February 2014 – Page 66

Under Siege In Syria

Anne Applebaum reports that Bashar Assad is starving his own people to death:

Nowadays, “death by forced starvation” sounds like something from an old newsreel. But it is not. Right now, in the 21st century, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is once again making use of it. While the international community is haggling over his chemical weapons, the stuff of modern nightmares, he is following the example of his medieval and his 20th-century predecessors and deliberately starving thousands of people to death.

Because he says he doesn’t want to feed armed rebels, trucks filled with food aid now sit outside the besieged city of Homs, where an unknown number of civilians have had no supplies for many weeks. The effects are the same as they were in the Łódź ghetto. A Dutch priest who has remained inside the city has described people literally going mad from hunger: “Infants are suffering the most. Nursing mothers can’t feed their babies as they are too weak from hunger. We search everywhere for milk, and when we find it we mix it with water.”

Map Of The Day

Nathan Yau pulled data from a running app to map common routes:

If there’s one quick (and expected) takeaway, it’s that people like to run by the water and in parks, probably to get away from cars and the scenery. In the smaller inland cities, there seem to be a few high-traffic roads with less running elsewhere.

The map for London is above. Other major cities here.

There’s No App For Inequality, Ctd

In a follow-up to his earlier post, Freddie continues to argue that online education is little help for disadvantaged students:

I keep pointing out: the record for educational technologies making an actual impact on educational outcomes is dismal. And that’s before we talk about the fact that these technologies are specifically endorsed as a method to spread education to marginal students from demographic categories with poor educational outcomes. As Alan Jacobs– the opposite of a technophobe– pointed out, the research we have suggests that it’s exactly the students who least need the affordability offered by online education who do best in online classes. Getting anything out of online classes takes great self-discipline and motivation; these are qualities that students who struggle typically lack.

When people talk about using online education to “scale up” education, that is necessarily saying that they are going to be giving students far less individual attention than they receive– despite the fact that individual attention, class time, and teacher investment are precisely what students need most to succeed.

This is an area where the media is particularly vulnerable to its demographic biases. So, so many people in our elite media have never been exposed to actual educational failure in any way, shape, or form. They come up through affluent suburban public school districts where all of the students come from stable and financially secure households. They go on to attend elite private high schools where the worst students are systematically excluded by test scores and an inability to pay. They attend Ivy League universities where all students were in the top five in their class and everybody was in the top 5% on the SAT. They then go to work at newspapers and magazines where everybody else is exactly like them. Of course, they think education can be fixed with apps or buzzwords or good ol’ American gumption. They literally don’t know what educational failure looks like.

Learning About Your Loved One’s Death On The News

Stacia Brown is unsettled that the public may have learned of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s overdose before his family did:

By the time the Wall Street Journal posted its first brief, the New York Times had also begun to report facts in the case. The most disturbing of these was the mention that an official had requested anonymity as he gave sensitive details to the press – including that Hoffman passed of an apparent overdose – “because he was not certain the actor’s family had been informed of the death.” …

Though the idea of that chills me to the bone, Philips Media Training founder Brad Phillips asserts that it’s not unusual. Though print journalists once voluntarily withheld names of victims until next of kin were notified, in the age of the Internet, where photos of a crime scene can be tweeted by passersby long before the first reporters reach the site, there’s no longer a hard and fast consensus around withholding names. “Would releasing the news on an official channel even without family notification – help clear up confusion and offer confirmation instead of allowing unconfirmed speculation to fester?” Philips wonders. “And couldn’t it be argued that that would be more respectful of the families?”

These are challenging questions, ones that should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps there are valid arguments to be made for releasing victims’ names before their families have been notified. But in the case of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the swift release felt unseemly and unnecessary. A celebrity’s overdose isn’t so time-sensitive that we can’t afford to respect the children of the deceased by waiting to confirm that they have been notified before the public has.

Island Of Tropical Debt

Now that S&P has downgraded its bonds to junk status, Salmon expects Puerto Rico to default soon. But he notes that “there’s no chapter of the US bankruptcy code which encompasses Puerto Rico”:

My advice to the Puerto Rican government, then, is this: start having quiet conversations in Washington about a piece of legislation which would give the island the legal freedom and ability to restructure its debts in a clean, one-and-done manner. Such a law would not be a bailout: it would involve no money flowing from DC to PR. But it would allow Puerto Rico to default on its debt and come out the other side, without the risk of years of legal chaos. While bondholders would squeal, at least they would get certainty. And Puerto Rico would get something much more valuable still — an opportunity to finally drag itself out of its horrible recession.

Roberto Ferdman comments on the situation:

Puerto Rico is in a pretty precarious spot. But it’s hardly something that happened overnight. The island has been crawling its way toward today’s economic mess for quite some time. “If you look at the numbers, the economy has shrunk by something like 15% over the past six or seven years,” economist José J. Villamil told Quartz. Puerto Rico’s economy has been getting smaller for almost eight years, as the chart [above] shows.

The Economist worried about default back in October:

For decades Puerto Rico has been sustained by federal subsidies. Its people, far poorer than the American average, get lots of transfers, from pensions to food stamps. Until 2006 the economy was buoyed by tax incentives for American firms that manufactured there. As drug companies took advantage, the territory became a vast medicinalmaquiladora.

This tax break disappeared in 2006, and Puerto Rico’s economy has shrunk virtually every year since. It has been able to keep on borrowing, thanks to another subsidy: interest on Puerto Rican debt is exempt from state, local and federal taxes in America, making it artificially attractive to investors.

Infinite Tolerance For Bureaucracy

Jacob T. Levy points out what the obsession with combating welfare and food stamp fraud leads to:

[P]oor people will be subjected to another set of forms, another set of inspections, another set of surveillance and monitoring, another set of insults, another risk of false findings of guilt, for trivial financial savings. Someone gets to posture as having zero tolerance for some unacceptable outcome; that’s what the zero tolerance policies are for. And life for a sixth of the country’s population gets worse, more unfree, more subject to the burdens and intrusions of micromanaging regulation.

This kind of thing is, famously, among Milton Friedman’s reasons for advocating a negative income tax in place of the complex array of partial-coverage welfare policies in America. (It’s also among the reasons called upon today by supporters of basic income guarantees.) I think Friedman understood, not only that regulations are administratively expensive to enforce, but that they’re also sources of unfreedom for the many people who don’t violate them. And the effort to make sure that income support only ever goes to the deserving poor however conceived, to regulate their behavior to stop them from doing whatever it is the undeserving do, is regulation, and requires the same costs, sacrifices, and burdens regulation always requires.

Nice move there, Google – celebrating the Olympics with the rainbow flag. That’s the Russian search-page. Here’s the one in Jamaica – another country riddled with pathological homophobia. And the Ugandan and Nigerian versions. If you think I’m over-reading some simple coloring, the quote on each page makes the intent clear:

“The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” –Olympic Charter

Well played.

Today I wondered if Clinton fatigue could worsen; mused if the pursuit of wealth through work is now in conflict with the deeper American principle of the pursuit of happiness; and mourned an epic beard.

I also appreciated the defense of French as integral to a proper education. It was the one foreign language I actually mastered. It enabled me to read Camus, Mauriac, Baudelaire, Constant, Flaubert, Tocqueville, de Maupassant, and above all, Pascal and Montaigne in the original. It’s up there with my Oxford entrance-level Latin as a foundation for my entire intellectual life – even though it could be described as useless as a practical endeavor. But the life of the mind is not a practical endeavor; and one good sign of the value of the truly great things in life is their “uselessness”.

The most popular post of the day was Clinton Fatigue? Next up: Sarah Palin’s baked Alaska.

Our renewal revenue is now 106 percent of the original revenue this time last year. 106 percent.

See you in the morning.

Rebuilding With Robots

Glenn Thrush covers the revival of Pittsburgh:

The irony that a city built on an industrial working class has reclaimed part of its past industrial glory by developing machines designed, in some cases, to replace human workers is lost on exactly no one. Carnegie Robotics, a new CMU startup generating a lot of buzz, makes a machine that sorts strawberries and can do the work of 800 people; Aethon, a medical robotics company founded in 2002, automates much of hospitals’ tangled internal logistics chains. “We create jobs, we don’t take them away,” growls Whittaker, whose own firm, RedZone Robotics, which he founded while keeping his university research post, builds robots that inspect small sewer lines. “If you want to dig through shit for a living that’s your business. But a robot can get into a tiny pipe, and a person can’t do that, so I’m not taking anyone’s job away.”

This story of Pittsburgh’s reinvention, then, is very much about not only the new politics of urban renewal—but also about the future shape of an American economy that may well be smarter, faster and more innovative, but without the sheer number of good, stable middle-class jobs that powered the great postwar American boom.

Of course, it’s still not clear whether the widespread automation of repetitive tasks—the kinds of things a machine can do as well or better than a human—is responsible for the anemic pace of American job creation since 2000. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, productivity and overall employment have generally risen together, with advances in technology spurring a virtuous cycle of re-investment and job creation. In the last decade or so, they have diverged—leading some economists to conclude that robots and smart software are elbowing humans out of the workforce. Two MIT researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, theorize that rapid technological advances have created a “great decoupling” of productivity and employment, which partially explains the malaise. Other researchers fiercely question that conclusion, and argue that the employment stall has as much to do with globalization and the accelerating boom-bust cycle of recent financial crises. “No one knows the cause” of the recent jobs slowdown,” economist David Autor told MIT’s Technology Review. “[It’s] a big puzzle… but there’s not a lot of evidence it’s linked to computers.”

Recent Dish on robots here.

Why Is Liberal A Dirty Word?

Beinart passes along a theory:

[T]here’s reason to believe that today, many Americans eschew the term not because they associate it with any particular unpopular attitudes or issue positions, but merely because they’ve only heard it discussed negatively. In a thought-provoking 2013 paper, Christopher Claassen, Patrick Tucker, and Steven S. Smith of Washington University in St. Louis note that although most Americans prefer the term “conservative,” those same Americans are “remarkably consistent” in telling researchers that they prefer liberal policies. How come? One reason may be that “conservative” has positive “extra-political” associations. To many Americans, it connotes “caution, restraint and respect for traditional values,” positive attributes irrespective of one’s views on specific policies.

But even more important, Claassen, Tucker, and Smith suggest, may be the negative way in which “liberal” is publicly discussed. “When certain labels are emphasized or favored by political and media elites,” they write, “the public is more likely to identify with them than others. Public framing often promotes the term ‘conservative,’ while the term ‘liberal’ is used with much less frequency and has long had a more negative connotation.” Part of the reason Americans consider liberal an epithet, in other words, is because they mostly hear it used as an epithet.

Month: February 2014