Opponents of the deal contend that it will cause overseas job losses and depress wages, since U.S. businesses will be better able to take advantage of low wage workers in developing economies.
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Obama administration releases text of TPP trade deal - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views
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Supporters, meanwhile, argue the deal will make it easier for U.S. businesses to sell overseas, opening up international markets just as the U.S. market is already open to imports from these 11 other countries. And they counter that the growth of U.S. exports will produce well-paying jobs at home.
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If passed by Congress, the TPP would rank as one of President Barack Obama's major second-term policy accomplishments and a signature part of his legacy.
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But pursuit of the deal has made strange political bedfellows, as Obama had to join forces with congressional Republicans to secure fast-track authority for the deal, which prevents filibusters or amendments during the 90-day review period.
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And Obama's own party has largely abandoned him on the issue. All three candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination -- Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley -- have announced their opposition to the TPP, citing concerns about the lack of protections for American workers.
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shared by katyshannon on 16 Nov 15
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Our great-grandchildren will speak a wildly different English - Quartz - 0 views
qz.com/...eak-a-wildly-different-english
english US england spanglish singlish dialects accents spellings future
shared by katyshannon on 16 Nov 15
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The global role English plays today as a lingua franca—used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages—has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.
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Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. But the Vulgar Latin used in speech continued to change, forming new dialects, which in time gave rise to the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian.
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Similar developments may be traced today in the use of English around the globe, especially in countries where it functions as a second language. New “interlanguages” are emerging, in which features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations.
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Looking back to the early 20th century, it was the Standard English used in England, spoken with the accent known as “Received Pronunciation,” that carried prestige. But today the largest concentration of native speakers is in the US, and the influence of US English can be heard throughout the world: can I get a cookie, I’m good, did you eat, the movies, “skedule” rather than “shedule.” In the future, to speak English will be to speak US English.
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The turn of the 20th century was a period of regulation and fixity—the rules of Standard English were established and codified in grammar books and in the New (Oxford) English Dictionary on historical principles, published as a series of volumes from 1884-1928. Today we are witnessing a process of de-standardization, and the emergence of competing norms of usage.
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Clipped forms, acronyms, blends, and abbreviations have long been productive methods of word formation in English (think of bus, smog and scuba) but the huge increase in such coinages means that they will be far more prominent in the English of 2115.
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Abbas Says PA Not Bound by Agreements With Israel - Diplomacy and Defense - Haaretz - 2 views
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NEW YORK – The Palestinian Authority will no longer uphold the agreements it has signed with Israel over the last 20 years, PA President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday
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Abbas said Israel “must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power
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The State of Palestine, based on the 4th of June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, is a state under occupation,” Abbas continued. He urged the United Nations to grant the Palestinians international protection and said any country that hasn’t yet recognized Palestine should do so forthwith.
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Abbas used the speech to assail Israel, accusing it of systematically violating all its agreements with the Palestinians and of trying to destroy the two-state solution.
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“We expect and call on the [Palestinian] Authority and its leader to act responsibly and accede to the proposal of the prime minister of Israel and enter into direct negotiations with Israel without preconditions,” the PMO said. “The fact that he – time and again – has refused to do so is the best possible proof of the fact he does not intend to reach a peace agreement.”
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A response to the speech issued by the Prime Minister’s Office didn’t relate directly to Abbas’ statement.
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Abbas also dwelled at length on hate crimes perpetrated by Jews against Palestinians and accused Israel of protecting the perpetrators rather than catching them. He also accused Israel of establishing an apartheid regime in the West Bank.
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“How can a state claiming to be an oasis of democracy and claiming that its courts and security apparatus function according to the law accept the existence of so-called ‘price tag’ gangs and other terrorist organizations that terrorize our people, their property and holy sites, all under the sight of the Israeli army and police, which do not deter or punish, but rather provide them with protection?” he demanded.
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Responding to speeches by other world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which focused mainly on the battle against ISIS, Abbas declared that any war on terror must begin with solving the Palestinian problem.
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Immediately after his speech, Abbas attended a festive ceremony in which the Palestinian flag was raised at UN headquarters for the first time.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the gathering that he doesn’t consider Israeli-Palestinian peace an “impossible dream” and that Washington remains committed to peace talks.
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This man, Abbas, is an anti-semite, and has made it very clear that he does not want peace: "Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah," and "The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours and they (the Jews) have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." 'I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land' "I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and the birthplace of Jesus Christ peace be upon him, to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people…" He did not even reference the Jewish connection to Israel "In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli-civilian or soldier-in our lands." It is very difficult to believe anything he said in his speech in this article. This kind of article is the propaganda that is spreading anti Israel and anti-semitic views throughout the world.
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The Coming Fight Over Oil Drilling in the Great Australian Bight | VICE | United States - 0 views
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The Coming Fight Over Oil Drilling in the Great Australian Bight
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An Australian Senate committee announced Monday it will consider BP's proposal to drill in search of oil reserves off the country's southern coast.
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"If this project goes ahead, we really are gambling with the future of the Great Australian Bight," Greens Senator Robert Simms said told the ABC.
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would see four exploration wells drilled 1–2.5 kilometers [0.6–1.6 miles] into the Great Australian Bight, a large body of water to the country's southwest.
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Last year, BP agreed to pay $24.5 billion [$17.7 billion USD] to settle claims against the company around the disaster.
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It's attention that would be attractive to South Australia, which faces the prospect of becoming Australia's worst-performing state economy.
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As the Wilderness Society points out, 85 percent of the species found in the bight cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
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with the spill having an "optimistic" flow rate and being capped within 35 days, the modeling predicts that 175,000 barrels of oil would be released into the bight. Worst-case scenario looks more like 50,000 barrels a day for 87 days (the same as Deepwater Horizon)—close to 4.35 million barrels.
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Nepal just elected its first female president - Quartz - 0 views
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A month after adopting a new national constitution, Nepal has elected Bidhya Devi Bhandari as its next president. She will be the country’s first female president and only the second president since Nepal became a democratic republic in 2008.
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The new constitution required an almost entirely new government,
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beginning with parliament’s election of prime minister Khadga Prasad Oli. He and Bhandari both represent Nepal’s Unified Marxist-Leninist Communist party.
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It also required that either the president or vice president be a woman, and that one-third of parliamentarians be women. Parliament’s first female speaker, Onsari Gharti Magar, was elected last week.
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Bhandari became involved in politics as a teenager in Nepal the 1980s, but stepped away from the action after marrying communist leader Madan Bhandari and having two children with him. After becoming a widow in 1993, when her husband was killed in a mysterious car accident, she stepped back in and campaigned to take his place in parliament.
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Nepal is still reeling from the violence and unrest sparked by the adoption of the new constitution. Minority groups complain that it marginalizes them, while others are dismayed at its secularism. India, Nepal’s neighbor, appears to have sided with the dissenters by instituting an unofficial blockade of fuel and other supplies across its border.
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shared by katyshannon on 20 Oct 15
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Texas Eliminates Funding to Planned Parenthood | TIME - 0 views
time.com/...texas-planned-parenthood
texas cutting funding planned parenthood time US history policy crisis
shared by katyshannon on 20 Oct 15
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Texas is eliminating taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood in the state, based on concerns over the organization’s fetal tissue donations, the governor announced on Monday.
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office issued a statement, saying Texas is ending Medicaid’s participation with Planned Parenthood, which means the women’s reproductive health nonprofit will no longer receive Medicaid funding in the state.
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“Following the release of gruesome videos filmed at Planned Parenthood facilities, including Gulf Coast in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott announced his LIFE Initiative to provide greater protections for children in the womb and prevent the sale of baby body parts,” Abbott’s statement reads. The cancellation “calls for funding to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers out of taxpayer money to be eliminated completely, both at the State and local levels,” according to the announcement.
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Abbott said that canceling Medicaid participation for Planned Parenthood in Texas moves the state closer to “providing greater access to safe healthcare for women while protecting our most vulnerable – the unborn.”
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Planned Parenthood has long said that its fetal tissue donations are legal, since the organization did not accept payment for the donations beyond the reimbursement of costs. On Oct. 13, Planned Parenthood announced that it will no longer accept reimbursements for expenses related to donated fetal tissue. “Planned Parenthood’s policies on fetal tissue donation already exceed the legal requirements,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards wrote in a letter to the National Institutes of Health. “Now we’re going even further in order to take away any basis for attacking Planned Parenthood to advance an anti-abortion political agenda.”
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Is Donald Trump a Fascist? - The New York Times - 0 views
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you usually hear liberals sling against the right: That the real estate magnate turned populist is actually a fascist.
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The hook for this charge was Trump’s illiberal musings about Muslims and databases and his lies — or, to be charitable, false memories
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argued that Trumpism, however ideologically inchoate, manifests at least seven of the hallmarks of fascism identified by the Italian polymath Umberto Eco.
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a celebration of aggressive masculinity,
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the best people of the world.”
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Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump:
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One could even go a little further. A great deal has been written on the question of why America didn’t produce an enduring socialist or Communist mass movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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as opposed to the “fascism” that liberals see lurking in every Republican president) is equally striking.
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that inoculated our politics against fascism’s appeal.
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nd while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace,
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e fascist temptations can creep in.
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He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.
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Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted
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“beat” by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican “rapists”
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he can do things better, that centralization is fine and dandy so long as you have the right Duce
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“proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative
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Should Trump’s rivals imitate the “fascism” whisperers in their party and start attacking Trump as a
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Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-
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He isn’t actually building a fascist mass movement (he hasn’t won a primary yet!)
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still several degrees of ugly away from the actual fascist move,
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precisely because Trump doesn’t have many of the core commitments that have tended to inoculate conservatives against fascism, it’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him
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but they should make it awfully difficult for him to get to 40 or 50 percent. And a somewhat fascist-looking candidate who
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Finally, freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far —
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the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration
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then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step
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The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream “Hitler!” on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.
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How the Coronavirus Will Change Young People's Lives - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...609862
social effects pandemic crisis culture politics financial youths Generation C
shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20
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Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
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With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.
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“Epidemics are really bad for economies,”
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“We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”
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People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help
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To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.
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Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.
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investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.
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Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
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Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.
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Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.
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American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,
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The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.
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Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
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as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.
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there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.
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those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.
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Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.
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there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.
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What will become of Generation C?
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Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.
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“People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”
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Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.
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Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others
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Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.
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in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.
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For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
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This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward
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When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game
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the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
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“There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”
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The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.
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Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”
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a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.
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the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.
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But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
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Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.
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As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know
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shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20
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How Racism Is Destroying America - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-hostility-eduardo-porter.html
racism American idea polarization safety net empathy culture politics
shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20
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liberal astigmatism — our belief that history is a story of racial progress, and our faith in our own empathy — makes Eduardo Porter’s “American Poison” a tough read.
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It is a learned, well-written but relentless survey of social science studies on the racial polarization, animosity and social fragmentation of American life.
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Empathy seems to increase with social distance.
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One such illusion is that increasing racial proximity by integrating schools and housing is a good way to break down racial animosities and paranoias.
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Empathy, Porter argues, has always waged an unequal struggle against the racial animus that courses through American history, poisoning both those who hate and those who are hated
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Race has contaminated American solidarity, making it impossible for poor whites, threatened by job loss, globalization and the death of carbon-intensive industries, to make common cause with African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and immigrants
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“Unwilling to share the bounty of state with people of other races and creeds, heritages and colors, real Americans — the white ones — have prevented the erection of a welfare state at all.”
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The great achievement of American liberalism — Franklin Roosevelt’s social security state — was passed
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only by a devil’s bargain with Southern segregationist senators. Liberal social security systems perpetuated black exclusion until Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms of 1964.
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“Johnson failed to grasp the scale at which inviting people of color into the network of rights and assurances created in the 1930s by F.D.R. to protect the well-being of white American workers would undermine support for the safety net altogether.”
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he points out the tragic irony of a white working class, decimated by deindustrialization and wasted by substance abuse, focusing their hatreds on minorities and turning against the very social programs — Obamacare, for example — that might actually help them
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“The America that built the most prosperous working class the world had ever seen collapsed into a heap of pathologies — deaths of despair — simply due to a lack of empathy. The greatest irony is that while the black and the brown suffered most intensely from the fallout, the collapse in social trust wiped away the American dream of working-class whites too.”
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This is a powerful argument, but it has a couple of problems
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it overestimates race and underestimates class and a free market political culture in explaining why America collects a far smaller percentage of national income in taxes compared with European countries that have more adequate public health, education and welfare services
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Porter treats racial hatred as a fixed dose of poison coursing through the veins of the public and neglects politics, the systematic way in which Republican politicians from Richard Nixon onward fed the poison with envenoming rhetoric about “welfare queens,” “dysfunctional black families” and the shame of welfare dependency.
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Racial polarization, Porter claims, has led to the collapse not only of “Americans’ support for the safety net,” but also of “their general support of public goods and the entire apparatus of government.”
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Porter’s jeremiad makes it impossible to understand the equally tenacious history of American progressive government: from Roosevelt himself, through Truman’s integration of the United States military, the Supreme Court ban on racial covenants in housing in 1948, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the struggle to desegregate American schools and finally — an achievement barely mentioned in Porter’s story — the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
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HISTORY OF GERMANY - 0 views
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Only to the east is there no natural border
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associated with the name Germany in the 1st century BC
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conquest of Gaul
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Celts
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Augustus Caesar
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subdued up to the Danube
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the Roman empire has some natural boundaries
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France and Spain - prosperous and stable parts of the Roman empire
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Tacitus
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shared by Javier E on 29 May 17
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For Trump and G.O.P., the Welfare State Shouldn't Be the Enemy - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ate-shouldnt-be-the-enemy.html
conservatism strategy welfare state regulation reform trump
shared by Javier E on 29 May 17
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lasvegas-flights liked it
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Historically, however, the level of government spending and the level of regulation have been packaged together and treated as a single variable. This has forced a choice between two options: the “liberal” package of big government and heavy regulation or the “conservative” package of small government and light regulation.
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But this is a false choice. Regulatory policy and fiscal policy are independent dimensions, and they can be rebundled in different packages. Mr. Trump’s gestures toward a big-government, low-regulation package — rooted more in instinct than intellect — proved popular with Republican voters
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Republicans need to recognize finally that secure property rights, openness to global trade and a relatively low regulatory burden are much more important than fiscal policy for innovation, job creation and rising standards of
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Government spending reliably rises as economies grow. When countries get richer, one of the first things their people do is vote for more generous government social services. This pattern, which economists have labeled Wagner’s Law, has held more or less steady for a century in dozens of developed democratic countries.
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The Republican legislative agenda is stalled because party members have boxed themselves in with their own bad ideas about what freedom and rising prosperity require. A new pro-growth economic platform that sets aside small-government monomania and focuses instead on protecting citizens’ basic rights to commit “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” as the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick put it, has both practical and political advantages
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Third, the idea that reducing taxpayer-financed government spending is the key to giving people more freedom and revving up the economy encourages conservative hostility to government as such
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not only are sound safety nets popular, but they also increase the public’s tolerance for the dislocations of a dynamic free-market economy
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a generous and effective safety net can be embraced as a tool to promote and sustain a culture of freedom, innovation and risk taking. Politically, repairing and improving the slipshod infrastructure of the safety net would liberate Republicans from the bad faith of attacking the welfare state in one breath, halfheartedly promising not to cut entitlements in the next and then breaking that promise once in power.
I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality - LA Times - 0 views
Tim Wu: Why the Courts Will Have to Save Net Neutrality - The New York Times - 0 views
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How China's Tencent Avoided an Antitrust Push, For Now. - The New York Times - 0 views
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There’s no company in the world like Tencent. It’s a true monopoly on many levels. It wields the kind of influence in China that Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google can only aspire to.
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Tencent is a mega entertainment platform. It is the world’s largest online game company, owning stakes in Riot Games and Epic Games. It owns China’s biggest online video, music and online literature businesses, too.
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Tencent is a venture capital investor. In 2020, it lagged only Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley investment firm, in terms of the number of unicorns — start-ups valued at over $1 billion — it has invested in, according to the Hurun Report, a Shanghai research firm.
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it has invested in more than 800 companies, including a 12 percent stake in Snap and 5 percent in Tesla. By comparison, GV, formerly Google Ventures and the most active corporate venture capital arm in the United States, has invested in more than 500 companies.
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Most important, Tencent is a platform operator. It runs WeChat, a mobile messaging app with social media and financial services abilities.
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WeChat needs other companies to keep its one billion users glued to the app. An operating system and an app store in its own right, WeChat allows users to run miniprograms created and run by other companie
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Those users can make purchases using WeChat’s payment system. Tesla, Airbnb and Starbucks all have their own WeChat miniprograms. So do most of major Chinese websites — barring those that WeChat forbids.
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Friendly companies build miniprograms for WeChat. Tencent invested in China’s ride-sharing and bike-sharing companies because their users pay frequently, and Tencent wanted them to use WeChat Pay.
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No matter how decent or humble Tencent may act, it’s a giant conglomerate with $24 billion in profit last year and spends much of it on investment. It picks winners and losers, but the winners won’t always be the best out there, thus harming innovation and efficiency.
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It limits user access to other products and services. Its WeChat app doesn’t allow users to share links for merchandise on Alibaba’s Taobao online marketplace or for short videos on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister company.
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Tencent doesn’t just court the industry. It has also long tried to get close to the government. Compared with the sometimes defiant Alibaba, Tencent has long publicly underscored its willingness to comply fully with rules and regulations.
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In April, the company said it would spend $7.8 billion on green energy, education, village revitalization and other pet topics of President Xi Jinping. In the view of Hong Bo, an internet commentator, Tencent is acting for self-preservation.
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shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19
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Opinion | Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...barr-liberals-family.html
liberalism conservatism despair anomie values crisis culture politics
shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19
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It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.
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The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.
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now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.
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Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.
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Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population
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We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.
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You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.
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Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.
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the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.
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While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.
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“The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”
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These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.
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. In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.
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The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil
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Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”
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Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”
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the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.
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While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.
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Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.
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Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
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Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
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The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
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The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
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“Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
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How bad can the climate crisis get if Trump wins again? | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views
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While US climate emissions fell 2.1% in 2019, they rose significantly in 2018, according to estimates from the economic analysis firm Rhodium Group. On net, emissions are slightly higher than in the beginning of 2017, when Trump’s administration began enacting dozens of environment rollbacks aimed at helping the oil and gas industry.
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“What they have done is created confusion within the business community and the environmental world as to what are going to be the standards,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under the Republican president George W Bush. “Essentially every regulation the agency promulgates gets a lawsuit that goes with it, almost inevitably … that’s the only good thing you can say about it.”
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Whitman called the approach “mindless” and said “whoever is a bigger donor gets to tell them what the environmental policy should be, it seems”.
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Americans choosing Trump would send the signal that they don’t care about the climate, Light said.
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“In the case of a second Trump term, we’ve got to totally double down on the efforts to communicate how serious the non-federal actors are in the United States,” Light said. “And what you really want to try to make sure is that those people in other countries who are not in favor of strengthening their countries’ own climate target are not able to point to the United States and say nothing’s going on there.”
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The concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases is at a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. The planet is already 1C hotter than it was before industrialization.
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As the technology for retrieving oil and gas has advanced, with hydraulic fracturing, the cost of production has plummeted. The US is now a net exporter of oil products.
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Much of the expansion expected would be for feedstocks to make chemicals and plastics, explained Courtney Bernhardt, the group’s research director.
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“The US is already struggling to meet climate commitments and transition to a low-carbon future,” Bernhardt said. “This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas and petrochemical industries.”
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In the race against Trump, all the major Democratic candidates have similarly pledged to seek at least net-zero emissions by 2050.
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The League of Conservation Voters’ called the House committee effort encouraging and said the announcement “is further proof that elections have consequences”. But other groups were critical, saying the plan would not transition away from fossil fuels fast enough.
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Opinion | How Many Will Die for the Dow? - The New York Times - 0 views
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What was the strategy Trump abandoned? It was the same strategy that has worked in other countries, from South Korea to New Zealand. First, use a lockdown to “crush the curve”: reduce the number of infected Americans to a relatively low level. Then combine gradual reopening with widespread testing, tracing of contacts after an infected individual is identified, and isolation of those who might spread the disease.
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In short, the hastily constructed Covid-19 safety net, while full of holes, has nonetheless protected many Americans from extreme hardship.
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that safety net will be snatched away over the next few months unless Congress and the White House act to maintain it. Small businesses have only an eight-week window to convert loans into grants, which means that many will start laying off workers within a month or so. Expanded unemployment benefits will expire on July 31.
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And unless state and local governments get large aid from Washington, we will soon see huge layoffs of schoolteachers, firefighters and police officers.
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Yet Trump and his party have come out against further aid to the unemployed and against helping beleaguered state and local governments. Instead, the party is increasingly putting all its hopes on a rapid reopening of the economy, even though that prospect terrifies health experts, who warn that it could lead to a second wave of infections and many more deaths.
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Some Republicans claim that we can’t afford to keep providing a safety net, because we’re incurring too much debt. But that’s both bad economics and disingenuous. After all, soaring budget deficits haven’t stopped Trump officials from considering, yes, more tax cuts.
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There’s also a pretense that the push for reopening is coming from ordinary working Americans, that it’s a populist, grass-roots demand. But the public is much more worried that we’ll reopen too quickly than that we’ll open too slowly
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No, the push to ignore the health experts is a top-down thing; it’s coming from Trump and his allies, and whatever limited public support they’re getting is driven by partisanship, not populism.
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In the early stages of this pandemic, Trump and the right in general downplayed the threat because they didn’t want to hurt stock prices. Now they’re pushing for a premature end to containment because they imagine that it will boost stocks again.
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So Trump and his party want to go full speed ahead with reopening no matter how many people it kills. As I said, their de facto position is that Americans must die for the Dow.
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To Cut Emissions to Zero, U.S. Needs to Make Big Changes in Next 10 Years - The New Yor... - 0 views
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If the United States wants to get serious about tackling climate change, the country will need to build a staggering amount of new energy infrastructure in just the next 10 years, laying down steel and concrete at a pace barely being contemplated today.
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That’s one conclusion from a major study released Tuesday by a team of energy experts at Princeton University, who set out several exhaustively detailed scenarios for how the country could slash its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by 2050.
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That goal has been endorsed by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as numerous states and businesses, to help avoid the worst effects of global warming.
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The researchers identified a common set of drastic changes that the United States would need to make over the next decade to stay on pace for zero emissions.
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This year, energy companies will install 42 gigawatts of new wind turbines and solar panels, smashing records. But that annual pace would need to nearly double over the next decade
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The capacity of the nation’s electric grid would have to expand roughly 60 percent by 2030 to handle vast amounts of wind and solar power
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By 2030, at least 50 percent of new cars sold would need to be battery-powered, with that share rising thereafter.
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Most homes today are heated by natural gas or oil. But in the next 10 years, nearly one-quarter would need to be warmed with efficient electric heat pumps, double today’s numbers.
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Virtually all of the 200 remaining coal-burning power plants would have to shut down by 2030.
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“The scale of what we have to build in a very short time frame surprised me,” said Christopher Greig, a senior scientist at Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
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To start, the United States could make enormous strides over the next decade by rapidly scaling up solutions already in use today, like wind, solar, electric cars and heat pumps. Doing so would require $2.5 trillion in additional investments by governments and industry by 2030.
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Wind and solar power could be backed up by batteries, some existing nuclear reactors and a large fleet of natural-gas plants that run only occasionally or have been modified to burn clean hydrogen.
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Devices that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could help offset emissions.
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But most of those technologies are still in early development. That would have to change quickly.
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“We need to be building up our options now,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton.
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The studies found that, if done right, getting to net zero appears broadly affordable, largely because technologies like wind and solar have become so much cheaper than anyone expected over the past decade.
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“It’s not a question of whether we have enough land, because we do,” said Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton. “But with that many new projects, you have to ask if they’ll run into local opposition.”
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Then there are jobs to consider. Net zero would mean eliminating coal and drastically reducing oil and gas use, displacing hundreds of thousands of fossil-fuel workers.
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On the flip side, millions of new green jobs would spring up for workers retrofitting homes or building wind farms, though those jobs might not be located in the same regions.
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Politicians would need to figure out how to gain public acceptance for the sweeping changes unfolding, while protecting vulnerable Americans from harm.
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What both studies do illustrate is that there’s little room for delay.
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“It may seem like 2050 is a long way off,” said Dr. Jenkins. “But if you think about the timelines for policies, business decisions and capital investments, it’s really more like the day after tomorrow.”
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How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk's Number - The New York Times - 0 views
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a Scottish moral philosopher.The philosopher, William MacAskill,
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his latest book, “What We Owe the Future,” became a best seller after it was published in August.
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His rising profile parallels the worldwide growth of the giving community he helped found, effective altruism. Once a niche pursuit for earnest vegans and volunteer kidney donors who lived frugally so that they would have more money to give away for cheap medical interventions in developing countries, it has emerged as a significant force in philanthropy, especially in millennial and Gen-Z giving.
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In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.
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“If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do,” Mr. MacAskill said.
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Mr. Musk has not officially joined the movement but he and Mr. MacAskill have known each other since 2015, when they met at an effective altruism conference. Mr. Musk has also said on Twitter that Mr. MacAskill’s giving philosophy is similar to his own.
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Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.
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If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades,
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Traditionally, effective altruism was focused on finding the lowest-cost interventions that did the most good. The classic example is insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent mosquitoes from giving people malaria.
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Mr. MacAskill argues that people living today have a responsibility not just to people halfway around the world but also those in future generations.
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The rise of this kind of thinking, known as longtermism, has meant the Effective Altruists are increasingly associated with causes that have the ring of science fiction to them — like preventing artificial intelligence from running amok or sending people to distant planets to increase our chances of survival as a species
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The two men first met in 2012, when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at M.I.T. with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
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Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. MacAskill suggested that he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly.
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Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.
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Bloomberg recently estimated that Mr. Bankman-Fried was worth $10.5 billion, even after the recent crash in crypto prices. That puts Mr. Bankman-Fried in the unusual position of having earned his enormous fortune on behalf of the effective altruism cause, rather than making the money and then searching for a sense of purpose in donating it.
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Mr. Bankman-Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years.
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Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion in donations
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Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.
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Mr. MacAskill said that he got to know Mr. Musk better through Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player and effective altruist, who briefly advised Mr. Musk on philanthropy.
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In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)
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Mr. MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misconceptions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”