1,263 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2021
  2. Jul 2021
    1. or Jonas, one of the questions we must face is this“What force shall represent the future in the present?”

      This is a pressing question which our governments pay far too little attention to.

    1. The New Money Trust: How Large Money Managers Control Our Economy and What We Can Do About It

      WTF is wrong?

      Where is the moral character and backbone of the American people. We know something is wrong! It smells and stinks yet no one does anything. Most of our elected politicians are useless turds floating in wastewater and the rest are multiple term professional corrupt politicians waiting for the appropriate revolving door opportunity. This has nothing to do with party affiliation, it is rampant on both sides. Political parties perpetuate the illusion as a control mechanism. We see it yet do nothing about it! WHY?

      This paper (topic) is typical of the continued "head in the sand" passive financial regulatory system loaded with Sheeple and kiss-ass do nothing idiots. Alarms have been going off since 2005/6 and as predicted then, our financial system imploded in 07/08.

      1. What lesson was learned?
      2. Who were the players?
      3. What disciplinary actions took place?
      4. Who went to Jail?

      Nothing has changed. Corruption and fraud fuel a dysfunctional financial system destined to cripple the American and Global economies. Economists and many within the financial sector know what is going on. Maybe they care about the average person but are afraid to come forward. Maybe they don't care and fully intend to rape and pillage as much of the global society as possible.

      The question is what are YOU going to do to protect future generations, your children, grand children and so on?

    1. Sergio: Did the Mexican government provide help in that transition?Rodolfo: The Mexican government, they provided some help. They provided 50 pesos when I first got here. And they just give me a whole bunch of pamphlets of school and housing, right? But I feel as though independent organizations were the ones who ultimately would have helped me a lot more. When I first got off the plane, they told me about all the resources, all the help, all the things that their company or their organization did for other people, deportees.

      Return to Mexico, first impressions

    1. It’s a familiar trick in the privatisation-happy US – like, say, underfunding public education and then criticising the institution for struggling.

      This same thing is being seen in the U.S. Post Office now too. Underfund it into failure rather than provide a public good.

      Capitalism definitely hasn't solved the issue, and certainly without government regulation. See also the last mile problem for internet service, telephone service, and cable service.

      UPS and FedEx apparently rely on the USPS for last mile delivery in remote areas. (Source for this?)

      The poor and the remote are inordinately effected in almost all these cases. What other things do these examples have in common? How can we compare and contrast the public service/government versions with the private capitalistic ones to make the issues more apparent. Which might be the better solution: capitalism with tight government regulation to ensure service at the low end or a government monopoly of the area? or something in between?

    1. Sarah Kliff on Twitter: “Coronavirus vaccines are free—But 9 percent of Americans say they’re not getting one because they are worried about cost. I see this a lot in my reporting: Patients who don’t seek care because they’re become so accustomed to surprise bills that follow. Https://t.co/gu6oDnlvhB” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved July 2, 2021, from https://twitter.com/sarahkliff/status/1395032095819542528?s=20

  3. Jun 2021
    1. Christophe Fraser 💙 on Twitter: “Reading Cummings accounts of early creation of Test & Trace, a question I have is when and how it was morphed from aiming to find ~30 contacts per index case, needed to contain spread, into a service that contacts 2-4 contacts per index case, mostly within household.” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved June 28, 2021, from https://twitter.com/ChristoPhraser/status/1408454903249477632

    1. Lewis Spurgin on Twitter: “Perhaps an under appreciated point with the B.1.617.2 variant is that regional PHE teams and local authorities across the country are putting in heroic amounts of effort to break chains of transmission. (1/2)” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved June 27, 2021, from https://twitter.com/LewisSpurgin/status/1395827267297759234

    1. Deepti Gurdasani on Twitter: “I’m still utterly stunned by yesterday’s events—Let me go over this in chronological order & why I’m shocked. - First, in the morning yesterday, we saw a ‘leaked’ report to FT which reported on @PHE_uk data that was not public at the time🧵” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved June 27, 2021, from https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1396373990986375171

    1. Knock, E. S., Whittles, L. K., Lees, J. A., Perez-Guzman, P. N., Verity, R., FitzJohn, R. G., Gaythorpe, K. A. M., Imai, N., Hinsley, W., Okell, L. C., Rosello, A., Kantas, N., Walters, C. E., Bhatia, S., Watson, O. J., Whittaker, C., Cattarino, L., Boonyasiri, A., Djaafara, B. A., … Baguelin, M. (2021). Key epidemiological drivers and impact of interventions in the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England. Science Translational Medicine, eabg4262. https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.abg4262

    1. We should favor ways of organizing our social and economic life so things that are socially productive are more nearly equally rewarded. And we should pick ways of making things, ways of delivering services, ways of running schooling that don’t skew achievement so far at the very top. … We could organize finance so that the middle of the skill distribution, the old home loan officer, is the dominant worker. We could organize medicine in such a way that the difference between the specialist doctor, the nurse practitioner, and the pharmacist is relatively small and most health care is delivered by people in the middle of the skill distribution. ... The core thing to do is to find policies both in education and the labor market that recompress the distribution of economic roles.

      This sounds like a positive move, but will require a lot of government regulation/oversight.

      Placing caps on runaway capitalism and meritocracy could be required to keep us from killing ourselves.

    1. Luisa: I think they've gained a lot. I think Mexico has gained a lot, but they don't know how to appreciate it. They pretty much throw us aside. Unfortunately, the Mexican government does not think that people who are returning from the States have anything to offer, and they're dead wrong about that. Honestly, if you look at a lot of these people that are coming back, they have so much to offer. They have so much to give and they have so much drive and they're hungry, but they don't make it easy for us.

      Reflections, Mexico, Policy to help integrate migrants back into Mexican Society (the lack thereof)

  4. May 2021
    1. Prof. Christina Pagel on Twitter: “So Hancock confirms that B.1.617.2 (‘India’ variant) is now dominant in England. Harries says we must remain ‘vigilant’. What does vigilant even mean? That we watch very carefully as a new, more dangerous, variant takes over cos it was so fun last time? Yeah, I’m pissed off” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved May 28, 2021, from https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1397951741283405825

    1. Prof. Devi Sridhar on Twitter: “Feel nauseous watching this testimony. It’s what we all could piece together was happening in No.10 & in SAGE, but to hear it directly and to re-live those weeks is just astonishing. How many lives could have been saved? How much of the harsh domestic restrictions were avoidable?” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved May 27, 2021, from https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1397507437951922180

    1. Lewis Goodall on Twitter: “Here we go. He’s not messing about: ‘The truth is, senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisors like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has the right to expect in a crisis like this. When the public needed us most the government failed.’ https://t.co/lV7QqIpTDY” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved May 27, 2021, from https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1397471561205092352

    1. Wellenius, G. A., Vispute, S., Espinosa, V., Fabrikant, A., Tsai, T. C., Hennessy, J., Dai, A., Williams, B., Gadepalli, K., Boulanger, A., Pearce, A., Kamath, C., Schlosberg, A., Bendebury, C., Mandayam, C., Stanton, C., Bavadekar, S., Pluntke, C., Desfontaines, D., … Gabrilovich, E. (2021). Impacts of social distancing policies on mobility and COVID-19 case growth in the US. Nature Communications, 12(1), 3118. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23404-5

    1. I worked on a recent project to sketch out for a centre-right German think-tank how a European data commons might work. I tried to steer it away from property rights and towards what you’d get if you started with the commons and then worked back to what data could be harnessed, and to which collective purposes. This is eminently do-able, and pushes you towards two distinct areas; groups of people who are served poorly or not at all by current data regimes, and existing cooperatives, unions and mutual societies who could collect and process their members’ data to improve collective bargaining, or licence access to it to generate revenue and boost affiliate membership. Viewing personal data as a collective asset points towards all sorts of currently under-provided public goods (I briefly describe several, on p. 74 here – yes, oddly enough, this stuff got shoved into an annex).

      Apparently lots of reading to catch up on here.

      I definitely like the idea of starting with the commons and working backwards, not only with respect to data, but with respect to most natural resources. This should be the primary goal of governments and the goal should be to prevent private individuals and corporations from privatizing profits and socializing the losses.

      Think of an individual organism in analogy to a country or even personkind. What do we call a group of cells that grows without check and consumes all the resources? (A cancer). The organism needs each cell and group of cells to work together for the common good. We can't have a group of cis-gender white men aggregating all the power and resources for themselves at the cost of the rest otherwise they're just a cancer on humanity.

    2. To change incentives so that personal data is treated with appropriate care, we need criminal penalties for the Facebook executives who left vulnerable half a billion people’s personal data, unleashing a lifetime of phishing attacks, and who now point to an FTC deal indemnifying them from liability because our phone numbers and unchangeable dates of birth are “old” data.

      We definitely need penalties and regulation to fix our problems.

    1. Braud, M., Gaboriaud, A., Ferry, T., Mardi, W. E., Silva, L. D., Lemouzy, M., Guttierrez, J., Petit, S., Szabelska, A., & IJzerman, H. (2021). COVID-19-related conspiracy beliefs and their relationship with perceived stress and pre-existing conspiracy beliefs in a Prolific Academic sample: A replication and extension of Georgiou et al. (2020). PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/t62s7

    1. it makes a difference whether the argument made before Congress is “Facebook is bad, cannot reform itself, and is guided by people who know what they’re doing but are doing int anyway—and the company needs to be broken up immediately” or if the argument is “Facebook means well, but it sure would be nice if they could send out fewer notifications and maybe stop recommending so much conspiratorial content.”

      Note the dramatic difference between these spaces and the potential ability for things to get better.

    1. Sam Bowman. (2021, January 25). If the govt can’t keep a few thousand people fed in hotel quarantine, how exactly was it supposed to provide for fifteen million pensioners self-isolating in Great Barrington-style ‘focused protection’ while the virus was spreading across the rest of the population? [Tweet]. @s8mb. https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/1353666214883684352

    1. Robert Colvile. (2021, February 16). The vaccine passports debate is a perfect illustration of my new working theory: That the most important part of modern government, and its most important limitation, is database management. Please stick with me on this—It’s much more interesting than it sounds. (1/?) [Tweet]. @rcolvile. https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1361673425140543490

    2. ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: “this is utterly bizarre: How would one conceptually even begin to determine a number by which the model overestimated unmitigated deaths. What is the comparison unmitigated ‘prediction’ to what actually happened supposed to mean?” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved May 1, 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1384070393514790918

  5. Apr 2021
    1. Der Guardian kritisiert in seinem Editorial, dass die US-Klimapolitik international vor allem auf private Finanzierung setzt und damit die Abhängigkeit der ärmeren Länder noch weiter zu verschärft. Das Risiko liegt dabei bei den ärmeren Ländern, Ihnen wurden bisher kaum öffentliche Gelder zugesagt. (Der Guardian verweist zum Hintergrund vor allem auf das Papier The Wallstreet Consensus von Daniela Gabor.)

      The Guardian view on Biden’s green revolution: it needs revolutionaries | Editorial | The Guardian

    1. Watching Representative Katie Porter Grill Trump Administration Officials Is Still My Favorite Pandemic Pastime

      watching Katie Porter support repealing the SALT Caps has betrayed me to my core, shattered my hopes for what the Democratic party could be. pretending to speak for the middle class, she's giving an enormously regressive tax cut to the ultra-wealthy, and it's sickening to watch & soils my every memory of her fighting good fights. Incredibly dishonest & tragic, using so many fake GOP style "think of the middle class" ways to sell something that hardly affects them.

    1. Dr Ellie Murray on Twitter: “There are 3 types of disaster responses: •panicking or freezing; •taking action; and •ignoring the disaster. That last one is the most common response to sudden disasters, like when, for example, a ferry sinks. I didn’t expect it would also be most common in a pandemic.” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2021, from https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1384223819670245378

  6. Mar 2021
    1. Other countries are already focusing their regulatory efforts on engineering and design. France has discussed appointing an algorithm auditor, who would oversee the effects of platform engineering on the French public. The U.K. has proposed that companies assess the impact of algorithms on illegal content distribution and illegal activity on their platforms. Europe is heading in that direction too.
    2. Theodore Roosevelt—who denounced the “unfair money-getting” that created a “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power”—rewrote the rules. He broke up monopolies to make the economy more fair, returning power to small businesses and entrepreneurs. He enacted protections for working people. And he created the national parks, public spaces for all to enjoy.

      We could definitely use another round of this now. Where is the end of our current gilded age?

    1. Prof. Devi Sridhar. (2020, March 25). We will be stuck in an endless cycle of lockdown/release for next 18 months, if we do not start mass testing, tracing, & isolating those who are carriers of the virus while pursuing rapid research for antiviral treatment or vaccine. This is the message the public needs to hear. [Tweet]. @devisridhar. https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1242743618986745861