Sciences Po spring term 2024 week 12
short film
Week 12
Modal verbs and modal passive
find the errror
Personally, I would rather follow the arguments pointed out by Jack and even continue his reflexion. In my opinion, influencers on social media certainly play a more important role that we think. Our brains function like that: we follow the group. So, when someone successes in catching our attention
People would generally agree that they are not the cleverest people and that they may don’t deserve their popularity
there are no clear evidences
However, the lecture seems to say that it depends on individuals and for some people, terrific dreams could make things worse.
scientists just focus on this particular stage of sleep without consider it as a simple stage of a more complex thing.
**
We should require people of all genders to register for the draft.
2000 Dr Who
2011 years later
Musk low birth rates
France Inter govt Melenchon
She often describes Ronald Reagan as "the template for the stupid President," saying that "before Reagan there was no idea the president could be stupid."[62]
What is culture without gay people? This is America, what is the culture? Not just New York. AIDS completely changed American culture... And with AIDS, a whole generation of gay men died practically all at once, within a couple of years. And especially the ones that I knew. The first people who died of AIDS were artists. They were also the most interesting people... The knowing audience also died and no longer exists in a real way... There's a huge gap in what people know, and there's no context for it anymore.[52]
Of the MeToo movement, she said,
It never occurred to me this would ever change. Being a woman was exactly the same from Eve till eight months ago. So it never occurred to me that it would change. Ever. I can tell you that it's probably one of the most surprising things in my life. The first forty guys who got caught—I knew almost all of them.[26]
UN Assange, Snowden, Manning, Harari, Romer, Lessig (only one woman)
One Israeli, one Australian
Model Unite nations climate crisis Germany cuts
I am Spartacus (Charlie)
When I checked my phone I saw an image of about 20 people outside inner London crown court. They were all holding placards saying: ‘If you prosecute Trudi, prosecute us too.’
“I’ve spent fifteen years not responding to this argument, because I worry it would be harsh and annoying to use my platform to beat up on one contrarian who nobody else listens to. But I recently learned Bryan Caplan also takes this seriously. Beating up on two contrarians who nobody else listens to is a great use of a platform!”
Astral codex X medicine
Columbine shooting pain
https://www.ted.com/talks/austin_eubanks_
mother https://www.ted.com/talks/sue_klebold_my_son_was_a_columbine_shooter_this_is_my_story?language=en
Solomon depression
https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depression_the_secret_we_share?language=en
https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_how_the_worst_moments_in_our_lives_make_us_who_we_are?language=en
https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_love_no_matter_what?language=en
Paul Graham
How to know if he wants to accept someone on Y Combinator
GRAHAM: Well, YC — one of the reasons I’m so contemptuous of university admissions is that I am also in the admissions business. I am obsessed. [laughs] We not only measure when we fail, but we’re obsessed with the failure cases. YC has a list of all the companies that we’ve missed, that have applied to YC and we’ve turned down, and they’ve gone on to be successful.
Paul Graham on Richard Hamming
Peterson and Pennebaker-
vague and ill defined success failure
critical thinking on intelligences
“Les 5 niveaux de la philocognition”
Dr Fanny Nusbaum
Psychologie et Neurosciences de l’intelligence et de la performance,
Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
5 levels of intelligence
1 users
Gwyneth Paltrow, Jamy, Sophie Davant, Stephane Bern, Bradley Cooper, Judith Polger,
2 technocrats
Ed Snowden, Anna Wintour, Thomas Pesquet
3
Jim Carrey, Kanye West,Camille Claudel, Leo di Caprio,
4
Brene Brown, David Goggins, Nicolas Hulot, Michelle Obama (not Barack), Elisabeth Badinter , Simone Veil, (not Robert)
5
Einstein, Alan Turing, Marie Curie, Da Vinci, Musk, Nietzche, Sarah Bernhardt, Archimedes, Alexander the great
Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father, László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age.[14] "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis.
Trained in her early years by her sister Susan, who ultimately became Women's World Champion, Judit Polgár was a chess prodigy from an early age. At age 5, she defeated a family friend without looking at the board. After the game, the friend joked: "You are good at chess, but I'm a good cook." Judit replied: "Do you cook without looking at the stove?"[29] However, according to Susan, Judit was not the sister with the most talent, explaining: "Judit was a slow starter, but very hard-working."[
Sarah Bernhardt (French: [saʁa bɛʁnɑʁt];[note 1] born Henriette-Rosine Bernard; 22 October 1844 – 26 March 1923) was a French stage actress who starred in some of the more popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictures.
She is also linked with the success of artist Alphonse Mucha, whose work she helped to publicize. Mucha became one of the more sought-after artists of this period for his Art Nouveau style.
Deep Mind
In the third century BCE , Eratosthenes, a Greek librarian in Alexandria , Egypt , determined the earth's circumference to be 40,250 to 45,900 kilometers (25,000 to 28,500 miles) by comparing the Sun's relative position at two different locations on the earth's surface.
New perspective?
Who has she included? Who has she left out?
How to define intelligence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
, Fields medal
Kardashian,
Dead activists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro-Wiwa
Her van had been struck by 30 bullets. Three had found her. Only three months before, in October 2009, she and her husband José had been ambushed as they drove through the town of El Limón. She had been hurt then, too, and her husband had been killed, leaving her with three small children and a mayor’s job to do. Well, she was still doing it; still on her feet.
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2012/12/08/maria-santos-gorrostieta
Rachel Carson Silent Spring Earth day, Greta?
Dissidents, Solzhenitsyn,
Fred Hampton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
Trial of the Chicago
Matt Damon water,
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Michelangelo, Picasso, Julien Assange, Bradley Manning, Lovelock, Carson, Feynman, Lessing, Lessig, Orwell, Sandel, Whittle, Sartre?
Aaron swartz,
Young, Rutherford, Bohr, Bohm, Maxwell, Planck, Bell,Oppenheimer
Frantz Fanon,Voltaire, Descartes, Marx, Kant,de Beavoir, Camus
Chaos theory, Margaret Hamilton, Darwin, Freud, vaccine Nobel prize, cancer,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm
Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos (the top-secret laboratory established in 1942 to design the atom bomb), the project's director, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, would not approve Bohm's security clearance after seeing evidence of his politics and his close friendship with Weinberg, who had been suspected of espionage.
During the war, Bohm remained at Berkeley, where he taught physics and conducted research in plasma, the synchrotron and the synchrocyclotron. He completed his PhD in 1943 by an unusual circumstance. According to biographer F. David Peat,[12] "The scattering calculations (of collisions of protons and deuterons) that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place!" To satisfy the University, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had successfully completed the research. Bohm later performed theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. These calculations were used for the electromagnetic enrichment of uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Bohm's aim was not to set out a deterministic, mechanical viewpoint but to show that it was possible to attribute properties to an underlying reality, in contrast to the conventional approach.[19] He began to develop his own interpretation (the De Broglie–Bohm theory, also called the pilot wave theory), the predictions of which agreed perfectly with the non-deterministic quantum theory. He initially called his approach a hidden variable theory, but he later called it ontological theory, reflecting his view that a stochastic process underlying the phenomena described by his theory might one day be found. Bohm and his colleague Basil Hiley later stated that they had found their own choice of terms of an "interpretation in terms of hidden variables" to be too restrictive, especially since their variables, position, and momentum "are not actually hidden".[20]
Bohm's work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Stewart Bell's inequality, which rules out local hidden variable theories; the full consequences of Bell's work are still being investigated.
His condition worsened and it was decided that the only treatment that might help him was electroconvulsive therapy. Bohm's wife consulted psychiatrist David Shainberg, Bohm's longtime friend and collaborator, who agreed that electroconvulsive treatments were probably his only option. Bohm showed improvement.
Week 11 17.4
Swiss human rights
https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/human-rights-law-and-the-climate
Intl day of human fraternity
Awareness days are meant to remind people of important causes and desirable behaviour. Among other things, February sees the International Day of Human Fraternity, World Day of Social Justice and—everyone’s favourite until it became a bit too commercialised—World Pulses Day. International Day of Happiness falls in March; you have to wait until November for World Kindness Day.
Anger is far too objectionable to be celebrated with a special day of its own. There is an anger-awareness week in Britain, but the emphasis is on controlling tempers, not giving in to them. Yet in the workplace, as elsewhere, anger is more ambiguous than it seems.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford University who teaches a course on how to acquire power, reckons that displaying anger is an important skill for those who want to rise up the corporate ladder. It is associated with decisiveness and competence (though angry women are more likely to evoke negative emotions among other people than angry men do).
**
Toxic work environments are as dangerous to health as second-hand smoke, argues Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, in his latest book, “Dying for a Paycheck”.
A giant of business scholarship, Mr Pfeffer teaches one of Stanford’s most popular courses, on office politics and power.
The Economist: What's the one solution that's easiest to implement that would produce the best outcome—and what's holding it back from happening?
Mr Pfeffer: We know that measurement affects behaviour. What gets measured gets managed. What gets measured improves; what isn’t measured is ignored and often gets worse. The single simplest and easiest thing to do is to measure the health effects of workplaces on people. A single-item measure of self-reported health prospectively predicts mortality and morbidity, even when other factors such as current health status are statistically controlled.
When people are suffering, they use drugs. Prescription drug use of various psychotropics such as antidepressants, sleeping pills, and ADHD medications to improve concentration can highlight workplaces, including work units and supervisors, that are adversely affecting people’s health.
We can—and should—measure the dimensions of work environments, including work hours, that we know affect health. Measurement would be the single most important thing we could do, particularly if we highlighted those workplaces doing the best—and the worst—on the various measures.
https://journeysbydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Selassie-come-home.pdf
how to acquire power
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1068rc5/are_there_any_books_or_writers_that_youve/
The 48 laws of power
looking forward
A collection of fine pieces
TOEFL prep https://www.ets.org/toefl/test-takers/ibt/about/content/writing.html
https://tstprep.com/articles/toefl/ten-awesome-tips-for-the-writing-section-of-the-toefl-test/
and fine writing A A Gill
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/02/creation-museum-201002
more fine writing
Quizlet
meme (Dawkins selfish gene)
Tell me you’re racist without telling me….
Tell me you’re an old fogey…
“James Vincent subsequently took him to an Eminem concert. Even so, the rapper missed making it onto Job's iPod. As Jobs said to Vincent af"ter the concert, "I don't know ..." He later told me, "I respect Eminem as an artist, but I just don't want to listen to his music, and I can't relate to his values the way I can to Dylan's."
week 9 3.4
crime areas
filter bubbles
Tobin tax
woke guide to woke
gladwell crime
week 8 27.3
class dynamic?
topics?
too untheoretical?
more Gladwell on policing
corruption
Dickens Orwell
Animal farm quotes
clumsy Eng
Vous pourrez compter sur ma détermination pour y contribuer à vos côtés et pour porter les intérêts de l’institution.
Rest assured of my unwavering commitment to collaborate with you in achieving these objectives and in advocating for the best interests of our institution.
You can count on my determination to work alongside you and to defend the interests of the institution.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/example/english/unwavering-commitment
more corruption- POWER
https://x.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1772596298119852102?s=20
from the ft
This year is the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s death and the 150th of Charles Dickens’s. Never spellbound by either (“The man can’t write worth a damn,” said the young Martin Amis, after one page of 1984), I was inclined to sit out all the commemorative rereading. And I did. But then the crisis of the day took me back to what one man wrote about the other. More on that in a minute. First, you will notice the pandemic is putting large corporations through a sort of moral invigilation. Ones that rejig their factories to make hand sanitiser (LVMH) or donate their knowhow (IBM) are hailed. Ones that behave like skinflints (JD Wetherspoon, Britannia Hotels) are tarred and feathered. Companies have to weigh how much discretionary help to give without flunking their narrow duty to survive and profit. This is the stuff of Stakeholder Capitalism or Corporate Social Responsibility. The topic has been in the air all of my career. It has been given new urgency by events. It is the subject of much FT treatment. And Orwell, I suspect, would see through it like glass. In a 1940 essay (how spoilt we are for round-number anniversaries) he politely explodes the idea of Dickens as a radical, or even as a social reformer. His case is that, for Dickens, nothing is wrong with the world that cannot be fixed through individual conscience. If only Murdstone were kinder to David Copperfield. If only all bosses were as nice as Fezziwig. That no one should have such awesome power over others in the first place goes unsaid by Dickens, and presumably unthought. And so his worldview, says Orwell, is “almost exclusively moral”. What Orwell would resent is the unearned smugness, when more systemic answers are available Dickens wants a “change of spirit rather than a change of structure”. He has no sense that a free market is “wrong as a system”. The French Revolution could have been averted had the Second Estate just “turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge”. And so we have “that recurrent Dickens figure, the Good Rich Man”, whose arbitrary might is used to help out the odd grateful urchin or debtor. What we do not have is the Good Trade Unionist pushing for structural change. What we do not have is the Good Finance Minister redistributing wealth. There is something feudal about Dickens. The rich man in his castle should be nicer to the poor man at his gate, but each is in his rightful station. You need not share Orwell’s ascetic socialism (I write this next to a 2010 Meursault) to see his point. And to see that it applies just as much to today’s economy. Some companies are open to any and all options to serve the general good — except higher taxes and regulation. “I feel like I’m at a firefighters’ conference,” said the writer Rutger Bregman, at a Davos event about inequality that did not mention tax. “And no one is allowed to speak about water.” What Orwell would hate about Stakeholder Capitalism is not just that it might achieve patchier results than the universal state. It is not even that it accords the powerful yet more power — at times, as we are seeing, over life and death. Under-resourced governments counting on private whim for basic things: it is a spectacle that should both warm the heart and utterly chill it. No, what Orwell would resent, I think, is the unearned smugness. The halo of “conscience”, when more systemic answers are available via government. The halo that Dickens still wears. You can see it in the world of philanthropy summits and impact investment funds. The double-anniversary of England’s most famous writers since Shakespeare meant little to me until the virus broke. All of a sudden, they serve as a neat contrast of worldviews. Dickens would look at the crisis and shame the corporates who fail to tap into their inner Fezziwig. Orwell would wonder how on earth it is left to their caprice in the first place. The difference matters because, when all this is over, there is likely to be a new social contract. The mystery is whether it will be more Dickensian (in the best sense) or Orwellian (also in the best sense). That is, will it pressure the rich to give more to the commons or will it absolutely oblige them? Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter
How do you tax shares?
profit- Buffett
Gladwell on broken windows and hot spot policing
African leaders
https://medium.com/the-daily-echo/profiles-in-courage-great-african-leaders-338279886c34
3 compositions
**
2nd composition deadline 27.3.24
The test-taker must read the question posted by the professor and the two student responses. Finally, they should write their own response which addresses the question and adds to the conversation. They have ten minutes to complete the task.
—
Your professor is teaching a class on education. Write a post responding to the professor’s question. In your response, you should:
express and support your personal opinion
make a contribution to the discussion in your own words
An effective response will contain at least 100 words.
Professor: Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about recent trends in education. Specifically, we’ll discuss how many universities have started letting students take classes from home instead of taking them in person on campus. I want to know what you think about this issue, so here’s a quick question for the discussion board: “What do you think is the most significant impact of online classes? Why do you think it has this impact?”
Jack: The main thing is that online classes make education more accessible. For one, they help reduce commuting time and costs and give students more flexibility in their schedules. Plus, online learning can be more accessible for students who have disabilities or live far away from campus. Traditionally, high costs have prevented many people from pursuing an education, but thanks to online classes cost is less of a problem.
Emily: I think that online classes cause people to learn less than before. There’s something to be said for the energy and engagement that comes from being in the same physical space as your classmates and instructor. Moreover, when we take classes in person it is easier to build relationships and collaborate. We learn just as much from personal connections as we do from our actual lectures and textbooks.
****
1 presentation finish with at least 2 questions
Topic must be linked to Economics, Politics, Media, new Tech or Business
https://www.toeflresources.com/sample-toefl-essays/
Aim: Get other students talking
****
week 7
cage fighting trash talk or diplomacy Jeffrey Sachs
https://x.com/ivan_8848/status/1769909923381420120?s=20
conspiracy
https://x.com/_BlakeHabyan/status/1770280894080663829?s=20
Warren commission
Ron Paul
Gladwell on spies CIA here
USA spies
was a spy?
If you can’t tell by their actions if they were spies….?
Angleton privately accused various foreign leaders of being Soviet spies. He twice informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that he believed Prime Minister Lester Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau were agents of the Soviet Union. Angleton accused Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson of being assets for the Soviet Union.[27]
In 1964, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer based in Geneva, insisted he needed to defect to the United States, as his role as a double agent had been discovered, and he was being recalled to Moscow.[27] Nosenko was allowed to defect, although the CIA was unable to verify a KGB recall order. Golitsyn had said from the beginning that the KGB would try to plant defectors in an effort to discredit him. Under great duress, Nosenko failed two highly questionable lie detector tests but passed a third test monitored by several Agency departments.[28] Judging his claim (as well as additional claims regarding Lee Harvey Oswald) improbable, Angleton permitted David Murphy, head of the Soviet Russia Division, to hold Nosenko in solitary confinement for over three years. This confinement included 16 months in a small attic with no windows, furniture, heat or air conditioning. Human contact was completely banned. Nosenko was given a shower once a week and had no television, reading material, radio, exercise, or toothbrush. Interrogations were frequent and intensive. Nosenko spent an additional four months in a ten-foot by ten-foot concrete bunker in Camp Peary.[23] He was told that this condition would continue for 25 years unless he confessed to being a Soviet spy
***
transparency international Eigen 1.20 - 5.40
https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_eigen_how_to_expose_the_corrupt
global witness Gooch .50 to 2.45 11.10 to 12.15
archives
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10422-10024.pdf
week 4
"communicative means more than simply interactive. In An A-Z of ELT I list the features of a communicative activity as being the following:
purposefulness: speakers are motivated by a communicative goal (such as getting information, making a request, giving instructions) and not simply by the need to display the correct use of language for its own sake;
reciprocity: to achieve this purpose, speakers need to interact, and there is as much need to listen as to speak;
negotiation: following from the above, they may need to check and repair the communication in order to be understood by each other;
synchronicity: the exchange – especially if it is spoken – usually takes place in real time;
unpredictability: neither the process, nor the outcome, nor the language used in the exchange, is entirely predictable;
heterogeneity: participants can use any communicative means at their disposal; in other words, they are not restricted to the use of a pre-specified grammar item.
“On the other hand, there also seems to be a good case for arguing that only life-like language use can tap into the cognitive and affective factors that both motivate and nurture language acquisition. But this presupposes that the communication matters: that it is both contingent – i.e. it connects to the real-world in some way – and engaging: that it engages the learners’ needs, interests, concerns and desires. In short, the learner needs to have some personal investment in the communication.”
from
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/c-is-for-communicative/
Scaleable errors, systemic errors eg pron of gh
too much, too many, enough +adj/noun
Problem of fossilized errors, how to correct them?
21st century skills?
critical thinking ?
from Mr Musk
Big Pharma
sales and marketing v R and D
The 4 C's of 21st Century Skills are:
Critical thinking: Finding solutions to problems
Creativity: Thinking outside the box
Collaboration: Working with others
Communication: Talking to others
from
Arguably, critical thinking is the most important quality for someone to have in health sciences.
In business settings, critical thinking is essential to improvement. It’s the mechanism that weeds out problems and replaces them with fruitful endeavors.
It’s what helps students figure stuff out for themselves when they don’t have a teacher at their disposal. here
The problems/dangers of critical thinking
JFK, RFK, Moon landing- what was in the tanks? Flat earth, vaccines, Chem trails
(Peter Thiel interview question)
Stanislas, Claudine Gay (Ackman), Exeter, Link.
general Weslay clark talking about Iraq etc
then clark again on isis
and putin on syria
Scott Galloway
“In addition, the battle over getting the “right” mix remains a misdirect. As we’ve written before, affirmative action affirms its mission by advancing kids based on income, not race. Letting in a rich Indian student who played lacrosse at Choate is not furthering diversity. Harvard’s freshman class is 51% non-white. However, 67% come from the upper fifth of families by income — the same portion as in 1983. We’re simply reshuffling the elites. In today’s America, you’re better off being born wealthy and non-white or gay than poor. This represents progress, but we need to update our thinking about who needs a hand up.”
https://www.profgalloway.com/rot/
More info (background)
Harvard recently announced President Claudine Gay plans to submit corrections to her 1997 PhD dissertation to correct instances of “inadequate citation.” Those corrections would be on top of ones Gay issued earlier to a pair of scholarly articles she wrote in the 2000s.
Harvard has described Gay’s corrections as “regrettable,” but officials found that the matter does not meet the threshold of research misconduct, something that would be a punishable offense.
Experts CNN interviewed stressed that plagiarism can be very complex and they were divided on what the punishment for Gay should be – or if there even should be one. None of those experts argued Gay should be outright fired and they noted that it’s rare for academics to be fired or students to be expelled for plagiarism.
from here https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism-probe/h_9b201ce1347a198e668987858b47b730
https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/mcintosh-and-white-privilege
Judgement- who teaches the teachers?
who watches the watchmen?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F
Today we have a technological answer-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_misconduct#Video_and_audio_recording
https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/bruce-hay-paternity-trap-maria-pia-shuman-mischa-haider.html
week 2
on substack Astral Codex, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger (nuclear tedtalks), Hannah Ritchie, The Mill, Blackbird Spyplane,
neo Nazis
how the economy works
Taibbi on Goldman Sachs- see below cntrl F squid
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-195229/
YCombinator hacker news on substack
dementia G7 NATO leaders Mitterand
Japan- NATO?
https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1754878466246279170?s=20
People to follow- Scott Alexander, Scott Galloway and Larry Lessig- tell me something I don’t know- links work, stats accurate etc
Background[edit]
L. Cassius ille, quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat, identidem in causis quaerere solebat, cui bono fuisset?[1]
Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a most honest and most wise judge, was in the habit of asking time and again in lawsuits: "to whom might it be for a benefit?"
—Cicero: Pro Roscio Amerino, §§ 84, 86
Another example of Cicero using Cui bono is in his defence of Sextus Roscius, in the Pro Roscio Amerino, once again invoking Cassius as the source: "Let that maxim of Cassius apply."[2]
American sociologist Peter Blau has used the concept of cui bono to differentiate organizations by who has primarily benefited: owners; members; specific others; or the general society.[3]
See
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?", though it is also known by variant translations, such as "Who watches the watchers?" and "Who will watch the watchmen?".
The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though the phrase is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the Republic. It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F
Presentation- introduce me to someone I don’t know or a new idea - like this
“Why hasn't an open source public platform been created for official communications?
Seems wrong to have public official communications select private organizations to support and thus promote.”
Lessig
“It’s puzzled me why the new Twitter competitors (and please, more and better!) haven’t done something obvious. And because it seems so obvious, there must be a good reason why they haven’t. Enlighten me?
Here’s the obvious idea: When you sign up for BlueSky or Threads or Mastodon or whatever, you give the platform your Twitter handle. You also authorize it to access your account to gather your followers/followed. Then as a step in the signup, the platform gives you the option of following/being followed by the same people when they join that alternative platform.
No doubt, this would require API access, which is, famously, not free. But it would seem completely worth whatever the cost. And even if the API access blocked this, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to trigger a data download and then gather the information from that.”
Lessig on Musk
“Musk is a poisonous type that this moment in history has made increasingly possible. (I discuss the type in The Age of the Fantasist.) He’s a man of enormous wealth, surrounded by people who don’t tell him the truth, psychologically unconstrained by the truth, convinced he is a savior, and that the world can’t live without him. He’s Putin but without an army. He’s Trump but constitutionally barred from being President. His single obsession is to be the center of attention. Yet he actually apparently doesn’t realize just how embarrassingly inane his ideas actually are. Years ago, I admired Musk, because I saw only what he had done, and very little of what he thought. Then, I saw a recording of him presenting an argument favoring a carbon tax. The argument was right and true, but the presentation was totally banal. If a first-year grad student had given the same talk, he would have been asked to leave grad school. Musk then followed this up by endorsing the election of a party that is constitutionally committed to denying climate change. Apparently, lower taxes on rich people is more important than honestly addressing climate change.” from https://medium.com/jammernd/on-a-tesla-dont-c6bdb6bf6138
https://twitter.com/EZRideryoyall/status/1755065279384555674
horse visual illusion
Plagiarism see Astral codex ten
Ron Paul on US foreign policy -
Ron Paul on Iran
In Florida you go to jail CNN
balance
El Salvador’s election math: 2 + 90 = 71
You need three numbers to understand this Sunday’s presidential election in El Salvador.
The first is 2. Since taking office in 2019, President Nayib Bukele’s sweeping anti-gang crackdown has resulted in the incarceration of 2% of the country’s adult population. In US terms, that’s the equivalent of throwing 5 million people in jail.
The second is 90. The official homicide rate has fallen more than 90% since 2015, including roughly 75% since Bukele took office.
The third is 71. Polls show Bukele leading his nearest competitor by 71 points. He will cruise to victory in a free and fair election.
The meaning of this math: Bukele has been criticized by human rights groups for thousands of abuses. He has used the military to strong-arm congress and twisted the constitution to run for a second term. But ordinary Salvadorans are OK with it because their cities are livable again after years when the country was one of the bloodiest in the world.
from https://www.gzeromedia.com/news/watching/el-salvadors-election-math-2-90-71
from the Economist
“Tossing aside due process is an essential part of Mr Bukele’s strategy. Previously, when a gangster swaggered into a shop and demanded protection money, the owner knew that to refuse was to court death. He could call the police, but if he testified he would be murdered and if no one testified there would not be enough evidence to lock the gangster up.
Now, if a gangster swaggers down the street, anyone can get him locked up with an anonymous phone call. This completely changes the balance of power in previously gang-dominated neighbourhoods. “Before, the good people were afraid. Now, the bad people are,” says Miguel. (However, he asks that The Economist use a pseudonym.)”
While dazzling voters with his charm, Mr Bukele has steadily removed checks on his own power. He won over the army and police with lavish benefits. Then he methodically asserted control over all three branches of government, wagering that the public wouldn’t mind ceding new powers to a man waging war on crime. In 2020 Congress refused to approve the hefty sums he wanted for his security plan, so he marched into the chamber with soldiers and accused lawmakers of thwarting the people’s desire for public safety. In 2021 his party won a super-majority. In June it passed a law to reduce the number of seats in the legislature from 84 to 60 and turn the country’s 262 municipalities into 44 districts. Critics say he has tweaked rules to benefit his own party.
When El Salvador’s courts tried to restrain Mr Bukele, he first ignored and then gutted them. In 2020 the constitutional court ruled that emergency powers he assumed during the pandemic were illegal. He wielded them anyway. Once he had a majority in Congress, he pushed aside the judges of the constitutional court and the attorney-general, who was investigating Mr Bukele’s ministers for embezzling funds, replacing them with yes-men. He forcibly retired a third of the country’s judges and replaced them with yes-men, too. The way he did so was unconstitutional, says Antonio Durán, a judge.
El salvador https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/el-salvador
What links these 2 schools?
week 2
https://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/how-privileged-are-you
As Education Minister, how could you improve state schools? Which is more important, the teachers, the materials, the deskes, where the teacher sits, attitude of staff towards students (expectations, norms) or contacts? Or opportunity to expel students who misbehave?
sustainable food Mona Lisa Is it a binary choice or a spectrum?
toxoplasmosis the buzz?
Harkness method
oil magnate Edward Harkness wrote to Exeter Principal Lewis Perry regarding how a substantial donation that Harkness would make to the academy might be used to fund a new way of teaching and learning:
What I have in mind is a classroom where students could sit around a table with a teacher who would talk with them and instruct them by a sort of tutorial or conference method, where each student would feel encouraged to speak up. This would be a real revolution in methods.[21]
The result was "Harkness teaching", in which a teacher and a group of students work together, exchanging ideas and information, similar to the Socratic method. In November 1930, Harkness gave Exeter $5.8 million to support this initiative. Since then, the academy's principal mode of instruction has been by discussion, "seminar style", around an oval table known as the Harkness table.[22][23] Today at Phillips Exeter Academy, all classes are taught using this method, with no more than 12 or 13 students per class.
What do you think of this method?
Without being able to move chairs and tables, what can we do to facilitate communication?
Do we need a Socrates for the Socratic method?
Who were the greatest teachers- Socrates, Jesus, Maria Montessori, Michael Sandel, Eric Mazur, Kieran Egan? What do they share?
What does Harvard and Harvard Business School do that others don’t? MIT?
Why don’t we try to use some of their methods/ideas in state teaching?
***
How to ask the right question- test your hypothesis
The first experiment I know of concerning this phenomenon was done by the psychologist P. C. Wason. He presented subjects with the three-number sequence 2, 4, 6, and asked them to try to guess the rule generating it. Their method of guessing was to produce other three-number sequences, to which the experimenter would respond “yes” or “no” depending on whether the new sequences were consistent with the rule. Once confident with their answers, the subjects would formulate the rule. (Note the similarity of this experiment to the discussion in Chapter 1 of the way history presents itself to us: assuming history is generated according to some logic, we see only the events, never the rules, but need to guess how it works.)
rule below
so a gap here to let you prepare your answers
ok here it is
The correct rule was “numbers in ascending order,” nothing more. Very few subjects discovered it because in order to do so they had to offer a series in descending order (that the experimenter would say “no” to). Wason noticed that the subjects had a rule in mind, but gave him examples aimed at confirming it instead of trying to supply series that were inconsistent with their hypothesis. Subjects tenaciously kept trying to confirm the rules that they had made up.
The norms of communication- what does probability mean?
Linda the bank teller
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
Linda is a bank teller.
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
a. A massive flood somewhere in America in which more than a thousand people die. b. An earthquake in California, causing massive flooding, in which more than a thousand people die.
50 biases
loss aversion
Bell curve Gaussian distribution Taleb
trolley car
Do we need a higher birthrate?
Do we need more immigration?
Do they need more immigration/ emigration?
Update from 31.1.24 on hydrogen from the New Scientist
Hydrogen/ Immigration/ Sex and gender
media Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton, here
and J Park here
Lord Reith here cntrl F
Tucker Carlson to explain Amanpour
Bin Laden- CNN
What is the prurpose of today’s media? Are Apple (tv), google, Tiktok, fb meta, x twitter in competition with Le Monde, the BBC, Fox news and the Guardian? In a world where media is free, what is being monetized?
Hydrogen Simplistic questions, JFK (mafia)
Week 2
This is right wing
https://x.com/MarinaPurkiss/status/1754967593847337310?s=20
Attacks
“The killing of three Americans at Tower 22 in Jordan near the border with Syria is a significant escalation of an already-precarious situation in the Middle East. Officials said the drone was fired by Iran-backed militants and appeared to come from Syria. It is still being determined which militia group specifically is responsible.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/28/politics/us-troops-drone-attack-jordan/index.html
How to respond? Syria, Iran, Lebanon?
“US military struck more than 85 Iran-linked targets in Iraq and Syria after three US soldiers were killed on Sunday. The United States military has launched dozens of air strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/2/us-launches-strikes-in-response-to-attack-that-killed-troops-in-jordan#:~:text=US%20military%20struck%20more%20than,soldiers%20were%20killed%20on%20Sunday.&text=The%20United%20States%20military%20has,remote%20US%20base%20in%20Jordan.
Give me 3 good reasons:
submarines U boats
“The Germans were well aware that the U.S. could not and would not accept unrestricted submarine warfare, but launched it anyway,” says Goemans. “The U.S. declaration of war was thus already taken into account when the final decision for unrestricted submarine warfare was made in January 1917. Indeed, Hindenburg explicitly admitted the day before ‘We count upon war with America.’”
So why would the German leadership under Paul von Hindenburg take such a big risk?
“It was a gamble, which was very likely to hurt them in the long run,” explains Goemans. “They thought the gamble would open up a window of opportunity in which they could defeat the British. If they defeated the British, then they could prevent Americans from coming to the mainland and they would have a victorious end to the war.”
Cabled by German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann in January 1917 to the Mexican embassy, the secret diplomatic communication was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. In the telegram, Zimmermann proposed a military alliance between Germany, Mexico, and Japan—should the United States enter the war. It basically said, “If you want to, we will help you in the effort of helping you regain some of your lost territories from the United States. The territory you lost in 1848 and subsequently,” explains Goemans, who calls the telegram “a ludicrous proposal.”
Mexico would be given Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico as spoils, according to the German plan. While Goemans says he never found any indication in official notes and papers from the time that the U.S. government took this threat seriously, it nevertheless became “a propaganda gift that could be used against the Germans more than it was a real factor in the decision making of the Americans [to go to war].” However, once its contents were splashed across newspaper front pages, American public opinion turned strongly against Germany, enflaming pro-war sentiments.
Germany formally surrendered on November 11, 1918. In those 19 months of U.S. engagement, more than two million American soldiers served on the battlefields of Western Europe—and 50,000 of them lost their lives.
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/looking-back-100-years-u-s-enters-world-war-i-on-april-6-1917/
Over time, especially after reports of German atrocities in Belgium in 1914 and following the sinking of the passenger liner RMS Lusitania in 1915, Americans increasingly came to see Germany as the aggressor in Europe.
While the country was at peace, American banks made huge loans to the Entente powers, which were used mainly to buy munitions, raw materials, and food from across the Atlantic.
The J.P. Morgan Bank offered assistance in the wartime financing of Britain and France from the earliest stages of the conflict through America's entrance in 1917.
J.P. Morgan issued loans to France including one in March 1915 and, following negotiations with the Anglo-French Financial Commission, another joint loan to Britain and France in October 1915, the latter amounting to US$500,000,000.
Wilson and the Democrats in 1916 campaigned on the slogan "He kept us out of war!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_entry_into_World_War_I
Lusitania was sunk on 7 May 1915, by a German U-boat 11 miles (18 km) off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, killing 1,199 passengers and crew.[2]
The contemporary investigations in both the United Kingdom and the United States into the precise causes of the ship's loss were obstructed by the needs of wartime secrecy and a propaganda campaign to ensure all blame fell upon Germany.[1] At time of her sinking she was carrying 4,200,000 rounds of Remington .303 rifle/machine-gun cartridges, almost 5,000 shrapnel shell casings (for a total of some 50 tons), and 3,240 brass percussion artillery fuses, but argument over whether the ship was a legitimate military target raged back and forth throughout the war.
In Schwieger's own words, recorded in the log of U-20:
Torpedo hits starboard side right behind the bridge. An unusually heavy detonation takes place with a very strong explosive cloud. The explosion of the torpedo must have been followed by a second one [boiler or coal or powder?]... The ship stops immediately and heels over to starboard very quickly, immersing simultaneously at the bow... the name Lusitania becomes visible in golden letters.[35]
U-20's torpedo officer, Raimund Weisbach, viewed the destruction through the vessel's periscope and felt the explosion was unusually severe.
Has time established the truth of what happened to the Lusitania? Is there contemporary relevance?
*****
weeks 3,4,5
predictions
Dancing simple answers to complex qu
Just get up and dance
https://x.com/nateliason/status/1762304731458732238?s=20
https://www.linkedin.com/in/flavie-delmeule-566952143/
Hurt Johnny Cash
Nick Cave
https://x.com/primalpoly/status/1762178176648941834?s=20
“I don’t believe in an interventionist god” -recklessness REM
Into my arms
To listen to here SONG
“I guess what I am trying to say is that, beyond the interminable but necessary debates about the abolition of the monarchy, I hold an inexplicable emotional attachment to the Royals – the strangeness of them, the deeply eccentric nature of the whole affair that so perfectly reflects the unique weirdness of Britain itself. I’m just drawn to that kind of thing – the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring.”
In reply to the letter writer from the UK, who asked, “What would the young Nick Cave have thought of that?!”, Cave wrote “the young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young, and like many young people, mostly demented, so I’m a little cautious around using him as a benchmark for what I should or should not do. He was cute though, I’ll give him that.”
Where the wild roses grow
Here is the first composition: deadline 06.03
Either:
the TOEFL composition below OR
choose one of these titles and write 250 words (intro, conclusion, at least 3 paragraphs in total)
1 One long-distance flight consumes fuel which a cars uses in several years’ time, but they cause the same amount of pollution. So some people think that for the sake of the environment we should discourage non-essential flights, such as tourist travel, rather than to limit the use of cars. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Discuss:
2 If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever. George Orwell.
3 He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security. Benjamin_Franklin
4 George Santayana Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
5 Karl Marx History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
6 Mark Twain:A lie may travel half-way around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots
7 History repeats itself. That is one of the things wrong with history. Clarence Darrow
Any questions, email me and I'll add them to my site.
https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/week-3-4-and-5
TOEFL 250 words- no more than 30 minutes for the task
First, give yourself three minutes to read this article:
Machu Picchu is a 15th-century Inca citadel situated in the Andean Mountains of Peru. This ancient site has puzzled historians and archaeologists for centuries, with many theories proposed as to its purpose. Over the years, archaeologists have put forth three possible reasons for the construction of Machu Picchu.
One possibility is that Machu Picchu was built as a permanent royal estate for the Inca emperor, Pachacuti. As the ruler of a major empire, Pachacuti would have needed a luxurious and impressive residence. Located at the top of a mountain, with breathtaking views of the surrounding landscape, Machu Picchu would have been an ideal location for such a residence. Anyone coming to meet with the emperor would have been impressed by his apparent power and wealth. This feature might have helped him to maintain his rule over the people of the region.
Another theory is that Machu Picchu was built as a ceremonial and religious center. The Inca were a deeply religious people, and their empire was filled with temples and shrines dedicated to their gods and goddesses. It is possible that Machu Picchu is just another shrine, albeit a very large one. With its impressive stonework and intricate carvings, it may have been built as a sacred site for religious ceremonies and rituals.
A third possibility is that Machu Picchu was built as a defensive fortress. Located at the top of a mountain and surrounded by steep cliffs, the site would have been very difficult to access, but easy to defend. This strategic location, combined with the strong walls and terraces of the citadel, would have made Machu Picchu a perfect military stronghold. Invading armies would have found it a very challenging target. Consequently, in times of invasion or domestic unrest, the Inca armies could have retreated to the fortress for safety.
Next, listen to the following lecture: click here https://www.toeflresources.com/toefl-integrated-writing-practice-machu-picchu/
Summarize the points made in the lecture, being sure to explain how they oppose specific points made in the reading passage.
Love- Streisand
“
from ACX
***
also ACX
motte and bailey
Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.
Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.
The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/
****
Comparative advantage in an economic model is the advantage over others in producing a particular good. A good can be produced at a lower relative opportunity cost or autarky price, i.e. at a lower relative marginal cost prior to trade.[1] Comparative advantage describes the economic reality of the work gains from trade for individuals, firms, or nations, which arise from differences in their factor endowments or technological progress.[2]
David Ricardo developed the classical theory of comparative advantage in 1817 to explain why countries engage in international trade even when one country's workers are more efficient at producing every single good than workers in other countries. He demonstrated that if two countries capable of producing two commodities engage in the free market (albeit with the assumption that the capital and labour do not move internationally[3]), then each country will increase its overall consumption by exporting the good for which it has a comparative advantage while importing the other good, provided that there exist differences in labor productivity between both countries.[4][5] Widely regarded as one of the most powerful[6] yet counter-intuitive[7] insights in economics, Ricardo's theory implies that comparative advantage rather than absolute advantage is responsible for much of international trade.
**
James Brander and Barbara Spencer demonstrated how, in a strategic setting where a few firms compete for the world market, export subsidies and import restrictions can keep foreign firms from competing with national firms, increasing welfare in the country implementing these so-called strategic trade policies.[49]
There are some economists who dispute the claims of the benefit of comparative advantage. James K. Galbraith has stated that "free trade has attained the status of a god" and that " ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." He argues that comparative advantage relies on the assumption of constant returns, which he states is not generally the case.[50] According to Galbraith, nations trapped into specializing in agriculture are condemned to perpetual poverty, as agriculture is dependent on land, a finite non-increasing natural resource
semiconductor chips
Taiwan, China, and South Korea combine for roughly 87% of the global foundry market. Here’s how it breaks down:
Moore’s Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
*****
Chinese mega developer Evergrande has been ordered into liquidation owing almost $350 billion US ($532 billion AUD) to its creditors. This is more debt than some entire nations- Thailand, Israel and Portugal – and concerns are high that its liquidation could have some disastrous knock-on effects.
Every year Chinese local government sells hundreds of millions of square metres of land to state owned and private developers. In the year to August 2023, 300 cities across China sold a total of 220 million square metres of land to residential property developers, worth 2.71 trillion Yuan ($580 billion AUD).
To put Evergrande’s holdings into perspective, their land reserves came in at 230 million square metres in June 2022. With Evergrande holding such a sizeable amount of land, if a traditional fire sale of assets was to occur as part of the company’s liquidation, it would risk hitting land prices hard and also the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue local government derives from land sales.
For this reason, if Evergrande’s mainland China land assets are to be liquidated on to the market, its likely they would be drip fed over time to not upset the balance of the economy.
Overall Chinese and Hong Kong stock markets have lost $7 trillion US worth of value since peaking in 2001. The story for smaller listed Chinese company’s is even worse, with the benchmark Shanghai CSI 1000 index has lost up to 72.3 per cent of its value since peaking in June 2015. Since the turn of the new calendar year, the index lost as much as 29.1 per cent of its value.
A study authored by Harvard Economics Professor Kenneth Rogoff found that in 2018, 80 per cent of all new homes were purchased by buyers who already had at least one home.
From
mattresses
“Global Market Insights, a research firm, reckons that worldwide revenues from sales of such gizmos reached $12.5bn in 2020 and could be more than triple that in five years. Matteo Franceschetti, boss of Eight Sleep, thinks the addressable market for his company is “literally everyone in the world”. After all, everybody sleeps.”
from
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/02/12/the-sleep-tech-industry-is-waking-up
*******
China
The survey data suggest that about 50% of China’s wealth is in the hands of the 113m or so people with a net worth of 1m-10m yuan. This cohort—just 8% of the population—has even more influence over financial markets than their wealth would suggest. They own 64% of all publicly traded shares, for instance, and 61% of investment funds (see chart 1).
wealth gini index
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/02/08/chinas-well-to-do-are-under-assault-from-every-side
cf USA
interest rates in Africa
“A mind-bending 70% of the buildings expected in Africa in 2040 do not exist, reckons the UN. Building them could be a boon not just for slum-dwellers but for growth, jobs and, potentially, climate-friendly construction. Africa will be the construction site of the world, enthuses Ian Shapiro of Reall, an investor in African housing.“
“Uganda, with almost 50m people, has about 7,000 mortgages outstanding. It is not an extreme case. In most sub-Saharan countries the stock of mortgage debt to GDP is lower than 1%. By comparison, in Britain it is 65%. A second reason is that perhaps 85% of people have informal jobs, such as selling fruit at the market or riding a motorbike taxi”
“A rule of thumb is that mortgage rates need to be in single digits to have a chance of being affordable, says Simon Walley of the World Bank. Yet just 15 out of 48 countries for which there are data in sub-Saharan Africa have rates below 10%. That is firstly because central-bank rates, a floor for mortgages, are persistently high to curb inflation.”
“Banks and investors can earn 13-15% a year simply by buying government bonds.”
“In Tanzania, which has a population of 67m, the mortgage-refinance company directly backs only 1,500 outstanding mortgages. In Kenya, with a population of 56m, the mortgage-refinance company has backed just 2,876 loans in almost five years, less than a tenth of its target. Mr Walley of the World Bank, which has lent to most of these companies, says the problem is that “the housing supply response hasn’t happened, or not to the scale we would have liked”. High underlying interest rates also limit their impact, says Aliou Maïga of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector arm of the World Bank. He also points to a tougher problem: poverty. “Whatever you do, it’s very very difficult to fit income levels into the housing equation,” he says.”
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/02/07/how-to-house-the-worlds-fastest-growing-population
*****
settlers in Palestine
from the Economisthttps://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/02/08/america-is-trying-to-peg-israels-settlers-back
At first the Israeli settlers in the West Bank tried to laugh off the executive order signed by Joe Biden, America’s president, on February 1st imposing sanctions on “persons undermining peace, security and stability in the West Bank”. The editor of a popular far-right website posted a cartoon of a Jewish shepherd in the West Bank. “What am I going to do now with all my assets in New York?” said the caption.
The laughter faded when Israeli banks began blocking the accounts of the settlers targeted by America’s sanctions regime. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and himself an ultra-nationalist settler, vowed to prevent financial institutions from implementing the sanctions. But his power in this matter is negligible. “If anyone thinks that for the sake of a few settlers’ accounts Israeli banks are about to jeopardise their access to the global financial system controlled by the Americans, they’re in for a rude awakening,” said a senior banker.
Mr Biden is a self-proclaimed Zionist who has backed Israel to the hilt since Hamas’s attack last year. But the order is a sign that his patience with Binyamin Netanyahu’s hardline coalition is wearing thin.
The Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the heart of a future Palestinian state, are among the biggest obstacles to America’s ambitious plans for peace. So far the sanctions have hit only four fairly minor settler activists, who are accused of violence against Palestinians. But the wording of the presidential order leaves little doubt that bigger figures, including cabinet ministers, could be affected. “It’s a warning shot and the target is Netanyahu,” says an Israeli official involved in talks with the Americans. Mr Biden seems to be trying to drive a wedge between the settlers and the rest of Israel, leaving Mr Netanyahu with the choice of either dumping his toxic partners or going down with them.
More problematic are the smaller settlements deep in the West Bank that would have to be dismantled. Most of their residents are religious ideologues who comprise less than 2% of Israel’s population but enjoy wide and fervent support. Parties representing them did well in the 2022 election, helping return Mr Netanyahu to office; indeed, he depends on them for his majority. They have been lavishly rewarded. Five ministers are settlers.
basketball
****
news
When we pick up the newspaper, we anticipate learning of momentous events. Yet the real world does not supply spectacular novelty very often. This imbalance was not obvious when the first newspaper published in America, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, appeared in Boston in 1690, promising news just once a month. But then came advances in technology—the rotary press in the 19th century, followed by radio and television in the 20th—and the definition of “news” began to inflate to fill all that space and, with it, all that yearning for something new, something interesting.
Boorstin argued that the imbalance between demand and supply was corrected by the invention of the “pseudo-event”. This was a happening or statement that did not arise spontaneously, out of the natural flow of events in the world, but was created, often by a canny public-relations agent. This kind of news now so defines the daily representation of reality beyond our direct experience that it is hard to imagine apprehending the world without it.”
from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/02/08/this-is-not-a-story-about-taylor-swift-and-the-super-bowl
**
homicide in El Salvador
“More than 74,000 people—equivalent to over 8% of the young male population of the country—have been locked up.”
“previously dangerous neighbourhoods have been transformed. The national homicide rate fell from 51 per 100,000 in 2018 to three last year.”
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2024/02/05/after-nayib-bukeles-crushing-unconstitutional-victory-what-next
***
Clinton 25 k fine
“Gerald Ford, for example, pardoned Richard Nixon after he resigned—which was necessary only because both men knew that Nixon faced criminal prosecution for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. And Bill Clinton “agreed to a five-year suspension of his law licence and a $25,000 fine” to avoid having criminal charges filed against him after his presidency.”
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/02/07/a-court-rejects-donald-trumps-claim-to-absolute-immunity
****
a class ceiling
1000 true fans
***
Mainstream media/ legacy media
https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1641135086279196673?s=20
***
How to get into a good school?
In France, USA, Denmark
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-reality-of-the-danish-fairytale-78069fbf
"No, I actually think it's great, but I know a lot of American progressives – the key audience this assessment was written for – would have a hard time dealing the outcome of a primarily meritocratic access model." I know this because we have the "free college!" that they're always harping about here in Tennessee. Ever hear them talk about how great it is? Ever hear them mention TN as the exemplar of how to do it?
- Gini Index: US 0.42, Denmark 0.28. - Life expectancy at birth: US 77.2 years, Denmark 81.4 years. - Share of population living on lees than 6.85$/day: US 1.7%, Denmark 0.4%. - Health spending (% of GDP): US 15.95%, Denmark 8.93%.
Rashid Khalidi
Khalidi has written, "It may seem hard to believe today, but for decades the United States was in fact a major patron, indeed in some respects the major patron, of earlier incarnations" of radical, militant Islam, in order to use all possible resources in waging the Cold War.
Deaths in USA
https://www.gzeromedia.com/us-cracks-down-on-chinas-role-in-fentanyl-crisis
Harford experimentation 10.45 to 13.25
failure bankrupt evolution survival of the … fittest, luckiest?
chain of events
“There is no such thing as a chain of events” see Taleb below
Yuval Noah Harari
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Black swan
“ I will illustrate with the following thought experiment. Assume that a legislator with courage, influence, intellect, vision, and perseverance manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect and employment on September 10, 2001; it imposes the continuously locked bulletproof doors in every cockpit (at high costs to the struggling airlines)—just in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York City. I know this is lunacy, but it is just a thought experiment (I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect, courage, vision, and perseverance; this is the point of the thought experiment). The legislation is not a popular measure among the airline personnel, as it complicates their lives. But it would certainly have prevented 9/11. The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statues in public squares, not so much as a quick mention of his contribution in his obituary. “Joe Smith, who helped avoid the disaster of 9/11, died of complications of liver disease.” Seeing how superfluous his measure was, and how it squandered resources, the public, with great help from airline pilots, might well boot him out of office. Vox clamantis in deserto. He will retire depressed, with a great sense of failure. He will die with the impression of having done nothing useful. I wish I could go attend his funeral, but, reader, I can’t find him. And yet, recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, and that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick from it. See how the silent hero is rewarded: even his own hormonal system will conspire to offer no reward. Now consider again the events of 9/11. In their aftermath, who got the recognition? Those you saw in the media, on television performing heroic acts, and those whom you saw trying to give you the impression that they were performing heroic acts. The latter category includes someone like the New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso, who “saved the stock exchange” and received a huge bonus for his contribution (the equivalent of several thousand average salaries). All he had to do was be there to ring the opening bell on television—the television that, we will see, is the carrier of unfairness and a major cause of Black Swan blindness. “
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they “Platonify.”
Education in a Taxicab I will introduce the third element of the triplet, the curse of learning, as follows. I closely watched my grandfather, who was minister of defense, and later minister of the interior and deputy prime minister in the early days of the war, before the fading of his political role. In spite of his position he did not seem to know what was going to happen any more than did his driver, Mikhail. But unlike my grandfather, Mikhail used to repeat “God knows” as his main commentary on events, transferring the task of understanding higher up. I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you’re a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite. It is not just knowledge but information that can be of dubious value. It came to my notice that almost everybody was acquainted with current events in their smallest details. The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin.
Consider by comparison the net worth of the thousand people you lined up in the stadium. Add to them the wealthiest person to be found on the planet—say, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Assume his net worth to be close to $80 billion—with the total capital of the others around a few million. How much of the total wealth would he represent? 99.9 percent? Indeed, all the others would represent no more than a rounding error for his net worth, the variation of his personal portfolio over the past second. For someone’s weight to represent such a share, he would need to weigh fifty million pounds! Try it again with, say, book sales. Line up a thousand authors (or people begging to get published, but calling themselves authors instead of waiters), and check their book sales. Then add the living writer who (currently) has the most readers. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, with several hundred million books sold, will dwarf the remaining thousand authors with, say, collectively, a few hundred thousand readers at most.
Matters that seem to belong to Mediocristan (subjected to what we call type 1 randomness): height, weight, calorie consumption, income for a baker, a small restaurant owner, a prostitute, or an orthodontist; gambling profits (in the very special case, assuming the person goes to a casino and maintains a constant betting size), car accidents, mortality rates, “IQ” (as measured). Matters that seem to belong to Extremistan (subjected to what we call type 2 randomness): wealth, income, book sales per author, book citations per author, name recognition as a “celebrity,” number of references on Google, populations of cities, uses of words in a vocabulary, numbers of speakers per language, damage caused by earthquakes, deaths in war, deaths from terrorist incidents, sizes of planets, sizes of companies, stock ownership, height between species (consider elephants and mice), financial markets (but your investment manager does not know it), commodity prices, inflation rates, economic data. The Extremistan list is much longer than the prior one.
Ackman, Fryer? Lammy cash
Lammy for sec genocide
intersectionality
Stanislas
Scott Alexander on lying
all of these are different things:
Reasoning well, and getting things right
Reasoning well, but getting things wrong because the world is complicated and you got unlucky.
Reasoning badly, because you are dumb.
Reasoning badly, because you are biased, and on some more-or-less subconscious level not even trying to reason well.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, but more-or-less subconsciously and unthinkingly presenting technically true facts in a deceptive way that leaves other people confused, without ever technically lying.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, but very consciously, and with full knowledge of what you’re doing, presenting technically true facts in a deceptive way intended to make other people confused, without ever technically lying.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, and literally lying and making up false facts to deceive other people.
In a perfect world, we would have separate words for all of these. In our own world, to save time and energy we usually apply a few pre-existing words to all of them.
I prefer to reserve lying for 7 and the most egregious cases of 6, and to have a pretty high standard for accusing people of this rather than 2/3/4/5.
Pareto
80 20 30
“Luxury companies might be noticing a spending slowdown among the 80% of their customers who are “nearly affluent,” said [Milton] Pedraza of the Luxury Institute. But he said those consumers typically account for about 30% of sales.
Instead, he said luxury brands often count on just 20% of its clientele − the ultra-wealthy and very wealthy — for the majority of their sales.”
anything missing here?
“Many of the world’s most lucrative businesses fall into one of three categories: 1) market speculation, which is how the likes of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway make their money; 2) attention-mining and advertising like Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook); and making premium goods as LVMH, Tesla, and the world’s biggest company, Apple do.”
Dua Lipa is a very dark horse.
Her family are from Kosovo, and originally Muslim. One of her grandfathers was the Head of the Kosovo Institute of History (improbably pictured here having lunch in the Sixties with the future grandfather of another dazzling British-Albanian pop sensation, Rita Ora). Lipa herself was born in London in 1995 after her parents moved there fleeing the war, but by 2008 and following Kosovan independence they moved back to Albania.
****
Unherd To carry on in the same stereotyped vein, if you are a woman, you are even less likely to be murdered. Of the 695 people murdered in England and Wales in the year to March 2020, 506 of them were men. And for the specific issue of murders on the street, by strangers — the fear we’re dealing with — the disparity is greater still: 154 men were murdered by strangers, and just 23 women.
All this is true. But that doesn’t mean that the streets feel safe for women.
The first trouble is that we bump up against the law of large numbers. Imagine that the average woman walks past 200 men in a day. I expect working women in large cities see much more than that, in non-pandemic times, but others who are at home or who live in small communities see far fewer, so perhaps that number’s about right. In a year, that’s 73,000 encounters; in a decade, 730,000. Even if only a tiny fraction of men are dangerous or threatening, women will occasionally encounter them.
https://wol.iza.org/opinions/5-reasons-why-immigrants-do-not-take-natives-jobs
Taibbi
squid
“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.”
from Rolling stone