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Millennials Are Doing Just Fine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673485 millennials generation comparison history economics
shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.
  • he belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.
  • That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • the mid-2010s saw the beginnings of a turnaround that has continued ever since. By 2019, households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation.
  • That year, according to the Current Population Survey, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, income for the median Millennial household was about $9,000 higher than that of the median Gen X household at the same age, and about $10,000 more than the median Boomer household, in 2019 dollars.
  • Booms and recessions push incomes up and down, but although many media stories have tended to associate Millennials almost exclusively with the latter, they’ve now experienced both, and in a big way: Increases in income since 2014 have been steep.
  • ed since Millennials became adults. The Affordable Care Act extended health-care coverage, and federal-government support during the pandemic actually caused poverty to fall in 2020 and 2021
  • since 2014. By my analysis, Black and Latino Americans ages 25 to 44 in 2021 were making more money than Black and Latino Silents, Boomers, and Gen Xers at the same age. The U.S. is not without economic inequities, many of them racial. But Black and Latino Millennials are not falling behind previous generations when it comes to their income. Instead, most are getting ahead
  • Millennial men, on average, have not seen the income increases that Millennial women have (more on that later)—a divergence at least partly explained by the growing gap in educational attainment between men and women
  • the median income of Americans with a four-year college degree has steadily risen while the income of those with only a high-school degree has fallen. This trend is not new, though it is troubling.
  • The Great Recession was no doubt a more harrowing experience for young adults than the recession Gen X faced, but the income stagnation that followed it nonetheless lasted only a few years. Over the past half century, the longest period of falling or stagnant wages was from the ’70s to the mid-’90s, when Boomers were young workers.
  • poverty is not any more common among Millennials today than it was among previous generations.
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Opinion | Biden's Approval Is Low, Except Compared With Everyone Else's - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-approval.html biden approval comparative leaders european politics pandemic economics
shared by Javier E on 14 May 24 - No Cached
  • Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?A. An American.
  • in general, Americans’ lack of language skills is less important than their insularity, their relative unfamiliarity with what happens and how things work in other nations.
  • Other countries, especially wealthy ones that more or less match the United States in technological development and general ability to get things done, are a sort of mirror that helps us see ourselves more clearly. Yet many Americans, even supposedly knowledgeable commentators, often seem unaware of both the ways other nations are similar to us and the ways they are different.
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  • how many are aware that President Biden is among the more popular — well, less unpopular — leaders in the Western world?
  • First, let’s talk about some other international comparisons that seem relevant to the current situation.
  • But public perception of our economic performance is strongly colored by rising prices. Inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — has subsided a lot, but prices haven’t and won’t come down
  • No matter what we did, many people were going to die — but the death toll was affected by politics, perhaps especially by the way vaccines became a front in the culture war. And America had a really bad pandemic, even compared with its peers. U.S. life expectancy was already lagging behind comparable countries’ by 2019, but the gap widened after Covid-19 struck.
  • On the other hand, the U.S. economy experienced an exceptionally strong bounce back from the pandemic recession. Even after adjusting for inflation, U.S. gross domestic product per capita is up 7 percent since the eve of the pandemic, greatly exceeding growth in other major wealthy economies
  • This would seem on the face of it to say something good about Biden’s economic policies.
  • Although we hear politicians on the campaign trail trying to make hay with the old Reagan-era question — Are you better off than you were four years ago? — there’s a lot of amnesia about what was actually happening in 2020, namely a deadly, terrifying pandemic
  • there have been huge recriminations against policymakers, both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, either for supposedly causing the bout of inflation or at any rate failing to prevent it.
  • the similarities between the wealthiest nations are more revealing than their differences.
  • Inflation surged almost everywhere after the pandemic. And if you take care to compare “apples to Äpfel” — to use the same consumer price measures — inflation has been remarkably similar in different countries.
  • Since the eve of the pandemic, the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices has risen 19.6 percent in the United States and 19.8 percent in the euro area.
  • This strongly suggests that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than national policies, were inflation’s main driver.
  • Still, inflation rankles voters. Even when income growth exceeds inflation, as it has in the United States, people tend to feel that they earned their higher wages only to have them snatched away by higher prices
  • this is probably the most important reason that, according to tracking polls conducted by Morning Consult, every single leader of a Group of 7 nation is underwater, with more voters disapproving than approving of their leadership.
  • So who’s the winner of this unpopularity contest? Who has the least bad net approval? The answer is Joe Biden, with Giorgia Meloni of Italy a close second. The other Group of 7 leaders are even more unpopular
  • this has political consequences
  • every political analysis that says the fault for Biden’s low approval lies with the president and his campaign — that he’s too old (although that narrative, after suddenly peaking, mostly faded away after his State of the Union address) or is out of touch with the concerns of “real” Americans — needs to explain why he’s doing less badly than his foreign peers.
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Opinion | Empathy Is Exhausting. There Is a Better Way. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-war-empathy-pain.html empathy compassion response indifference evil distress
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • “What can I even do?”Many people are feeling similarly defeated, and many others are outraged by the political inaction that ensues. A Muslim colleague of mine said she was appalled to see so much indifference to the atrocities and innocent lives lost in Gaza and Israel. How could anyone just go on as if nothing had happened?
  • inaction isn’t always caused by apathy. It can also be the product of empathy. More specifically, it can be the result of what psychologists call empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.
  • I felt it intensely this fall, as violence escalated abroad and anger echoed across the United States. Helpless as a teacher, unsure of how to protect my students from hostility and hate. Useless as a psychologist and writer, finding words too empty to offer any hope. Powerless as a parent, searching for ways to reassure my kids that the world is a safe place and most people are good. Soon I found myself avoiding the news altogether and changing the subject when war came up
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  • Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.
  • Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies
  • Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.
  • The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.
  • Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.
  • when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.
  • In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.
  • empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”
  • Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”
  • “Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”
  • Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.
  • To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.
  • A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:
  • When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help
  • The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.
  • in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.
  • To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.
  • Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.
  • Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.
  • If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.
  • Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.
  • Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.
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'The machine did it coldly': Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets | Israel-G... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes israel hamas war proportionality bomb targets
shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.
  • The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict in the past six months. UN data shows that in the first month of the war alone, 1,340 families suffered multiple losses, with 312 families losing more than 10 members.
  • Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.
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  • Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
  • “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one intelligence officer said. Another said the principal question they were faced with was whether the “collateral damage” to civilians allowed for an attack.
  • “Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole house on its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care – you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
  • ccording to conflict experts, if Israel has been using dumb bombs to flatten the homes of thousands of Palestinians who were linked, with the assistance of AI, to militant groups in Gaza, that could help explain the shockingly high death toll in the war.
  • Details about the specific kinds of data used to train Lavender’s algorithm, or how the programme reached its conclusions, are not included in the accounts published by +972 or Local Call. However, the sources said that during the first few weeks of the war, Unit 8200 refined Lavender’s algorithm and tweaked its search parameters.
  • Responding to the publication of the testimonies in +972 and Local Call, the IDF said in a statement that its operations were carried out in accordance with the rules of proportionality under international law. It said dumb bombs are “standard weaponry” that are used by IDF pilots in a manner that ensures “a high level of precision”.
  • “The IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” it added. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.”
  • In earlier military operations conducted by the IDF, producing human targets was often a more labour-intensive process. Multiple sources who described target development in previous wars to the Guardian, said the decision to “incriminate” an individual, or identify them as a legitimate target, would be discussed and then signed off by a legal adviser.
  • n the weeks and months after 7 October, this model for approving strikes on human targets was dramatically accelerated, according to the sources. As the IDF’s bombardment of Gaza intensified, they said, commanders demanded a continuous pipeline of targets.
  • “We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us,” said one intelligence officer. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”
  • Lavender was developed by the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence division, Unit 8200, which is comparable to the US’s National Security Agency or GCHQ in the UK.
  • After randomly sampling and cross-checking its predictions, the unit concluded Lavender had achieved a 90% accuracy rate, the sources said, leading the IDF to approve its sweeping use as a target recommendation tool.
  • Lavender created a database of tens of thousands of individuals who were marked as predominantly low-ranking members of Hamas’s military wing, they added. This was used alongside another AI-based decision support system, called the Gospel, which recommended buildings and structures as targets rather than individuals.
  • The accounts include first-hand testimony of how intelligence officers worked with Lavender and how the reach of its dragnet could be adjusted. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” one of the sources said. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is.”
  • broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
  • Before the war, US and Israeli estimated membership of Hamas’s military wing at approximately 25-30,000 people.
  • there was a decision to treat Palestinian men linked to Hamas’s military wing as potential targets, regardless of their rank or importance.
  • According to +972 and Local Call, the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials. “We had a calculation for how many [civilians could be killed] for the brigade commander, how many [civilians] for a battalion commander, and so on,” one source said.
  • Another source, who justified the use of Lavender to help identify low-ranking targets, said that “when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it”. They said that in wartime there was insufficient time to carefully “incriminate every target”
  • So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it,” they added.
  • When it came to targeting low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
  • Such a strategy risked higher numbers of civilian casualties, and the sources said the IDF imposed pre-authorised limits on the number of civilians it deemed acceptable to kill in a strike aimed at a single Hamas militant. The ratio was said to have changed over time, and varied according to the seniority of the target.
  • The IDF’s targeting processes in the most intensive phase of the bombardment were also relaxed, they said. “There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations,” one source said. “A policy so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge.”
  • “There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” another added. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.” There appears to have been significant fluctuations in the figure that military commanders would tolerate at different stages of the war
  • One source said that the limit on permitted civilian casualties “went up and down” over time, and at one point was as low as five. During the first week of the conflict, the source said, permission was given to kill 15 non-combatants to take out junior militants in Gaza
  • at one stage earlier in the war they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military importance, or age.
  • “It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” they said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’ … In practice, the proportionality criterion did not exist.”
  • Experts in international humanitarian law who spoke to the Guardian expressed alarm at accounts of the IDF accepting and pre-authorising collateral damage ratios as high as 20 civilians, particularly for lower-ranking militants. They said militaries must assess proportionality for each individual strike.
  • An international law expert at the US state department said they had “never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable, especially for lower-level combatants. There’s a lot of leeway, but that strikes me as extreme”.
  • Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Department of Defense, now an analyst at Crisis Group, said: “While there may be certain occasions where 15 collateral civilian deaths could be proportionate, there are other times where it definitely wouldn’t be. You can’t just set a tolerable number for a category of targets and say that it’ll be lawfully proportionate in each case.”
  • Whatever the legal or moral justification for Israel’s bombing strategy, some of its intelligence officers appear now to be questioning the approach set by their commanders. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza,” one said.
  • Another said that after the 7 October attacks by Hamas, the atmosphere in the IDF was “painful and vindictive”. “There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough. On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”
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The future belongs to Right-wing progressives - UnHerd - 0 views

unherd.com/...ngs-to-right-wing-progressives technopoly utopianism right-wing fascism progressive culture politics crisis UK US
shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order.
  • in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele
  • These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.
  • This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety
  • yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.
  • Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room
  • Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.
  • is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.
  • We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
  • El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.
  • For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model
  • As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity
  • Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.
  • As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.
  • Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.
  • Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites
  • Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.
  • There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.
  • At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.
  • How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask
  • Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.
  • The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho
  • od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.
  • In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.
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No 'Hippie Ape': Bonobos Are Often Aggressive, Study Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...obo-chimpanzee-aggression.html ape study bonobo chimps primates
shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • In the early 1900s, primatologists noticed a group of apes in central Africa with a distinctly slender build; they called them “pygmy chimpanzees.” But as the years passed, it became clear that those animals, now known as bonobos, were profoundly different from chimpanzees.
  • Chimpanzee societies are dominated by males that kill other males, raid the territory of neighboring troops and defend their own ground with border patrols. Male chimpanzees also attack females to coerce them into mating, and sometimes even kill infants.
  • Among bonobos, in contrast, females are dominant. Males do not go on patrols, form alliances or kill other bonobos. And bonobos usually resolve their disputes with sex — lots of it.
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  • Bonobos became famous for showing that nature didn’t always have to be red in tooth and claw. “Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world’s ‘hippie chimps,’” Sally Coxe, a conservationist, said in 2006.
  • Because bonobos live in remote, swampy rainforests, it has been much more difficult to observe them in the wild than chimpanzees. More recent research has shown that bonobos live a more aggressive life than their reputation would suggest.
  • In a study based on thousands of hours of observations in the wild published on Friday, for example, researchers found that male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do.
  • “There is no ‘hippie ape,’”
  • As our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees can offer us clues about the roots of human behavior. We and the two species share a common ancestor that lived about 7 million years ago. About 5 million years later, bonobos split off from chimpanzees.
  • In 2012, a trio of Harvard researchers proposed that bonobos evolved much like dogs did. Less aggressive wolves were not as likely to be killed by humans, which over time led to the emergence of dogs. In a similar fashion, the researchers argued, female bonobos preferred to mate with less aggressive males, giving birth to less aggressive offspring.
  • The researchers called their idea the self-domestication hypothesis. In later years, they speculated that humans may have undergone a self-domestication of their own.
  • Dr. Mouginot soon became perplexed, as she saw that male bonobos acted aggressively on a regular basis. Unlike male chimpanzees, who started their days in a mellow mood, the male bonobos seemed to wake up ready for a fight.
  • She and her colleagues trained field assistants, who made more observations throughout the pandemic. The new analysis, based on 9,300 hours of observations on 12 male bonobos and 14 male chimpanzees, found that bonobos committed aggressive acts 2.8 times as frequently as than the chimpanzees did.
  • Dr. Mouginot found that the frequent bonobo aggressions almost always involved a single male attacking another male. Chimpanzees, in contrast, often ganged up to attack a victim.
  • the study set a new standard for comparing aggression in bonobos and chimpanzees.
  • Dr. Mouginot speculated that male chimpanzees engage in one-on-one aggression less often because it poses bigger dangers: A victim of aggression may not want to go on a border patrol with the perpetrator, for example. Or he may bring back some of his own allies to wreak vengeance.
  • It may be easier for male bonobos to get away with aggression, Dr. Mouginot said, because in their female-dominated society they don’t face the risks that come with male alliances. “I think that’s why we see more aggression in bonobos — because it’s less risky to act aggressively against other males,”
  • the apes that carried out the most aggressive acts were also the ones who mated most often.
  • parts of the self-domestication hypothesis “clearly need refinement.” It may be important to consider the effect that different kinds of aggression have on a species, rather than lumping them altogether, he said.
  • Still, he argued that the differences between the two species remained significant. “Chimpanzees murder, and bonobos don’t,
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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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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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Opinion | The GOP has a lock on some states, Democrats others. It's not healthy. - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...democrats-one-party-state-rule one-party rule campaign politics US history culture policy
shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.
  • It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties
  • Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.
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  • The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.
  • The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.
  • Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.
  • Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.
  • Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election
  • Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.
  • In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.
  • This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.
  • What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security.
  • Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences.
  • The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.
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'Anxiety' Review: Confronting That Queasy Feeling - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...g-that-queasy-feeling-111e359e culture anxiety review book
shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • In “Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide,” Mr. Chopra builds his case on the pillars of four traditions of thought that in their various ways see anxiety as an inevitable part of the human condition
  • he first and oldest is Buddhism, which teaches that a feeling of dissatisfaction with life, dukkha, is the root of all mental suffering.
  • n the 19th and 20th centuries, Mr. Chopra notes, European existentialists saw anxiety as the necessary consequence of human freedom: Realizing that we have to choose our moral values and fashion our own futures induces a kind of vertigo as we feel the burden of responsibility for our fates.
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  • Freudian psychoanalysis offers yet another account. As Mr. Chopra’s summary has it: “Anxiety is a signal to us that we harbor repressed emotions, desires, and sexuality.”
  • Finally, there is the idea of “materialist alienation,” advocated by both Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse. This theory identifies the sources of anxiety in the material and economic conditions of society rather than in the individual psyche:
  • Although Mr. Chopra, a philosophy professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, notes many overlaps and commonalities in the four approaches, their differences make them inconsistent as a set. It isn’t clear that they are centrally concerned with anxiety at all.
  • ukkha in Buddhism isn’t usually understood to refer to anxiety but rather to a state of discontent.
  • Mr. Chopra acknowledges that one of his key existentialist figures, Nietzsche, never uses the term. Alluding to Marx’s alienated labor, Mr. Chopra asks: “What does such alienation feel like?” His answer: “Like anxiety, for it is anxiety.
  • Mr. Chopra interprets everything through the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its significance or sees it where it is not. He says, for example, that from his own experience he has concluded that being “indecisive, distracted, insecure, or anxious . . . amounted to the same thing.” But for many people those conditions are very different.
  • Mr. Chopra is a serial user of the “presumptive we”: using the first-person plural to speak for all of us when he is really speaking for some or sometimes only himself.
  • At times Mr. Chopra writes of anxiety as though it were a key to self-definition, saying, at one point “thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.” Tell me your anxieties and I’ll tell you who you are may sound profound, but replace “anxieties” with “dreams,” “loves,” “hopes” or “values” and it is just as true.
  • Even philosophy in Mr. Chopra’s view springs not from wonder, as Aristotle and Plato claimed, but from anxiety. However, neither those giants of thought nor others who followed them for centuries had much to say about it
  • That “anxiety is a basic human affect and signature of human consciousness” is made somewhat problematic, he concedes, by the fact that it only emerged as “an explicitly named and identified problem in the nineteenth century.”
  • Still, Mr. Chopra is right to want to normalize the anxiety that people really do feel, saying that it is wrong to think that mental health consists in being anxiety-free. His basic therapeutic advice—not to push anxiety away but “to see what it ‘points to’ ”—is also spot-on
  • his book is a good primer on the major philosophers of anxiety, or at least its close relations.
28More

The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-already-losing-steam-a93478b1 ai revolution analysis evaluation 2024 economics
shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Most of the measurable and qualitative improvements in today’s large language model AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—including their talents for writing and analysis—come down to shoving ever more data into them. 
  • AI could become a commodity
  • To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to “synthetic data,” which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models,
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  • AIs like ChatGPT rapidly got better in their early days, but what we’ve seen in the past 14-and-a-half months are only incremental gains, says Marcus. “The truth is, the core capabilities of these systems have either reached a plateau, or at least have slowed down in their improvement,” he adds.
  • the gaps between the performance of various AI models are closing. All of the best proprietary AI models are converging on about the same scores on tests of their abilities, and even free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are catching up.
  • models work by digesting huge volumes of text, and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.
  • A mature technology is one where everyone knows how to build it. Absent profound breakthroughs—which become exceedingly rare—no one has an edge in performance
  • companies look for efficiencies, and whoever is winning shifts from who is in the lead to who can cut costs to the bone. The last major technology this happened with was electric vehicles, and now it appears to be happening to AI.
  • the future for AI startups—like OpenAI and Anthropic—could be dim.
  • Microsoft and Google will be able to entice enough users to make their AI investments worthwhile, doing so will require spending vast amounts of money over a long period of time, leaving even the best-funded AI startups—with their comparatively paltry warchests—unable to compete.
  • Many other AI startups, even well-funded ones, are apparently in talks to sell themselves.
  • the bottom line is that for a popular service that relies on generative AI, the costs of running it far exceed the already eye-watering cost of training it.
  • That difference is alarming, but what really matters to the long-term health of the industry is how much it costs to run AIs. 
  • Changing people’s mindsets and habits will be among the biggest barriers to swift adoption of AI. That is a remarkably consistent pattern across the rollout of all new technologies.
  • the industry spent $50 billion on chips from Nvidia to train AI in 2023, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue.
  • For an almost entirely ad-supported company like Google, which is now offering AI-generated summaries across billions of search results, analysts believe delivering AI answers on those searches will eat into the company’s margins
  • Google, Microsoft and others said their revenue from cloud services went up, which they attributed in part to those services powering other company’s AIs. But sustaining that revenue depends on other companies and startups getting enough value out of AI to justify continuing to fork over billions of dollars to train and run those systems
  • three in four white-collar workers now use AI at work. Another survey, from corporate expense-management and tracking company Ramp, shows about a third of companies pay for at least one AI tool, up from 21% a year ago.
  • OpenAI doesn’t disclose its annual revenue, but the Financial Times reported in December that it was at least $2 billion, and that the company thought it could double that amount by 2025. 
  • That is still a far cry from the revenue needed to justify OpenAI’s now nearly $90 billion valuation
  • the company excels at generating interest and attention, but it’s unclear how many of those users will stick around. 
  • AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as
  • While these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them. This means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll. He compares it to the way that self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.
  • Add in the myriad challenges of using AI at work. For example, AIs still make up fake information,
  • getting the most out of open-ended chatbots isn’t intuitive, and workers will need significant training and time to adjust.
  • That’s because AI has to think anew every single time something is asked of it, and the resources that AI uses when it generates an answer are far larger than what it takes to, say, return a conventional search result
  • None of this is to say that today’s AI won’t, in the long run, transform all sorts of jobs and industries. The problem is that the current level of investment—in startups and by big companies—seems to be predicated on the idea that AI is going to get so much better, so fast, and be adopted so quickly that its impact on our lives and the economy is hard to comprehend. 
  • Mounting evidence suggests that won’t be the case.
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Opinion | What Democrats Need to Do Now - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aga-trump-vance-democrats.html Democratic party dynamism MAGA class struggle struggle class security 2024 platform culture politics policy
shared by Javier E about 9 hours ago - No Cached
  • Over the last eight years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends Donald Trump.
  • It has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters respect.
  • J.D. Vance is the embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview — with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements, free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration.
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  • MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.
  • If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.
  • In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators.
  • the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.
  • Americans have a zeal for continual self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone.”
  • “the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”
  • we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common futur
  • Americans can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like Vladimir Putin at bay.
  • Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.
  • MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.”
  • MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.
  • MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside
  • MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics.
  • MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.
  • If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century
  • My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from the psychologist John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.
  • The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness.
  • Americans can’t be secure if the border is in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a sense that the government has things under control.
  • Americans can’t be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that Democrats largely built are so important.
  • offer people a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete
  • champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.
  • If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric — elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business
  • They need to stand up to protectionism, not join the stampede.
  • Democrats need to throttle back the regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled innovation.
  • Democrats need to take on their teachers’ unions and commit to dynamism in the field of education.
  • tap back into the more traditional American aspiration: We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can create a fluid, mobile society.
  • The economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less
  • Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and dynamism.”
  • t aspiration is not like a brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that can be fed or dampened
  • “The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”
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