Month: March 2014

Chart Of The Day

by Patrick Appel

Low Wages

Ben Casselman puts the low-wage workforce under the microscope:

[O]ne thing is clear: A larger share of low-wage workers are trying to support themselves today than in past years. About 39 percent of workers earning under $10.10 an hour — adjusted for inflation — were supporting themselves in in 1990, compared to more than half today. Back then, nearly a quarter of low-wage earners were teenagers, compared to just 13 percent today.

He goes into more detail in a second post:

Someone working full time for the federal minimum wage earns about $15,000 a year. Only about a fifth of all minimum-wage earners made less than that in 2013, according to data from the Census Bureau. But about half of minimum-wage workers had family incomes of less than $40,000, and nearly 70 percent had incomes below $60,000, which is roughly the national median.

Most minimum-wage workers, in other words, have other sources of income. Still, most are solidly in the bottom half of the income spectrum.

What Can We Do For Uganda’s Gays? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

While many European countries and international groups have cut aid to the Ugandan government, the White House seems stuck:

Since Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed legislation imposing up to a lifetime prison sentence for homosexuality, Obama administration officials repeatedly have said there would be a “review” of U.S.-funded programs in Uganda, but have declined to discuss details of that review or options for reallocating funding. This is a touchy subject, since the United States has allocated more than $400 million in aid to Uganda for HIV and other health programs. While the Obama administration may want to send a message about LGBT rights and avoid funding organizations that might turn in LGBT people — some current grantees have even openly backed the anti-gay law — the administration also does not want to appear to be cutting off anti-retroviral therapy to those relying on those programs. … More than half of the 88 countries receiving assistance from the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) already criminalize homosexuality.

Secretary Kerry’s paltry response is to send “experts” on homosexuality to discuss things with Museveni – whose wife, by the way, just offered these illuminating thoughts on the anti-gay law: “Uganda’s First Lady has said if cows can’t be gay, then humans can definitely not be gay.” Meanwhile, more horror stories are coming out of the country:

“As a lesbian living in Uganda, it has been very difficult,” [says gay-rights activist Clare Byarugaba]. “My mom said, ‘I’m going to hand you into police.’ What that means is corrective rape. That I can’t see my family anymore. I have received so many death threats. And now I’m facing seven years to life imprisonment simply because of the work I’m doing—and because of my sexual orientation.” …

After Byarugaba was involuntarily outed by a Ugandan tabloid “witch hunt” earlier this year, she had to take a week off from work to cope with the personal fallout. “Coming out was supposed to be my journey,” she said. “Unfortunately the media did it for me when I was not ready.” She has seen friends lose their jobs and get assaulted by the police. “A transgender friend, a mob attacked her and undressed her in public,” Byarugaba said. “I know people who have tried to commit suicide. People call me on a daily basis and say, ‘Give me five reasons why I shouldn’t kill myself.’”

Previous Dish on the crisis in Uganda here.

A Bang-Up Job, Ctd

by Katie Zavadski & Chris Bodenner

From Michael Lemonick’s explainer on the discovery of the “first direct evidence of cosmic inflation” (visualized in the above video referenced by a reader):

[J]ust .0000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds (give or take) after the Big Bang, the [Inflationary Universe theory] said, the cosmos underwent a burst of expansion so furious that it was briefly flying apart faster than the speed of light. Exceeding light speed is supposed to be impossible, except that that law applies only to something moving through spacetime, not spacetime itself expanding. Just as with gravitational waves, there’s plenty of reason to think it really happened, but again, no proof.

Not until now, anyway. … The telescope the researchers used—the [BICEP2]—is tuned to see the critical kind of polarization in background radiation, but there was no guarantee it ever would. Inflation theory comes in several versions, all of which posit different intensities. “In some,” says MIT’s Alan Guth, who was one of the inflationary universe theory’s original inventors, “the waves are so weak they could never be detected. To see them turn up is beautiful.”

Theoretical physicist Matt Strassler dives deeper. Jamie Condliffe describes how the BICEP2 crushes the competing popular idea of a cyclic universe:

The cyclic model, championed by Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, predicted that the Universe expanded and contracted over very long cycles. Starting with a Big Bang and ending with a Big Crunch, the growth of the Universe, Turok reckoned, would be tempered by gravity pulling it pack together, in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction. … The main benefit of the now-debunked cyclic model was that it neatly sidestepped the fact that all the matter in the Universe, every atom around us, had to come from somewhere. As far as it was concerned, everything had been here forever.

The inflation model, however, defines a very clear starting point to our Universe, before which there was… well, nobody quite knows.

MIT physics professor Max Tegmark further contrasts Inflationary Cosmology (IC) with the now-discredited Traditional Cosmology (TC):

Q: What caused our Big Bang?
TC: There’s no explanation – the equations simply assume it happened.
IC: The repeated doubling in size of an explosive subatomic speck of inflating material.

Q: Did our Big Bang happen at a single point?
TC: No.
IC: Almost: it began in a region of space much smaller than an atom.

Q: Where in space did our Big Bang explosion happen?
TC: It happened everywhere, at an infinite number of points, all at once, with no explanation for the synchronization.
IC: In that tiny region – but inflation stretched it out to about the size of a grapefruit growing so fast that the subsequent expansion made it larger than all the space that we see today.

Q: How could an infinite space get created in a finite time?
TC: There’s no explanation — the equations simply assume that as soon as there was any space at all, it was infinite in size.
IC: By exploiting a clever loophole in Einstein’s general relativity theory, inflation produces an infinite number of galaxies by continuing forever, and an observer in one of these galaxies will view space and time differently, perceiving space as having been infinite already when inflation ended.

Q: How big is space?
TC: There’s no prediction.
IC: Probably infinite.

Nature‘s conversation with lead BICEP2 researcher John Kovac is here. He and his team’s discovery finally allows Stephen Hawking to claim victory in one of his famous bets. Sarah Gray looks ahead:

Despite meticulous checking by the [BICEP2] team, there is no way to be 100% certain of these results. The findings have to be verified, but according to Time, several research projects are already underway to test the results. Researchers are also already building BICEP3, which hopes to be operational by next summer. This discovery is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of learning about the expansion of the universe[;] it opens the door to new discovery and helps narrow down possible theories.

The Eurasian Idea

by Jonah Shepp

Pankaj Mishra explores the anti-Western, chauvinist ideology that Putin’s Russia reflects:

Eurasianism is presently articulated by the political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, the son of a KGB officer, who reportedly has many attentive listeners in the Kremlin and the Orthodox Church. Dugin and his acolytes acknowledge that centuries after Tamerlane’s conquests, which redrew the map of the world, Eurasia remains, as U.S. policy maker Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in 1997, “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” Accordingly, Dugin has advocated a new anti-Western alliance between Russia and Asian countries. Revanchists such as Dugin have enjoyed a fresh legitimacy in the post-Yeltsin era, when the empire created by Soviet Communists fragmented and a struggling Russia appeared to have been deceived and undermined by a resurgent and triumphalist West. …

Putin himself rose to high office on a wave of support from the Russian masses, which had been exposed to some terrible suffering caused by Russia’s westernization through economic “shock therapy.” Bending Crimea to his will, or calling for a religious revival, Putin seems to be realizing the old Eurasian fantasy of a strong ideological state dedicated to restoring Russia’s distinctive national and civilizational “otherness.”

With that ideology in mind, Timothy Snyder notes that Putin’s view of the Ukrainian revolutionaries is more than a little ironic:

It is deeply strange for an openly right-wing authoritarian regime, such as that of Vladimir Putin, to treat the presence of right-wing politicians in a neighboring democracy as the reason for a military invasion. Putin’s own social policy is, if anything, to the right of the Ukrainians whom he criticizes. The Russian attempt to control Ukraine is based upon Eurasian ideology, which explicitly rejects liberal democracy. The founder of the Eurasian movement is an actual fascist, Alexander Dugin, who calls for a revolution of values from Portugal to Siberia. The man responsible for Ukraine policy, Sergei Glayzev, used to run a far-right nationalist party that was banned for its racist electoral campaign. Putin has placed himself at the head of a worldwide campaign against homosexuality. This is politically useful, since opposition to Russia is now blamed on an international gay lobby which cannot by its nature understand the inherent spirituality of traditional Russian civilization.

Ask Shane Bauer Anything: An Ill-Advised Hike

By Chas Danner

When considering Iran’s imprisonment of American hikers Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, many (including Dish readers) have insisted that the trio shares responsibility for their fate by electing to travel near Iraq’s border with Iran in the first place. In today’s video from Bauer, he defends their choice to vacation in Iraqi Kurdistan, while admitting their mistake in not realizing how close they were to the border. In a followup, Shane adds that they did not cross into Iran accidentally as many have presumed. In fact, they were made to cross the unmarked border by Iranian guards on the other side, something one of those guards has since reached out to them to apologize for:

When Shane and his friends were first captured, I remember feeling annoyed about the risks they’d taken, particularly because I was worried their story might divert attention from Iran’s brutal crackdown on the Green Movement that summer. But let’s be clear, no one deserves to spend years in prison for forgetting to buy a map, let alone 400+ days in solitary confinement like Sarah had to endure. Injustice is injustice.

In yesterday’s video, Shane detailed how difficult it was to readjust to life outside of prison, as well as how the perspective he gained from his experience has helped him report on the plight of prisoners here in America. Along those lines, Bauer has since written a special report for Mother Jones about solitary confinement in American prisons. Also he, Sarah (now his wife) and Josh have co-written the memoir A Sliver of Light, which comes out today. Excerpt here.

(Archive)

The Global Workspace In Your Head

by Tracy R. Walsh

A review of Stanislas Dehaene’s latest book, Consciousness and the Brain, lays out the cognitive scientist’s theory of awareness:

Dehaene takes the “global workspace” model of consciousness developed by psychologist Bernard Baars and boldly extends it, identifying consciousness as the process of brain-wide information sharing. At any time, millions of short-lived mental representations of your world are being created by unconscious processing, he says. Consciousness selects one and makes it available to distributed, high-level decision systems through a brain-wide “broadcast”. … Consciousness, thinks Dehaene, may have evolved to pick out what is relevant from this huge amount of parallel activity, and keep it active within the global workspace while different parts of the brain evaluate it. It is necessary so we can deal with one important thing at a time and enable a kind of “collective intelligence” to be reached. That would include providing access to memory and mental associations, as well as to language processors which could describe the ongoing experience, Dehaene suggests. It all takes time, which may explain why consciousness seems to run about a third of a second behind reality.

Previous Dish on Dehaene’s work here.

Faces Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

Ami-Vitale_02

Yusuf, a keeper, sleeps with three orphaned baby rhinos at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya. The youngest rhino on the right was orphaned when poachers killed his mother on Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The largest rhino, Nicky, is not an orphan but is being hand-raised because her mother is partially blind. On the woman who took the photo:

Montana-based photographer and filmmaker Ami Vitale is shedding some much-needed light on the illegal wildlife trade and poaching of animals taking place in northern Kenya. She recently launched a crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy and the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), using photography as a platform to show how local communities are working to protect their wildlife from the heavily armed criminal networks of poachers that are devastating to the rhinos, elephants and many other plains animals of Africa. … While her initial goal has just been reached, she has now turned her sights on to other related and achievable goals, like providing educational, visual storytelling initiatives for the NRT—a collective of 26 indigenous groups in northern Kenya.

In addition to Vitale’s website, you can follow her work on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Nikon, her Montana workshops, and her storytelling seminars with NatGeo. Previous Dish on animal poaching here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Paying A Premium For Prime

by Katie Zavadski & Patrick Appel

With Amazon raising the price of Prime by $20, Yannick Lejacq wonders how far Amazon can push consumers:

Giving up a few beers or a dinner out doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice compared to all the time and money Amazon Prime has saved me over the past few years. But I have to wonder what the current price jump portends for the future of Amazon. The company knows that I’m an addict. And like any addict, I’m not entirely reasonable when it comes to my spending habits. I say that Prime saves me money, but really I’m just assuming it does. The real convenience is that it saves me from lurking on countless other websites just to find the best possible deals.

So once I’m hooked, what’s another $20? Or another $50? How far can Amazon push Prime before it starts to lose customers rather than continue to gain?

Derek Thompson fits Prime into Amazon’s overall business strategy:

For investors, Prime represents a key lever for generating profits in the future. Many of the analysts I spoke to for my business column last year on Amazon said they didn’t think it could raise prices dramatically on most of its merchandise. Instead, they said Amazon could always raise the price of Prime on its most passionate customers and add hundreds of millions of dollars to its bottom line just like that. …

The power of memberships isn’t just that they represent dependable revenue for Amazon in the topsy-turvy world of retail. It’s also that they’re sticky for customers. Couch potatoes have a hard enough time canceling their $90-a-month gym memberships, thanks to status quo bias and general laziness. It’s even harder to justify canceling a $8.25-a-month membership that gets you free fast shipping to the biggest online store, a great digital video offering, and more, just because the price went up by less than $2 a month.

Jordan Weissmann crunches the numbers:

The fact that Prime has stayed as cheap as it has for so long is one more small testament to Jeff Bezos’s willingness to sacrifice short-term profit margins to lure long-term customers. If you only adjust for inflation, a $79 Prime account nine years ago would be worth $94 today. Unlike when it debuted, subscribers also get access to Amazon’s library of streaming TV and movies. As the company has noted, shipping costs are up—the price of diesel fuel for trucks has just about doubled since 2005. And finally, it says subscribers are using the service more often, which by default makes it more expensive for Amazon to run. It costs more to serve up an all-you-can-eat buffet when the diners start pigging out.

Calculate whether Prime is worth it for you here.

Crimea, Russian Federation

by Jonah Shepp

Unrest in Ukraine

Russia annexed the peninsula this morning:

Last night, the Kremlin website posted an approval of Crimea’s draft independence bill, recognizing Crimea as a sovereign state. Today, Putin spoke for close to an hour about the history of Russia, Crimea, and the West, before overseeing the signing of document, citing the will of the Crimean people as justification and decrying the West’s attempt to stop the union.

In the speech, Putin made the expected point that there’s not that much the international community can do to prevent two willing, sovereign entities to merge. He made the case that Russia has acted in accordance with international law, and that thousands of Russian troops on the ground in Crimea had nothing to do with it.

John Cassidy parses Putin’s speech at the annexation ceremony, in which he said Russia had been “robbed” of Crimea in 1954:

At least as regards Crimea, and give or take a few rhetorical flourishes and judgments, this is a roughly accurate representation of what happened, or, at least, of what recent history felt like to many Russians. (It felt quite different to the Crimean Tatars.) Thus the strong public support for Putin’s actions. To some in the West, and to certain liberal Russians, such as Garry Kasparov, this looks eerily like Hitler’s grab of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938. Most Russians, and even Mikhail Gorbachev, beg to differ.

Crimea’s return to Russia “should be welcomed and not met with the announcement of sanctions,” the former Soviet leader said in a statement that was released on Monday. “If until now Crimea had been joined to Ukraine because of Soviet laws that were taken without asking the people, then now the people have decided to rectify this error.”

Putin’s defenders are skating over the fact that Russia has violated Ukraine’s sovereignty; stomped on international commitments it made during the nineties; destabilized the eastern part of Ukraine by shipping in agitators; and even, quite possibly, broken its own laws, which stipulate that new lands can join the Russian Federation only after the country to which they used to belong has made an agreement with Moscow. For all these reasons, sanctions are justified.

But there is still the strategic point. If Crimea’s status as part of Ukraine is regarded as an accident, or a blunder by Khrushchev, the sight of it rejoining Russia can be regarded as a tidying up of historical loose ends—a delayed but inevitable part of the redrawing of boundaries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Timothy Garton Ash rallies the West to defend what remains of Ukraine:

Putin scored a few telling hits on US unilateralism and western double standards, but what he has done threatens the foundations of international order. He thanked China for its support, but does Beijing want the Tibetans to secede following a referendum? He recalled Soviet acceptance of German unification and appealed to Germans to back the unification of “the Russian world”, which apparently includes all Russian-speakers. With rhetoric more reminiscent of 1914 than 2014, Putin’s Russia is now a revanchist power in plain view.

Without the consent of all parts of the existing state (hence completely unlike Scotland), without due constitutional process, and without a free and fair vote, the territorial integrity of Ukraine, guaranteed 20 years ago by Russia, the US and Britain, has been destroyed. In practical terms, on the ground, that cannot be undone. What can still be rescued, however, is the political integrity of the rest of Ukraine.

Stewart M. Patrick fears the precedent that Crimea’s accession to Russia sets:

Hundreds of minority populations around the world might in principle insist on secession, throwing existing borders into chaos. Not for nothing did Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing bemoan that the principle of national self-determination advanced by his president was “loaded with dynamite.”

Moreover, Russia’s aspirations are not limited to Crimea, and its successful annexation could clear a path for the Kremlin to seek to regain de-facto sovereignty over territories in the former Soviet Union with large Russian minority populations, under the pretext of protecting “oppressed” compatriots. We have seen this movie before, most obviously in Georgia. In 2008, the Russian military intervened to assist two breakaway republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In the aftermath of that intervention, Moscow pledged to remove its troops. They remain there today. Or consider Moldova, where Moscow has for more than two decades supported the statelet of Transdniester, allowing it to become a veritable Walmart of arms trafficking.

(Photo: Name plates on the walls of the Crimean parliament building are removed after the annexation of Crimea by Russia on March 18, 2014. By Bulent Doruk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Putting The Midterms On Cruise Control

by Patrick Appel

Ponnuru warns Republicans against it:

Take a look at the Huffington Post’s poll averages. Obama’s net job-approval rating is slightly up since the start of February. His rating on the economy has been improving since early December. He has been rising on foreign policy since late September. While the president is still “upside down,” as the operatives say, on all those measures, Republicans would be foolish to assume that the trend is their friend.

And even if Republicans succeed by taking the path of least resistance, they will be storing up future trouble. What if they win the Senate? In that case, Congress will have to move legislation. Republicans will have to come up with attractive conservative bills then, so that Obama will either feel it necessary to sign them or pay a political price for vetoing them. They will be in much better shape if they have campaigned on some of these ideas.

He is interested in the GOP “coming up with an agenda, selling it to the public and refining it as they go.” Douthat doubts that will happen:

I don’t think you’re likely to see real movement until after the 2016 campaign. The House Republican caucus is just too dysfunctional to unite around anything except modest budget deals and insufficient alternatives, and if they did unite around something more substantial they’re too distant from the White House ideologically to cut a deal. That’s probably still going to be the case after the midterms, and the lame duck phase of presidencies rarely produce much policy movement anyway. So for the ideas currently circulating to actually come up for votes that mean something, I think you’d need a change in the correlation of forces in Washington D.C. – and in particular, you’d need a clear leader capable of pushing them, which basically can only happen if there’s a Republican in the White House.

As for what happens to these kind of proposals if it’s Hillary Clinton in the White House instead, with a Republican House and a divided Senate? Honestly, I no idea – but I can’t say I’m optimistic.