Politics

You are currently browsing the archive for the Politics category.

“Almost Half Of Its Drivers Stop Driving After A Year”

June 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Uber is good for consumer experience and the environment, but CEO Travis Kalanick is determined to convince the public the rideshare company is also beneficial to workers, and that’s a lie. When half your employees quit in the first year, you haven’t created good jobs. When your business model kills many more-stable positions, you’re not good for employment. When you publicly lust for that day you can be rid of all your employees, you aren’t a friend of Labor. Maybe all these things are necessarily collateral damage in the march of progress, but let’s be honest about it.

From Ellen Huet’s Forbes report about the company’s fifth-anniversary ceremony:

Uber is adding “hundreds of thousands” of drivers globally every month, Kalanick said, and has 26,000 active drivers in New York, 15,000 in London, 10,000 in  Paris and 22,000 in San Francisco, the company said. It has 20,000 active drivers (and 42,000 who have ever signed up) in Chengdu, China, a region where Uber’s two major rivals recently merged and control almost 99% of the market. Uber often signs up many more drivers than remain current active drivers: In a recent study of U.S. drivers, Uber found that that almost half of its drivers stop driving after a year.

Because Uber tends to experiment and explore many different verticals — courier service and food delivery, for example — it was surprising that Kalanick barely mentioned the company’s potential outside of its core ride-hailing service. He only made one allusion — “just imagine all the goods and services you could get delivered quickly and safely with just the touch of a button” — to Uber’s other services. He also made no mention of Uber’s advances in developing autonomous cars, which have involved poaching numerous engineers and researchers from Carnegie Mellon to staff up its own research center.

Instead, the address focused on Uber’s effects on cities, urban transportation and its driver workforce. An Uber driver who is also a military wife gave the introduction for Kalanick and spoke briefly, occasionally tearing up, about how Uber’s flexible schedule allowed her to volunteer at her son’s school.•

Tags: ,

“American Social Mobility Has Stalled In Recent Decades, And That Accidents Of Birth Have Come To Matter Far Too Much”

June 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s hard to imagine greater symbols of America living in the past than roasting pigs and gas-guzzling motorcycles, but an Iowa “Roast and Ride” is where GOP hopefuls just gathered to make a case that they should be the next President. In their speeches, the Perrys and Walkers of the world unironically promised to return America to greatness by wallowing in nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. According to an Economist report, there was one exception: Marco Rubio. An excerpt:

Mr Perry is 65 years old, while Mr Walker is 47. But the two governors sounded rather similar in their wistful recollections of modest childhoods marked by cheerful, hard-working, up-by-the-bootstraps small town thrift. Mr Walker was the undoubted star of the day even before he arrived. His speech was well-received, but it was a disappointment. He talked of an American Dream led astray, and set up a straw man attack on Mr Obama and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, saying that to listen to them, the measure of success in America was “how many people are dependent on government.” But in his own childhood in small town America, nobody said or wrote in their high school yearbooks that they wanted to grow up to be dependent on the government, Mr Walker said. The great thing about America, he went on, was that it offered equality of opportunity, even if outcomes were up to individuals. America is one of the few countries left in the world where it doesn’t matter what class you are born into, he declared, and many in the audience, notably the older voters with snowy hair, clapped enthusiastically.

But even in a political speech to activists, that was a riskily glib thing to say. The evidence is overwhelming that American social mobility has stalled in recent decades, and that accidents of birth have come to matter far too much. The great question of the age is how to fix that, and both thoughtful Republicans and Democrats have begun wrestling with competing solutions. Mr Walker simply sweeps that debate aside, and in doing so sounds like a spokesman for an imperfectly-remembered past when the American Dream came easily.

The contrast was startling when Senator Marco Rubio came to talk. The Cuban-American senator from Florida is only three years younger than Mr Walker, but he sounded as if he came from a different generation. The economy has changed in the past 20 years, he told the crowd. There is more global competition and machines can do many of the jobs that once paid good wages to middle class workers. We are living through a moment of transformation such as we have not seen since the Industrial Revolution, Mr Rubio said. Unfortunately, we have all of these leaders that are stuck in the past, he said. He was polite enough to add: “especially on the left”, but his rebuke to some of his Republican rivals was well made.

In part Mr Rubio is defending himself tactically from the charge that America is not ready to hand the White House to another young, eloquent senator (having tried that with a certain Senator Obama from Illinois). But he is right to challenge crowds such as the one in Boone. I like the 20th century, Mr Rubio joked. I was born in the 20th century. But it is time to build a new American century.•

“They Undermine Economic Growth And Social Cohesion”

June 7, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I put up a post of Thomas Piketty’s NYRB take on Sir Tony Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done? Here’s a passage from an Economist piece about the same book, which compares Atkinson’s work to Piketty’s conversation-turning Capital in the Twenty-First Century:

In the event, Sir Anthony is more radical than Mr Piketty; he calls for robust taxation of the rich whom he reckons have got off easily over the last generation (see chart). But that’s not all. He believes government should meddle in markets in all sorts of ways to influence the distribution of economic rewards. Sir Anthony’s recommendations are a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, when trade unions were a dominant force in politics and the state was seen as a much-needed check on markets. Even the most egalitarian economists, such as Mr Piketty, are reluctant to recommend employment guarantees and wage controls. Sir Anthony is not. And if his arguments are not always wholly convincing, he may nonetheless succeed in shifting the debate.

Inequality begins with a clear statement of the harm done by rising income gaps: they unfairly punish those who suffer bad luck. They undermine economic growth and social cohesion. Perhaps most importantly, inequality in economic resources translates directly into inequality in personal opportunity. Wealth generates comfort even when it isn’t being spent; the rich enjoy the fact that they are insured against future hardship or could use their wealth in future to satisfy personal or professional goals.•

Tags: ,

“We Have A Political Selection Ritual Straight Out Of The 19th Century”

June 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I have a natural aversion to institutions that have run their course and entered into obsolescence. I felt it in churches and libraries I was dragged to as a child (though I loved reading), and I feel that way about post offices and polling places as an adult. It doesn’t work anymore, and I’m not a good enough sport to play along with the ruse. 

In his latest Financial Times column, Douglas Coupland wonders how the hanging chad still hangs around. An excerpt:

The most interesting lie I see in millennial bashing is that millennials aren’t political and that they don’t vote. I hear this, and inside my head I hear a loud screeching brake noise in my head and say, WTF?

Millennials are the most politically informed cohort ever. They know their rights. They know about power imbalances. They know about environmental degradation, they know about GMOs, Yellow 6, fuel rods, transgender politics and the near complete lobbyocracy of US politics. You can’t pull the wool over the eyes of most millennials. I think it’s because millennial political expression began with the stillborn Occupy events that they get branded as apathetic but the issue with millennials isn’t a perceived apathy on their part. I think it’s in large part the fact that they look at the mechanics of voting and compare it to the universe they inhabit and they collectively say, You have to be kidding: every four years I go into a plywood booth and use a graphite-based stylus to “fill in a box” corresponding to my decision for who’s best for the job? What century are we in? How is this still even happening?

And they have a point. The way voting works now is like taking everyone’s computers and devices away and telling them they have to instead use envelopes and stamps to communicate with each other. In the era of Airbnb, Netflix and Skype we have a political selection ritual straight out of the 19th century.•

Tags:

“At The Core Of His Program Is A Series Of Proposals That Aim To Transform The Very Operation Of The Markets For Labor And Capital”

June 5, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a New York Review of Books piece, Thomas Piketty, who has suggested his own remedies for wealth disparity (including aggressive investment in education), reviews British economist Anthony B. Atkinson’s progressive treatment of the problem in the UK, Inequality: What Can Be Done? which suggests, among other things, an endowment be paid to all citizens at the time of their eighteenth birthdays. An excerpt:

The idea of going back to a more progressive tax structure clearly has a major part in the plan of action that Atkinson sets forth. The British economist leaves no doubt about it: the spectacular lowering of top income tax rates has sharply contributed to the rise of inequality since the 1980s, without bringing adequate corresponding benefits to society at large. We must therefore waste no time discarding the taboo that says marginal tax rates must never rise above 50 percent. Atkinson proposes a far-reaching reformation of the British income tax, with top tax rates raised to 55 percent for annual income above £100,000 and 65 percent for annual income above £200,000, as well as a hike in the cap on contributions to national insurance.

All of which would make it possible to finance a significant expansion of the British social security and income redistribution system, notably with a sharp increase in family benefits (doubling and even quadrupling them in one of the variants proposed), as well as a rise in retirement and unemployment benefits for people with lower resources.* Atkinson presents a series of variants of these measures and scenarios for reform, while advocating those measures that make it possible to return to a policy of universal social safety nets (i.e., that would be open to everyone), as opposed to conditional transfers of resources.

If these proposals, statistically accounted for and fully financed from taxes, were to be adopted, there would be a significant drop in British levels of inequality and poverty. According to the simulations done by Atkinson and Sutherland, those levels would fall from their current quasi-American levels to the point where they would come close to European and OECDaverages. This is the central goal of Atkinson’s first set of proposals: you can’t expect everything from fiscal redistribution, but that nonetheless is where you have to begin.

Radical Reformism: A New Philosophy of Rights

But Atkinson’s plan of action hardly stops there. At the core of his program is a series of proposals that aim to transform the very operation of the markets for labor and capital, introducing new rights for those who now have the fewest rights. His proposals include guaranteed minimum-wage public jobs for the unemployed, new rights for organized labor, public regulation of technological change, and democratization of access to capital. This is only a sampling of the many reforms he recommends.•

Tags: ,

“On Its Own It’s Doomed To Failure”

June 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There was competition for the Apollo program emanating from Russia, but there were no giant multinationals actively working to quash it. That’s what carbon-free energy must circumvent, as James Dyke explains in a Conversation piece, which lauds the Global Apollo initiative for renewable energy while simultaneously worrying about it. The opening:

A group of prominent scientists has launched an “Apollo programme” for renewables, called Global Apollo. Its mission is to make carbon-free electricity less costly than that generated from coal, and to do it within ten years. It’s an international effort that will promote the technological advances required to produce the rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and so keep climate change to within the “safe” limit of two degrees celsius.

It’s an ambitious if not audacious statement of intent that will seek to marshal the efforts of current and new generations of engineers and scientists.

And on its own it’s doomed to failure. Let me explain.

The Global Apollo mission takes inspiration not only from the Apollo Program that sent humans to the moon, but also the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). What’s that got to do with climate change? Well, the ITRS is a collaborative effort between the world’s largest chip manufacturers to understand, plan and ultimately resolve technological challenges that allow faster semiconductor chips. Over the past 30 years this has produced continual decreases in microchip prices along with steady performance improvements.

Faster and cheaper chips translates to better and cheaper electronic products that spur further innovation. It’s a win-win. But this is a terrible analogy for our current dependence on fossil fuels.

It’s a terrible analogy because the ITRS doesn’t operate in a world in which electronic vacuum tube manufacturers spend millions of dollars actively trying to undermine the development of semiconductors.•

Tags:

“I Can See A Future Where There Are Almost No Private Cars In Cities”

June 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If autonomous vehicles are perfected and cities continue growing more populous, two possibilities which presently seem like inevitabilities, then driverless taxis becoming a major form of transport–perhaps the major one–in urban areas would not be a surprise. In Joanna Roberts’ Horizon piece, some EU urban planners and transportation experts predict such a transition will begin in earnest in five to ten years, which sounds ambitious. An excerpt:

People in cities will shift from using private transport to using self-driving public taxis, as fleets of shared, low-speed electric cars are introduced over the next decade, according to European researchers working on the future of automated transport.

By contrast, travel in rural areas and for long journeys will continue to rely on private cars, although these will become more and more automated to increase safety and comfort.

Dr Michel Parent, an advanced road transport expert at INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, has been working on various EU-funded projects since the 90s to develop self-driving cars that would operate in city centres. He says that fleets of on-demand driverless vehicles that pick people up from their homes and connect them with mass public transport networks could be operational within a decade.

‘I would say that in some cities we will see it in five to 10 years as a major transportation, at least the shift from private mobility to public mobility,’ he said. ‘The technology is available; we have demonstrated the feasibility and the safety of these systems. Now it’s up to the cities and up to European legislation to come up with rules to deploy these systems.’ …

While ridding cities of private cars might take some getting used to, Dr Parent believes it will catch on. ‘People are very smart. If it is more convenient and cheaper they will not hesitate one instant. I can see a future where there are almost no private cars in cities.’•

Tags: ,

“I Can’t Imagine That The U.S. Government Would Want A Guy Who Knows So Much Staying In Russia”

June 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My default position on whistleblowers is I don’t want them imprisoned, since it’s a more dangerous world without them. I feel that way about Edward Snowden, as sloppy as he might have been at times in his mission. I still wonder, however, if much will truly come of his daring. 

In his New York Times Op-Ed piece, Snowden declares the world has said “no” to surveillance, but I’m not so sure. Spying has been with us for as long as there’s been information, and governments have always been involved, using the Cold War or the War on Terror or any other conflict as an excuse. And I truly wonder how any legislation is going to keep up with technology. That one isn’t really a fair race. Perhaps even more difficult to control than government will be huge corporations, which don’t even have to break the law–just offer us a Faustian bargain–to get at what’s inside our brains. The Internet of Things will make it very easy for everyone to be tracked at all times. 

At Reddit, Mattathias Schwartz of the New Yorker conducted a predictably smart Ask Me Anything about Snowden. A few exchanges follow.

_________________________

Question:

Why are whistleblowers treated like criminals?

Mattathias Schwartz:

Well, if whistleblowers come from within the US intelligence community (FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, DIA, etc.) they usually are criminals, under current federal laws against the release of classified information. A lot of recent protections that apply to whistleblowers do not apply to those who work within the intelligence community. The Washington Post did a good story on this, and how it applies to Snowden’s case, here …http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/03/12/edward-snowdens-claim-that-as-a-contractor-he-had-no-proper-channels-for-protection-as-a-whistleblower/ … and my colleague Jane Mayer wrote about Thomas Drake, an NSA employee who attempted to blow the whistle, here …http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer.

_____________________

Question:

Can speculate why there seems to be such apathy (after an initial and momentary outrage at the water cooler) by the American public regarding the erosion of our civil liberties? Case in point would be the NSA spying and data collection efforts to which change has essentially squeaked by with little continued pressure by the constituents since the revelations.

Mattathias Schwartz:

I think it’s too soon to say whether there’s been a sea change or not. It’s all still in play. To see where it winds up, you’d have to track what happens with the PCLOB’s ongoing inquiry into Executive Order 12333, and you’d have to see whether the Supreme Court decides to weigh in on Fourth Amendment / NSA / surveillance issues. It already started to with United States v. Jones and if I had to guess, I would say that there will be more action to come on that front.

_____________________

Question:

Do you worry about the future of well-funded investigative journalism now that we’re living in the era of free internet news?

Mattathias Schwartz:

Yes! There is a lot to worry about here. Part of me thinks that Big Tech should be funding this stuff–they certainly make plenty of money on journalism that they don’t pay for!–but that’s a troubled notion if you look at how much money Big Tech spends to influence policy in Washington. Reporting is expensive and the number of institutions willing to put up the money to do it is shrinking–I am lucky to be working with the New Yorker, which is one of them. I can foresee three models under which this kind of work can continue. There’s the opera model, which depends on patronage and a small, influential, highbrow audience. There’s the model that the Swiss watch companies found after the invention of the Quartz watch, shifting away from mass-market utility and towards luxury, which isn’t so different from the opera model, actually. And then you’ve got the Snowden model, where a private individual takes it upon themselves to speak out in those places where they feel that investigative journalists, and politicians, have failed to do so. There will always be people who want this information, and over time, supply will keep pace with demand, especially when you can cram so much supply onto a USB stick.

_________________________

Question:

I thought the Snowden op-ed in the NYT today was a little strange, but can’t tell if it’s my own cynicism. Seemed like a politician’s intervention–lots of spin. What did you think?

Mattathias Schwartz:

Hi K, Yeah it is “spin” in the sense that he is obviously trying to influence the Beltway conversation, but I enjoyed the writing and I was glad to see ES speaking in his own voice finally, as opposed to speaking through his collaborators, or through documents. Looking at it from the outside, my sense is that he wants to come home. And I liked the bit about a “post-terror generation.”

_________________________

Question:

Do you think he’ll ever be able to come home without spending a long time in federal prison?

Mattathias Schwartz:

It’s hard to predict the future but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a trial on some limited set of charges, which would give Snowden a public platform at the risk of a limited jail term, if he were found guilty. Snowden has already said that he’s willing to come home if he can be guaranteed a fair trial. And I can’t imagine that the US government would want a guy who knows so much staying in Russia for the long term.•

“The Agility And Lethality Of Which Will Leave Humans Utterly Defenceless”

June 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Nature, a quartet of researchers write of their concerns as Artificial Intelligence matures, worrying about our robot brethren contributing to warmongering and income inequality. In “Take a Stand on AI Weapons,” Berkeley computer professor Stuart Russell focuses on the former, questioning the wisdom of Lethal Automated Weapons Systems. An excerpt:

The artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics communities face an important ethical decision: whether to support or oppose the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).

Technologies have reached a point at which the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades. The stakes are high: LAWS have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.  

Autonomous weapons systems select and engage targets without human intervention; they become lethal when those targets include humans. LAWS might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate enemy combatants in a city, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. …

In my view, the overriding concern should be the probable endpoint of this technological trajectory. The capabilities of autonomous weapons will be limited more by the laws of physics — for example, by constraints on range, speed and payload — than by any deficiencies in the AI systems that control them. For instance, as flying robots become smaller, their manoeuvrability increases and their ability to be targeted decreases. They have a shorter range, yet they must be large enough to carry a lethal payload — perhaps a one-gram shaped charge to puncture the human cranium. Despite the limits imposed by physics, one can expect platforms deployed in the millions, the agility and lethality of which will leave humans utterly defenceless. This is not a desirable future.•

Tags:

“Maybe It’s A Better Way To Describe It As A Revolutionary Process”

June 4, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Predicting things will fall apart is easy, but predicting when is hard. Chris Hedges, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, thinks we’ve already entered the collapse phase.

In the U.S., we have myriad problems that increasingly seem unfixable from the inside: gerrymandering, Citizens United, corporatocracy, institutionalized racism, income inequality. You know, gerrymandering might be the most frustrating of them all, since you can’t remedy the rest with entrenched leadership.

Elias Isquith of Salon just interviewed Hedges, who asserts that a revolutionary movement in America would have global stakes. “When we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us,” the author says, making clear what he believes would happen if our society runs aground.

The Q&A’s opening exchange:

Question:

Do you think we are in a revolutionary era now? Or is it more something on the horizon?

Chris Hedges:

It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place.

That’s what that essay I quote by Alexander Berkman, “The Invisible Revolution,” talks about. He likens it to a pot that’s beginning to boil. So it’s already taking place, although it’s subterranean. And the facade of power — both the physical facade of power and the ideological facade of power — appears to remain intact. But it has less and less credibility.

There are all sorts of neutral indicators that show that. Low voter turnout, the fact that Congress has an approval rating of 7 percent, that polls continually reflect a kind of pessimism about where we are going, that many of the major systems that have been set in place — especially in terms of internal security — have no popularity at all.

All of these are indicators that something is seriously wrong, that the government is no longer responding to the most basic concerns, needs, and rights of the citizenry. That is [true for the] left and right. But what’s going to take it’s place, that has not been articulated. Yes, we are in a revolutionary moment; but maybe it’s a better way to describe it as a revolutionary process.•

Tags: ,

“Think Of Them As The New Randroids”

June 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Slate piece, David Auerbach asks whether Rand Paul or some other Republican could siphon votes from left-leaning technologists concerned about civil liberties. That could happen, although the GOP would need to reposition itself significantly for such a candidate to triumph in the Republican Primary.

I will take issue with Auerbach’s depiction of former Democratic candidate Howard Dean, the clear antecedent to the Paul brand. The author writes this of the former Vermont governor: “…he ended up impacting the Democratic agenda (anti-war, expanded health care, gay rights) for years.” Dean had an impact on the American electoral process for sure, realizing before anyone that grassroots and social media could be wedded to buoy a largely unknown candidate, but I don’t believe he influenced the Democratic agenda at all. Only the Iraq War becoming a boondoggle made Democrats turn against it, universal health care was on the docket long before 2004 and neither of the main 2008 contenders supported gay marriage (Hillary Clinton opposed it and Barack Obama was purposely vague); the tide turned on that issue for the party only because voters and polls moved leftward.

Auerbach’s opening:

Every time Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul assails mass government surveillance on the floor of the Senate, it is surprising to see who emerges to praise the erratically unorthodox Republican, from Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald to true-blue progressive reporter Marcy Wheeler. This support comes with caveats, of course. But the lefty applause for Paul also arrives at a moment of a distinctly lacking enthusiasm for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. More importantly, these plaudits align with many of the concerns of a quiet but influential contingent of liberal-leaning techies who might one day become Rand Democrats—or Democrats willing to support some other, future right-wing firebrand with lefty-compatible ideas about civil liberties—much in the way disaffected blue-collar workers became Reagan Democrats. Think of them as the New Randroids—and definitely not because they admire Ayn Rand, which they don’t. Progressives and loyal Democrats would be wise not to ignore them.

Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul, has long enjoyed a libertarian following within what I call the tech laity—the vast number of tech workers who don’t work for buzzy startups or dominate the tech press. This group of engineers and other research and development workers, far less white and somewhat less male than what’s portrayed in the media, clusters around industry hubs in the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Austin, Los Angeles, and so on. The libertarians among them, who hate the Federal Reserve and have funded the presidential ambitions of Paul pere, make up a tiny minority of the whole. What’s been surprising is how hard Rand Paul has worked to broaden that small following in the hopes of reaching disaffected Republicans and Democrats. He has about as much chance of winning the nomination as Howard Dean, Paul’s closest antecedent, did in 2004. But Dean came closer than most people remember, and he ended up impacting the Democratic agenda (anti-war, expanded health care, gay rights) for years. Paul hopes to do the same—and perhaps make another run at the presidency in 2020 or 2024.•

Tags: ,

“The Question Is Whether These New Technologies Actually Represent The Future Of Pet Ownership”

June 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Frontiers opinion piece, University of Melbourne research fellow Jean-Loup Rault wonders if pet ownership will become morally unacceptable and environmentally unsustainable in the next 35 years, as animal-rights sensibilities shift and population grows, with digital and virtual pets filling the void. “Funerals are held for AIBO robotic dogs in Japan nowadays,” writes the doctor, demonstrating the emotions we can attach to AI.

I’m guessing Freeman Dyson would argue that this would be just an intermediate step, and children will eventually play with specially designed biological creatures that don’t use resources but create them. I don’t know if either will happen in the next 35 years or at all, though I would assume household robots will take on a more prominent role.

The opening:

Over half the people in Western societies share their daily life with pets, which makes it the norm rather than the exception. Our shared history with domestic animals goes back tens of thousands years. However, technological advances in the last decades – computer, internet, social media – revolutionized our means of communication, and particularly our social lives. A legitimate but tacit question is whether this technological evolution will also change human–animal relationships, and concurrently, the place of pets in human societies. Pet ownership in its current form is likely unsustainable in a growing, urbanized population. Digital technologies have quickly revolutionized human communication and social relationships, and logically could tackle human–animal relationships as well. The question is whether these new technologies actually represent the future of pet ownership, helping tackle its sustainability while solving animal welfare issues.

To consider whether new technologies could substitute animal use, one should first consider the reasons for keeping animals, and particularly pets. Domestication started some 18,000–32,000 years ago with dogs. However, today’s pets cover a wide range of species from mammals, birds, and fish to the more ‘exotic’ reptiles, arachnids, and even insects. One of the many definitions of a pet is “a domesticated animal kept for pleasure rather than utility” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary), although non-domesticated species are increasingly popular. The benefits or function that humans derive from pet ownership are still debated. It may be a cultural habit: “I had a pet growing up, so it is normal to have one,” even though for some people the only interaction with their pet is restricted to providing food and water and no other forms of social interaction, hence only partly fulfilling our ‘duty of care.’ Pet ownership could be a sign of status: dog ownership can be interpreted as an economic indicator, highly correlated with rise in countries’ income. Pets may be used to compensate for lack of social relationships, as pet owners report feeling less lonely, although there are evidence that pets facilitate human social interactions. A widespread theory holds that pet ownership brings health benefits. Alternative explanations are, for instance, that pet ownership may improve reproductive fitness given that people more easily approach someone walking their dog. Nevertheless, some scientists remain dubious, citing inconsistent findings on the benefits of pet ownership (1). Irrespectively, the human–animal relationship is a strong and emotional powerful bond: pets are often considered part of the family, and dogs and children activate common brain regions in mothers (2), drawing on the hormone oxytocin (3). Historically, the human–animal relationship has already been a changing concept, from animals for their consumptive value to ‘reservoirs of human need’ such as love and care (4). However, we are possibly witnessing the dawn of a new era, the digital revolution with likely effects on pet ownership, similar to the industrial revolution which replaced animal power for petrol and electrical engines.•

Tags:

“Now Robots Are Taking On Some Jobs That Require More Agility”

June 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The next robots will be more agile, the cords cut. They’ll be nimble enough to move around a warehouse, and manufacturing may be reshored to the United States. Of course, that won’t add up to as many jobs as you might think, because while they’ll be safe enough to collaborate with humans, they won’t require too many in the short run and hardly any in the longer term.

An excerpt from James Hagerty’s Wall Street Journal article about the nouveau machines:

Today, industrial robots are most common in auto plants—which have long been the biggest users of robot technology—and they do jobs that don’t take much delicacy: heavy lifting, welding, applying glue and painting. People still do most of the final assembly of cars, especially when it involves small parts or wiring that needs to be guided into place.

Now robots are taking on some jobs that require more agility. At aRenault SA plant in Cleon, France, robots made by Universal Robots AS of Denmark drive screws into engines, especially those that go into places people find hard to get at. The robots employ a reach of more than 50 inches and six rotating joints to do the work. They also verify that parts are properly fastened and check to make sure the correct part is being used.

The Renault effort demonstrates a couple of trends that are drastically changing how robots are made. For one, they’re getting much lighter. The Renault units weigh only about 64 pounds, so “we can easily remove them and reinstall them in another place,” says Dominique Graille, a manager at Renault, which is using 15 robots from Universal now and plans to double that by year-end.

Researchers hope robots will become so easy to set up and move around that they can reduce the need for companies to make heavy investments in tools and structures that are bolted to the floor. That would allow manufacturers to make shorter runs of niche or custom products without having to spend lots of time and money reconfiguring factories. “We’re getting away from the [structures and machinery] that can only be used for one thing on the factory floor and [instead] using robots that can be easily repurposed,” says Henrik Christensen, director of robotics at Georgia Institute of Technology.•

Tags: , ,

“He Argues That Population Growth Constitutes Not A Crisis But, In The Long Run, A Boon”

June 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In relation to the recent Paul Ehrlich post, here’s the opening of an excellent 1990 New York Times article by John Tierney about a wager the Malthusian made about the population bomb with his fierce academic rival, the cornucopian economist Julian L. Simon:

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more — a view of the planet’s ultimate limits, a vision of humanity’s destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era.

They lead two intellectual schools — sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters — that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain forests being decimated. But in 1980 these opponents managed to agree on one way to chart and test the global future. They promised to abide by the results exactly 10 years later — in October 1990 — and to pay up out of their own pockets.

The bettors, who have never met in all the years they have been excoriating each other, are both 58-year-old professors who grew up in the Newark suburbs. The ecologist, Paul R. Ehrlich, has been one of the world’s better-known scientists since publishing The Population Bomb in 1968. More than three million copies were sold, and he became perhaps the only author ever interviewed for an hour on The Tonight Show. When he is not teaching at Stanford University or studying butterflies in the Rockies, Ehrlich can generally be found on a plane on his way to give a lecture, collect an award or appear in an occasional spot on the Today show. This summer he won a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant for $345,000, and in September he went to Stockholm to share half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize, the ecologist’s version of the Nobel. His many personal successes haven’t changed his position in the debate over humanity’s fate. He is the pessimist.

The economist, Julian L. Simon of the University of Maryland, often speaks of himself as an outcast, which isn’t quite true. His books carry jacket blurbs from Nobel laureate economists, and his views have helped shape policy in Washington for the past decade. But Simon has certainly never enjoyed Ehrlich’s academic success or popular appeal. On the first Earth Day in 1970, while Ehrlich was in the national news helping to launch the environmental movement, Simon sat in a college auditorium listening as a zoologist, to great applause, denounced him as a reactionary whose work “lacks scholarship or substance.” Simon took revenge, first by throwing a drink in his critic’s face at a faculty party and then by becoming the scourge of the environmental movement. When he unveiled his happy vision of beneficent technology and human progress in Science magazine in 1980, it attracted one of the largest batches of angry letters in the journal’s history.

In some ways, Simon goes beyond Dr. Pangloss, the tutor in Candide who insists that “All is for the best in this best of possible worlds.” Simon believes that today’s world is merely the best so far. Tomorrow’s will be better still, because it will have more people producing more bright ideas. He argues that population growth constitutes not a crisis but, in the long run, a boon that will ultimately mean a cleaner environment, a healthier humanity and more abundant supplies of food and raw materials for everyone. And this progress can go on indefinitely because — “incredible as it may seem at first,” he wrote in his 1980 article — the planet’s resources are actually not finite.•

Tags: , ,

“I Have Advocated For The Use Of Artificial Intelligence To Potentially, One Day, Replace The President Of The United States”

June 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Algorithms might be able to run a corporation, but what about an entire country? With our luck in America, it would probably be the Dubya 2163X.

In an Esquire interview John Hendrickson conducted with Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist Party Presidential candidate, the technologically progressive contender comments on the potential future intersection of AI and politics, as well as on moral machines and the existential threat of superintelligence. The opening:

Question:

Can a robot be president? Can that happen?

Zoltan Istvan:

I have advocated for the use of artificial intelligence to potentially, one day, replace the president of the United States, as well as other politicians. And the reason is that you might actually have an entity that would be truly unselfish, truly not influenced by any type of lobbyist. Now, of course, I’m not [talking about] trying to have a robot today, especially if I’m running for the U.S. presidency. But in the future–maybe 30 years into the future–it’s very possible you could have an artificial intelligence system that can run the country better than a human being.

Question:

Why is that?

Zoltan Istvan:

Because human beings are naturally selfish. Human beings are naturally after their own interests. We are geared towards pursuing our own desires, but oftentimes, those desires have contrasts to the benefit of society, at large, or against the benefit of the greater good. Whereas, if you have a machine, you will be able to program that machine to, hopefully, benefit the greatest good, and really go after that. Regardless of any personal interest that the machine might have. I think it’s based on having a more altruistic living entity that would be able to make decisions, rather than a human.

Question:

But what happens if people democratically pick a bad robot?

Zoltan Istvan:

So, this is the danger of even thinking this way. Because it’s possible that you could get a robot that might become selfish during its term as president. Or it could be hacked, you know? The hacking could be the number one worry that everyone would have with an artificial intelligence leading the country. But, it could also do something crazy, like malfunction, and maybe we wouldn’t even know if it’s necessarily malfunctioning. This happens all the time in people. But the problem is, that far into the future, it wouldn’t be just one entity that’s closed off into some sort of computer that would be walking around. At that stage, an artificial intelligence that is leading the nation would be totally interconnected with all other machines. That presents another situation, because, potentially, it could just take over everything.

That said, though, let’s say we had an on-and-off switch.•

Tags: ,

“The Great Weakness Was The Book Wasn’t Radical Enough”

June 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of a 1994 New Scientist interview with sociological salesman Alvin Toffler, which, among other things, reflects on his incredibly popular 1970 book, Future Shock:

Question:

What led you to write Future Shock? 

Alvin Toffler:

While covering Congress, it occurred to us that big technological and social changes were occurring in the United States, but that the political system seemed totally blind to their existence. Between 1955 and 1960, the birth control pill was introduced, television became universalized [sic], commercial jet travel came into being and a whole raft of other technological events occurred. Having spent several years watching the political process, we came away feeling that 99 per cent of what politicians do is keep systems running that were laid in place by previous generations of politicians.

Our ideas came together in 1965 in an article called ‘The future as a way of life,’ which argued that change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people. We coined the phrase ‘future shock’ as an analogy to the concept of culture shock. With future shock you stay in one place but your own culture changes so rapidly that it has the same disorienting effect as going to another culture.

Question:

Were you surprised by the reaction to the book? 

Alvin Toffler:

I think that it touched a nerve. Remember we were coming out of the Sixties, countries were being torn apart, change was almost out of control for a period. It touched a nerve, it gave a language, it introduced a metaphor that people could use to describe their own experience.

Question:

Looking back to 1970 when the book came out, how would you have done it differently? 

Alvin Toffler:

The great weakness was the book wasn’t radical enough, although everybody said it was a very radical book. The reason for that is that we introduced the concept of the general crisis of industrialism. Marx had talked about the general crisis of capitalism and the argument of the left was always that capitalism would collapse upon itself and socialism would triumph. We argued that both capitalism and socialism would collapse eventually because both were the offspring of industrial civilization, and that we were on the edge of a new way of life, a new civilization. Had we understood more deeply the consequences of that idea we would not have accepted as naively as we did the forecasts of the economists. If you think that economists are arrogant now, in the Sixties they were really riding high. They claimed we would never have another recession, and the reason was that we understand how the economy works, and ‘all we have to do is fine-tune it” as one economist told us. We were young and naive and we bought that notion. We should have anticipated that the revolution we were talking about would have hit the economy in a much deeper way.•

____________________________

Orson Welles narrated the 1972 documentary McGraw-Hill produced about Toffler‘s bestseller. The movie is odd and paranoid and overheated and fun.

“Jobs That Required Great Deal Of Routine In Repeating The Same Task Over And Over Again Were Very Likely To Be Automated”

June 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a sidebar to Mary-Ann Russon’s International Business Times report about which jobs are least and most prone to technological unemployment, umpires are listed as having a 98.3% chance of being replaced by robots. I can’t speak to umpires in other sports, but I would assume in American baseball, sensors could already do as good or better a job calling balls and strikes.

An excerpt:

Jobs least likely to be automated

The jobs that are least likely to be automated include jobs in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) industries, such as engineers, scientists, astronomers, architects, surgeons, psychologists, dentists, chiropractors, opticians, electricians and dietitians.

Jobs where a greater amount of personal care and in-depth attention are required were also very unlikely to be automated, such as therapists, teachers, personal trainers, choreographers, air traffic controllers, archaeologists, fashion and set designers, the clergy, lawyers, vets, the police, dancers, journalists, firefighters, tour guides, public relation specialists and most computer-related professions.

Jobs most likely to be automated

In contrast, jobs that required a lot of data to be processed or a great deal of routine in repeating the same task over and over again were very likely to be automated, such as bank tellers, loan officers, administrators, insurance underwriters in the finance industry, as well as retail roles like cashiers, retail assistants, telemarketers, sales executives and waitressing.

Also most at risk of automation are most repairman jobs, and most types of clerks that handle administration, whether the clerk be working in a hotel, a brokerage, an office, the mailroom, handling payroll or managing files.•

Tags: , ,

“I Don’t Think We’ve Seen The End Of Dictatorship Any More Than We’ve Seen The End Of War”

June 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

According to the NGO Freedom House, even though the number of dictatorships has dwindled, there remain 106 in the world. At BBC Future, Rachel Nuwer examines the personality traits and political conditions that allow such authoritarian governments to exist and wonders if we’ll ever live in a dictator-less world. An excerpt:

The causative factors that give rise to dictatorships in the first place have not changed much over the centuries. Some of the first were established in Classical Rome in times of emergencies. “A single individual like Julius Caesar was given a lot of power to help society cope with a crisis, after which that power was supposed to be relinquished,” says Richard Overy, a historian at the University of Exeter. “But usually, he wasn’t so keen to relinquish it.” Many modern and recent dictatorships – those of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, for instance – were also established in times of turmoil, and future ones likely will be, too. “Over the next century, there will be acute points of crisis,” Overy says. “I don’t think we’ve seen the end of dictatorship any more than we’ve seen the end of war.”  

But just as violence on a whole has declined across history, so, too, has the number of dictatorships, especially since the 1970s, as regimes across Latin America and Eastern Europe fell. There are slight undulations; the crumbling of the Soviet Union was accompanied by a steep decline in dictatorships, but now many of those countries are creeping back toward that former mode of governance. Overall, though, dictatorships are scarcer now than they were in the past. “It’s harder for people to justify dictatorships today, partly because the whole globe is in the eye of the media,” Overy says. “Getting away with things is more difficult than it used to be.”   

Consequently, days might be numbered on at least some remaining dictatorships – particularly if their oppressive rule is contributing to home-grown economic problems. “When you’re operating in an economy that’s perpetuating your collapse, your backers become nervous that you won’t be able to help them, so they start to shop around,” [NYU professor Bruce] Bueno de Mesquita says. Such situations sometimes result in military coups, he adds, which tend to push countries in a more positive direction for citizen wellbeing, at least based on past examples.

Some dictatorships, however, show no signs of cracking.•

Tags: , ,

“What Ehrlich Famously Got Wrong Was The Planet’s Carrying Capacity”

June 1, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Paul Ehrlich was not subtle, as people seldom are when throwing around the word “bomb.”

The Stanford insect biologist spent the ’60s and ’70s scaring the bejeezus out of people, predicting imminent societal collapse due to overpopulation, with hundreds of millions starving to death. In the big picture, he was right that environmental damage would prove challenging to the survival of the human species, but the devil was in the details, and his presumptions about the short-term ramifications of overpopulation were way off the mark.

Justin Fox of Bloomberg Review reflects on Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, a Malthusian message so chillingly effective that he did a solid hour one evening on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. The opinion writer finds the philippic a mixed blessing. He points out the scientist’s wrong-mindedness about overcrowding while acknowledging that today’s widely held anti-Ehrlich belief that population will level off naturally could also be incorrect.

One note: Embedded below the Bloomberg excerpt is a new NYT documentary about the ominous prognostication that never came to pass. In it, a comment Ehrlich makes reveals the misanthropy that has always seemed to be lurking behind his views. It’s this: “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.” Wow.

From Fox:

In a just-released New York Times mini-documentary on the book and its aftermath, the now-83-year-old Stanford biologist says insufferable things like, “One of the things that people don’t understand is that timing to an ecologist is very, very different from timing to an average person.” Uh, then why did you write a book clearly aimed at average people that confidently predicted that in the 1970s hundreds of millions would die of famine? “I expressed more certainty because I was trying to bring people to get something done.” (In that vein he also co-founded the activist group Zero Population Growth, rechristened in 2002 as Population Connection.)

Still, I figured I’d give the book itself a chance. I’ve had a copy for years, and thanks to a recentbook-sorting projectI was able to find it in a matter of seconds this morning. Because it’s not very long, I was able to read it in an hour or two. And I have to say it surprised me.

First of all, half of Ehrlich’s prediction came true. He forecast in the book that global population, about 3.5 billion at the time, would double by 2005. He was only six years off on that — world population hit 7 billion in 2011 — which I figure counts as getting it right.

What Ehrlich famously got wrong was the planet’s carrying capacity. Sure, global population doubled. But thanks to theGreen Revolution, per-acre grain yields went up much faster than that. The inflection point in global agricultural productivity, in fact, came just as Ehrlich was finishing his book.

Here’s the interesting thing, though — Ehrlich was well aware that this was a possibility.•

__________________________

“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.”

Tags: ,

“This Is Not About Cliven Bundy And Cows”

June 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cliven Bundy, the apotheosis of Tea Party hypocrisy, paranoia and prejudice, is still up to his tits in cattle.

After a mess of militias engaged in a 2014 armed stand-off with federal agents on his behalf over unpaid taxes, Bundy is still in arrears and more emboldened than ever. A year after the Fox News-enabled gun-waving, Rory Carroll of the Guardian caught up with the American who would most resemble a real-life Simpsons character if he was at all funny. He’s feeling triumphant, but the feds are still pursuing the matter with a slower and steadier approach. An excerpt: 

Wearing trademark jeans, boots, cowboy hat and bolo tie, the Mormon father of 14 was upbeat in an interview with the Guardian, speaking from the family home – which as a boy he helped his father build – and as he inspected cattle pens, trailed by his two dogs.

“I don’t think this is a battle that Cliven Bundy won. It’s a battle that the American people won. They’re just not going to put up with abuse by the federal government.”

Bundy said he was no outlaw, that he pays all taxes and state duties – but not federal fees for grazing, which he stopped paying after the BLM imposed restrictions as part of an effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise.

The federal government owns 85% of Nevada land, and a federal court upheld the claim against Bundy but he rejected its authority and legitimacy, citing a libertarian theory that the US constitution forbids federal ownership of land. “This is not about Cliven Bundy and cows. It’s about state sovereignty.”

The BLM’s retreat vindicated his stance, he said, tapping a copy of the US constitution which he keeps in a breast pocket.

Third-person grandiosity and race-tinged commentary

Two clouds, however, hover above the rancher’s apparent triumph.

A supporter named Will Michael recently pleaded guilty in a federal court in Pennsylvania to making threats against a BLM official during the standoff, a possible harbinger of prosecutions against other supporters and Bundy himself.•

Tags: ,

“Her Activism Has Slowed Her Already Painstaking Creation”

May 31, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

When making an accounting of all the great American short-story writers, is Grace Paley the most neglected? Despite just three major collections, she was one of our best–funny, outraged, noble and strange. The author’s time was split among fictional narratives, motherhood and human-rights protesting. In a 1979 People article, Kristin McCurran suggested that perhaps Paley’s literary output had been compromised by time spent on political causes, a trade-off the writer never seemed to regret. An excerpt:

She is an American writer few people have read, but those who have, including her most distinguished peers, think the world of Grace Paley. To Susan Sontag “she is a wonderful writer and a noble citizen.” To Donald Barthelme “Grace Paley is a very good writer and troublemaker.”

Both were by way of explaining why the Sarah Lawrence teacher and short-story writer was in a Washington, D.C. courtroom last week. Her troublemaking had consisted of stepping onto the White House lawn last Labor Day with 10 other members of the War Resisters League and unfurling a banner which read NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS, NO NUCLEAR POWER—U.S. OR USSR. As Grace told superior court Judge Donald S. Smith at her sentencing, “We tried to go about the demonstration in a quiet, gentle way.” The judge’s response: a suspended 180-day sentence, $100 fine and three years’ probation.

At the time of the White House protest, seven fellow War Resisters, on U.S. tourist visas in Moscow, had staged a similar demonstration outside the Kremlin. But while the Washington 11 were being jailed for 30 hours and tried by jury last December, their compatriots in Moscow were released without arrest. Paley’s group did not hesitate to publicize the irony.

Of course her activism has slowed her already painstaking creation. Grace, at 56, has published only two major collections of stories and none since Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in 1974. Indeed, she has been busily seeking confrontations with authorities since the ’60s, when Vietnam war protests took her to Hanoi, Stockholm and Paris. “I think I could have done more for peace,” she admits, “if I’d written about the war, but I happen to love being in the streets.”

Even literary admirers who share her politics probably half wish Paley would chain herself to the typewriter instead. Her characters, as one fond critic described them, are “lonely people, junkies, unwed mothers, losers of all sorts, and the lady downstairs, who is often drunk.” Philip Roth calls her work “splendidly comic and unladylike.” But Paley intends to go on being unladylike, as it were. “I believe that people have to act,” she says. “Billions of dollars are put into what’s called defense, while the needs of the people are neglected.”•

Tags: ,

“To Most Students Of U.S. Politics, The Phrase American Socialism Is An Oxymoron”

May 31, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Libertarianism is supposed to be having a moment in America, but Edward Luce of the Financial Times argues that it’s Socialism that really is. I’ll certainly disagree with the columnist’s depiction of Martin O’Malley as a “left winger” (he’s a pragmatist in the Clinton mold), but it is worth thinking back on the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that moment, it seemed capitalism had ultimately triumphed. What if capitalism leads to robotics so profound that technological unemployment brings about the end of capitalism? Or at least a radical redefining of it? Not impossible.

Luce’s opening:

Leftwing politicians are in electoral retreat across most of the western world. The one exception is the United States. At 15 per cent in the Democratic polls, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, is riding higher than any US socialist since Eugene Debs ran for the White House a century ago.

The fact that Mr Sanders has very little chance of unseating Hillary Clinton is beside the point. His popularity is dragging her leftward. If he flames out, other left-wingers, such as Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland who entered the race at the weekend, are ready to pick up the baton. Elizabeth Warren, the populist Massachusetts senator, will continue to prod Mrs Clinton from outside the field. The more Mrs Clinton adopts their language, the harder it will be for her to reclaim the centre ground next year. Yet she is only following the crowd. A surprisingly large chunk of Democrats are happy to break the US taboo against socialism.

To most students of US politics, the phrase American socialism is an oxymoron — like clean coal or the Bolivian navy. A century ago, Werner Sombart, a German scholar, asked “Why is there no socialism in America?” It was a question that confounded Marxists. As the most advanced capitalistic society, the US was most ripe for a proletarian revolution, according to their teleology.

Yet the US refused to live up to its role.•

Tags:

“We Are Only Aware Of His Story Because He Did Something Unimaginable To Survive”

May 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but modern China almost has been. In a rush to modernization, the focus has been on the greater good, which, as always, has its blind spots, from the world’s highest cancer rates to life-threatening pollution to a healthcare system incapable of nurturing a gigantic population being pulled at a breakneck pace by the sweep of history.

Case in point: The harrowing story of Zheng Yanliang, who took desperate measures to escape certain death in the world’s largest economy.

From Bernhard Zand at Spiegel:

His shroud had already been purchased when, on April 14, 2012, Zheng Yanliang, 48, a Chinese man from Hebei Province, summoned up the last of his strength to lean out of his bed and reach for his toolbox. He took out a hacksaw. Then he wrapped the handle of a backscratcher in a piece of material, which he stuck in his mouth so that he could bite on it. He did not hesitate. He had thought about his options and concluded that he had only one choice, this unthinkable, monstrous deed. He placed the saw against his right leg, a hand’s breadth below his hip, and began to saw.

The life of worker Zheng Yanliang, which began in 1966, probably would have ended in 2012 were it not for a miracle. It’s a life that spans the entire period of China’s opening to the world, and of the great Chinese economic miracle. Zheng diligently contributed to his society’s high-speed transformation, as both a farmer and a migrant worker, as did millions upon millions of his fellow Chinese, in a country where progress for the masses is everything and the fate of the individual means nothing. Zheng’s story shows what can happen when someone falters in this relentless pursuit of prosperity, and when he falls and is taken out of the running. We are only aware of his story because he did something unimaginable to survive, and because photos were later taken of what happened to him. We know nothing about many thousands of other Chinese who fall by the wayside while working to increase their own and the overall gross national product.•

Tags: ,

“In This Case The Entire Business Is Fake”

May 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a fascinating New York Times article, Liz Alderman reports on the ghost companies of Europe, phantom businesses with pretend inventory and customers, which exist merely to supply (unpaid) make-believe jobs to the long-term unemployed, novice workers who need experience or those retraining for new industries. 

Considered broadly, such an arrangement already exists all over the globe, although not with the express mission of helping citizens back into the workforce. A massive number of people already have fake, non-paying jobs in the Freeconomy. Each day, hundreds of millions create content for Facebook, which would make the company the largest sweatshop in world history, if it paid even a nominal amount. Should technological unemployment become widespread, become the new normal, we’ll continue to produce content and products, even if there’s no compensation. Maybe we’ll receive “free” minutes or bonus points or nothing at all. But for that to happen in a large-scale and permanent way, we’ll have to start taxing capital rather than labor, and there will need to be a guaranteed basic income.

The opening of Alderman’s piece:

At 9:30 a.m. on a sunny weekday, the phones at Candelia, a purveyor of sleek office furniture in Lille, France, rang steadily with orders from customers across the country and from Switzerland and Germany. A photocopier clacked rhythmically while more than a dozen workers processed sales, dealt with suppliers and arranged for desks and chairs to be shipped.

Sabine de Buyzer, working in the accounting department, leaned into her computer and scanned a row of numbers. Candelia was doing well. Its revenue that week was outpacing expenses, even counting taxes and salaries. “We have to be profitable,” Ms. de Buyzer said. “Everyone’s working all out to make sure we succeed.”

This was a sentiment any boss would like to hear, but in this case the entire business is fake. So are Candelia’s customers and suppliers, from the companies ordering the furniture to the trucking operators that make deliveries. Even the bank where Candelia gets its loans is not real. 

More than 100 Potemkin companies like Candelia are operating today in France, and there are thousands more across Europe. In Seine-St.-Denis, outside Paris, a pet business called Animal Kingdom sells products like dog food and frogs. ArtLim, a company in Limoges, peddles fine porcelain. Prestige Cosmetique in Orleans deals in perfumes. All these companies’ wares are imaginary.

These companies are all part of an elaborate training network that effectively operates as a parallel economic universe.•

Tags:

“Historic Monsters Might Be Punished For 6 Million Years”

May 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not exactly the most pressing concern to sort out how we’d conduct justice should it become possible for humans to upload consciousness to computers and attain a sort-of immortality for our sort-of selves. But it may be theoretically possible and makes for a fun bull session, so Conor Friedersdorf penned a well-written cautionary essay on the topic for the Atlantic, which also considers other unintended consequences of the endless summer. An excerpt:

Radical life extension would so scramble and confound our normal notions of justice that there’s no telling how future Americans would react to the new reality. Historic monsters might be punished for 6 million years … or just three or four times longer than a 150-year sentence a U.S. court imposed on this obscure money-launderer. It’s hard to speculate even when confining ourselves to descendants of ours, in this country, with moral codes closely resembling our own.

In fact, it isn’t clear how we’d react right now.

If today’s Americans magically took custody of servers containing the disembodied consciousnesses of every figure ever mentioned in the country’s newspapers, going back to the beginning, would we stop at punishing former Nazi leaders? Would there be a protest movement to hold Native American killers and slaveholders accountable? What about the folks behind the Tuskegee syphilis experiment? Or the city leaders of towns in the Jim Crow South that subjugated blacks?•

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »