, no information about whether the staff was out looking for good opportunities in the community, no data about how his money was being managed.
  • One year later, despite a booming stock market, his account was worth less than the $5,000 he had put in, and had not been used in any way in the community. His balance was lower because the foundation charges hefty fees to donors who keep their money there. “I was flabbergasted,” he told me. “I didn’t understand what I, as a donor, was getting for my fees.”
  • Though donors receive a big tax break for donating to donor-advised funds, the funds have no payout requirements, unlike private foundations, which are required to disperse 5 percent of their assets each year. With donor-advised funds, “there’s no urgency and no forced payout,”
  • he had met wealthy individuals who said they were setting up donor-advised funds so that their children could disperse the funds and learn about philanthropy—they had no intent to spend the money in their own lifetimes.
  • Fund managers also receive fees for the amount of money they have under management, which means they have little incentive to encourage people to spend the money in their accounts,
  • Transparency is also an issue. While foundations have to provide detailed information about where they give their money, donor-advised funds distributions are listed as gifts made from the entire charitable fund—like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation—rather than from individuals.
  • Donor-advised funds can also be set up anonymously, which makes it hard for nonprofits to engage with potential givers. They also don’t have websites or mission statements like private foundations do, which can make it hard for nonprofits to know what causes donors support.
  • Public charities—defined as organizations that receive a significant amount of their revenue from small donations—were saddled with less oversight, in part because Congress figured that their large number of donors would make sure they were spending their money well, Madoff said. But an attorney named Norman Sugarman, who represented the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, convinced the IRS to categorize a certain type of asset—charitable dollars placed in individually named accounts managed by a public charity—as donations to public, not private, foundations.
  • Donor-advised funds have been growing nationally as the amount of money made by the top 1 percent has grown: Contributions to donor-advised funds grew 15.1 percent in fiscal year 2016, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, while overall charitable contributions grew only 1.4 percent that year
  • Six of the top 10 philanthropies in the country last year, in terms of the amount of nongovernmental money raised, were donor-advised funds,
  • In addition, those funds with high payout rates could just be giving to another donor-advised fund, rather than to a public charity, Madoff says. One-quarter of donor-advised fund sponsors distribute less than 1 percent of their assets in a year,
  • Groups that administer donor-advised funds defend their payout rate, saying distributions from donor-advised funds are around 14 percent of assets a year. But that number can be misleading, because one donor-advised fund could give out all its money, while many more could give out none, skewing the data.
  • Donor-advised funds are especially popular in places like Silicon Valley because they provide tax advantages for donating appreciated stock, which many start-up founders have but don’t necessarily want to pay huge taxes on
  • Donors get a tax break for the value of the appreciated stock at the time they donate it, which can also spare them hefty capital-gains taxes. “Anybody with a business interest can give their business interest before it goes public and save huge amounts of taxes,”
  • Often, people give to donor-advised funds right before a public event like an initial public offering, so they can avoid the capital-gains taxes they’d otherwise have to pay, and instead receive a tax deduction. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan gave $500 million in stock to the foundation in 2012, when Facebook held its initial public offering, and also donated $1 billion in stock in 2013
  • Wealthy donors can also donate real estate and deduct the value of real estate at the time of the donation—if they’d given to a private foundation, they’d only be able to deduct the donor’s basis value (typically the purchase price) of the real estate at the time they acquired it. The difference can be a huge amount of money in the hot market of California.
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Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek? - by Bill Coberly - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...-all-too-cynical-for-star-trek science fiction trek utopia values TV culture history
shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF WE CAN’T even trust the institutions in our imagined utopias?
  • Starfleet’s exact role was left intentionally vague in the original series (1966–69); the writer’s guide for the original Star Trek explicitly encourages writers to “stay away from it as much as possible,” partly to avoid getting into the details of Earth’s future politics. But by the time of Star Trek’s heyday in the mid-1990s, Starfleet was established as an elite institution composed of brilliant and dedicated people (human and otherwise) who served in an organization resembling NASA, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Department of State all bundled together, with all of the opportunities for incoherence and mission creep that jumble implies.
  • One of the greatest episodes of Deep Space Nine (1992–99), “In the Pale Moonlight,” is entirely about how, in times of crisis, moral compromise may be necessary, even for Starfleet. But such cases are treated as exceptional, unusual circumstances far beyond the norm; as a rule, Starfleet is good, and the best way to be a good servant of the true and just in the world of Star Trek is by being a good Starfleet officer. How does one be a good Starfleet officer? By doing one’s job, by being a professional, by following one’s duty.
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  • the characters in the core three modern shows—Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds—are less concerned with professionalism and duty and more concerned with personal morality, authenticity, and teamwork.
  • Dylan Roth, writing for Fanbyte, suggested that as Star Trek has aged, it has “changed from a series about benign authority to one about stalwart heroes protecting an institution from moral decay.” This is true enough, but I also think there’s something else going on with the modern Trek shows. Namely, the atmosphere and philosophy of the shows is much less comfortable with the maxims of professionalism and duty that were foundational to pre-2017 Star Trek media.
  • Modern Star Trek, much like older Star Trek, often presents its main characters as moral paragons, but whereas older Trek would usually depict them embodying Starfleet’s ideals in the presence of challenging aliens, modern Trek is more likely to establish their uprightness by contrast with the faceless and untrustworthy institution of Starfleet itself. Both eras do both things, at least occasionally, but the ratio has notably shifted.
  • Old-school Sisko reminds his crew of the expectations he has for them and unsubtly critiques their behavior as unbecoming of Starfleet officers. He acknowledges their difficulties (“I know it’s hot. . .”), but leaves no doubt that he expects them to perform their duties as professionals anyway. New-school Tilly motivates her command by making it clear that she sees and hears their concerns, and encourages them to work together by seeing the value in their unique life experiences.
  • difference in leadership style is everywhere between the two eras. The Strange New Worlds version of Capt. Christopher Pike has been repeatedly praised for being more collaborative than commanding (I struggle to remember a time he has ever raised his voice), whereas Capt. Sisko shouts at everyone, as only the great Avery Brooks can shout. Picard’s version of its title character trades all his twentieth-century grouchy gravitas for a more grandfatherly role; his inspirational speeches now seek to buoy his friends’ confidence rather than inspire subordinates to high achievement.
  • WHY THE CHANGE? Part of it probably has to do with the other material that Star Trek writers are drawing from. The ’60s and ’90s-era Trek writers either served in the military themselves or were drawing from science fiction written by people who had. (Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and many of the great science-fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Walter M. Miller Jr., each served in some capacity in the World War II-era U.S. or British armed forces.
  • modern Trek writers are far less likely to have served—but are far more likely to have worked in twenty-first-century corporate America, which has a rather different set of norms and concepts of professionalism.
  • more fundamentally, popular science fiction today—as written by authors like N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, and Tamsyn Muir—is more likely to be concerned with questions of identity and combating imperialism. It is also more likely to be written from marginalized perspectives, which have valid reasons to distrust institutions and authority. For many of these writers, concepts like “professionalism” have questionable implications
  • Besides, nobody likes any of America’s institutions anymore (and for all that Star Trek is ostensibly international, it is a fundamentally American franchise). Gallup’s polling about Americans’ faith in U.S. institutions shows it hovering at or near record-breaking lows, spawning a great deal of hand-wringing from people across the political spectrum. These apparently untrustworthy institutions range from purely political ones (the presidency, the Supreme Court, etc.) to “the church or organized religion” (whatever that means), “banks,” and “newspapers.”
  • What are professionalism and duty if not the suppression of individual quirks in service of some larger goal or institution? Duty overrides individual desires or assessments of right and wrong.
  • But older Trek nevertheless believed in duty, because it believed that Starfleet was a fundamentally good institution, even if it may be failed by individual bad or misguided actors. It elevated Starfleet’s regulations and codes of conduct almost to the status of holy wri
  • it is difficult to be seriously inspired by the notion of duties if one has a deep distrust of the institutions that assign such duties.
  • Of course the characters written by twenty-first-century authors, who are animated by the same deep distrust of American institutions as the rest of us, are less likely to justify themselves with the language of duty than they are by reference to personal morality and authenticity. And of course they’re going to be skeptical of rank and hierarchy because they don’t believe these things are necessarily signs of actual merit or accomplishment any more than the rest of us do.
  • Yet I worry. If Star Trek is supposed to start from the assumption that Starfleet and the Federation are quasi-utopian, I worry about what it says about our collective imaginations if we can’t even let the institutions of that fictional utopia be utopian. If we can’t even trust Starfleet, who can we trust?
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Opinion | The Question of Transgender Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsgender-care-cass-report.html epistemic bubble evidence ethic belief trans debate humility
shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.
  • Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.
  • Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being
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  • a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.
  • As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”
  • The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.
  • he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”
  • her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.
  • In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.
  • “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote
  • A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
  • Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence
  • Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.
  • She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.
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As U.S. sends Ukraine military aid, a lobbying coalition is forged - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...aine-lobbying-military-aid-war lobbying ukraine mobilisation mass campaign crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Ukrainian civil society, she said, has “this approach, which is called ‘we are a drop in the ocean,’ which means that we all, all the efforts, are modest because we are not gods, we are human beings,” Matviichuk said. “But together … we can change the reality for better.”
  • As part of a nationwide campaign, they also aired television and radio spots and bought billboard ads highlighting that Russian forces have destroyed hundreds of churches and tortured and killed Christian pastors.
  • One such billboard popped up across the street from the church Johnson attends in his district. “We pushed on every lever,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom
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  • “We did things like bring over shrapnel from Ukraine, from cruise missiles that exploded in civilian areas, and put it on their desk and say, look, this is what we’re up against,” Murskyj said. “You know, this landed in somebody’s house, and now it’s in your office.”
  • “The intensity was high; there was energy in the air. And we realized that we needed to do everything that we possibly could to make this happen.” Murskyj said, adding that there were “dozens of organizations, and hundreds if not thousands of individuals, who worked hard” to get the legislation passed.
  • “I think the most effective thing [the Zelensky administration] did was, they listened, and then they gave the speaker space to work the issue,” said a person familiar with Johnson’s position, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue. “They took him at his word after that meeting with Zelensky in December.”
  • Johnson indicated early on that he would support the legislation if his main questions were addressed, those involved in the talks said. Over time, he became an ally.
  • “Up until that point, it had really been an aggressive pressure campaign,” the person said. “And really, from my view, it was having the opposite effect because it was just making the people who were ‘never Ukraine-ers’ say, ‘They’re just eviscerating you; they’re not interested in giving you space or what’s in America’s interests.’”
  • For Johnson, a Southern Baptist, arguments from fellow members of the evangelical community were particularly important, those involved in the process said. The speaker met numerous groups of religious leaders from the United States and Ukraine who pushed him to pass the aid bill.
  • American evangelicals helped dispel a narrative circulating in the conservative media that Ukraine was persecuting Christian communities, pointing out that it was in fact Russia that was restricting religious freedom.
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He Turned 55. Then He Started the World's Most Important Company. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hips-entrepreneurship-506fcbc4 entrepreneur chip company Taiwan
shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.
  • The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about
  • I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC. 
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  • “I could not have done it sooner,” he says. “I don’t think anybody could have done it sooner. Because I was the first one.” 
  • By the late 1960s, he was managing TI’s integrated-circuit division. Before long, he was running the entire semiconductor group. 
  • He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and would have stayed for his Ph.D. if he hadn’t failed the qualifying exam. Instead, he got his first job in semiconductors and moved to Texas Instruments in 1958
  • he came along as the integrated circuit was being invented, and his timing couldn’t have been any better, as Chang belonged to the first generation of semiconductor geeks. He developed a reputation as a tenacious manager who could wring every possible improvement out of production lines, which put his career on the fast track.
  • Chang grew up dreaming of being a writer—a novelist, maybe a journalist—and he planned to major in English literature at Harvard University. But after his freshman year, he decided that what he actually wanted was a good job
  • “They talk about life-work balance,” he says. “That’s a term I didn’t even know when I was their age. Work-life balance. When I was their age, if there was no work, there was no life.” 
  • These days, TSMC is investing $40 billion to build plants in Arizona, but the project has been stymied by delays, setbacks and labor shortages, and Chang told me that some of TSMC’s young employees in the U.S. have attitudes toward work that he struggles to understand. 
  • Chang says he wouldn’t have taken the risk of moving to Taiwan if he weren’t financially secure. In fact, he didn’t take that same risk the first time he could have.
  • “The closer the industry match,” they wrote, “the greater the success rate.” 
  • By then, Chang knew that he wasn’t long for Texas Instruments. But his stock options hadn’t vested, so he turned down the invitation to Taiwan. “I was not financially secure yet,” he says. “I was never after great wealth. I was only after financial security.” For this corporate executive in the middle of the 1980s, financial security equated to $200,000 a year. “After tax, of course,” he says. 
  • Chang’s situation had changed by the time Li called again three years later. He’d exercised a few million dollars of stock options and bought tax-exempt municipal bonds that paid enough for him to be financially secure by his living standards. Once he’d achieved that goal, he was ready to pursue another one. 
  • “There was no certainty at all that Taiwan would give me the chance to build a great semiconductor company, but the possibility existed, and it was the only possibility for me,” Chang says. “That’s why I went to Taiwan.” 
  • Not long ago, a team of economists investigated whether older entrepreneurs are more successful than younger ones. By scrutinizing Census Bureau records and freshly available Internal Revenue Service data, they were able to identify 2.7 million founders in the U.S. who started companies between 2007 and 2014. Then they looked at their ages.
  • The average age of those entrepreneurs at the founding of their companies was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, that number was 45. The economists also determined that 50-year-old founders were almost twice as likely to achieve major success as 30-year-old founders, while the founders with the lowest chance of success were the ones in their early 20s
  • “Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young,” they wrote in their 2020 paper.  
  • Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists throw money at talented young entrepreneurs in the hopes they will start the next trillion-dollar company. They have plentiful energy, insatiable ambition and the vision to peek around corners and see the future. What they don’t typically have are mortgages, family obligations and other adult responsibilities to distract them or diminish their appetite for risk. Chang himself says that younger people are more innovative when it comes to science and technical subjects. 
  • But in business, older is better. Entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s may not have the exuberance to believe they will change the world, but they have the experience to know how they actually can. Some need years of specialized training before they can start a company. In biotechnology, for example, founders are more likely to be college professors than college dropouts. Others require the lessons and connections they accumulate over the course of their careers. 
  • one more finding from their study of U.S. companies that helps explain the success of a chip maker in Taiwan. It was that prior employment in the area of their startups—both the general sector and specific industry—predicted “a vastly higher probability” of success.
  • Chang was such a workaholic that he made sales calls on his honeymoon and had no patience for those who didn’t share his drive
  • Morris Chang had 30 years of experience in his industry when he decided to uproot his life and move to another continent. He knew more about semiconductors than just about anyone on earth—and certainly more than anyone in Taiwan. As soon as he started his job at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chang was summoned to K.T. Li’s office and given a second job. “He felt I should start a semiconductor company in Taiwan,”
  • “I decided right away that this could not be the kind of great company that I wanted to build at either Texas Instruments or General Instrument,”
  • TI handled every part of chip production, but what worked in Texas would not translate to Taiwan. The only way that he could build a great company in his new home was to make a new sort of company altogether, one with a business model that would exploit the country’s strengths and mitigate its many weaknesses.
  • Chang determined that Taiwan had precisely one strength in the chip supply chain. The research firm that he was now running had been experimenting with semiconductors for the previous 10 years. When he studied that decade of data, Chang was pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s yields, the percentage of working chips on silicon wafers. They were almost twice as high in Taiwan as they were in the U.S., he said. 
  • “People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.” 
  • Taiwan’s government took a 48% stake, with the rest of the funding coming from the Dutch electronics giant Philips and Taiwan’s private sector, but Chang was the driving force behind the company. The insight to build TSMC around such an unconventional business model was born from his experience, contacts and expertise. He understood his industry deeply enough to disrupt it. 
  • “TSMC was a business-model innovation,” Chang says. “For innovations of that kind, I think people of a more advanced age are perhaps even more capable than people of a younger age.”
  • the personal philosophy that he’d developed over the course of his long career. “To be a partner to our customers,” he says. That founding principle from 1987 is the bedrock of the foundry business to this day, as TSMC says the key to its success has always been enabling the success of its customers.  
  • TSMC manufactures chips in iPhones, iPads and Mac computers for Apple, which manufactures a quarter of TSMC’s net revenue. Nvidia is often called a chip maker, which is curious, because it doesn’t make chips. TSMC does. 
  • Churning out identical copies of a single chip for an iPhone requires one TSMC fab to produce more than a quintillion transistors—that is, one million trillions—every few months. In a year, the entire semiconductor industry produces “more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history,” Miller writes. 
  • I asked how he thought about success when he moved to Taiwan. “The highest degree of success in 1985, according to me, was to build a great company. A lower degree of success was at least to do something that I liked to do and I wanted to do,” he says. “I happened to achieve the highest degree of success that I had in mind.” 
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Chocolate Might Never Be the Same - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678053 chocolate culture crisis history economics
shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”
  • The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,
  • Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.
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  • Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland.
  • ore important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.
  • No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat.
  • Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown
  • Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature,
  • Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA.
  • Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.
  • So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.
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Why Israelis Are So Happy - WSJ - 0 views

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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
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Opinion | Is This a Sputnik Moment? - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.
  • Russia has been testing weapons that target space capabilities or using them on the battlefield in Ukraine. In November 2021, Moscow conducted an antisatellite test by launching a missile at one of its own defunct satellites. It has also employed systems designed to jam Starlink and GPS to degrade Ukraine’s communication systems, as well as the drones and munitions the country uses to defend itself. It is not surprising that Moscow would seek to develop a more powerful way to cause widespread damage to constellations of satellites.
  • What appears unprecedented now is that Russia could be working toward deploying nuclear weapons on satellites, which are constantly orbiting the Earth, to be detonated at times and locations of Moscow’s choosing.
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  • Russian military doctrine states that Russia would use nuclear weapons in the event of attacks against key Russian assets or threats to the existence of the state, and experts believe Russia could use nuclear weapons first in a crisis to signal resolve.
  • Russia has seen how important space-based assets can be on the battlefield in Ukraine. Starlink, with its thousands of satellites orbiting Earth, provides Ukrainian forces with uninterrupted communication. The U.S. Department of Defense openly discusses its investments in large satellite constellations. Hundreds of satellites used for missile warning, intelligence and communications are seen as a way to be more resilient against a variety of growing space threats. Moscow would look for ways to target these large satellite constellations and to erode the advantage they provide.
  • Nor is it new for Russia to violate nuclear arms control agreements. In recent years, Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, suspended its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and de-ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Backing out of arms control commitments is part of Russia’s modus operandi.
  • But a nuclear detonation in space is indiscriminate. It would degrade or destroy any satellites in its path and within the same orbital region. It wouldn’t just affect U.S. satellites but also the aggressor’s own satellites, as well as an unknown number of satellites owned by the over 90 countries operating in space, and astronauts living on the International Space Station and Chinese space station
  • Russia, however, has less to lose: Its once vaunted space program is in decline, dinged by sanctions, and said it intends to withdraw from the International Space Station program after 2024. Moscow is now well behind China in its total number of operating on-orbit satellites.
  • Third, we need to be realistic about prospects for future arms control with Russia. Moscow has shown a disregard for its treaty commitments. Just last month, Moscow rejected attempts by the Biden administration to restart bilateral arms control talks. Rather than trying again, the administration should instead focus on strengthening deterrence by improving our own capabilities and building multilateral coalitions for responsible nuclear behavior
  • Finally, policymakers need to protect our intelligence sources and intelligence gathering methods
  • With Russian officials already demanding proof of what the United States knows, declassifying those sources and methods plays directly into Moscow’s hands and jeopardizes those channels for future intelligence collection.
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Trump's anger at courts, frayed alliances could upend approach to judicial issues - The... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Under the Trump administration, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed 174 district court judges, 54 circuit court judges and three Supreme Court justices — shifting the balance of the highest court to a 6-3 conservative majority. During his campaign rallies and events, Trump often likes to highlight the total, though he has exaggerated it.
  • In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, McConnell recalled that Trump’s first candidacy had worried many conservatives at the time but that his Supreme Court list and picks had calmed their nerves and that his bargain with Trump had moved the country “right of center.”
  • McConnell and Trump have not spoken since late 2020, and Trump has repeatedly called for McConnell to be removed as the GOP leader of the Senate.
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  • Trump and Leo, a prominent conservative lawyer influential in his first term, have not spoken since 2020, according to people familiar with the matter. Their relationship ended over a heated fight in 2020 at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump accused Leo of picking Rod J. Rosenstein to be deputy attorney general, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump’s anger around Rosenstein centered on his decision to appoint special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to oversee the Justice Department’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election
  • Trump has signaled that he wants the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, and his associates have drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to send the military against civil demonstrations. Near the end of his time in the White House, he repeatedly complained that his White House Counsel’s Office wasn’t doing enough to help him overturn the election results. His attorney general resigned after he would not back up his claims.
  • “He’s the leading candidate, so I don’t know that it matters what I think,” said Brent O. Hatch, a lawyer who is on the board of the Federalist Society.
  • Although Trump reshaped the Supreme Court while in office, leading to the overturning of Roe, he has sometimes told others that the decision is a political albatross for Republicans. And he has complained recently at rallies about the Supreme Court and the decisions the judges make, saying without evidence they rule too often against Republicans to show “independence.”
  • Trump is running on a campaign focused, at least in part, on vengeance and retribution. The former president has made it clear that loyalty would be a key criteria in how he makes decisions if returned to office.
  • Most members of the Federalist Society board of directors declined to comment on the record or did not respond to a request for comment. Interviews with a dozen other prominent lawyers suggested most had serious misgivings about Trump returning to power but were resigned to the high likelihood he will be the nominee, and many expressed openness to working for another Trump administration.
  • There is a heated debate underway in conservative legal circles about how GOP lawyers should interact with what increasingly appears to be the likely nominee, according to conservative lawyers who described the private talks on the condition of anonymity. The discussions include whether they would return to work for Trump.
  • One prominent lawyer described a November dinner he attended where almost all the attorneys in the room said they would prefer another nominee — but were split on whether to back Trump if he wins
  • Leo, McConnell and McGahn have expressed reservations about what another Trump term would look like, though they have largely stayed away from a public fight.
  • Some of the informal conversations and debates underway in conservative legal circles about a second Trump term include Project 2025, a coalition of right-wing groups that has outlined plans for the next Republican administration. Clark, who is working on the Insurrection Act for Project 2025, has been charged with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, in the case alleging Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark pleaded guilty.
  • The involvement of Clark with that effort has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as a potentially disastrous choice to take a senior leadership role at the department because of his past activities around the 2020 election.
  • Rob Kelner, a prominent conservative lawyer, said more conservative lawyers should have spoken up against Trump, but that it would cost them business and relationships.
  • “There were so many positions he took and so many statements that he made that flatly contradicted the foundational principles of the conservative movement and the Federalist Society, and yet it was so rare to hear conservative lawyers speak out against Trump,” Kelner said.
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Immigration powered the economy, job market amid border negotiations - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented versus undocumented. But estimates from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2021. That’s down compared to previous decades: Between 2007 and 2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found. Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.
  • immigrant workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for years to come.
  • The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants, according to the CBO.
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  • Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force in 2023 had grown by 5.2 million people, thanks especially to net immigration
  • economy grow. But today’s snapshot still represents a stark turnaround from just a short time ago.
  • he flow of migrants to the United States started slowing during the Trump administration, when officials took hundreds of executive actions designed to restrict migration.
  • Right before the pandemic, there were about 1.5 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than pre-2017 trends would have predicted, according to the San Francisco Fed. By the end of 2021, that shortfall had widened to about 2 million
  • But the economy overall wound up rebounding aggressively from the sudden, widespread closures of 2020, bolstered by historic government stimulus and vaccines that debuted faster than expected.
  • The sudden snapback in demand sent inflation soaring. Supply chain issues were a main reason prices rose quickly. But labor shortages posed a problem, too, and economists feared that rising wages — as employers scrambled to find workers — would keep price increases dangerously high.
  • That’s because the labor force that emerged as the pandemic ebbed was smaller than it had been: Millions of people retired early, stayed home to take over child care or avoid getting sick, or decided to look for new jobs entirely
  • In the span of a year or so, employers went from having businesses crater to sprinting to hire enough staff to keep restaurants, hotels, retail stores and construction sites going. Wages for the lowest earners rose at the fastest pace.
  • About the same time, the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back Trump-era restrictions.
  • In normal economic times, some analysts note, new immigrants can drag down wages, especially if employers decide to hire them over native-born workers. Undocumented workers, who don’t have as much leverage to push for higher pay, could lower average wages even more.
  • But the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were desperate to hire.
  • lus, it would be exceedingly difficult for immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force,
  • “What it can do is lower the wages of a specific occupation in a specific area, but American workers aren’t stupid. They change jobs. They change what they specialize in,” Nowrasteh said. “So that’s part of the reason why wages don’t go down.”
  • Experts argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since January 2023
  • Particularly for immigrants fleeing poorer countries, the booming U.S. job market and the promise of higher wages continue to be an enormous draw.
  • “More than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the day.”
  • Upon arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January, Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories manufacturer making $20 an hour.
  • But for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.
  • Federal law requires migrants to wait nearly six months to receive a work permit after filing for asylum. Wait times can stretch for additional months because of a backlog in cases.
  • While they wait, many migrants find off-the-books work as day laborers or street vendors, advocates say. Others get jobs using falsified documents, including many teenagers who came into the country as unaccompanied minors.
  • Still, many migrants miss the year-long window to apply for asylum — a process that can cost thousands of dollars — leaving them with few pathways to work authorization, advocates say. Those who can’t apply for asylum often end up working without official permission in low-wage industries where they are susceptible to exploitation.
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Opinion | The Mystery of White Rural Rage - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.
  • It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.
  • This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
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  • “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy, and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.
  • Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides
  • Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.
  • The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.
  • Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have
  • But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.
  • So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.
  • While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs.
  • And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.
  • This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Al
  • In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.
  • Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there.
  • Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.
  • Draw attention to some of these realities and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist
  • The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.
  • while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.
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Inside the porn industry, AI looms large - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ai-porn-avn-industry porn ai transformation disruption culture
shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Since the first AVN “expo” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate.
  • Now, a new shift is on the horizon: Artificial intelligence models that spin up photorealistic images and videos that put viewers in the director’s chair, letting them create whatever porn they like.
  • Some site owners think it’s a privilege people will pay for, and they are racing to build custom AI models that — unlike the sanitized content on OpenAI’s video engine Sora — draw on a vast repository of porn images and videos.
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  • he trickiest question may be how to prevent abuse. AI generators have technological boundaries, but not morals, and it’s relatively easy for users to trick them into creating content that depicts violence, rape, sex with children or a celebrity — or even a crush from work who never consented to appear
  • In some cases, the engines themselves are trained on porn images whose subjects didn’t explicitly agree to the new use. Currently, no federal laws protect the victims of nonconsensual deepfakes.
  • Adult entertainment is a giant industry accounting for a substantial chunk of all internet traffic: Major porn sites get more monthly visitors and page views than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or Zoom
  • The industry is a habitual early adopter of new technology, from VHS to DVD to dot com. In the mid-2000s, porn companies set up massive sites where users upload and watch free videos, and ad sales foot the bills.
  • At last year’s AVN conference, Steven Jones said his peers looked at him “like he was crazy” when he talked about AI opportunities: “Nobody was interested.” This year, Jones said, he’s been “the belle of the ball.”
  • He called up his old business partner, and the two immediately spent about $550,000 securing the web domains for porn dot ai, deepfake dot com and deepfakes dot com, Jones said. “Lightspeed” was back.
  • One major model, Stable Diffusion, shares its code publicly, and some technologists have figured out how to edit the code to allow for sexual images
  • What keeps Jones up at night is people trying to use his company’s tools to generate images of abuse, he said. The models have some technological guardrails that make it difficult for users to render children, celebrities or acts of violence. But people are constantly looking for workarounds.
  • So with help from an angel investor he will not name, Jones hired five employees and a handful of offshore contractors and started building an image engine trained on bundles of freely available pornographic images, as well as thousands of nude photos from Jones’s own collection
  • Users create what Jones calls a “dream girl,” prompting the AI with descriptions of the character’s appearance, pose and setting. The nudes don’t portray real people, he said. Rather, the goal is to re-create a fantasy from the user’s imagination.
  • The AI-generated images got better, their computerized sheen growing steadily less noticeable. Jones grew his user base to 500,000 people, many of whom pay to generate more images than the five per day allotted to free accounts, he said. The site’s “power users” generate AI porn for 10 hours a day, he said.
  • Jones described the site as an “artists’ community” where people can explore their sexualities and fantasies in a safe space. Unlike some corners of the traditional adult industry, no performers are being pressured, underpaid or placed in harm’s way
  • And critically, consumers don’t have to wait for their favorite OnlyFans performer to come online or trawl through Pornhub to find the content they like.
  • Next comes AI-generated video — “porn’s holy grail,” Jones said. Eventually, he sees the technology becoming interactive, with users giving instructions to lifelike automated “performers.” Within two years, he said, there will be “fully AI cam girls,” a reference to creators who make solo sex content.
  • It costs $12 per day to rent a server from Amazon Web Services, he said, and generating a single picture requires users to have access to a corresponding server. His users have so far generated more than 1.6 million images.
  • Copyright holders including newspapers, photographers and artists have filed a slew of lawsuits against AI companies, claiming the companies trained their models on copyrighted content. If plaintiffs win, it could cut off the free-for-all that benefits entrepreneurs such as Jones.
  • But Jones’s plan to create consumer-friendly AI porn engines faced significant obstacles. The companies behind major image-generation models used technical boundaries to block “not safe for work” content and, without racy images to learn from, the models weren’t good at re-creating nude bodies or scenes.
  • Jones said his team takes down images that other users flag as abusive. Their list of blocked prompts currently contains 1,000 terms including “high school.”
  • “I see certain things people type in, and I just hope to God they’re trying to test the model, like we are. I hope they don’t actually want to see the things they’re typing in.
  • Peter Acworth, the owner of kink dot com, is trying to teach an AI porn generator to understand even subtler concepts, such as the difference between torture and consensual sexual bondage. For decades Acworth has pushed for spaces — in the real world and online — for consenting adults to explore nonconventional sexual interests. In 2006, he bought the San Francisco Armory, a castle-like building in the city’s Mission neighborhood, and turned it into a studio where his company filmed fetish porn until shuttering in 2017.
  • Now, Acworth is working with engineers to train an image-generation model on pictures of BDSM, an acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.
  • Others alluded to a porn apocalypse, with AI wiping out existing models of adult entertainment.“Look around,” said Christian Burke, head of engineering at the adult-industry payment app Melon, gesturing at performers huddled, laughing and hugging across the show floor. “This could look entirely different in a few years.”
  • But the age of AI brings few guarantees for the people, largely women, who appear in porn. Many have signed broad contracts granting companies the rights to reproduce their likeness in any medium for the rest of time
  • Not only could performers lose income, Walters said, they could find themselves in offensive or abusive scenes they never consented to.
  • Lana Smalls, a 23-year-old performer whose videos have been viewed 20 million times on Pornhub, said she’s had colleagues show up to shoots with major studios only to be surprised by sweeping AI clauses in their contracts.
  • “This industry is too fragmented for collective bargaining,” Spiegler said. “Plus, this industry doesn’t like rules.”
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How 'Surf City USA' became California's MAGA stronghold - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Huntington Beach, one of Orange County’s largest cities, has long been associated with conservative beliefs, but its evolution in recent years shows how the bitter polarization of national politics has crept into even the most mundane municipal matters.
  • “It’s the tipping on its head of the old notion that all politics is local. Now, all politics are national, and I think the overall effect of that is really destructive,” said Jim Newton, a public policy lecturer at UCLA and editor of Blueprint magazine. “It takes a sharply divided country at the national level and drags that down into local disputes.”
  • Spurred by those early oil booms, the city embraced development and corporate interests, said Chris Jepsen, the president of the Orange County Historical Society, earning it “a reputation for being pro-business and ardently pro-property rights.”
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  • “Politics, Democratic or Republican, were not particularly important,” said Tom Harman, a former Republican state senator who got his start on the city council in the 1990s. “People didn’t run on party preference. They ran on what they could do in the community and how they could make the city a better place to live.”
  • It had long been a destination for surfing, but officials in the ’90s began leaning into that reputation to court the tourism industry. Huntington Beach became “Surf City USA,” a moniker pulled from a chart-topping song.
  • Two high-profile acts of white-supremacist violence — the shooting of a Black man in 1994, and the stabbing of a Native American man two years later — prompted the city to crack down on the groups who had flocked from across Southern California.
  • City police stepped up patrols, the council passed a human dignity policy condemning hate crimes, and officials started a human relations commission to combat bigotry. Ken Inouye, the founding chair of that task force and a 51-year resident of Huntington Beach, said residents from across the city “came together because we knew we were better than that.”
  • Both efforts were reversed when the current Republican majority took over the council.
  • In recent decades, sweeping demographic change has pushed Orange County to the left. But those shifts have been more subtle in Huntington Beach, and the city has retained its rightward lean. Unlike the county’s other largest cities, most residents are White and Republicans still account for the plurality of Huntington Beach’s registered voters.
  • During Donald Trump’s presidency, residents bridled at California’s pandemic restrictions, much as Trump did. Fierce protests became common, with crowds clogging the pier and Pacific Coast Highway to shout down coronavirus precautions or cheer Trump. Some of the rallies were organized by white-supremacist groups and turned violent.
  • Another inflection point came in 2021, when former mixed martial arts fighter and hard-right council member Tito Ortiz resigned from his post and the remaining members appointed a Democrat, Rhonda Bolton, in his stead. The move infuriated city Republicans, who wanted Ortiz replaced with an ideological equal.
  • “The tone of political rhetoric has gotten coarser and sillier as time has worn on,” she said. “And Huntington Beach is a reflection of what’s happening nationally.”
  • Carol Daus, who has lived in the city nearly three decades, said the council’s focus on contentious cultural debates has divided the community, pitting neighbors against neighbors. One example of the acrimony: Protect HB has hung posters across the city urging a “No” vote on the March ballot measures, but some 40 of those signs were recently vandalized with large green “Yes” stickers.
  • “This city during the past several years, following the Trump administration and covid lockdown, was like a volcano ready to explode,” Daus said. “And now it has.”
  • “I feel duped,” said Sue Welfringer, a longtime Huntington Beach resident and registered Republican. She voted for the four-person conservative slate because she liked their stances on homelessness and limiting development, but mostly she appreciated that they got along with each other.
  • “I almost don’t even want to vote at all because I don’t want to make another terrible mistake I regret,” said Welfringer, who opposes the council’s stances on issues like LGBTQ rights and voter ID. “I feel like they had a hidden agenda. And now I’m also worried what else is on their hidden agenda. I’m afraid to know what big issue is next.”
  • “Ideally, it would be wonderful if we could just focus on the roads and infrastructure,” he said. “But I think we’re in a time now where there really isn’t any such thing as a nonpartisan local focus anymore.”
  • But this dynamic has turned city council meetings into routine spectacles, where public comment drags on for hours and speakers hurl invectives at the seven members sitting on the dais.
  • Butch Twining, a candidate for city council, is one of three conservatives looking to build on the Republican majority, campaigning as a slate to replace Bolton and the council’s other two liberal members in November. A victory would give conservatives a 7-0 vise grip on the council.
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How We Can Control AI - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...how-we-can-control-ai-327eeecf ai threat control crisis
shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • What’s still difficult is to encode human values
  • That currently requires an extra step known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, in which programmers use their own responses to train the model to be helpful and accurate. Meanwhile, so-called “red teams” provoke the program in order to uncover any possible harmful outputs
  • This combination of human adjustments and guardrails is designed to ensure alignment of AI with human values and overall safety. So far, this seems to have worked reasonably well.
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  • At some point they will be able to, for example, suggest recipes for novel cyberattacks or biological attacks—all based on publicly available knowledge.
  • But as models become more sophisticated, this approach may prove insufficient. Some models are beginning to exhibit polymathic behavior: They appear to know more than just what is in their training data and can link concepts across fields, languages, and geographies.
  • We need to adopt new approaches to AI safety that track the complexity and innovation speed of the core models themselves.
  • What’s much harder to test for is what’s known as “capability overhang”—meaning not just the model’s current knowledge, but the derived knowledge it could potentially generate on its own.
  • Red teams have so far shown some promise in predicting models’ capabilities, but upcoming technologies could break our current approach to safety in AI. For one, “recursive self-improvement” is a feature that allows AI systems to collect data and get feedback on their own and incorporate it to update their own parameters, thus enabling the models to train themselves
  • This could result in, say, an AI that can build complex system applications (e.g., a simple search engine or a new game) from scratch. But, the full scope of the potential new capabilities that could be enabled by recursive self-improvement is not known.
  • Another example would be “multi-agent systems,” where multiple independent AI systems are able to coordinate with each other to build something new.
  • This so-called “combinatorial innovation,” where systems are merged to build something new, will be a threat simply because the number of combinations will quickly exceed the capacity of human oversight.
  • Short of pulling the plug on the computers doing this work, it will likely be very difficult to monitor such technologies once these breakthroughs occur
  • Current regulatory approaches are based on individual model size and training effort, and are based on passing increasingly rigorous tests, but these techniques will break down as the systems become orders of magnitude more powerful and potentially elusive
  • AI regulatory approaches will need to evolve to identify and govern the new emergent capabilities and the scaling of those capabilities.
  • But the AI Act has already fallen behind the frontier of innovation, as open-source AI models—which are largely exempt from the legislation—expand in scope and number
  • Europe has so far attempted the most ambitious regulatory regime with its AI Act,
  • both Biden’s order and Europe’s AI Act lack intrinsic mechanisms to rapidly adapt to an AI landscape that will continue to change quickly and often.
  • a gathering in Palo Alto organized by the Rand Corp. and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where key technical leaders in AI converged on an idea: The best way to solve these problems is to create a new set of testing companies that will be incentivized to out-innovate each other—in short, a robust economy of testing
  • To check the most powerful AI systems, their testers will also themselves have to be powerful AI systems, precisely trained and refined to excel at the single task of identifying safety concerns and problem areas in the world’s most advanced models.
  • To be trustworthy and yet agile, these testing companies should be checked and certified by government regulators but developed and funded in the private market, with possible support by philanthropy organizations
  • The field is moving too quickly and the stakes are too high for exclusive reliance on typical government processes and timeframes.
  • One way this can unfold is for government regulators to require AI models exceeding a certain level of capability to be evaluated by government-certified private testing companies (from startups to university labs to nonprofit research organizations), with model builders paying for this testing and certification so as to meet safety requirements.
  • As AI models proliferate, growing demand for testing would create a big enough market. Testing companies could specialize in certifying submitted models across different safety regimes, such as the ability to self-proliferate, create new bio or cyber weapons, or manipulate or deceive their human creators
  • Much ink has been spilled over presumed threats of AI. Advanced AI systems could end up misaligned with human values and interests, able to cause chaos and catastrophe either deliberately or (often) despite efforts to make them safe. And as they advance, the threats we face today will only expand as new systems learn to self-improve, collaborate and potentially resist human oversight.
  • If we can bring about an ecosystem of nimble, sophisticated, independent testing companies who continuously develop and improve their skill evaluating AI testing, we can help bring about a future in which society benefits from the incredible power of AI tools while maintaining meaningful safeguards against destructive outcomes.
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OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678446 AI arrogance copyright history
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  • If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle.
  • the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data.
  • At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.
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  • Altman and OpenAI have been candid on this front. The end goal of OpenAI has always been to build a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would, in their imagining, alter the course of human history forever, ushering in an unthinkable revolution of productivity and prosperity—a utopian world where jobs disappear, replaced by some form of universal basic income, and humanity experiences quantum leaps in science and medicine. (Or, the machines cause life on Earth as we know it to end.) The stakes, in this hypothetical, are unimaginably high—all the more reason for OpenAI to accelerate progress by any means necessary.
  • As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.
  • In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”
  • Part of Altman’s reasoning, he told Andersen, is that AI development is a geopolitical race against autocracies like China. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than that of “authoritarian governments,” he said. He noted that, in an ideal world, AI should be a product of nations. But in this world, Altman seems to view his company as akin to its own nation-state.
  • Wu’s colleague Daniel Kokotajlo jumped in with the justification. “To add to that,” he said, “AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”
  • This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition
  • Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.
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(3) Chartbook 285: Cal-Tex - How Bidenomics is shaping America's multi-speed energy tra... - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...ook-285-cal-tex-how-bidenomics transition power generation politics policy
shared by Javier E on 27 May 24 - No Cached
  • If the Texas solar boom, the biggest in the USA, has little to do with Bidenomics, are we exaggerating the impact of Bidenomics? Rather than the shiny new tax incentives is it more general factors such as the plunging cost of PVs driving the renewable surge in the USA. Or, if policy is indeed the key, are state-level measures in Texas making the difference? Or, is this unfair to the IRA? Are its main effects still to come? Will it pile-on a boom that is already underway?
  • What did I learn?
  • First, when we compare the US renewable energy trajectory with the global picture, there is little reason to believe that Bidenomics has, so far, produced an exceptional US trajectory.
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  • Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions
  • How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA?
  • The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.
  • The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.
  • all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.
  • The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”
  • The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA
  • At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters.
  • So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.
  • As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”
  • Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation
  • Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.
  • According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”
  • So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post).
  • Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy.
  • The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.
  • The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up
  • Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.
  • though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development,
  • If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.
  • the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system.
  • The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum.
  • What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance
  • The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.
  • Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.
  • This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves
  • And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.
  • Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact.
  • A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side.
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How Asian Groceries Like H Mart and Patel Brothers Are Reshaping America - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-grocery-stores-america.html groceries food asian industry
shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by the musician Michelle Zauner). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.
  • Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.
  • Asian American grocers still represent less than one percent of the total U.S. grocery business,
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  • ate which products the big-box chains stock.
  • But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they di
  • more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.
  • April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales
  • Miso, ghee, turmeric, soy sauce — their journeys to becoming widely available pantry staples all began with an Asian grocer.
  • H Mart is attracting the clientele of the big grocers, too. Thirty percent of its shoppers today are non Asian, Mr. Kwon said, and he’s made changes to continue drawing them
  • placing more emphasis on in-store tastings, explaining how ingredients are used and posting signs in both Korean and English. Similarly, at 99 Ranch, the announcements ring out in Mandarin and English, and Western music has been added to the store playlists.
  • Swetal Patel, a partner at Patel Brothers, said that as the chain has expanded its audience — he estimates that 20 to 25 percent of shoppers are now non South Asian
  • “I find it fascinating that there are things on the shelf that I have no idea what they are,” said Jill Connors, an economic development director for the city of Dubuque, Iowa, who started shopping at Hornbill Asian Market earlier this year because she and her husband became vegan and wanted high-quality tofu at a reasonable price.
  • The sheer variety of foods to explore “brings more joy to the shopping and cooking process,”
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The Jury, Not the Prosecutor, Decides Who's Guilty - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678564 trump trial political prosecution rule of law got
shared by Javier E on 31 May 24 - No Cached
  • Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is an elected prosecutor who ran as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic city. Trump also received more scrutiny from prosecutors after he became a political figure than he’d ever experienced before. But none of this has any bearing on whether Trump actually committed the crimes with which he was charged.
  • The bar for convicting any defendant in the American justice system is extremely high: It requires a unanimous decision by 12 citizens who deem a crime to have occurred beyond a reasonable doubt
  • The more important question is not what motivated the charges, but whether they were justified and proved to a jury’s satisfaction.
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  • A prosecutor may well have political motivation, but his motivation isn’t what determines a verdict; he must prove his charges in court, through an adversarial process. Despite the yelps that Trump was tried in a kangaroo court, his lawyers had every opportunity to challenge jurors, introduce evidence, question prosecution witnesses, and call their own.
  • Trump is also right to note that his business practices and records didn’t attract anywhere near as much attention before he was a politician. Trump was famous before he was president, but becoming the most famous person on Earth is something else entirely. With the perks of fame comes more scrutiny. (Just ask Hunter Biden.)
  • Supporters of the Trump prosecution should be honest about the possibility of political motive underlying the case. The danger of political bias is an inherent flaw in the system of elected district attorneys that most jurisdictions around the U.S. use.
  • Capone was a notorious gangster, involved in murder, bootlegging, and racketeering, so it seems ludicrous that he was nailed on something as procedural and dry and quotidian as evading taxes.
  • the Capone case. The mobster committed many crimes, but he did them in a way that made them hard to prosecute. Like many organized-crime bosses, he made sure to speak about things elliptically and keep his fingerprints (literal and metaphorical) off things. (Does this sound familiar?) But Capone couldn’t hide financial crimes as effectively. Prosecutors went after him for tax evasion because that’s what they could prove. It is not selective prosecution to go charge someone for a crime for which you have evidence, even if you don’t charge them for the other, more difficult-to-prove crimes. It is realism. It’s also justified and just.
  • Republican cries of political prosecution can also be understood in another, better way. Because Trump’s defenders are unwilling to argue that he didn’t falsify the records or that it shouldn’t be a crime, they’re actually arguing that he should get a pass on crimes they view as minor because he’s a political figure
  • “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said at a press conference this morning. Indeed, that’s the point of equal justice under the law.
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Climate change just became solvable because of math - 0 views

the.ink/...case-for-climate-unilateralism climate change economic cost research
shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • For years, economists’ best estimates of the cost of climate inaction were giant but not quite big enough to stimulate immediate and adequate action. The cost of inaction was, in a sense, high enough to be terrifying but too low to be galvanizing
  • now a groundbreaking new study has raised the estimated cost of inaction by so much that it makes acting seem like a bargain, and even makes it makes sense for wealthy countries to act alone, regardless of what their peers are doing. It’s a rare academic paper that could change everything.
  • Until the new paper, the most commonly used economic models were predicting climate impacts on the world economy on the order of about $200 in losses per ton of carbon emitted, or around 2 percent of world GDP (the monetary value of everything people produce) per degree of warming
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  • But while those are huge numbers by any measure (world GDP is around $100 trillion), they aren’t big enough to motivate most leaders to justify mitigation, which will also cost a whole lot of money.
  • To put it in terms the authors use, the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act will cost Americans roughly $80 per ton of carbon emissions avoided, and while each ton not pumped into the atmosphere would save the world $200 as a whole, it would only save Americans about $40 of that $200, making it feel to some altruistic but not self-evident in purely economic terms.
  • In their new paper, economists Adrien Bilal of Harvard and Diego Känzig of Northwestern take a fresh look at the data
  • They show that the social cost of carbon is likely far bigger — six times bigger — than previously estimated: losses of more than $1,000 per ton, or around 12 percent of world GDP per degree of warming.
  • — roughly equivalent to the economic drag on big economies if they were permanently at war.
  • Suddenly, that $80 Americans are spending on reducing one ton of carbon emissions is netting them $200 or so in U.S. economic activity.
  • Bilal and Känzig argue that it’s very much worth it for countries of means to spend the money now to avoid much greater costs down the line
  • the potential losses are so vast it makes sense for these countries to go ahead and act on their own to avoid climate change losses, even if other nations do nothing.
  • What’s different about your methodology and how did it lead you to the numbers you've come up with?
  • Adrien Bilal: So virtually all of the previous work that's been done on the subject has relied on comparisons of different countries that heat up or cool down at different points in time. The U.K. gets a little hotter in one year, and then Germany stays cool. And then you look at how GDP in the U.K. evolves following that change in temperature.
  • that generally gives you numbers in the vicinity of $150 per ton of carbon emitted and a 2 percent decline in GDP per degree Celsius in warming
  • we think that is quite different from what climate change is actually doing to the world. It's not only that the U.K. is going to heat up a little more than Germany, but the whole world is heating up because of climate change. And, in particular, oceans are also heating up. And when the whole planet warms, that has potentially really different implications for the climate system, increased frequency of extreme weather events that then have big local impacts. 
  • that's actually what geoscientists have been telling us for a long time, but it simply hadn't percolated into economics. And so we took that perspective very seriously and thought, "Well, what happens when we basically compare years where the world is very hot to years where the world is cooler?" And that gives you a much larger effect of climate change on the economy.
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Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intell... - 0 views

conversationswithtyler.com/...fareed-zakaria ideas intellectual curiosity conversation cowen china india devlopment liberal democracy west revolution
shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • ZAKARIA: Yes. I think I’ve always been intellectually very curious. I don’t think I’m the smartest person in the world, but I am very intellectually curious. I get fascinated by ideas and why things are some way. Even when I was very young, I remember I would read much more broadly than my peers.
  • I think I looked this up once, but Henry Kissinger’s memoirs came out when I was 14, I think. I remember reading them because I remember my mom — at that point, she was working at the Times of India. They excerpted it. I remember telling her that they had chosen some of the wrong excerpts, that there were other parts that would have been better. I must have read enough of it to have had an opinion.
  • The Bengali intelligentsia was the great intelligentsia of India, probably the most literate, the most learned. I think it’s because they’re very clever. One of the things I’ve always noticed is that people who are very clever political elites tend to think that they should run the economy because they can do it better than the market.
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  • a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
  • Milton Friedman used to say that there are two groups of people who don’t like the free market. Academics, intellectuals because they think they can do it better than the market, and businessmen because they don’t like competition. What they really want — this is a variation of the Peter Thiel argument — what they all really want is to be monopolists. That former part is, I think, what explains the Bengali intellectuals.
  • I think that the reality is, the market is much more powerful than they are in these areas. To give you one simple example, they decided, “Okay, we need to be making high-end chips.” Who do they bet on? They bet on Intel, a company that has failed miserably to compete with TSMC, the great Taiwanese chip manufacturer. Intel is now getting multi-billion-dollar grants from the United States government, from the European Union, because it fills all the categories that you’re looking for: big company, stable and well-run, in some sense, can guarantee a lot of jobs.
  • But of course, the reality is that chip making is so complicated
  • Who knew that, actually, it’s Nvidia, whose chips turned out to be designed for gaming, turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence? That’s a perfect example of how the Hayekian market signals that come bottom-up are much more powerful than a political elite who tries to tell you what it is.
  • COWEN: What did you learn from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer?
  • One was a reverence for tradition, and in particular, I loved the hymnal. I think Britain’s great contribution to music is religious music. It doesn’t have anything to compete with the Germans and the Italians in opera and things like that. Religious music, I think the Brits and the English have done particularly well.
  • The second thing I would say is an admiration for Christianity for its extraordinary emphasis on being nice to people who have not been lucky in life. I would say that’s, to me, the central message of Christianity that I take, certainly from the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s imbued through the Book of Common Prayer: to be nice to the people who have been less fortunate than you. Be nice to poor people. Recognize that in God’s kingdom, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
  • There is an enormous emphasis on the idea that those things that make you powerful in this world are not the things that really matter, that your dignity as a human being doesn’t come from that. I think that’s a very powerful idea. It’s a very revolutionary idea
  • Tom Holland has a very good book about this. He’s a wonderful historian in Britain. I think it’s called Dominion.
  • He points out what a revolutionary idea this was. It completely upended the Roman values, which were very much, the first shall be first. The powerful and the rich are the ones to be valued. He points out, here is this Jewish preacher coming out of the Middle East saying, “No, the first shall be last, the last shall be first in the kingdom of heaven.”
  • COWEN: I went to Amritsar the year before, and it was one of the most magical feelings I’ve ever had in any place. I’m still not sure what exactly I can trace it to — I am not a Sikh, of course. But what, for you, accounts for the strong, powerful, wondrous feeling one gets from that place?
  • I think there’s something about it architecturally, which is that there is a serenity about it. Sometimes you can find Hindu temples that are very elaborate. Sikhism is a kind of offshoot of Hinduism. The Hindu temples can be very elaborate, but very elaborate and ornate. This somehow has a simplicity to it. When you add to that the water — I’ve always thought that water adds an enormously calming effect
  • Hindi and Urdu are two Indian languages, very related. They both have roughly the same grammatical structure, but then Hindi derives its vocabulary entirely from Sanskrit, or almost entirely from Sanskrit, and Urdu derives its vocabulary almost entirely from Persian. Urdu is a language of Indian Muslims and is the official language for Pakistan. It’s a beautiful language, very lyrical, very much influenced by that Persian literary sensibility.
  • If you’re speaking one of the languages, there’s a way to alternate between both, which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a broad embrace of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, used to often do that. He would say, “I am delighted to be coming here to your home.” He’d repeat the word home, first in Urdu, then in Hindi, so that in effect, both constituencies were covered.
  • Modi, by contrast, India’s current prime minister, is a great Hindu nationalist. He takes pains almost never to use an Urdu word when he speaks. He speaks in a kind of highly Sanskritized Hindi that most Indians actually find hard to understand because the everyday language, Bollywood Hindi, is a mixture of Hindi words and Urdu words
  • I think the partition of India was a complete travesty. It was premised on this notion of religious nationalism. It was horrendously executed. The person who drew the lines, a man named Radcliffe, had never been to India. He’d never been east of the Suez and was given this task, and he did it in a month or two, probably caused a million-and-a-half to two million lives lost, maybe 10 million people displaced. It broke that wonderfully diverse, syncretic aspect of India.
  • If you look at cities like Delhi and Lahore, what was beautiful about them is that they mix together all the influences of India: Hindu, Muslim, Punjabi, Sindhi. Now what you have is much more bifurcated. If you go to Lahore, Lahore is a Muslim city in Pakistan, and it has a Punjabi influence. Delhi has become, essentially, much more Indian and Hindu and has lost that Muslim influence. To me, as somebody who really loves cosmopolitanism and diversity, it’s sad to see that. It’s almost like you’ve lost something that really made these places wonderfully rich.
  • I feel the same way when you read about the history of Europe. You think of a place like Vienna, which, in its most dazzling moment, was dazzling precisely because it was this polyglot population of people coming from all over the Habsburg Empire. A large segment of it was Jewish, and it had, as a result — think about Freud and Klimt and the music that came out of there, and the architecture that came out at the turn of the 19th century. And it’s all gone. It’s like, at this point, a somewhat beautiful but slightly dull Austrian city.
  • I remember once being asked when I was a graduate student at Harvard — Tony Lake was then national security adviser, and his office called and said — I’d written something in the New York Times, I think — “Mr. Lake would like you to come to the White House to brief him.”
  • I think, in a sense, Islam fit in within that tapestry very easily, and it’s been around for a while. When people talk about cleansing India, Hindu nationals talk about cleansing India of foreign influences. Islam has been in India since the 11th century, so it’s been around for a long time
  • I was amazed that America — it wasn’t America; it was where I was at Yale and Harvard and all that — that nobody cared where I came from. Nobody cared.
  • the syncretic nature of India, that India has always been diverse. Hinduism is very tolerant. It’s a kind of unusual religion in that you can believe in one god and be Hindu. You can believe in 300. You can be vegetarian and believe that’s a religious dictate. You can be nonvegetarian and believe that that’s completely compatible with your religion. It’s always embraced almost every variant and variation.
  • I walked in and there were five people around the table: Tony Lake; Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger; George Stephanopoulos, who was then director of communications at the White House; Joe Nye, who was a senior professor at Harvard; one other person; and myself. And I kept thinking to myself, “Are they going to realize at some point that I’m not an American citizen? They’re asking me for my advice on what America should do, and I am on a student visa.” And of course, nobody ever did, which is one of the great glories of America.
  • My thesis topic was, I tried to answer the question, when countries rise in great power, when they rise economically, they become great powers because they quickly translate that economic power into diplomatic and military power. What explains the principal exception in modern history, which is the United States?
  • My simple answer was that the United States was a very unusual creature in the modern world. It was a very strong nation with a very weak state. The federal government in the United States did not have the capacity to extract the resources from the society at large because you didn’t have income taxes in those days.
  • COWEN: What put you off academia? And this was for the better, in my view.
  • ZAKARIA: I think two things. One, I could see that political science was moving away from the political science that I loved, which was a broad discipline rooted in the social sciences but also rooted in the humanities, which was rigorous, structural, historical comparisons. Looking at different countries, trying to understand why there were differences.
  • It was moving much more toward a huge emphasis on things like rational choice, on game theory There was an economist envy. Just as economists have math envy, political scientists have economist envy. It was moving in that direction
  • COWEN: After 9/11 in 2001, you wrote a famous essay for Newsweek, “Why Do They Hate Us?” You talked about the rulers, failed ideas, religion. If you were to revise or rethink that piece today, how would you change it? Because we have 23 more years of data, right?
  • He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard.
  • His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book
  • I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines,
  • It’s all within you, and you have to be able to generate ideas from that lonely space. I’ve always found that hard. For me, writing books is the hardest thing I do. I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else.
  • The second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington. Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me
  • ZAKARIA: Yes. Not very much, honestly. The central point I was making in that essay was that if you look at the Arab world, it is the principal outlier in the modern era, where it has undergone almost no political modernization.
  • The Arab world had remained absolutely static. My argument was that it was largely because of the curse of oil and oil wealth, which had impeded modernization. But along with that, because of that failed modernization, they had developed this reactionary ideology of Islam, which said the answer is to go further back, not to go forward. “Islam is the solution,” was the cry of the Islamic fundamentalists in the 1970s.
  • COWEN: I’m struck that this year, both you and Ruchir Sharma have books coming out — again, Fareed’s book is Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present — that I would describe broadly as classically liberal. Do you think classical liberalism is making a comeback
  • the reason these books are coming out — and certainly, mine, as you know, is centrally occupied with the problem that there’s a great danger that we are going to lose this enormous, probably the most important thing that’s happened in the last 500, 600 years in human history, this movement that has allowed for the creation of modern liberal democratic societies with somewhat market economies.
  • If you look at the graph of income, of GDP, per capita GDP, it’s like a straight line. There’s no improvement until you get to about, roughly speaking, the 17th, 18th century in Europe, and then you see a sharp uptick. You see this extraordinary rise, and that coincides with the rise of science and intellectual curiosity and the scientific method, and the industrial revolution after that. All that was a product of this great burst of liberal Enlightenment thinking in the West.
  • If you think about what we’ve gone through in the last 30 years — and this is really the central argument in my book — massive expansion of globalization, massive expansion of information technology so that it has completely upended the old economy. All of this happening, and people are overwhelmed, and they search in that age of anxiety. They search for a solution, and the easy solutions are the ones offered by the populists.
  • They’re deeply anti-liberal, illiberal. So, I worry that, actually, if we don’t cherish what we have, we’ll lose what has been one of the great, great periods of progress in human history.
  • COWEN: Why does your book cover the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age? ZAKARIA: The Dutch are the first modern country. If you think about politics before that — certainly with the exception of ancient Greece and Rome — in modern history, the Dutch invent modern politics and economics. They invent modern politics in the sense that it’s the first time politics is not about courts and kings. It is about a merchant republic with powerful factions and interest groups and political parties, or the precursor to political parties.
  • It’s the beginning of modern economics because it’s economics based not simply on land and agriculture, but on the famous thing that John Locke talked about, which is mixing human beings’ labor with the land. The Dutch literally do this when they reclaim land from the sea and find ways to manage it, and then invent tall ships, which is, in some ways, one of the first great technological revolutions that has a direct economic impact.
  • You put all that together, and the Dutch — they become the richest country in the world, and they become the leading technological power in the world. It was very important to me to start the story — because they are really the beginnings of modern liberalism
  • COWEN: Circa 1800, how large were the Chinese and Indian economies?
  • Circa 1800, the Chinese and Indian economies are the two largest economies in the world, and people have taken this to mean, oh, the West had a temporary spurt because of colonies and cheap energy, and that the Chinese and Indians are just coming back to where they were.
  • First of all, the statistic is misleading because in those days, GDP was simply measured by using population. All society was agricultural. The more people you had, the larger your GDP. It was meaningless because the state could not extract that GDP in any meaningful way, and it’s meaningless because it doesn’t measure progress. It doesn’t measure per capita GDP growth, which is the most important thing to look at.
  • If you look at per capita GDP growth from 1350 to 1950, for 600 years, India and China have basically no movement. It’s about $600 in 1350 and $600 in 1950. The West, by comparison, moves up 600 percent in that period. It’s roughly $500 per capita GDP to roughly $5,000 per capita GDP.
  • You can also look at all kinds of other measures. You can look at diet. There are economic historians who’ve done this very well, and people in England were eating four to five times as much grain and protein as people in China and India. You can look at the extraordinary flourishing of science and engineering. You can look at the rise of the great universities. It’s all happening in the West.
  • The reason this is important is, people need to understand the rise of the West has been a very profound, deep-rooted historical phenomenon that began sometime in the 15th century. The fact that we’re moving out of that phase is a big, big deal. This is not a momentary blip. This is a huge train. The West define modernity. Even when countries try to be modern, they are in some way becoming Western because there is no path we know of to modernity without that.
  • One other way of just thinking about how silly that statistic is: in pure GDP terms, China had a larger GDP than Britain in 1900. Now, look at Britain in 1900: the most advanced industrial society in the world, ruling one-quarter of the world, largest navy in the world, was able to humiliate China by using a small fraction of its military power during the opium era. That’s what tells you that number is really meaningless. The West has been significantly more advanced than the rest of the world since the 16th century at least.
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