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The Rise and Fall of BNN Breaking, an AI-Generated News Outlet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reaking-ai-generated-news.html AI news publishing fraud
shared by Javier E on 12 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • His is just one of many complaints against BNN, a site based in Hong Kong that published numerous falsehoods during its short time online as a result of what appeared to be generative A.I. errors.
  • During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of “seasoned” journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune’s self-reported audience. Prominent news organizations like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian linked to BNN’s stories
  • Google News often surfaced them, too
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  • A closer look, however, would have revealed that individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT.
  • How easily the site and its mistakes entered the ecosystem for legitimate news highlights a growing concern: A.I.-generated content is upending, and often poisoning, the online information supply.
  • The websites, which seem to operate with little to no human supervision, often have generic names — such as iBusiness Day and Ireland Top News — that are modeled after actual news outlets. They crank out material in more than a dozen languages, much of which is not clearly disclosed as being artificially generated, but could easily be mistaken as being created by human writers.
  • Now, experts say, A.I. could turbocharge the threat, easily ripping off the work of journalists and enabling error-ridden counterfeits to circulate even more widely — as has already happened with travel guidebooks, celebrity biographies and obituaries.
  • The result is a machine-powered ouroboros that could squeeze out sustainable, trustworthy journalism. Even though A.I.-generated stories are often poorly constructed, they can still outrank their source material on search engines and social platforms, which often use A.I. to help position content. The artificially elevated stories can then divert advertising spending, which is increasingly assigned by automated auctions without human oversight.
  • NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation, identified more than 800 websites that use A.I. to produce unreliable news content.
  • Low-paid freelancers and algorithms have churned out much of the faux-news content, prizing speed and volume over accuracy.
  • Former employees said they thought they were joining a legitimate news operation; one had mistaken it for BNN Bloomberg, a Canadian business news channel. BNN’s website insisted that “accuracy is nonnegotiable” and that “every piece of information underwent rigorous checks, ensuring our news remains an undeniable source of truth.”
  • this was not a traditional journalism outlet. While the journalists could occasionally report and write original articles, they were asked to primarily use a generative A.I. tool to compose stories, said Ms. Chakraborty and Hemin Bakir, a journalist based in Iraq who worked for BNN for almost a year. They said they had uploaded articles from other news outlets to the generative A.I. tool to create paraphrased versions for BNN to publish.
  • Mr. Chahal’s evangelism carried weight with his employees because of his wealth and seemingly impressive track record, they said. Born in India and raised in Northern California, Mr. Chahal made millions in the online advertising business in the early 2000s and wrote a how-to book about his rags-to-riches story that landed him an interview with Oprah Winfrey.
  • Mr. Chahal told Mr. Bakir to focus on checking stories that had a significant number of readers, such as those republished by MSN.com.Employees did not want their bylines on stories generated purely by A.I., but Mr. Chahal insisted on this. Soon, the tool randomly assigned their names to stories.
  • This crossed a line for some BNN employees, according to screenshots of WhatsApp conversations reviewed by The Times, in which they told Mr. Chahal that they were receiving complaints about stories they didn’t realize had been published under their names.
  • According to three journalists who worked at BNN and screenshots of WhatsApp conversations reviewed by The Times, Mr. Chahal regularly directed profanities at employees and called them idiots and morons. When employees said purely A.I.-generated news, such as the Fanning story, should be published under the generic “BNN Newsroom” byline, Mr. Chahal was dismissive.“When I do this, I won’t have a need for any of you,” he wrote on WhatsApp.Mr. Bakir replied to Mr. Chahal that assigning journalists’ bylines to A.I.-generated stories was putting their integrity and careers in “jeopardy.”
  • This was a strategy that Mr. Chahal favored, according to former BNN employees. He used his news service to exercise grudges, publishing slanted stories about a politician from San Francisco he disliked, Wikipedia after it published a negative entry about BNN Breaking and Elon Musk after accounts belonging to Mr. Chahal, his wife and his companies were suspended o
  • The increasing popularity of programmatic advertising — which uses algorithms to automatically place ads across the internet — allows A.I.-powered news sites to generate revenue by mass-producing low-quality clickbait content
  • Experts are nervous about how A.I.-fueled news could overwhelm accurate reporting with a deluge of junk content distorted by machine-powered repetition. A particular worry is that A.I. aggregators could chip away even further at the viability of local journalism, siphoning away its revenue and damaging its credibility by contaminating the information ecosystem.
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Which 'Succession' Character is James Murdoch? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ames-murdoch-maureen-dowd.html murdoch fox news fox succession role model right-wing media disinformation culture history
shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
  • in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.
  • “I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas
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  • A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.
  • In 2017, President Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Murdoch rebuked Mr. Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”
  • In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox nighttime anchors picked up a false story line about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.
  • So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside?“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”
  • Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”
  • But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?
  • Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.
  • When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one
  • Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News — labeled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren — and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox and its kin — downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line — be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?
  • He is particularly excited about investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.”
  • He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.
  • I noted to Ms. Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.
  • I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed.
  • when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.
  • “I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”
  • Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Ms. Murdoch said.
  • Mr. Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23 million to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell yes,” he said with a smile.
  • “So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.
  • After so much time in the executive suite, Mr. Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.
  • “The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says, ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”
  • I wondered what he made of Fox and Mr. Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalized.“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”
  • He added that Mr. Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu has been “his message from Day 1,” and is “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”
  • “I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”
  • With Mr. Trump and Fox, who is the dog and who is the tail?“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”
  • Confirm or Deny
  • Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.Isn’t that what they say — the harder you work, the luckier you get?
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Taxi Driver Suicides Are a Warning to All of Us - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...561926 taxi labor low-income driver
shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • As of 2016, 91 percent of the city’s professional drivers were immigrants, many of whom hail from the world’s poorest countries. Half of all drivers of non-app-based for-hire vehicles, traditionally the most lucrative slice of the market, hail from the Dominican Republic. Almost a quarter of taxi drivers, meanwhile, are originally from Bangladesh.
  • n an interview with Vincent Barone of am New York, Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, insisted that something must be done about the resulting labor glut: “We now have a saturation of tens of thousands of workers, even after working 10-, 12-, 14-hour shifts, [who] are talking about hunger and poverty, and that’s not acceptable.”
  • Usually, the notion that new low-skill immigrants represent competition for those who already live among us is airily dismissed on the grounds that the labor market is dynamic, and so too are low-skill workers.
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  • When faced with new competition, New York City’s immigrant drivers are supposed to learn new skills—they’re supposed to enroll in their local coding academy at night, or enroll in master’s programs in social-media marketing or food-truck management—and allow newcomers to take their place on the bottom rung. But what if climbing the ladder isn’t quite as easy as it sounds?
  • One of the reasons younger Americans are so optimistic about immigration, I suspect, is that many of us are the children of newcomers who, in earlier eras, were fortunate enough to make the transition from working-class service jobs to jobs that offered a bit more pay, status, and stability
  • To allow for the possibility that low-skill immigration has different implications today, when the prospects for upward mobility among low-skill workers are almost universally acknowledged to be bleaker than in years past, before a cavalcade of social and technological changes greatly reduced their power, seems almost sacrilegious. It smacks of dishonoring one’s parents or grandparents. And so piety wins out
  • We badly want to believe that we still live in a non-zero-sum nation, in which good-paying jobs for low-skill workers are abundant, and opportunities for advancement are always just around the corner
  • And all this is unfolding at a moment when the labor market is the tightest it has been since the turn of the century, and before the potential of labor-displacing automation is close to being fully realized.
  • What we are seeing in certain corners of New York City is not a story pitting scrappy immigrants against hateful nativists who resent their rivals for being culturally different or for the color of their skin. It is more like a desperate contest between people who are trying and failing to escape the pull of American poverty and others for whom American poverty still feels like deliverance from something much worse
  • This story does not compute for those who worship at the altar of Emma Lazarus, and who congratulate themselves for tipping their immigrant drivers generously or, better still, who deign to praise them for their marvelous work ethic. What they won’t do is stop to consider that we as a country are creating a new underclass for their convenience, and that the desperation of this new underclass might one day cause serious ructions that they won’t be able to ignore.
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'Set the standard': Cuomo allegations test Democrats' commitment to #MeToo | Andrew Cuo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...omo-allegation-democrats-metoo politics US culture policy
shared by carolinehayter on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • New York Democrats have called for the governor to resign over sexual harassment allegations, but no national figures have joined the chorus
  • But no other national Democrats have joined the chorus. The Axios website branded it the party’s “hypocrisy moment”, arguing: “Governor Andrew Cuomo should be facing explicit calls to resign from President Biden on down, if you apply the standard that Democrats set for similar allegations against Republicans. And it’s not a close call.”
  • But in 2017, as the #MeToo movement held powerful men accountable, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator who holds Hillary Clinton’s former seat in New York, argued that the former president should have resigned over the affair.
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  • The charge of double standards points to a steep learning curve for a party that has struggled to keep pace with shifting public attitudes towards gender roles, power dynamics and sexual boundaries.
  • That same year, Gillibrand became the first Democratic senator to call for her Minnesota colleague Al Franken to quit over allegations of sexual misconduct. She was joined by others including Kamala Harris, who tweeted: “Sexual harassment and misconduct should not be allowed by anyone and should not occur anywhere. I believe the best thing for Senator Franken to do is step down.”Franken did just that, but some critics now believe that he was the victim of a rush to judgment and should have been allowed to wait for the results of an investigation.
  • This time, although Gillibrand said Cuomo’s alleged conduct was “completely unacceptable”, she stopped short of demanding he resign before the investigation is done
  • “The vice-president’s view is that she believes all women should be treated with respect. Their voices should be heard. They should tell their story. There’s an independent investigation that is happening now, being overseen by the New York attorney general, and she certainly supports that.”
  • But this puts Democratic leaders out of step with groups such as Women’s March, which was born out of the January 2017 protests against Donald Trump, who faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment
  • “We share the view that there should be an independent investigation but Cuomo himself has not even denied many of the harassment allegations and, for us, it’s about behaviour that is disqualifying. It could be illegal, but it also could not be illegal.”
  • Just as the instant deification then instant demonisation of Cuomo has left many crying out for nuance and complexity, so it can be said that no two cases of sexual harassment in politics are quite the same.
  • In 2018 Eric Schneiderman, an attorney general of New York lauded as a liberal advocate of women’s rights, resigned after being accused of physically abusing four women. Cuomo was among those who were quick to call for him to step down.
  • Trump’s nominee to the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, was nearly derailed by allegations from Dr Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her
  • In 2019 several women accused Biden of making unwanted physical contact.
  • Last year Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. He vehemently denied the claim, which remained unsubstantiated and faded from the election race. Biden picked a woman – Harris – as his running mate and often highlighted his work as lead sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act.
  • Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “In hindsight, a number of the Democrats in the Senate who had pushed him to step down later expressed regret. They realised they moved too quickly, they didn’t know enough and the punishment didn’t really fit what they later learnt to be the misbehaviour.”
  • sexual
  • “I don’t think the Republican party is in any position to be lecturing anyone about how to handle sexual harassment. They seem to have actually gotten real expertise on how to evade it.”
  • “Just because we fire Andrew Cuomo and Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, that doesn’t alone solve the problem. The bigger problem is still there, which is that harassment is seen as an acceptable part of our culture. That’s why so many of these people in power are doing it. So yes, we need to respond and uproot harassment wherever it lies but we also need to keep our eye on the ball.”
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Times Square's business leaders weigh in on what's to come in 2021 - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html US Culture pandemic crisis pandemic-recovery change covid-19
shared by aidenborst on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • New York City tourism and real estate officials are hoping Thursday night's New Year's Eve celebration will mark a turning point for Times Square, the Manhattan neighborhood that has become a symbol of sorts for the economic ills of the Covid-19 economy.
  • Commerce among the more than 1,500 businesses in the tourist destination and business district — centrally located between major public transportation hubs — has been decimated by the pandemic. However, business leaders still expect the area to make a full economic recovery once Covid-19 vaccines become widely distributed.
  • "We wanted to send a message that New York is still here. It's not going away," Tompkins told CNN Business.
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  • Officials have differing opinions about how much change Times Square may be in for over the next few years — as new businesses inevitably replace old ones — and how long its full recovery will take. Real estate and tourism officials say estimates range between one and four years.
  • "2021 is certainly going to feel more upbeat than 2020 did, but I think there will also be some disappointment,"
  • Douglas Hercher, managing director at RobertDouglas, a private real estate investment bank. "If people are thinking Times Square, by the summer, is going to look like the Times Square we all know and love, that's probably not going to be the case."
  • A Times Square Alliance study found foot traffic in the neighborhood's busiest block on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was down 70% from the previous year.
  • Tompkins says about 43% of Times Square's street-level businesses are currently closed, down from 87% in the spring. Hercher estimates 25%-30% of retail rental spaces in Midtown have "gone dark" due to tenants shuttering indefinitely.
  • "We've been really fortunate in that we raised the original capital for the project prior to Covid," Orowitz said. "At the end of the day, from the perspective of an entertainment and tourism Mecca, I think Times Square continues to evolve and will continue to be what it always was."
  • Krispy Kreme, for example, opened its new flagship Times Square location in September, a few months after Covid-19 lockdowns caused a 78% drop in Manhattan retail sales activity, according to the Metro Manhattan Office Space blog.
  • Tompkins says the pandemic hasn't changed Times Square's appeal to retailers looking to create more-engaging shopping experiences for their customers. Luxury real estate developer L&L Holding Company has continued construction of its TSX Broadway experiential retail complex throughout the pandemic.
  • L&L managing director David Orowitz says the pandemic hasn't shaken the developer's faith in the $2.5 billion project, which is still set to open at the end of 2022.
  • "You're going to see those retailers reducing their footprint to bring their costs in line with their sales. ... I think rental rates are going to have to come down tremendously to attract tenancy to those spaces."
  • the normalizing of remote work options across business sectors this year has already led many companies to scale back on office space, which some analysts have predicted will be a permanent shift in the commercial real estate market.
  • "We've definitely seen in the residential market, rents have dropped 10-15% this year in Manhattan," he said. "That's probably a little bit of the canary in the coal mine."
  • Only 8% of Manhattan's estimated 1 million office employees returned to their offices for work by mid-August, according to a survey conducted by the Partnership for New York City.
  • "There's talk about whether it makes sense to make those into residential usage," he said. "The name of the game here in the Covid era is flexibility."
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Without Trump, or Masks, Mar-a-Lago Partied On - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-new-years-eve-mar-a-lago.html Pandemic US history
shared by cartergramiak on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Trump’s private social club in Palm Beach, Fla., hosted a New Year’s Eve gala at which revelers without masks dined indoors and danced to performances by Vanilla Ice and members of the Beach Boys.
  • But members of the president’s family and extended political circle partied on anyway at an event that flouted warnings against indoor gatherings during the holidays as the coronavirus surges to its deadliest levels yet.
  • Attendees included Mr. Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and his girlfriend, the former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a former New York mayor, was shown in online footage ballroom-dancing with a female partner to a rendition of “New York, New York.” More than 500 guests were expected, according to The Palm Beach Post.
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  • Social media posts from the event also showed live performances by Teri Nunn, the lead singer of the 1970s and ’80s new-wave band Berlin, famous for the song “Take My Breath Away,” and two members of the Beach Boys, who now perform without the founding members Al Jardine and Brian Wilson.
  • Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, unexpectedly returned to the White House hours before the party, which he had originally planned to attend. It was unclear why Mr. Trump flew back to Washington, where he has not appeared in public since his return.
  • “Now they want to give people ravaged by the China Virus $600, rather than the $2000 which they so desperately need,” he wrote. “Not fair, or smart!”
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Opinion | I've Seen a Future Without Cars, and It's Amazing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ban-cars-manhattan-cities.html car transportation urbanism urban nyc future
shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Rather than stumble back into car dependency, cities can begin to undo their worst mistake: giving up so much of their land to the automobile.
  • There is little evidence that public transit is responsible for the spread of the coronavirus in New York or elsewhere; some cities with heavily used transit systems, including Hong Kong, were able to avoid terrible tolls from the virus.
  • rian paths for people to avoid intense overcrowding — transit might be no less safe than cars, in terms of the risk of the spread of disease. In all other measures of safety, transit is far safer than cars.
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  • Chakrabarti is among a group of urbanists who’ve been calling attention to a less-discussed problem with cars. Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment, they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us: Cars take up way too much physical space to transport too few people. It’s geometry.
  • In most American cities, wherever you look, you will see a landscape constructed primarily for the movement and storage of automobiles, not the enjoyment of people: endless wide boulevards and freeways for cars to move swiftly; each road lined with parking spaces for cars at rest; retail establishments ringed with spots for cars; houses built around garages for cars; and a gas station, for cars to feed, on every other corner.
  • In the most car-dependent cities, the amount of space devoted to automobiles reaches truly ridiculous levels. In Los Angeles, for instance, land for parking exceeds the entire land area of Manhattan, enough space to house almost a million more people at Los Angeles’s prevailing density.
  • in the most populated cities, physical space is just about the most precious resource there is. The land value of Manhattan alone is estimated to top $1.7 trillion. Why are we giving so much of it to cars?
  • Without cars, Manhattan’s streets could give priority to more equitable and accessible ways of getting around, including an extensive system of bike “superhighways” and bus rapid transit — a bus system with dedicated lanes in the roadway, creating a service that approaches the capacity, speed and efficiency of the subway, at a fraction of the cost.
  • The amount of space devoted to cars in Manhattan is not just wasteful, but, in a deeper sense, unfair to the millions of New Yorkers who have no need for cars.
  • More than half of the city’s households do not own a car, and of those who do, most do not use them for commuting. Of the 1.6 million commuters who come into Manhattan every weekday (or, who did, before the virus), more than 80 percent make the trip via public transit, mostly trains and buses. Only around 12 percent of daily commuters get to the island by car.
  • New York’s drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they’ve been given, they’re still stuck in gridlock.
  • cars are not just greedy for physical space, they’re insatiable. There is even a term for the phenomenon: “induced demand,” which holds that the more land you give to cars, the more attractive driving becomes, leading to more traffic, leading to more roads — an unwinnable cycle that ends with every inch of our cities paved under parking lot.
  • Even if you’re a committed daily driver, “it’s in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you’re going to be able to drive easier.”
  • PAU’s plan bears this out. Banning private cars on Manhattan would reduce traffic by as much as 20 percent on routes that start and end within New York’s other boroughs — that is, in places where cars would still be allowed
  • Under PAU’s plan, road traffic in a car-free Manhattan would fall by about 60 percent. The absence of cars would allow pedestrians, buses and bikes to race across New York at unheard-of speeds. Today, a bus trip from uptown to downtown — for instance, from Harlem to City Hall — takes an hour and 48 minutes. With the sort of rapid bus system PAU imagines, and without cars in the way, the same trek would take 35 minutes.
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As attacks against Asian Americans spike, advocates call for action to protect communit... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Asian American Hate Crime Coronavirus
shared by hannahcarter11 on 16 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • A string of recent attacks against Asian Americans has communities and advocates on high alert, especially as many in the United States gather this weekend to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
  • An 84-year-old man from Thailand died in late January after being attacked on his morning walk in San Francisco. Days later, a 91-year-old Asian man was violently shoved to the ground in Oakland's Chinatown. Last week, a 64-year-old woman was robbed outside a Vietnamese market in San Jose, California. And a 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face last week on the New York City subway.
  • But authorities and advocates for the Asian community say that hate and violence against Asians has been brewing for several months -- and needs to be addressed.
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  • Kulkarni likened the rise of hate against Asian Americans since the pandemic began to the 19th century era of "yellow peril," during which racist laws as well as stereotypes of East Asian immigrants as a threat to society proliferated in the US.
  • From then through the end of 2020, the organization received more than 2,800 firsthand reports of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and Washington, DC, according to data released this week.
  • The majority of those incidents -- about 71% -- were cases of verbal harassment, while shunning or avoidance made up about 21%. About 9% of the incidents involved physical assaults, and 6% included being purposely coughed or spit on, according to a Stop AAPI Hate news release.
  • A report published Wednesday by the Asian American Bar Association of New York noted that from January 1 to November 1, 2020, the New York Police Department saw an eight-fold increase in reported anti-Asian hate crimes compared to the same period in 2019.
  • From 2017 to 2019, the organization received less than 500 reported instances of hate against Asian Americans. But from February to December last year, they said they estimate there have been 3,000 incidents of hate cataloged by their group and others.
  • Yang attributes the rise of anti-Asian hate in the US partially to former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly referred to the coronavirus as the "China virus" in the early days of the pandemic.
  • Experts also blame the insecurity and fear brought on by the pandemic. People may respond to threats of disease or other crises by scapegoating another group perceived as falling outside the cultural norms -- in this case Asian Americans, the authors of the Asian American Bar Association report wrote.
  • Asian Americans are seen as easy targets for crime, perhaps because of language and cultural barriers that might prevent them from reporting incidents, according to Yang. And the elderly are particularly vulnerable, with concerns that they could be targeted for robberies as they are out shopping for the Lunar New Year.
  • But community leaders say that more needs to be done.Both Kulkarni and Yang are calling on community solutions to help address the problem. Yang called for bystander intervention training and local efforts such as neighborhood walk services and shopping services for the elderly. Kulkarni has called for more support and resources for Asian Americans to help them address incidents of assault and harassment.
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The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-us.html failure pandemic politics history crisis trump culture policy control
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  • Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large
  • Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:a lack of effective travel restrictions;repeated breakdowns in testing;confusing advice about masks;a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;and inconsistent messages from public officials.
  • Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.
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  • In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.
  • many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration.
  • “As an American, I think there is a lot of good to be said about our libertarian tradition,” Dr. Jared Baeten, an epidemiologist and vice dean at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said. “But this is the consequence — we don’t succeed as well as a collective.”
  • That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries.
  • First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions.
  • The New York Times set out to reconstruct the unique failure of the United States, through numerous interviews with scientists and public health experts around the world. The reporting points to two central themes.
  • When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.
  • That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.
  • Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus.
  • one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months: the United States.
  • Nearly every country has struggled to contain the coronavirus and made mistakes along the way.
  • it quickly became clear that the United States’ policy was full of holes. It did not apply to immediate family members of American citizens and permanent residents returning from China, for example. In the two months after the policy went into place, almost 40,000 people arrived in the United States on direct flights from China.
  • On Jan. 31, his administration announced that it was restricting entry to the United States from China: Many foreign nationals — be they citizens of China or other countries — would not be allowed into the United States if they had been to China in the previous two weeks.
  • A travel policy that fell short
  • In retrospect, one of Mr. Trump’s first policy responses to the virus appears to have been one of his most promising.
  • The administration’s policy also did little to create quarantines for people who entered the United States and may have had the virus.
  • ven more important, the policy failed to take into account that the virus had spread well beyond China by early February. Later data would show that many infected people arriving in the United States came from Europe
  • South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan largely restricted entry to residents returning home. Those residents then had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival
  • South Korea and Hong Kong also tested for the virus at the airport and transferred anyone who was positive to a government facility.
  • “People need a bit more than a suggestion to look after their own health,” said Dr. Mackay, who has been working with Australian officials on their pandemic response. “They need guidelines, they need rules — and they need to be enforced.”
  • Travel restrictions and quarantines were central to the success in controlling the virus in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia, as well as New Zealand, many epidemiologists believe. In Australia, the number of new cases per day fell more than 90 percent in April. It remained near zero through May and early June, even as the virus surged across much of the United States.
  • the tolls in Australia and the United States remain vastly different. Fewer than 300 Australians have died of complications from Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. If the United States had the same per capita death rate, about 3,300 Americans would have died, rather than 158,000.
  • there is a good chance that a different version of Mr. Trump’s restrictions — one with fewer holes and stronger quarantines — would have meaningfully slowed the virus’s spread.
  • travel restrictions had been successful enough in fighting the coronavirus around the world that those views may need to be revisited.“Travel,” he said, “is the hallmark of the spread of this virus around the world.”
  • Traditionally, public health experts had not seen travel restrictions as central to fighting a pandemic, given their economic costs and the availability of other options, like testing, quarantining and contact tracing
  • But he added that
  • By early March, with the testing delays still unresolved, the New York region became a global center of the virus — without people realizing it until weeks later. More widespread testing could have made a major difference, experts said, leading to earlier lockdowns and social distancing and ultimately less sickness and death.
  • While the C.D.C. was struggling to solve its testing flaws, Germany was rapidly building up its ability to test. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a chemist by training, and other political leaders were watching the virus sweep across northern Italy, not far from southern Germany, and pushed for a big expansion of testing.
  • By the time the virus became a problem in Germany, labs around the country had thousands of test kits ready to use. From the beginning, the government covered the cost of the tests. American laboratories often charge patients about $100 for a test.
  • Without free tests, Dr. Hendrik Streeck, director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Bonn, said at the time, “a young person with no health insurance and an itchy throat is unlikely to go to the doctor and therefore risks infecting more people.”
  • Germany was soon far ahead of other countries in testing. It was able to diagnose asymptomatic cases, trace the contacts of new patients and isolate people before they could spread the virus. The country has still suffered a significant outbreak. But it has had many fewer cases per capita than Italy, Spain, France, Britain or Canada — and about one-fifth the rate of the United States.
  • One measure of the continuing troubles with testing is the percentage of tests that come back positive. In a country that has the virus under control, fewer than 5 percent of tests come back positive, according to World Health Organization guidelines. Many countries have reached that benchmark. The United States, even with the large recent volume of tests, has not.
  • In Belgium recently, test results have typically come back in 48 to 72 hours. In Germany and Greece, it is two days. In France, the wait is often 24 hours.
  • The conflicting advice, echoed by the C.D.C. and others, led to relatively little mask wearing in many countries early in the pandemic. But several Asian countries were exceptions, partly because they had a tradition of mask wearing to avoid sickness or minimize the effects of pollution.
  • The double mask failure
  • By January, mask wearing in Japan was widespread, as it often had been during a typical flu season. Masks also quickly became the norm in much of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and China.
  • In the following months, scientists around the world began to report two strands of evidence that both pointed to the importance of masks: Research showed that the virus could be transmitted through droplets that hang in the air, and several studies found that the virus spread less frequently in places where people were wearing masks.
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America, Learn From New York - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • even for my senior attendings, it is the worst they have ever seen. Here, the curve is not flat. We are overwhelmed
  • There was a time for testing in New York, and we missed it. China warned Italy. Italy warned us. We didn’t listen. Now the onus is on the rest of America to listen to New York.
  • Many of my patients clearly haven’t received the message to stay home unless they’re in immediate need of professional medical assistance.
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  • If they didn’t have the coronavirus before coming to our hospital, they probably do now. So much for gatherings of 10 people or fewer.
  • Meanwhile, my colleagues tend to patients in the critical-care bay with dipping oxygen levels, patients who can barely speak and may need breathing tubes.
  • Earlier in the month, we were told that positive-pressure oxygen masks, such as CPAP machines, were risky, as they would aerosolize the virus, increasing health-care workers’ risk of infection
  • But in recent days, running dangerously low on ventilators, we have attempted using CPAP machines to stave off the need for medically induced comas.
  • Nevertheless, we need to perform an alarming number of of intubations. Our ventilators are almost all in use, and the ICUs are at capacity.
  • On Wednesday, I greeted a patient I had discharged only one week prior. When I saw his name pop up on the board, my heart sank. He is just shy of 50, with hardly any past medical history, and he had seemed fine. Now he was gasping for air. His chest X-ray was no relief—COVID-19 for sure. I needed to admit him to the hospital, and set him up with oxygen, heart monitoring, and a bed.
  • My colleagues and I discuss this pandemic with a sardonic sense of helplessness. Some of us are getting sick. Our reality alters by the moment. Every day, we change our triage system. Each day could be the day that the masks run out. There is much we think but are too afraid to say to one another.
  • I do not want to see you in my hospital. I do not want you to go to any hospital in the United States. I do not want you to leave your home, except for essential food and supplies. I do not want you to get tested for the coronavirus, unless you need to be admitted to a hospital.
  • If you have mild symptoms, assume that you have the coronavirus. Stay home, wash your hands, call your doctor. Don’t come to the emergency department just because of a fever or cough. Receiving a test won’t change our recommendation that you remain in self-isolation. We don’t want you to expose yourself to those who definitely do have the virus.
  • Social distancing, while still crucial, came too late in New York to prevent a crisis. Maybe, just maybe, extreme measures can prevent this from happening in other cities around the country.
  • the hospital received one piece of good news yesterday. A coronavirus patient was successfully taken off a ventilator after two weeks, a first for our Medical ICU and a victory for the staff and, of course, the patient.
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Crowded N.Y.C. Jails Stoke Covid Fears: 'It's a Ticking Time Bomb' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyc-jail-covid.html new york times Politics Culture policy
shared by leilamulveny on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • New York City’s jails were under such threat from the coronavirus last spring that city officials moved swiftly to let hundreds of people out of the crowded, airless old buildings. The effort shrank the jail population to its lowest point in more than half a century.
  • There are now more than 5,500 people in the city’s jails, slightly more than were detained last March. About three-quarters of the people being held have not been convicted. Many are awaiting trial much longer than usual, as the court system continues to operate at a near standstill during the pandemic.
  • Those behind bars are at high risk for contracting and spreading the virus, and correctional facilities have been home to some of the largest outbreaks nationally. Often, those outbreaks have spread into the community at large, as people shuttle in and out of detention. Few of those being detained in New York have been offered vaccines.
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  • Data kept by Correctional Health Services, which oversees care in jails, shows that infections and exposures in the jails crept up during January and February to their highest levels since last spring. A Department of Correction spokesman, in a statement, noted that the average test positivity rate in the jails was lower than in the city at large, though experts warn that the virus’s prevalence in jails can be hard to track.
  • The Department of Correction said that there were not widespread or systemic shortages of soap or other sanitary materials, and that staff members are subject to discipline for not wearing masks. The department also pointed to the ruling in a lawsuit filed by E.E. Keenan, a lawyer representing current and recent detainees at Rikers, in which a judge declined to order city jails to improve their hygiene regimens.
  • In the earliest months of the pandemic, public defenders and local officials, led by Mayor Bill de Blasio, pushed for city prosecutors and state courts to release the most vulnerable populations from behind bars and introduced an early release program for people being held on a jail sentence of one year or less.
  • But none of the measures that the city took to release people were implemented on a continuing basis and the jails population began to grow anew in the summer.
  • Judges have also set bail and remanded people to pretrial detention in violent felony cases — which are not part of the state bail reform law — at higher rates than before the pandemic, according to a forthcoming report from the center. Alternatives to jail are being used less often. Public defenders said attempts to secure the release of people at high risk for contracting the virus have fallen short in recent months.
  • At least 700 people are jailed whose cases would likely have been resolved if not for the pandemic, according to the city. An additional 285 who otherwise would have been discharged to state prison to serve sentences are stuck in city jails, as those transfers are currently suspended, the Department of Correction said
  • “It doesn’t take a mental health professional to say that if somebody is living 24/7 in complete fear of death, that their mental health is not going to be that sound,” said Mr. Keenan, the lawyer who represented Rikers detainees in a lawsuit against the city over jail conditions. A group of guards have also filed a lawsuit saying that jail policies placed them at risk.
  • For Mr. Churaman, who was transferred to Rikers Island in July after a felony murder conviction was overturned and he awaited a new trial, the time inside was especially difficult.
  • Rigodis Appling, a Manhattan public defender, said that because her clients in jails experienced no relief from the pandemic — no time at which they were able to feel fully safe from infection — they were in a state of unrelenting anxiety.
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Amazon Won't Test Job Seekers For Marijuana Use : NPR - 0 views

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  • Amazon operates — and is rapidly expanding into — places where marijuana is legal. Steven Senne/AP Amazon will no longer test most job applicants for marijuana use in the latest sign of America's changing relationship with pot. Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., also says it now backs legalizing marijuana nationwide.
  • Marijuana users and advocates are cheering the news, but it may also bring relief to Amazon's hiring managers: The company operates — and is rapidly expanding into — places where marijuana is legal.
  • Even before New York legalized marijuana, New York City banned testing prospective employees for marijuana, with some exceptions. Based on that law, a New York man sued Amazon in March, saying the company illegally reversed a h
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  • Laws prohibiting marijuana "are responsible for more than half a million arrests in the United States every year," according to the Drug Policy Alliance, which also supports decriminalization. In a statement to NPR, the group applauded Amazon's announcement as "a huge step forward." "Drug testing has never provided an accurate indication of a person's ability to perform their job," the group said, "and yet this incredibly invasive practice has locked out millions of people who use drugs — both licit and illicit — from the workplace."
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Live Covid News Updates: India, Vaccines, Masks and Reopening - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask
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  • New York City’s reopening — a milestone longed for over the last 14 months — arrived at last on Wednesday. It was less a grand gala than a soft opening, a finish line at the end of a long race that no one wanted to be the first to cross.
  • Masks, no longer a hard requirement for the vaccinated in most situations, remained firmly in place by the majority of people, whether in the big-box stores and tiny boutiques of Manhattan or the shaded paths of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
  • “It’s still store policy,” said Raj Lalbatchan, 23, a worker at Victoria, a store selling clothing in the Bronx. Nearby, Elisabeth Ocasio, 51, a server at the restaurant La Isla, said it is standing firm with the status quo. “We don’t know who’s vaccinated and who’s not,” she said. “We’re doing everything the same here.”
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  • As the virus was crushing New York City last year, testing was limited, hospitals were full and thousands were dying every day. The living retreated to their apartments and the city, almost overnight, transformed into a shadow of itself. The city’s known death toll sits at more than 33,000 people.
  • But on Wednesday, scenes of joy alongside those of caution played out throughout the city. The owner of du Pont dry cleaners on Amsterdam Avenue in the Upper West Side, Byong Min, 64, spent 90 days in a hospital suffering from Covid last year, the scar from his tracheotomy visible above his collar. On Wednesday morning, a customer arrived and asked tentatively: Could she enter without a mask?
  • In Red Hook in Brooklyn, the Chelsea Garden Center, a bustling nursery, considered removing its 2-customer indoor limit, but stopped short. “It’s a little scary to change things,” said Bethany Perkins, an employee. “We’re so used to the rules right now.”
  • “When you’re not sure, my personal advice is wear a mask,” the mayor said, adding “we’ve done it, for god’s sakes, for a year, we can do it a little bit longer to finish the job.”
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New York Fears Being 'Starved' for Vaccine Just as Rollout Speeds Up - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by xaviermcelderry on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • After a sluggish first month, the pace of coronavirus vaccinations is accelerating to the point that New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week, officials said on Friday, causing several health facilities to alter their immediate inoculation plans.On Thursday, Mount Sinai Hospital, one of Manhattan’s largest facilities, canceled many upcoming vaccination appointments for older patients, saying the doses it had anticipated receiving were no longer likely to arrive.
  • Elsewhere in New York, officials in at least one county said they had only enough doses to last through the weekend, echoing a similar sentiment by city officials.
  • Until recently, New York City had been struggling to quickly administer the doses it had received, and a large backlog of doses had built up. But in recent days, the pace of vaccinations has picked up drastically because of expanded eligibility and because many new vaccination sites have opened over the last week, including several large government-run ones.
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  • “The increasing problem now is there is not enough supply of vaccine to keep up with the first appointments, let alone the second appointments,” Mr. de Blasio said on Friday.
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As the Virus Surges, How Much Longer Can N.Y. Avoid a Full Shutdown? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-crackdown-second-wave-ny.html new york politics pandemic
shared by martinelligi on 19 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The numbers are also spiking in some areas that were spared the worst in the spring: Western New York has seen about 3,700 new cases in the last week alone, with rates of positive test results running above 5 percent.
  • Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says his response to the pandemic continues to be aggressive and highlights his state’s achievements: New York is still seeing much lower rates of infection than most states. And the number of daily deaths and hospitalizations pales in comparison to the spring, when thousands died for several weeks running, and tens of thousands were sickened.
  • he defensive posture from Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, is striking considering the confident air he’s projected since the early days of the pandemic.
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  • Mr. Cuomo also announced a ban on gatherings of more than 10 people in private residences, a rule that drew some angry rebuttals and could be difficult for families to comply with during Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas. Some upstate sheriffs have said they will not enforce the rule.
  • reality is that the sooner you close, the softer you have to close.”
  • At the same time, they recognize people were weary of Covid-related restrictions. “We see the fatigue,” said Gareth Rhodes, a member of New York State’s Covid-19 Task Force.
  • “I don’t think we need a full lockdown; on the other hand, I do think we need action,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University, noting that political leaders had been suggesting for weeks that they are considering new restrictions. “I always say if you think you need to do something, it probably means you need to do it.”Joseph Goldstein and Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting
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Is Democratic Gerrymandering of New York's Congressional Delegation Hypocritical? | Mic... - 0 views

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shared by clairemann on 12 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • With census data now in hand and the 2022 midterm election just over a year away, states are busily redrawing their electoral maps to take account of population shifts since 2010. In some states, the task falls to non-partisan commissions. In most others, however, state legislatures redraw district lines, fully aware of the political implications. In a country in which the word gerrymander dates to the Founding (a portmanteau of Elbridge Gerry and salamander, after the shape of the district he engineered), it should surprise no one that state elected officials draw district lines that favor themselves and members of their own political party.
  • New York voters approved a plan to hand over redistricting responsibility to a bipartisan commission that would use apolitical criteria to draw fair maps. But then Democrats won supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.
  • Given Democrats’ repeated complaints about gerrymandering by Republican-controlled state legislatures, Republicans and their allies will no doubt label the move by New York to respond in kind hypocritical. Is the charge fair? Perhaps, but as I shall explain below, not necessarily, and in the end, there are worse sins than hypocrisy.
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  • It can be hypocritical to call for a change in the law but to act in ways that would violate the changed law.
  • Nonetheless, it would not be hypocritical for Sheila herself to continue to drive on the left side of the road while Parliament considers her proposal. Indeed, it would be grossly irresponsible for her to start driving on the right side of the road before the law has changed.
  • The upshot is that it is sometimes but not always hypocritical to seek to change the law but continue to engage in behavior inconsistent with the change one seeks. Whether the charge of hypocrisy fairly applies in such circumstances depends on the nature of the law—to what extent it addresses freestanding evils versus solves collective action problems—as well as the grounds for seeking to change it.
  • Gerrymandering unfairly advantages the party in control of the state legislature, thereby undermining the right to vote and democratic principles. One might therefore think that someone who opposes political gerrymandering anywhere ought to oppose it everywhere. If so, New York legislators considering gerrymandering the state’s congressional districts to aid Democrats are indeed hypocrites.
  • Two years ago, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that federal courts could not adjudicate challenges to political gerrymandering.
  • Accordingly, even if one concludes that there is at least a soupçon of hypocrisy in the New York Democrats’ plan to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts, the only current alternative is worse. In this case, hypocrisy may be more than the tribute vice pays to virtue. It is itself a kind of virtue.
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The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-america-future.html pandemic response strategies US
shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • More than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history shared their thoughts on the future during in-depth interviews. When can we emerge from our homes? How long, realistically, before we have a treatment or vaccine? How will we keep the virus at bay
  • The path forward depends on factors that are certainly difficult but doable, they said: a carefully staggered approach to reopening, widespread testing and surveillance, a treatment that works, adequate resources for health care providers — and eventually an effective vaccine.
  • The scenario that Mr. Trump has been unrolling at his daily press briefings — that the lockdowns will end soon, that a protective pill is almost at hand, that football stadiums and restaurants will soon be full — is a fantasy, most experts said.
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  • They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.
  • Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.
  • Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.
  • More Americans may die than the White House admits.
  • The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000.
  • The institute’s projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.
  • Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.
  • Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.
  • A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.
  • China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.
  • The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.
  • In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos.
  • Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.
  • China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were.
  • The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.
  • The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.
  • it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.
  • Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.
  • The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.
  • Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance
  • On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.
  • Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.
  • In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.
  • Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.
  • On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns.
  • China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’s incubation period.
  • Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.
  • Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control
  • But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.
  • Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.
  • Immunity will become a societal advantage.
  • Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.
  • “It will be a frightening schism,” Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”
  • Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense
  • Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them.
  • As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection
  • My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,”
  • It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.
  • The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.
  • Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.
  • once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.
  • To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.
  • “If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,”
  • In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.
  • There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears.
  • Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards
  • Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.
  • In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.
  • The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.
  • China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.
  • There will not be a vaccine soon.
  • any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.
  • the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.
  • for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.
  • A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.
  • It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.
  • Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.
  • “Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.
  • The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.
  • if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.
  • “People have to start thinking big,” Dr. Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”
  • Treatments are likely to arrive first.
  • The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.
  • as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.
  • Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.
  • Goodbye, ‘America First.’
  • A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.
  • And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.
  • This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted.
  • “If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,”
  • If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said.“What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”
  • Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.
  • In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.
  • He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.
  • In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.
  • If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change
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Andrew Sullivan: NY Times Abandons Liberalism for Activism - 0 views

nymag.com/...s-liberalism-for-activism.html brexit uk identify drag NYT propaganda white supremacy ideology activism liberalism American idea culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • “Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”
  • How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different
  • (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition
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  • the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else.
  • America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.
  • Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity
  • some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue.” In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.
  • Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines!
  • The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively.
  • A special issue dedicated to exposing the racial terror-state in America before and after Reconstruction is extremely worthwhile
  • In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers:
  • I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”
  • It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way?
  • “One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.” In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.
  • The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms.
  • It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it
  • Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.
  • This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship
  • I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview.
  • It’s not a strip show, for Pete’s sake. It’s a laugh, designed for the entire family. And yes, Dave Chappelle, the sanest man in America at the moment, is right. Men dressed obviously as women are first and foremost funny.
  • hat would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.
  • the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one.
  • Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it.
  • it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end
  • between Sohrab Ahmari, representing the Trumpy post-liberals, and David French, a Reagan-style fusionist, it was a rare moment of agreement. They both took it as a premise that Drag Queen Story Hour — a relatively new trend in which drag queens read kids stories in local libraries — was a problem they both wish didn’t exist
  • both French and Ahmari have no idea what they are talking about.
  • drag queens are clowns. They are not transgender (or haven’t been until very, very recently). They are men, mainly gay, who make no attempt to pass as actual women, and don’t necessarily want to be women, but dress up as a caricature of a woman. Sure, some have bawdy names, and in the context of a late night gay bar, they can say some bawdy things. But they’re not really about sex at all. They’re about costume and play
  • Children love drag queens the way they love clowns or circuses or Halloween or live Disney characters in Disney World. It’s dress-up fun.
  • I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.
  • o how on Earth is this a sign of the cultural apocalypse? These clowns read children’s stories to kids and their parents, and encourage young children to read books. This is the work of the devil?
  • allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973
  • Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa.
  • How many Americans would support this
  • The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government
  • It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetim
  • Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us.
  • It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t
  • this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had.
  • that is Boris Johnson’s core case: the people decided, the parliament revoked Article 50, and so it is vital for democracy that the U.K. exit without any continuing hassle or delay. If parliament is seen as dismissing the result of the referendum, then the parliament will effectively be at war with the people as a whole, and he will rally the people against them. It’s near perfect populism. His job is to get what the people voted for done, despite the elites. And if that is the central message of the coming election campaign he will not only win, but handily.
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'Huge amount of ego': how Bloomberg and Trump ended up fierce rivals | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...loomberg-past-new-york-rivalry trump Policy
shared by cartergramiak on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • These days Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg can best be described as mortal enemies.
  • Bloomberg and Trump, both billionaires from New York, for years kept a cordial and even friendly relationship as they repeatedly ran into each other at charity events, parties and even one of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s weddings.
  • Trump has even praised Bloomberg’s past positions on gun control on Fox News’s Fox & Friends.
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  • They ran in different social circles. Where Trump would go to a dinner party hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, Bloomberg would go to editor Tina Brown’s house.
  • “I’m sure Bloomberg has no gold toilets at his house,” said Rebecca Katz, a New York-based Democratic strategist. “It’s a different kind of money with less to prove.”
  • Bloomberg has seen his national poll numbers rise within the Democratic primary as he’s poured money into advertising for his campaign.
  • Trump has criticized Bloomberg as well. In early December, Trump mockingly tweeted that “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization” to investigate “President Trump, only”.
  • Trump around that time tweeted: “Little Michael Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!”
  • “I’m for guns, he’s against guns,” Trump said. Though Trump, in the past, had praised Bloomberg’s positions on guns.
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Zephyr Teachout on Sheldon Silver, Corruption and New York Politics - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ion-and-new-york-politics.html corruption campaign political politics
shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • fighting the kind of corruption that plagues not only New York State but the whole nation isn’t just about getting cuffs on the right guy. As with the recent conviction of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell for receiving improper gifts and loans, a fixation on plain graft misses the more pernicious poison that has entered our system.
  • Corruption exists when institutions and officials charged with serving the public serve their own ends. Under current law, campaign contributions are illegal if there is an explicit quid pro quo, and legal if there isn’t. But legal campaign contributions can be as bad as bribes in creating obligations. The corruption that hides in plain sight is the real threat to our democracy.
  • The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can’t even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day. When you spend a lifetime serving campaign donors, it may seem easy to serve them when they come with an outright bribe, because it doesn’t seem that different.
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  • The former governor of New York David A. Paterson, for example, said that he had trouble understanding where the criminality lay in the allegation that Mr. Silver accepted payments from law firms for referrals, including referrals by a doctor to whom Mr. Silver funneled state health research funds. Mr. Paterson said, “in the legal profession, people refer business all the time. And theoretically, as a speaker, you could do that as well.”
  • In our private financing system, candidates are trained to respond to campaign cash and serve donors’ interests. Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it’s not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.
  • We should take this moment to pursue fundamental reform. We must reconstitute what it means to run for office and to serve in office. We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn’t solve the problem of creating outside dependencies. New York lawmakers can’t carry water for two masters when in office.
  • We should reject the private financing of campaigns as the only model. We need to provide enough public funding for campaigns so that anyone with a broad base of support can run for office, and respond effectively to attacks, without becoming dependent on private patrons. Running for office shouldn’t be a job defined by permanent begging at the feet of the wealthiest donors in the country.
  • Corruption is about greed and private interests put ahead of the public good. Whether influence is bought through a bribe, outside spending, outside income or campaign contributions, the public suffers in the same way.
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