145 posts tagged with institutions.
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How much COF-999 would you need to reverse global warming?
This New, Yellow Powder Quickly Pulls Carbon Dioxide From the Air, and Researchers Say 'There's Nothing Like It' - "Scientists say just 200 grams of the material could capture 44 pounds of the greenhouse gas per year—the same as a large tree." [more inside]
"This string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold"
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are surging "faster than ever" to beyond anything humans ever experienced, officials say - "Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever." [more inside]
Power (Plough, Sword & Book) and Progress (Exit, Voice & Loyalty)
Justice by Means of Democracy [archive|transcript] - "[T]he work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again. So we have to do work to introduce new governance mechanisms in the place of those that are not working."[1,2; link-heavy post!] [more inside]
Self selective assortative voting (with your feet)
The Red State Brain Drain Isn't Coming. It's Happening Right Now. [archive] - "As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags." [more inside]
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
The Memory Bank*
A Hidden Currency of Incalculable Worth [ungated] - "We need to start thinking about policies aimed at freeing up time for impoverished families as a form of aid. We could begin by defining a healthy society as one in which everyone has a place to stay, food to eat and time to enjoy the fruits of their labor with those for whom they labor. A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work." [link-heavy FPP! ;] [more inside]
What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance?
Rebecca Solnit: How to meet the climate crisis? Redefine 'abundance.' [ungated] - "Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we're well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?"[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
Abundance: Aplenty for All
Making energy too cheap to meter - "The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it's almost free." [more inside]
Practical Utopias from Degrowth Pastoralism to Star Trek Futurism
Why the Age of American Progress Ended [ungated] - "Invention alone can't change the world; what matters is what happens next."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
Civilization reboot: Imagine post-capitalism instead of the world's end
An Economic History of the ('Long') Twentieth Century - "Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Atoms and Bits
The story so far: So until some random assortment of matter and energy somehow arranged itself into what we think of as 'life', the universe was just that: a random assortment of matter and energy. After life, life began to arrange matter and energy, according to life -- creating life (and death) at least on the third rock from some star... [more inside]
Complaint as a queer method
"To be heard as complaining is not to be heard" is the first sentence of Sara Ahmed's book Complaint! about how power is used against those who complain about abuses of power (pdf of intro). Paris Review interview: "When you make a complaint about harassment that’s endemic to a university, you’re pitting yourself against people who don’t want that problem to be recognized." Listen to Ahmed's lecture from March 16, 2022.
Tax Loopholes and Revolving Doors (Occupy K Street)
How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government [ungated] - "Lawyers from top accounting firms do brief stints in the Treasury Department, with the expectation of big raises when they return." [more inside]
You have twenty seconds to comply.
The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine [ungated] - "Israeli agents had wanted to kill Iran's top nuclear scientist for years. Then they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present."[1,2] [more inside]
It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile
Enough with the GDP — it's time to measure genuine progress - "Unlike GDP, the Genuine Progress Indicator is designed to measure economic performance from the perspective of ordinary American households, not corporations or Wall Street investors."[1,2] [more inside]
When great powers continually destabilize each other and foment unrest
The future of war is bizarre and terrifying [thread(reader)] - "Drones, eternal cyberwar, info ops, and the specter of biological warfare."[1,2] [more inside]
Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer
How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life [ungated link] - "Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism." (NYT, PBS)
[more inside]
This Is the Way
Interview: Saikat Chakrabarti, creator of the Green New Deal - "He also discovered AOC, served as her chief of staff, and co-founded the Justice Democrats." [more inside]
"The Modern Point of View and the New Order"
What comes after smartphones? - "We've spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we've only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them." [more inside]
The Trick of Orthodoxy
Economics truly is a disgrace - "This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my 'economics is a disgrace' blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry." (via; previously) [more inside]
With fewer tourists to entertain, it has found a much more important use
An empty Paris hotel now shelters the homeless - "In normal times the Hotel Avenir Montmartre is a tourist magnet with its views of the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur church, but COVID-19 has scared off the usual guests. Instead, the hotel has opened its doors to the homeless." [more inside]
Age of Discord II
Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties' - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it's here and what we can do to temper it."[1,2] (via) [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Organization through sectoral bargaining
How Workers Can Achieve Real Power - "We can build a sectoral bargaining system—and strong, democratic, worker-driven unions—from the ground up." [more inside]
Skyscrapers for plants: maybe farm/forest arcologies should be things
Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms - "Here we show that wheat grown on a single hectare of land in a 10-layer indoor vertical facility could produce ... 220 to 600 times the current world average annual wheat yield of 3.2 t/ha." (via) [more inside]
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]
Ethics in AI
DeepMind researchers propose rebuilding the AI industry on a base of anticolonialism - "The researchers detailed how to build AI systems while critically examining colonialism and colonial forms of AI already in use in a preprint paper released Thursday. The paper was coauthored by DeepMind research scientists William Isaac and Shakir Mohammed and Marie-Therese Png, an Oxford doctoral student and DeepMind Ethics and Society intern who previously provided tech advice to the United Nations Secretary General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation." [more inside]
Angry, educated and rich
Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies - "Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands."[1] (via; previously) [more inside]
A better world than this is possible
Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century
Politics Without Politicians - "The political scientist Hélène Landemore asks, If government is for the people, why can't the people do the governing?" (via) [more inside]
The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020
Overfishing on the rise as global consumption climbs: U.N. agency - "More than a third of the fish stocks around the world are being overfished and the problem is particularly acute in developing countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report on Monday." (pdf) [more inside]
State Capacity
America's Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms - "Inside the U.S. and Panama's long-running collaboration to rid an entire continent of a deadly disease." (thread/reader: "Screwworms were eradicated from the U.S. decades ago. But how? In the 1950s, the U.S. began growing millions of screwworms in a factory, sterilizing them with radiation, and dropping them out of planes. And this still happens today! Everyday!"; the USDA's screwworm eradication collection; merch/stickers; via)
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
Four functions of markets - "The period from 2008 until now has been a kind of undead neoliberal era. Post Great Financial Crisis, neoliberal ideas have been discredited among much of the public and are actively contested even within governing elites. But, absent consensus on some new set of social heuristics, not much has actually changed. Material interests in the continuity of institutions shaped by neoliberalism remain strong."[1] [more inside]
Private Riches, Public Squalor
Study: A year is too short for a U.S. worker to earn middle-class life - "The widening gulf... between what American life costs and what American jobs pay is a central fact of American political economy that the public appears to have understood long before economists." [The New Midlife Crisis] [more inside]
The privatization of voting infrastructure
How Amazon.com moved into the business of U.S. elections - "Amazon.com Inc's cloud computing arm is making an aggressive push into one of the most sensitive technology sectors: U.S. elections." [more inside]
The Next Administration: Using Presidential Power for Good
The Day One Agenda - "Without signing a single new law, the next president can lower prescription drug prices, cancel student debt, break up the big banks, give everybody who wants one a bank account, counteract the dominance of monopoly power, protect farmers from price discrimination and unfair dealing, force divestment from fossil fuel projects, close a slew of tax loopholes, hold crooked CEOs accountable, mandate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, allow the effective legalization of marijuana, make it easier for 800,000 workers to join a union, and much, much more. We have compiled a series of essays to explain precisely how, and under what authority, the next president can accomplish all this."[1] (via)
The invention of (synthetic) central bank digital currency
The Fed is going to revamp how Americans pay for things. Big banks aren't happy. "America's central bank plans to build its own real-time payment system, much to the chagrin of big commercial banks. The news: The Federal Reserve has announced that it will create 'FedNow', a system that will allow real-time bank-to-bank payments, all day every day."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
L'Obvs: "It's time to go beyond capitalism"
Economist Piketty's latest book a 1,200 page tome about abolishing billionaires - "The new book, called 'Capitalism and Ideology', tops 1,200 pages and delves into the political ideologies behind income inequality, while providing radical solutions for reversing the world's wealth disparities." (previously) [more inside]
A way towards 'reparations': expand housing opportunity (& public goods)
America has a housing segregation problem. Seattle may just have the solution. - "Economist Raj Chetty found the program has 'the largest effect I've ever seen in a social science intervention.'"[1,2] [more inside]
Art UK
Simeon Solomon: the rise and fall of a Victorian aesthete; Madame de Pompadour: Rococo style icon; Who were the Bluestockings?; The socialite and the introvert: the shared life and art of Ethel Sands and Anna Hope Hudson; Frank Bowling: 60 years of pioneering colourful abstraction; The cinematic and artistic genius of Ray Harryhausen; Fashion reconstructed: the dress in Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait... these are a small handful of the many articles at Art UK: "a cultural education charity [who] enable global audiences to learn about the UK’s national art collection" whose website "is the showcase for art in every UK public collection" and includes "over 220,000 artworks by over 40,000 artists." [more inside]
Toronto Tomorrow
A Big Master Plan for Google's Growing Smart City - "Google sibling company Sidewalk Labs has revealed its master plan for the controversial Quayside waterfront development—and it's a lot bigger."[1,2] [more inside]
Your Data, Your Money, Your Laws
Your data could be at the centre of the fight against big tech (NYT) - "Furman, a Harvard professor advising the British government on tech regulation, said that rather than relying on antitrust law alone, countries should create a dedicated regulator for the tech industry, to match those covering the banking, health and transportation sectors of the economy. He said a watchdog with expertise in the field could better review a company's behavior and use of data on a case-by-case basis." [more inside]
The Black Psychiatrists of America
The Forgotten Tale of How Black Psychiatrists Helped Make 'Sesame Street' - "The children's television show entranced preschoolers—and helped teach impressionable black kids."
Money Stuff
Facebook Will Make the Money Now - "Money is a technology. This is true, first of all, in a grand abstract sense: The human capacity to generate collective fictions is our most powerful and general technology, the thing that distinguishes us from other animals and enables long-term cooperation and complex societies, and money is one of the most important collective fictions."[1] [more inside]
Who Gets What: Economics as Religion -- Once More Unto the Breach!
A Beginner's Guide to MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) - "MMT proposes that a country with its own currency, such as the U.S., doesn't have to worry about accumulating too much debt because it can always print more money to pay interest. So the only constraint on spending is inflation, which can break out if the public and private sectors spend too much at the same time. As long as there are enough workers and equipment to meet growing demand without igniting inflation, the government can spend what it needs to maintain employment and achieve goals such as halting climate change." [more inside]
Like hostile tribes doomed over centuries to share the same tiny valley
Three levels of controversy over MMT - "Economics debates are often passionate, and frequently become too personal. But MMT debates are stuck on infinite recursion, and they take place in a thunderdrome entirely their own." (also btw: MMT streetfighting, MMT stabilization policy — some comments & critiques, The MMT solvency constraint, Translating "net financial assets", A note on model risk, policy design, and political alliances and Because the stakes are so small?)*
402 Payment Required
Shouldn't We All Have Seamless Micropayments By Now? - "The web's founders fully expected some form of digital payment to be integral to its functioning. But nearly three decades later, we're still waiting." (previously) [more inside]
Modernist Tastemaker? Fascist Snob? Corporate Artist?
“His “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” in 1932 successfully sold the profession to America by reducing and reframing the architecture of the day into an aesthetic that would come to be known as the International Style. And in his curating, he conveniently omitted architectural modernism’s more populist programs and ideology (the building of affordable housing, schools, recreation centers, and the like). In fact, Johnson, who could afford to fund his own projects and work on commissions for free (a significant advantage over his competitors), had little care for social concerns unless they somehow benefited him: “Social responsibility was boring,” Lamster notes,” and for Philip Johnson, to be boring was an unforgivable crime.” The Boys’ Club:
On the myths and enigmas of Philip Johnson’s life and of a supposedly egalitarian architectural culture. (The Nation)
The problem of increasing returns to scale and public goods provisioning
E. Glen Weyl:[1,2,3] "I believe it is the deepest and most pernicious failure in this philosophy and the one whose solution would require the most systematic rethinking of the whole project, rather than just tweaks along the edges. That issue is the problem of what one might call public goods, but is much broader than how many economists usually think of public goods and thus I will label the issue of increasing returns."[4,5,6] (threadreader; via 'the problem of increasing returns to scale, how little it is addressed, how carefully ignored') [more inside]
(dystopic) utopianism...
The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's 'Whole Earth Catalog' - "Brand's generation will leave behind a frightening, if unintentional, inheritance. My generation, and those after us, are staring down a ravaged environment, eviscerated institutions, and the increasing erosion of democracy." ('We Are as Gods and Might as Well Get Good at It') [more inside]