History Readings

big, rich companies with the money to pay large fees to Internet service providers would be favored over small start-ups with innovative business models — stifling the birth of the next Facebook or Twitter.

Under the proposal, broadband providers would have to disclose how they treat all Internet traffic and on what terms they offer more rapid lanes, and would be required to act “in a commercially reasonable manner,” agency officials said. That standard would be fleshed out as the agency seeks public comment.

The proposed rules would also require Internet service providers to disclose whether in assigning faster lanes, they have favored their affiliated companies that provide content.

Opponents of the new proposed rules said they appeared to be full of holes, particularly in seeking to impose the “commercially reasonable” standard.

“The very essence of a ‘commercial reasonableness’ standard is discrimination,” Michael Weinberg, a vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, said in a statement. “And the core of net neutrality is nondiscrimination.”

it could be commercially reasonable for a broadband provider to charge a content company higher rates for access to consumers because that company’s service was competitively threatening.

the rollout of one-stop search tools is "really intentionally trying to change the way people do research,"

Mr. Asher believes that "it’s a logical impossibility to create a querying tool that doesn’t have any form of bias." He speculates that discovery vendors may have better information about their own content, boosting certain articles higher in results.

Vendors of discovery tools will make deals with providers that sell content to libraries, he says, so that content can be represented in the discovery tools’ indexes and made available for search. (Beyond products from Ebsco and ProQuest, other major tools in this genre, known as "web scale" or "index based" discovery, include Primo, from Ex Libris, and WorldCat Discovery Services, from OCLC.)

Mr. Asher’s experiment discovered that default settings of the tools had a major effect on what resources students chose. Working with Google Scholar, which is integrated with Google Books, students used more books. With Summon, they used a lot of shorter newspaper and magazine articles. With ­Ebsco Discovery Service, they used more journals, which meant they scored highest under the study’s rating rubric.

"That’s bound to change what people find."

the competition for student and faculty attention has only intensified since 2004, when Google’s "simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature" made its debut. That free service, called Google Scholar, has many fans in academe.

Mr. Asher is familiar with the criticisms of Google Scholar. After all, his own study listed them: "limited advanced search functionality, incomplete or inaccurate metadata, inflated citation counts, lack of usage statistics, and inconsistent coverage across disciplines."

"I kind of hate to say it, since I am a librarian," he says. "We pay a lot of money for discovery tools. And then I go off and just use Google Scholar."

This kind of leader is warm-blooded and leads with full humanity. In every White House, and in many private offices, there seems to be a tug of war between those who want to express this messy amateur humanism and those calculators who emphasize message discipline

Was there, Connolly asked, “a triggering event that flooded the I.R.S. with new applications?” Answering his own question, Connolly said “the triggering event is the Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United. The number of applications between 2009 and 2012 for a 501(c)(4) doubled from 1,751 to 3,357.” Citizens United was decided on Jan. 21, 2010.

HE I.

R.S. appropriation has gone up during periods of Democratic control and down when Republicans have controlled at least one branch of Congress

the I.R.S. commissioner, described the effect of these cuts to the Way and Means Committee. “No challenge facing our agency is greater than the significant reduction in funding that has occurred over the last several years,” he said. “I am deeply concerned about the ability of the I.R.S. to continue to fulfill its mission if the agency lacks adequate funding. Our current level of funding is clearly less than what the agency needs.”

Koskinen observed that cuts in agency funding have reduced audits of corporations and of wealthy citizens: “Audits of high-income individuals – defined as those with $1 million or more in income – fell 3.7 percent as well last year. The I.R.S. examined approximately 61,000 business returns in FY 2013, down 13 percent from FY 2012.”

Republicans are aware of what happens to tax collections from the rich when the I.R.S. budget is cut and seem happy to live with those consequences.

imilarly, the House Oversight Committee has been relentless in its efforts to blame the Obama administration for the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others were killed. Committee Republicans have done so despite their own record of repeatedly voting to cut spending on security for state department personnel.

it’s no fun serving on an oversight committee when your own party is running the executive branch. The years when Republicans controlled the House and White House, 2001 to 2007, were a public relations disaster for the Oversight Committee. The panel pointedly avoided taking on the Bush administration despite a plethora of scandals: abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison, evidence that the claim Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was false, Jack Abramoff’s illicit lobbying, and the failure of the administration to respond to Hurricane Katrina.By the end of 2005, the committee had issued the Bush administration a total of 3 subpoenas, all on relatively noncontroversial matters.

the most commonly cited economic statistics — such as per capita gross domestic product — continue to show that the United States has maintained its lead as the world’s richest large country. But those numbers are averages, which do not capture the distribution of income.

Three broad factors appear to be driving much of the weak income performance in the United States. First, educational attainment in the United States has risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last three decades, making it harder for the American economy to maintain its share of highly skilled, well-paying jobs.

technology skills that are above average relative to 55- to 65-year-olds in rest of the industrialized world

Younger Americans, though, are not keeping pace: Those between 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries, well behind their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Japan and Scandinavia

The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

Whatever the causes, the stagnation of income has left many Americans dissatisfied with the state of the country. Only about 30 percent of people believe the country is headed in the right direction,

both opinion surveys and interviews suggest that the public mood in Canada and Northern Europe is less sour than in the United States today.

Elsewhere in Europe, economic growth has been slower in the last few years than in the United States, as the Continent has struggled to escape the financial crisis. But incomes for most families in Sweden and several other Northern European countries have still outpaced those in the United States, where much of the fruits of recent economic growth have flowed into corporate profits or top incomes.

Even in Germany, though, the poor have fared better than in the United States, where per capita income has declined between 2000 and 2010 at the 40th percentile, as well as at the 30th, 20th, 10th and 5th.

the poor in the United States have trailed their counterparts in at least a few other countries since the early 1980s. With slow income growth since then, the American poor now clearly trail the poor in several other rich countries. At the 20th percentile — where someone is making less than four-fifths of the population — income in both the Netherlands and Canada was 15 percent higher than income in the United States in 2010.

By contrast, Americans at the 95th percentile of the distribution — with $58,600 in after-tax per capita income, not including capital gains — still make 20 percent more than their counterparts in Canada, 26 percent more than those in Britain and 50 percent more than those in the Netherlands. For these well-off families, the United States still has easily the world’s most prosperous major economy.

The residents of some villages woke to find that ballot boxes had been moved to different locations — or were not available at all. In Shamshai, another area of Taliban control, election officials decided at the last minute to send boxes to a village a few miles away. In Taliban-held Alizai, the ballot boxes never turned up.

Representatives of observer organizations, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of disrupting the official tabulation process, said evidence of fraud was widespread. Though polls were open across the district, it was unsafe for monitors to reach many places, raising the likelihood of vote manipulation.

Still, some said they did not mind living under Taliban rule, especially in recent years. They said that after the uprising, some of the insurgents had started treating people better, aware that there was now an alternative.

"Blue-collar whites have been migrating to the Republican Party ever since Ronald Reagan called them Reagan Democrats," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. "It's a culture that is heavily family based, more small-town and rural. It's very pro-gun, and very patriotic. We're talking about a group of folks who see Democratic efforts at gun control as a cultural assault, an attack on their values."

"There's a complete lack of understanding of what primary voters are all about," said one GOP strategist involved in a potential presidential candidate's campaign, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. "You go around and hang out with big Republican donors, and if you were to take all their advice on how to win, you'd be screwed beyond belief, particularly in a primary."

No Exit makes it very clear that the life of a startup founder is a miserable one, and that engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company.

Financially, starting up a company in Silicon Valley makes very little sense. You have a very high chance (indeed, a certainty) of having to scrape by on a very low income in a very expensive city. At a time of your life when you should be out enjoying life and meeting friends and generally having lots of fun, you will instead be unhappily tethered to your laptop at all times. In return for sacrificing a six-figure salary elsewhere and general enjoyment of life, you’re given a lottery ticket: you get a minuscule chance of making untold millions of dollars.

So where does it come from, this intense Silicon Valley desire to buy the most expensive lottery ticket in the world?

The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum. Even on a purely financial basis, if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones. A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money.

Essentially the way that the startup ecosystem works is by taking the valuable labor of thousands of hopeful founders, and converting it into large amounts of capital for a tiny number of successes

On its face, the winners, here, are the people with the big successful exits. But after reading No Exit, a different conclusion presents itself. The real winners are the happy and well-paid engineers, enjoying their lives and their youth while working for great companies like Google. In the world of startups, the only winning move is not to play.

Everything in American culture would lead one to think that it is easy to launch a new restaurant, hair salon, company, or fill in the blank. I wouldn’t go so far to say that those who do it have a false sense of entitlement – but there’s seemingly no sense of contentment in being a no. 2 or lower in a company.

most of the website or mobile app start-ups that you guys in the general media (I will lazily generalize like you all do and lump you all together) lazily or ignorantly refer to as “tech” or “silicon valley” are not founded by computer engineers. They are started by coders, which are a couple notches below computer engineers on the knowledge and experience scale. They are willing to forego a big steady paycheck because they are short on knowledge and experience, and are not usually “incredibly qualified engineers – in fact, they are mostly just qualified to work on mobile apps and economically unsustainable web start-ups. Their value to established companies that need to develop products that generate revenue and profits is questionable, at best.

I don’t know if you have ever worked for a very large multi-national company that compartmentalizes your job into little tasks so that your skills can be exploited for a few years, and then discarded when they are obsolete. Many big companies are poorly managed, and while they may offer stable employment in the short term, when the errors of their executives impose their costs on the company, the employees usually pay the price. And then what do they do? People who avoid working for large companies and seek the excitement of start-ups have a different value system than you and all those who would choose the illusion of job security.

“It is in my mind one of the great, unreported ironies of the first Obama administration.”

“People are asking us, how do they protect their privacy?” Mr. Meinrath said.

Radio Free Asia, a United States government-financed nonprofit, has given $1 million to explore multiple overseas deployments. The countries involved have not been revealed, Mr. Meinrath said, adding, “I can’t talk about specific locations because lives could be at risk.”

The mesh software, called Commotion, is a major redesign of systems that have been run for years by experts across Europe, said Mr. Meinrath, who is now director of the New America Foundation’s X-Lab. The idea, he said, was to take the technology out of what he calls “the geekosphere” and make it accessible to the public. (Commotion is available to download free from the project’s website.)

Resilience could become the prime argument for mesh networks, with privacy as a bonus, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. That is similar to the original Internet, before it was controlled by corporate hands and scoured by government spies, he said.“It makes mesh more like the Internet than the Internet,” he said.

His work is a challenge both to Marxism and laissez-faire economics, which “both count on pure economic forces for harmony or justice to prevail,” he said.

In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent.

he accepts that his work is essentially political, and he is highly critical of the huge management salaries now in vogue, saying that “the idea that you need people making 10 million in compensation to work is pure ideology.”

Inequality by itself is acceptable, he says, to the extent it spurs individual initiative and wealth-generation that, with the aid of progressive taxation and other measures, helps makes everyone in society better off. “I have no problem with inequality as long as it is in the common interest,” he said.

But like the Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, he argues that extreme inequality “threatens our democratic institutions.” Democracy is not just one citizen, one vote, but a promise of equal opportunity.

“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality” in income, he said, “and such extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that we don’t need 19th-century inequality to grow.”

that’s just where the capitalist world is heading again, he concludes.

He favors a progressive global tax on real wealth (minus debt), with the proceeds not handed to inefficient governments but redistributed to those with less capital.