144 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as noth-ing more than a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood adoor leading, via their death, to the company of gods and to Eter-nity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks, some men dared freethemselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal Citywhere Liberty would flourish. Others, noting the evolution of themarket society, understood that the liberty of some would entailthe alienation of others, and they sought Equality.

      quote pulled from Jacques Attali's book Fraternités

    2. If, for ex-ample, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequalspecies using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threatenthe notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

      I find it hard to believe that equality is "the very cornerstone of our democracy".

  2. Dec 2023
  3. Nov 2023
    1. Der Emissions Gap Report 2023 des UN-Umweltprogramms (Titel: Broken Rekord) zeigt, dass sich die Welt nach wie vor auf eine Erhitzung um 2,5-2,9° zubewegt. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit dafür, dass das 1,5°-Ziel noch erreicht wird, liegt bei höchstens 14%. Der Treibhausgasausstoß erreichte einen historischen Rekord; er war 2022 1,2% höher als 2021. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000195965/welt-steuert-auf-drei-grad-erhitzung-zu-methan

      Bericht: https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2023

  4. Sep 2023
  5. Aug 2023
  6. Apr 2023
    1. Based on yesterday's discussion at Dan Allosso's Book Club, we don't include defense spending into the consumer price index for calculating inflation or other market indicators. What other things (communal goods) aren't included into these measures, but which potentially should be to take into account the balance of governmental spending versus individual spending. It seems unfair that individual sectors, particularly those like defense contracting which are capitalistic in nature, but which are living on governmental rent extraction, should be free from the vagaries of inflation?

      Throwing them into the basket may create broader stability for the broader system and act as a brake via feedback mechanisms which would push those corporations to work for the broader economic good, particularly when they're taking such a large piece of the overall pie.

      Similarly how might we adjust corporate tax rates with respect to the level of inflation to prevent corporate price gouging during times of inflation which seems to be seen in the current 2023 economic climate. Workers have seen some small gains in salary since the pandemic, but inflationary pressures have dramatically eaten into these taking the gains and then some back into corporate coffers. The FED can increase interest rates to effect some change, but this doesn't change corporate price gouging in any way, tax or other policies will be necessary to do this.

  7. Mar 2023
    1. Piketty, Thomas. A Brief History of Equality. Translated by Steven Rendall. Harvard University Press, 2022. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674273559.

      annotation target: url: urn:x-pdf:61f07d62a5664b0280bb35ee2d6a69e5

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  8. Feb 2023
    1. https://docdrop.org/pdf/From-equality-to-hierarchy---DeDeo-Simon-l891k.pdf/

      Broadly seen, this paper seems to be more a summary and brief commentary on that of Kawakatsu et al.

      Where do the references converge/diverge? What's really added?

      I want to see the related paper: From hierarchy to equality.

    2. rank is not an assessment of who has thebest intrinsic properties, but rather a useful consensus view thatprovides rules for how to behave toward others.

      Rank (social or otherwise) can be a signal for predictability from the perspective of consensus views for how to behave towards others with respect to the abilities or values being measured.


      Ranking people for some sort of technical ability may be a better objective measure rather than ranking people on social status which is far less objective from a humanist perspective. In employment situations, individuals are more likely to rely on social and cultural biases and racist tendencies rather than on objective measures with respect to the job at hand. How can we better objectify the actual underlying values over and above the more subjective ones.

    3. M. G. Marmot, G. Rose, M. Shipley, P. J. Hamilton, Employment grade and coronary heart disease in British civil servants.J. Epidemiol. Community Health32,244–249 (1978).7R. M. Sapolsky, The influence of social hierarchy on primate health.Science308, 648–652 (2005)

      Want to read with respect to https://hypothes.is/a/hFZ1mqTgEe2MHU8Jfedg_A

    4. While hierarchies might benefitthe group as a whole, the benefits are distributedunequally, with those at the bottom suffering the most(6, 7).

      Is this the reason that we have such social problems in the United States? Hierarchies may benefit us as a whole, but somehow those at the bottom (along with a racist presumption that that's where they below) are hurt the most?

      How do we turn this on it's head?

    5. DeDeo, Simon, and Elizabeth A. Hobson. “From Equality to Hierarchy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 21 (May 25, 2021): e2106186118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106186118.

  9. Jan 2023
    1. Male inequality, explained by an expert, Richard Reeves, Big Think

      Jan 4, 2023

      Modern males are struggling. Author Richard Reeves outlines the three major issues boys and men face and shares possible solutions.

      Boys and men are falling behind. This might seem surprising to some people, and maybe ridiculous to others, considering that discussions on gender disparities tend to focus on the structural challenges faced by girls and women, not boys and men.

      But long-term data reveal a clear and alarming trend: In recent decades, American men have been faring increasingly worse in many areas of life, including education, workforce participation, skill acquisition, wages, and fatherhood.

      Gender politics is often framed as a zero-sum game: Any effort to help men takes away from women. But in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men, journalist and Brookings Institution scholar Richard V. Reeves argues that the structural problems contributing to male malaise affect everybody, and that shying away from these tough conversations is not a productive path forward.

      About Richard Reeves: Richard V. Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he directs the Future of the Middle Class Initiative and co-directs the Center on Children and Families. His Brookings research focuses on the middle class, inequality and social mobility.

  10. Dec 2022
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYycpKcUhc4

      We need more social acceptability for neurodivergence in much the way we accept the use of eyeglasses without attaching a social stigma to it.

      What ways is this like exacerbating the stigmas of racism and institutionalized racism? How can we break down these broader barriers without othering people?

    1. There is, however, an argument often made with respect to not fully addressingpoverty and inequality. It is based on the assumption that there is a necessarytrade- off between having a strong economy and having a robust social welfarestate. The recent origins of this argument can be traced back to an influen-tial book entitled, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by the economistArthur Okun.
  11. Nov 2022
  12. Sep 2022
    1. But until all participants in the debate recognize the overwhelming importance of having two parents in the home, we’re not going to get very far in improving opportunity.

      If two-parent families are so important, where is the support for all two-parent families? Where is economic support for these going to magically appear? Is he pushing that agenda?

      The arrest and incarceration rates for African-American men is primarily a tax on Black families which tends to split them up and destabilize them appalling rates. Why not mention this as something that could be helped in his argument here?

      He seems to be doing a lot of cherry picking.

    1. a few years later our founding fathers wrote another document they started this one with words we the people of the United States this of course is the preamble to the Constitution

      Inequity in the U.S. Constitution

      The speaker goes on to describe the inherent inequities in the U.S. Constitution, which also says "we the people". Notably, the lack of rights for women (pointing out "51 gender specific male pronouns"), no mention of natives, and counting Africans as three-fifths.

  13. Jul 2022
    1. ; until, in 1907, eachclass had come to be dealt with according to principles which wereobviously very different from those of 1834. The report of this investi¬gation was presented to the Poor Law Commission, with the interest¬ing result that we heard no more of the “ principles of 1834 ”! It wassubsequently published as English Poor Law Policy (1910).

      Beatrice Webb studied the effects of the British "principles of 1834" and how they were carried out (differently) from area to area to see the overall effects through 1907. The result of her study apparently showed what a poor policy it had been to the point that no one mentioned the old "principles of 1834" again.

      How might this sort of sociological study be carried out on the effects of laws within the United States now in terms of economics and equality for various movements like redlining, abortion, etc.? Is anyone doing this sort of work?


      There is an example of the Eviction Lab at Princeton has some of this sort of data and analysis. https://evictionlab.org/map

    1. Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited

      A new Science Advances paper examines the persistent and pernicious misbelief that equality itself is inherently zero-sum.

      Across nine studies, the authors examine the reactions of advantaged group members to equality-enhancing policies and find that they consistently and incorrectly assume that increasing equality harms their group.

      These misperceptions persist even after interventions and prevail even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

    1. en inequality is declining worldwide. It is true that inBritain and America income equality, which had beenimproving for most of the past two centuries (British aristocratswere six inches taller than the average in 1800; today they areless than two inches taller), has stalled since the 1970s.

      Matt Ridley cites a lot of statistics in The Rational Optimist to indicate that inequality has been declining worldwide, though he doesn't do it as convincingly or as well cited as Thomas Piketty does in A Brief History of Equality.

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  14. Jun 2022
    1. Numerous studies have shown thatthe fiscal state’s rise in power made a major contribution to the pro-cess of economic development. The new receipts did in fact make itpossible to finance expenditures that proved indispensable not onlyfor reducing inequalities but also for encouraging growth. These ex-penditures included a massive and relatively egalitarian investmentin education and health care (or, at least, a much more massive andegalitarian investment than any previous); expansion of transporta-tion and other community infrastructure; the replacement income,such as retirement pensions, necessary for supporting an aging popu-lation; and reserves, such as unemployment insurance, for stabilizingthe economy and society in the event of a recession.1

      See especially P. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

      Ample evidence has shown that increasing taxes in Western countries along with the states' power to use it during the majority of the 1900s not only reduced inequalities but encouraged growth.

    2. Unsurprisingly, each system often tries to prevent the princi-ples it holds dear from being changed, and even attempts to make anyeffort to challenge them illegal.
    3. 18. The success of the referendum orga nized by Uber and Lyft to preserve their ex-tremely precarious model in California in 2020 illustrates the limits of an idyllic visionof direct democracy, as well as the need to reconceive a salarial status that makes it pos-sible to reconcile protection and autonomy.
  15. May 2022
    1. By exam-ining how movement toward equality has actually been produced, wecan learn precious lessons for our future and better understand thestruggles and mobilizations that have made this movement possible,as well as the institutional structures and legal, social, fiscal, educa-tional, and electoral systems that have allowed equality to become alasting reality.

      Understanding the history of inequality and how changes in institutional structures in legal, social, fiscal educational, and electoral systems have encouraged change toward equality, we might continue to change and modify these to ensure even greater equality.

  16. Apr 2022
  17. Mar 2022
    1. You also need to design a compensation structure that pays writers what they’re worth.

      A writer's collective trying to gather writers using the bait that they've managed to crack the problem of "paying writers what they're worth" seems to be a lot of hype.

      This seems to put the already extant fear into a writer's mind that they're not being paid enough. Doesn't the broader economics of a capitalistic system already solve this issue? Where are the inequalities? What about paying the website designers and developers? What about the advertising and other marketing people?

    1. ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘@STWorg @ProfColinDavis @rpancost @chrisdc77 @syrpis this is the most in depth treatment of the impact of equalities law on pandemic policy that I’ve been able to find- it would seem to underscore that there is a legal need for impact assessments that ask (some) of these questions https://t.co/auiApVC0TW’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 22 March 2022, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1485927221449613314

  18. Feb 2022
    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1494322378142359554.html

      from https://twitter.com/NeilLewisJr/status/1494322378142359554

      Context:

      Some news: yesterday I learned that, by faculty vote, my bid for tenure/promotion was not approved.<br><br>I feel many things, but not shame or regret. I am so proud of our work during our time at yale, and angry that this version of that work will come to an end, this end.

      — Michael W. Kraus (@mwkraus) February 16, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Therefore, any law, custom, stereotype or belief that oppresses or deprives women of their inherent right to reach their full potential cannot be binding on any person at all
    2. law prohibits any discrimination and guarantee all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.56
    3. Communal Land Reform Act grants women equal rights when they apply for communal land

      equal rights to property

  19. Jan 2022
    1. Organizations as varied as Y Combinator, MIT’s Radiation Lab, and ARPA have astonishing track records in catalyzing progress far beyond their confines.

      Are they really the ones pushing the progress and innovating, or are they benefiting from filtering out only the highest level potential producers and simply supporting them?

      Would we get more overall benefit from raising the level of the ocean so that all boats rise instead of a select few?


      Another example, how was Hungary able to produce so many Nobel Prize winners?

    1. Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies ofthe Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another themeans to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or womanwas subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak ofcommunism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individualfreedom.

      Why can't we have some of the driving force of capitalism while ensuring that no person is subordinated to another while still supporting individual freedoms?

      Where did Western culture go wrong in getting stuck in a death lock with capitalism?

  20. Dec 2021
    1. We will suggest that there isa reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that theirideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired byNative American sources and examples. Because it was true.
    2. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law,for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equalbefore the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested withabsolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal incomparison.
    1. first of all the phrase equality inequality so we wasn't used in the Middle Ages at all um you know they've got enough stuff on database that they can do word searches now you know so 00:35:01 people have gone through them and confirmed that this wasn't an issue nobody talked about it the concept of equality and inequality really you know talk about it in math Italian PhD and 00:35:16 wasn't it two guys actually did a systematics went through yeah they did a word search took a whole medieval literature is that discovered that no basically until the fifteen hundreds of pieces these words at all

      The ideas of equality and inequality didn't exist or weren't used in the middle ages until about the 1500s.

      Reference?

    1. And this explains, again, why this ended up being a book, not about equality, but about freedom: about how early humans, just like us, were keenly aware of their own freedom and determined to use it.

      What is The Dawn of Everything really about? Is it as Miriam Ronzoni suggests, a book about freedom more than it is about equality?

  21. Nov 2021
    1. Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

      I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

      Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

      Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

      A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

      An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

      A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.


      A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.


      What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.


      Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.


      How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

      The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)


      Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.


    1. I created a social justice metaphor library to help explain concepts like why you can't just create a "level playing field" without acknowledging the economic impacts of history (see, even saying it like that is complicated).

      I love that Dave has started a list of these useful social justice metaphors.

      I got side tracked by the idea this morning and submitted a handful I could think of off the top of my head.

      • Baseball fence
      • Parable of the Polygons
      • Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

      I'm curious if there are any useful ones in the neurodiversity space? I feel like I need more of these myself.

  22. Oct 2021
    1. Around 1700, the Virginia House of Burgesses declared:The Christian Servants in this country for the most part consists of the Worser Sort of the people of Europe. Andsince . . . such numbers of Irish and other Nations have been brought in of which a great many have been soldiers inthe late warrs that according to our present Circumstances we can hardly governe them and if they were fitted withArmes and had the Opertunity of meeting together by Musters we have just reason to fears they may rise upon us.It was a kind of class consciousness, a class fear. There were thingshappening in early Virginia, and in the other colonies, to warrant it

      This is a powerful example that class consciousness and class fears have driven the building of America since its inception.

      It's been built into our DNA and thus will be difficult to ever stamp out fully so that people will enjoy greater equality, equity, and freedom.

  23. Aug 2021
    1. With an increase from 8% in 2011 to 11.2% as of September 30, 2020, thyssenkrupp achieved a significant improvement in this area, even though the target of 15% was not achieved.

      Manual - Gender Equality

  24. Jul 2021
    1. But in identity politics, equality refers to groups, not individuals, and demands action to redress disparate outcomes among groups—in other words, equity, which often amounts to new forms of discrimination. In practice, identity politics inverts the old hierarchy of power into a new one: bottom rail on top. The fixed lens of power makes true equality, based on common humanity, impossible.
    2. In our case, a system intended to expand equality has become an enforcer of inequality. Americans are now meritocrats by birth. We know this, but because it violates our fundamental beliefs, we go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

      Class stratification helps to create not only racist policies but policies that enforce the economic stratification and prevent upward (or downward) mobility.

      I believe downward mobility is much simpler for Black Americans (find reference to OTM podcast about Obama to back this up).

      How can we create social valves (similar to those in the circulatory system of our legs) that help to push people up and maintain them at certain levels without disadvantaging those who are still at the bottom and who may neither want to move up nor have the ability?

  25. Jun 2021
  26. May 2021
    1. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted.
    1. Cameron, R. L., Kavanagh, K., Watt, D. C., Robertson, C., Cuschieri, K., Ahmed, S., & Pollock, K. G. (2017). The impact of bivalent HPV vaccine on cervical intraepithelial neoplasia by deprivation in Scotland: Reducing the gap. J Epidemiol Community Health, 71(10), 954–960. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2017-209113

    1. Andre, F., Booy, R., Bock, H., Clemens, J., Datta, S., John, T., Lee, B., Lolekha, S., Peltola, H., Ruff, T., Santosham, M., & Schmitt, H. (2008). Vaccination greatly reduces disease, disability, death and inequity worldwide. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 86(2), 140–146. https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.07.040089

  27. Apr 2021
    1. s. “We don’t have to prove a racially discriminatory impact to win.”A federal judge agreed with Husted, ruling that Ohio did not violate the law because voters were purged for a variety of reasons. The case has since been appealed to the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments in late July and has not yet ruled.When Hamilton County, Ohio, where Cincinnati is the county seat, removed 75,000 voters this year, nearly half, and in some neighborhoods far more, were purged because of “non

      Ohio, you are disgusting. Don't you goddam treat my fellow Americans like that

  28. Mar 2021
    1. Preliminary results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in solutions to address rising inequality in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time employment, and after the first year, that number rose to 40 percent.

      This is what happened when 125 participants were given $500/month over two years to see what would happen.

    1. 8. It requires all public sector organisations to actively consider how what they do, every day, affects all of us – not just some

      This is really a very poor description of the Public Sector Equality Duty under the Act.

    2. Businesses, healthcare providers or employers can’t single out trans people thanks to the act. Trans people continue to face stigma and discrimination but this Act has helped strengthen their legal rights.

      This gives those who meet the criterion in the Act for the protected characteristic of 'gender reassignment' addition rights that others do not have.

    3. 1. It protects all of us from discrimination – wherever you are The Act legally protects you from being treated differently by your employer, school or college. It also means you can’t be treated differently when you use public services, like the hospital or the doctors, and even at your local shops and restaurants.

      This fails to mention that some discrimination is lawful under the Act, such as that provided by the single-sex exemption.

    4. 3. The Act protects against discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, ethnic origins, faith, age and nationality

      Why is the protected characteristic of sex not listed? Is this omission incompetence or deliberate?

    5. faith

      The protected characteristic is 'religion or belief', not 'faith'.

  29. Feb 2021
    1. Between mass evictions, unemployment numbers soaring, unemployment benefits ending, there's a lot of people lucky to have any place to sleep. They're certainly not worrying about new clothes, or matching curtains, they're just trying to find any job and find any place to sleep, take care of their children, take care of their own mental health, etc. According to the social contract, they haven't earned the right to self-expression if they haven't even earned the right to a stable place to live.
  30. Jan 2021
  31. Dec 2020
    1. Police deemed the death suspicious, but did not label it a homicide despite the fact that someone had buried the body.

      An easy way to keep severe crime off of their books perhaps? Should police be the ones doing this sort of classification or should it go to an independent body unaffiliated with local law enforcement?

      Would it have been classified the same if it was a more identifiable affluent white woman? (Likely not...)

  32. Nov 2020
    1. can be the privileged mode

      evidence we have explored so far on the course suggests socio-economic factors determine access and skills (just like in real life, if not exacerbated)

    1. {...{ foo: null }} was getting serialized as foo="null" because spread() was checking for strict equality with undefined. It's now checking for loose equality with null.
  33. Oct 2020
  34. Sep 2020
    1. In mapbox.js you'll see this line: const key = {};We can use anything as a key — we could do setContext('mapbox', ...) for example. The downside of using a string is that different component libraries might accidentally use the same one; using an object literal means the keys are guaranteed not to conflict in any circumstance (since an object only has referential equality to itself, i.e. {} !== {} whereas "x" === "x"), even when you have multiple different contexts operating across many component layers.
  35. Aug 2020
  36. Jul 2020
    1. You can use any object as the key, as Svelte uses a Map internally — in other words you could do (thing) instead of (thing.id). Using a string or number is generally safer, however, since it means identity persists without referential equality, for example when updating with fresh data from an API server.
    1. Labaree argues that American education has had three goals that have shifted in importance over time: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. Democratic equality supports the idea that education is a public good, necessary for creating informed citizens.

      Raising informed citizens as a goal of education

  37. Jun 2020
    1. The seventy-one-year-old advised Coles to reconcile himself with enslavement and only promote emancipation in a way that did not offend anyone.

      It seems pretty obvious now that creating equality is going to have to offend some. We should offend them as quickly as we can.

    1. That’s absolutely not true, because the pitfall that tech falls into is the same one that every other corporation, or actually any other group in America falls into. Which is the idea that true diversity and racial justice is going to be painless for white people and there will be no adjustment. And that people of color want the exact same things you want, and value the same things you value. And somehow at the end of that, they’re going to still see you as superior in some way. None of that is true in real diversity, and in real racial justice and gender justice.
  38. May 2020
  39. Apr 2020
    1. "What if most rich assholes are made, not born?"

      What if the cold-heartedness so often associated with the upper crust—let's call it Rich Asshole Syndrome—isn’t the result of having been raised by a parade of resentful nannies, too many sailing lessons, or repeated caviar overdoses, but the compounded disappointment of being lucky but still feeling unfulfilled? We’re told that those with the most toys are winning, that money represents points on the scoreboard of life. But what if that tired story is just another facet of a scam in which we’re all getting ripped off?

      In New York, I’d developed psychological defenses against the desperation I saw in the streets. I told myself that there were social services for homeless people, that they would just use my money to buy drugs or booze, that they’d probably brought their situation on themselves. But none of that worked with these Indian kids. There were no shelters waiting to receive them. I saw them sleeping in the streets at night, huddled together for warmth, like puppies. They weren’t going to spend my money unwisely. They weren’t even asking for money. They were just staring at my food like the starving creatures they were.

      The social distance separating rich and poor, like so many of the other distances that separate us from each other, only entered human experience after the advent of agriculture and the hierarchical civilizations that followed, which is why it’s so psychologically difficult to twist your soul into a shape that allows you to ignore starving children standing close enough to smell your plate of curry. You’ve got to silence the inner voice calling for justice and for fairness. But we silence this ancient, insistent voice at great cost to our own psychological well-being.

      When volunteers in their studies placed the interests of others before their own, a primitive part of the brain normally associated with food or sex was activated. When researchers measured vagal tone (an indicator of feeling safe and calm) in 74 preschoolers, they found that children who’d donated tokens to help sick kids had much better readings than those who’d kept all their tokens for themselves. Jonas Miller, the lead investigator, said that the findings suggested “we might be wired from a young age to derive a sense of safety from providing care for others.”

      Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff monitored intersections with four-way stop signs and found that people in expensive cars were four times more likely to cut in front of other drivers, compared to folks in more modest vehicles. When the researchers posed as pedestrians waiting to cross a street, all the drivers in cheap cars respected their right of way, while those in expensive cars drove right on by 46.2 percent of the time, even when they’d made eye contact with the pedestrians waiting to cross. Other studies by the same team showed that wealthier subjects were more likely to cheat at an array of tasks and games. For example, Keltner reported that wealthier subjects were far more likely to claim they’d won a computer game—even though the game was rigged so that winning was impossible. Wealthy subjects were more likely to lie in negotiations and excuse unethical behavior at work, like lying to clients in order to make more money. When Keltner and Piff left a jar of candy in the entrance to their lab with a sign saying whatever was left over would be given to kids at a nearby school, they found that wealthier people stole more candy from the babies.

      Books such as Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work and The Psychopath Test argue that many traits characteristic of psychopaths are celebrated in business: ruthlessness, a convenient absence of social conscience, a single-minded focus on “success.” But while psychopaths may be ideally suited to some of the most lucrative professions, I’m arguing something different here. It’s not just that heartless people are more likely to become rich. I’m saying that being rich tends to corrode whatever heart you’ve got left. I’m suggesting, in other words, that it’s likely the wealthy subjects who participated in Muscatell’s study learned to be less unsettled by the photos of sick kids by the experience of being rich—much as I learned to ignore starving children in Rajastan so I could comfortably continue my vacation.

      What we’ve been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country,” said Piff, “is that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases.”

      Institutions seeking to justify a fundamentally anti-human economic system constantly rebroadcast the message that winning the money game will bring satisfaction and happiness. But we’ve got around 300,000 years of ancestral experience telling us it just isn’t so. Selfishness may be essential to civilization, but that only raises the question of whether a civilization so out of step with our evolved nature makes sense for the human beings within it.

  40. Feb 2020
    1. Image Credit: Detail from "The School of Athens" by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (c. 1509–1511).

      Euclid's common notions appear to be grounds for many of Marx's arguments in Ch. 1, but also throughout the book.

      Near the beginning of Ch. 1 of the Elements Euclid lists them [PDF]:

      • Things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another (the Transitive property of a Euclidean relation).
      • If equals are added to equals, then the wholes are equal (Addition property of equality).
      • If equals are subtracted from equals, then the differences are equal (Subtraction property of equality).
      • Things that coincide with one another are equal to one another (Reflexive property).
      • The whole is greater than the part.

      Regarding the fifth, also see Aristotle, Metaphysics 8.6 [=1045a]; Topics 6.13 (=150a15-16);

      On the concept of the "whole-before-the-parts" (along with the "whole of the parts" and the "whole in the part"), also see Proclus, El. Theol., prop. 67.

  41. Nov 2019
    1. McGarrity explained that right-wing extremists like the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh were charged with hate crimes instead of domestic terrorism simply because “there’s no domestic terrorism charge.”AdvertisementTo be clear, there is a law that defines domestic terrorism but not one that charges people who commit acts of terrorism in America. People who conspire with international terrorists—even if they aren’t materially involved in an act of violence—are charged with “acts of terrorism transcending international boundaries.” But someone who sends pipe bombs to Democrats; plows through a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Va.; or shoots up a church in Charleston, S.C., will not face domestic terrorism charges.

      It is mind boggling to me that there is a charge for people in America who commit a domestic act of terrorism. They are committing crimes that are just as bad if not worse at times as the international crimes that are committed are.

  42. Oct 2019
    1. "The Fifteenth Amendment stated that people could not be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This construction allowed states to continue to decide the qualifications of voters as long as those qualifications were ostensibly race-neutral. Thus, while states could not deny African American men the right to vote on the basis of race, they could deny it to women on the basis of sex or to people who could not prove they were literate." Before the 15th amendment women and colored men and women were not allowed to vote but the 15th amendment allowed these privileges and prevented discrimination amongst the rights of someone based on their race and gender and states cannot deny these rights to the people because it is a constitutional law.

  43. May 2019
    1. nreality,informationmonopoliessuchasGooglehavetheabilitytoprioritizewebsearchresultsonthebasisofavarietyoftopics,suchaspromotingtheirownbusinessinterestsoverthoseofcompetitorsorsmallercompaniesthatarelessprofitableadvertisingclientsthanlargermultinationalcorporationsare.

      It's a good thing google was exposed to the issues at hand and took action. As several other people have already mentioned in their annotations google has seen and responded to the racist algorithms and improved the search results drastically. This will teach youth much better examples of equality and power.

  44. Feb 2019
    1. hierarchical social order

      We talked about this a lot in Rachel's class last semester -- how hierarchical institutions have played a role in social movements for equality. Examples include the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and Beyonce.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ

  45. Jan 2019
    1. there the advocate cannot prejudge the case lest he threaten both jus-tice and his own livelihood.

      There is danger afoot.

      I remember when I used to think that achieving equality under the law was like playing Jenga. Legal precedents were things that were stacked--one on top of another--like a tower of Jenga blocks, intricately connected. To fight for equality was to strategically go after specific precedents (blocks) that would eventually cause the tower to fall and allow for new, pro-equality precedents to be made (stacked), creating a new tower. But then I realized that Jenga can't be played if the initial blocks aren't placed on top of something else -- a particular surface/foundation -- and the same goes for legal precedents. There's always something lurking below (or beyond). We are still prejudging when it comes to the law -- but not in a way that works with or for everyone.

    1. Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice

      Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. This paper builds upon the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, to propose a working definition of design justice: Design justice is a field of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices.

    1. A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South

      Abstract: At the heart of the open educational resources (OER) movement is the intention to provide affordable access to culturally relevant education to all. This imperative could be described as a desire to provide education in a manner consistent with social justice which, according to Fraser (2005), is understood as “parity of participation”. Drawing on her concept of social justice, we suggest a slight modification of Fraser’s framework for critically analysing ways in which the adoption and impact of OER and their undergirding open educational practices (OEP) might be considered socially just. We then provide illustrative examples from the cross-regional Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project (2014-2017) to show how this framework can assist in determining in what ways, if at all, the adoption of OER and enactment of OEP have responded to economic inequalities, cultural inequities and political exclusions in education. Furthermore, we employ Fraser’s (2005) concepts to identify whether these social changes are either “affirmative” (i.e., ameliorative) or “transformative” in their economic, cultural and political effects in the Global South education context.

  46. Dec 2018
  47. Sep 2018
    1. build community, empower students to speak, and underscore the inherently collective nature of creativity and interpretation

      I'll be interested to see how true this is. Or will it just be the same in-class loudmouths (myself included), who are aggressive annotators. Maybe even more aggressive because we're not as conscious of taking up other students' space and time.

    1. “The food is contaminated, but why are my portions so small?”

      This analogy stood out to me as a very effective means to explain what the author is trying to get at. The idea that regardless of how bad something is, if everyone has it and I don't, the question isn't if I should have it, it's why don't I. It's used fairly effectively here to get the point across, specifically with the idea of food, which is so necessary to us. We could even go further to draw the connection between food and technology as now completely essential to our lives that who cares if it's contaminated or dangerous, we still need it.

  48. Aug 2018
    1. And both books help explain so much more than Trump. #MeToo. White nationalism. Hindu nationalism. Black Lives Matter. Campus debates about privilege and appropriation. Syria. Islamism. The spread of populism and retreat of democracy worldwide. The rise of the far right in Europe. The rise of the far left in the United States. All these phenomena throb with questions of identity, of “Who am I?” and “To what do I belong?”

      Perhaps not to what do I belong even, but one of the key questions I see over and over in many of these groups is: "Why do I have less than them? Why am I not considered equal? Why am I not treated the same?"

      Every kindergartner knows this intrinsically.

      To many articles focus on the name and identities of the movements and not enough on what it is that they really want.

    1. gender

      Wycombe District Council have got this wring. Gender ius NOT a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, sex is.

      According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission:

      'Gender’ refers to socially constructed roles of women and men and/or an individual’s conception of their identity. The term is often used interchangeably with ‘sex’, partly in recognition that much of the inequality between women and men is driven by underlying social and power structures rather than by biological sex. Although the Equality Act protects people from discrimination because of their sex, other UK legislation (such as the regulations requiring employers to publish their gender pay gap) refers to gender. This may cause confusion in some circumstances.

      Language and the meaning of words are important and proper understanding of these terms is vital so that staff and the public are aware of what rights they have and what your Public Sector Equality Duty is.

      Mis-stating the protected characteristics under the Act cannot give a good impression to the public and it can only reflect poorly on the organisation. Any confusion or inconsistency over meaning of undefined terms may prevent people from accessing their rights under the law.

  49. Jun 2018
  50. Mar 2018
  51. Jan 2018
  52. Dec 2017
    1. In global terms, digital inequalities continue to be well-documented and, in many instances, divides across lines of geography, gender, age, physical abilities, socio-economic status, language, and educational attainment are growing.

      The digital divide, internationally.

  53. Oct 2017
    1. Ethics

      I would be curious to see how the founders would have pictured and wanted an 'ethics' class to be like. It would be interesting to compare how they would be taught today and see concepts like democracy that are held equally but human rights and equality possibly have a large discrepancy.

    2. To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business.

      Within the highlighted excerpt, I want to focus on the masculine articles of "he" and "his" as they depict the forms of gender discrimination and inequality that were present within the University prior to 1920. Preceding 1920, women were not legally allowed to enroll within publicly funded professional and graduate schools. Consequently, following 1920 and the legislation which allowed female enrollment, the University exercised forms of gender discrimination within its application process, thus illustrating its masculine roots. However, following a law-suit accusing the University of its discrimination, it was determined that the school could no longer exercise any forms of discrimination, "with respect to race, color, religion, national origin, or sex." Therefore, as a result of such legislation, female students now consist of 55% of the student population thus inviting the revision of masculine pronouns within the Rockfish Gap Report, thus illustrating the University's progress toward gender equality.

  54. Sep 2017
  55. Feb 2017
    1. and or course, if women have lost the gift of prophesying, so have men.

      Grimké repeats over and over again in this text her belief in the complete moral equality of the sexes (i.e. what is right for man is right for woman, if women have lost it then so have men, etc.) but I wonder what she has to say about meaningful distinctions between the two sexes? The reality is that even outside of social, cultural, political and religious structures, there are some basic and fundamental distinguishing characteristics for both men and women. Namely, a woman's ability to carry, bear, and feed children. Does Grimké consider any of these distinctions (or this one in particular) at all? And would this ability perhaps in her mind make women actually superior to men?

  56. Jan 2017
    1. We are concerned about the constant use of federal funds to support this most notorious expression of segregation. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.

      -- Martin Luther King Jr.

  57. Dec 2016
    1. "Lynching in America" documents 4075 lynchings in 12 Southern states between Reconstruction and World War 2.

      https://twitter.com/eji_org "The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society."

  58. Nov 2016
  59. Dec 2015
    1. Hiding the names of universities during the hiring process is just part of a larger strategy by Deloitte to seek a more diverse workforce. They have teamed up with the UK-based consulting company Rare to incorporate a new screening process called “contextualisation” that seeks to judge an applicant’s performance in the context in which they achieved it.
    2. One of Britain’s largest companies no longer wants its recruiters and hiring managers to know where its applicants went to college, school or university. “We are calling it school and university-blind interviewing,” Deloitte’s Head of UK Resourcing Victoria Lawes, said in an interview with LinkedIn. “What we really want to do is ensure that, whoever is recruiting isn’t consciously or unconsciously favoring a person who attended a certain school or university.”
  60. Nov 2015
    1. Instead, we need to fix our own broken processes. We need to question our own assumptions. We need to fix ourselves, our communities, our society. We need to be proactive in digging out the roots of the problem right here, in our own world.
    2. Every aspect of our lives is open for scrutiny. Every aspect of our political system is open for scrutiny. Every aspect of our socio-economic system is open for scrutiny. We are responsible for that task.THAT is our job. We don’t need to “help” people of color. They neither need nor want our “help.”
    3. 12% of college graduates with STEM degrees are people of color.12%This means more than 1 in 10 resumes that cross your desk should be from a person of color. This means more than 1 in 10 people you interview for jobs should be people of color. This means more than 1 in 10 people you hire should be people of color.This means if you are not seeing those numbers in your organization, something is very wrong with the way you hire people.

      I haven't researched this statistic, but it sounds about right. I might expect well more than 12%, unless "people of color" only includes African-Americans.

    4. It is not sufficient to be “good.” It is not sufficient to want to “help.” We can’t “go there” and “help them” to make things better. Because the problem isn’t “there” with “them.” It is here with us.What we need is to look for the roots of inequality that emerge in our own lives, and eradicate them.
  61. Oct 2015
    1. women and housewives have totake on many of the tasks traditionally assigned to men like paying bills,attending to bank business, dealing with car mechanics, daily shopping,taking children from school, or going to government offices.

      I think this is a good thing. It puts women closer to holding equal ground with men within the household and outside it.

    1. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization.

      Is this just becoming more of a competition between who ends up with control? I thought we were working towards beneficial social and urban reform here..

  62. Sep 2015
  63. Aug 2015
    1. So perhaps a simpler way of putting the conclusion is that the Republican Party is motivated by a general philosophy while Democrats are motivated by specific policies they want to achieve.

      This is also the source of so much hate toward Republicans spouted by Democrats. It's not uncommon to hear about Republicans who "vote against their own interest". However, voting against one's own interests is a radical and amazing thing to do. If everyone who held significant privilege and power voted against their own interests we might have a more equitable world.

  64. Jun 2015
    1. But the marriage equality movement has been curiously hostile to polygamy, and for a particularly unsatisfying reason: short-term political need.

      I hope that the focus on prohibition by the drug policy reform movement helps sidestep a similar effect happening with cannabis.

  65. Feb 2014
    1. Finally, as we think about the relationship between the structure of information and cultural production and liberal society, there is the question of how the transition to more commons-based production will affect social justice, or equality. Here in particular it is important to retain a cautious perspective as to how much can be changed by reorganizing our information production system. Raw poverty and social or racial stratification will not be substantially affected by these changes. Education will do much more than a laptop and a high speed Internet connection in every home, though these might contribute in some measure to avoiding increasing inequality in the advanced economies, where opportunities for both production and consump- tion may increasingly be known only to those connected.
  66. Sep 2013
    1. And therefore when you and I are agreed, the result will be the attainment of perfect truth.

      Socrates considers Callicles to be an equal.

    2. Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,—charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honourable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth

      Men who act according to nature would be free of socially imposed restrictions and true justice would be present. The "best and strongest" are pacified by society with the promise of honor through equality and justice.