Month: April 2014

Victoria Turk sums up Greenpeace’s latest report (pdf) on the global environmental impact of the IT industry:

It puts IT-related emissions at two percent of global emissions—about the same as the aviation industry.

While it’s harder to envisage emissions coming from the hum of your laptop compared to, say, the roar of a jet engine, keeping data centres in power requires a lot of, well, power. And as our data consumption increases and more people get connected, that’s only going up. As Greenpeace writes, “The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the sector’s sustainability efforts.”

The report commended some companies for committing to clean energy—it praised Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce for setting goals of 100 percent renewable energy for their data centres and making steps in that direction. It was considerably less effusive in its verdict on [Amazon Web Services] (whose data centres provide storage and computing to a whole load of internet heavy-hitters) and Twitter[.]

Lauren C. Williams adds that this naming and shaming really does push IT companies to clean up their act:

“What you have is a set of customer-facing companies that are delivering very valuable information services,” Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University research fellow for energy policy and finance, told ThinkProgress. “Because they are customer-facing, these companies actually care about where they get their electricity. When it’s shown that they’re getting their energy from sources that aren’t as clean, that’s a problem for their customers.”

To combat a poor public image, companies in turn start revising their policies and focus on investing in cleaner energies. Greenpeace released a similar report in 2012 that named Apple as one of the dirtiest companies. Since then, Apple has jumped to the front of pack. “Apple is the archetypal example,” Koomey said. “They were really slammed in the first report. And what Apple decided to do was put this whole thing behind them and go to 100 percent renewable [energy].”

Fallows wonders whether it will succeed:

Through its 30-plus years of economic modernization, China has seemed to stick to efficient levels of corruption. Connected families got very rich, but most families did better than they had before.

An increasingly important question for Xi Jinping’s time in office, which bears on the even more urgent question of whether China can make progress against its environmental catastrophe, involves the levels and forms of Chinese corruption. Has it begun passing from tolerable to intolerable levels? If so, does Xi Jinping have the time, tools, or incentive to do anything about it? Will exposing high-level malfeasance—like the astonishing recent case of Zhou Yongkang, who appears to have taken more than $14 billion while he held powerful petroleum and internal-security roles—encourage the public? Or instead sour and shock them about how bad the problem really is? Is it even possible to run a government and command a party while simultaneously threatening the system that most current power-holders have relied on for power and wealth?

Adam Minter highlights one example of everyday corruption: the pocketing of the fines China collects from parents who violate the one-child policy:

The problem, according to Chinese media reports, is that quite a bit of that revenue doesn’t seem to land in government treasuries. In rural Yunnan Province, for example, audits suggest that in one county as little as 10.18% of social compensation fees flowed into government coffers. In Chongqing, 68 million yuan ($11 million) worth of social planning fees failed to find their way to the treasury.

Needless to say, the stench of corruption hangs heavy over such discrepancies. In Yunnan, officials were found to be using social maintenance fees to pay for personal expenses, including medical bills. In some regions, local authorities allow officials who collect the fees to keep a certain percentage of them. The situation — whereby officials are incentivized to hunt down children for their revenue-generating potential — is both untenable and perverse.

In a review of Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, Katha Pollitt faults today’s left for its acceptance of sex work:

It’s one thing to say sex workers shouldn’t be stigmatized, let alone put in jail. But when feminists argue that sex work should be normalized, they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area. They accept that sex is something women have and men get (do I hear “rape culture,” anyone?), that men are entitled to sex without attracting a partner, even to the limited extent of a pickup in a bar, much less pleasing or satisfying her. As Grant says, they are buying a fantasy—the fantasy of the woman who wants whatever they want (how johns persuade themselves of this is beyond me). But maybe men would be better partners, in bed and out of it, if they couldn’t purchase that fantasy, if sex for them, as for women, meant finding someone who likes them enough to exchange pleasure for pleasure, intimacy for intimacy.

The current way of seeing sex work is all about liberty—but what about equality? I thought the left was about that, too.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown disagrees:

I’m not sure what Pollitt means by “normalized.”

I’ve never seen any feminists arguing that prostitution should be the predominant sexual paradigm or that scores more people should go into it. We simply think that prohibition of sex work creates more problems than it solves, that adults should be free to engage in sexual contracts with one another as they see fit, and that driving sex work underground leads to more exploitative conditions for those who are coerced or forced into it. If that’s “normalization,” sure, but it wouldn’t be the first term I’d choose. Semantics aside, the fact that a practice may contribute to troubling gender expectations simply isn’t justification to prohibit it.

Erik Loomis also takes issue with Pollitt’s moralizing tone:

Unfortunately, while Pollitt is writing in the language of second-wave feminism, she’s also writing in the language of prohibitionism. She tries to stigmatize a reality of the world as immoral, but in fact just reinforces a system by which women are in fact victimized. Even the poor women she accuses Grant of ignoring are not helped by keeping sex work illegal. If you legalize sex work, you are going to make it harder for underground sex operations that treat women terribly to continue because a major reason why they exist is that sex work is illegal and therefore stigmatized. That’s not to say sex work is great–it’s a bad job—but keeping it illegal does not promote the equality that Pollitt wants to see.

Ben Casselman sums up today’s jobs report:

The economy added 192,000 jobs in March, the 42nd consecutive month of growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. All the gains were in the private sector, pushing nongovernment employment to 116 million, just above the prior record set in January 2008, when the recession was just beginning. The private sector lost 8.8 million jobs in the recession and has gained 8.9 million since.

But the wounds of the recession are far from fully healed. Total payrolls remain more than 400,000 below their prior peak due to deep cuts in the number of government workers, especially at the state and local level. And the adult population (16 years and older) has grown by 14 million since the recession began, meaning the U.S. job market is nowhere close to fully recovered on a per-capita basis.

Drum is relatively upbeat:

This is basically good news. The labor force participation rate increased because 500,000 people entered the labor force, and the raw number of unemployed stayed about the same. The fact that people are returning to the labor force is pretty positive, as is the fact that jobs numbers for January and February were revised upward a bit. Jared Bernstein points out that wage growth has been fairly strong over the past year, which also counts as good news as long as the Fed doesn’t use this as an excuse to start tightening monetary policy.

Ylan Mui sees the report as a sign that the economy could finally takeoff:

[M]any analysts believe the economy grew at a paltry rate of 2 percent or less during the first quarter. (The government’s official estimate won’t be released until the end of the month.) That threatened forecasts that the economy could expand at a rate of 3 percent this year for the first time in nearly a decade. The solid job growth in March — if it holds up in future months — puts that goal back within striking distance.

Danny Vinik throws cold water:

[W]hile the nearly 200,000 jobs is a welcome development, the recovery has still not hit second gear. Month-to-month jobs reports contain a lot of noise as the sampling error is high and revisions can change the numbers significantly. One way to filter out some of that noise is to use a three-month moving average. As you can see, job growth has fluctuated between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs for years now:

Cassidy notes that the many groups are still doing very poorly:

[R]ather than trying to further parse the payroll numbers, let’s look, for once, at the distributional data in the report, which shows that a great deal of variation and inequity are persisting, despite the over-all improvement. The recovery has been real for some groups, particularly those with college educations and whites who aren’t trapped in extended spells of unemployment. But, for other groups, including the long-term unemployed, African-Americans, and young adults who aren’t in college, finding work remains a formidable challenge, and finding a decent job is even harder.

But Bill McBride wants the recovery put in perspective:

Although this was a slow recovery compared to most previous recessions, this was actually a relatively fast recovery compared to recessions following a severe financial crisis.  It is easy to complain about policy makers, but we have to recognize that some policies actually helped ease the pain for millions of workers.