Tag: Premium

The State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report, which came out on Friday, bumped several countries into its lowest tier, including Thailand:

Thailand, Malaysia, and Venezuela’s status was automatically downgraded this year because they have been on a State Department human trafficking watch list for over four years and have not improved. Thailand is among the worst offenders, according to the State Department. … Though the Thai government reportedly paid a U.S. public relations firm $51,000 a month to help it boost its rating on the State Department report, the U.S. downgraded the country to the bottom tier, where it stands alongside 23 others including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Libya and Cuba. The 23 countries that were placed in the report’s lowest tier could face U.S. government sanctions on non-humanitarian, non-trade-related aid.

Joshua Kurlantzick is cheered that the Thai PR campaign failed:

[It’s] a particularly tough blow at a time when Thailand has just suffered a military coup and is facing penalties for the coup not only from the United States but also from Europe, Australia, and many other countries. Besides Thailand, other countries downgraded in the new report also had lobbied the administration hard, stressing not only that they were (allegedly) taking action against trafficking but also emphasizing their increasingly warm bilateral ties with the United States. Qatar, an important American partner which received a ranking slightly above that of Thailand, had pushed to be given a higher rating. This time, to its credit, the White House was not swayed.

For example, Thailand surely deserves to be placed among the Tier 3 nations, and should have been downgraded to Tier 3 years ago. In just the past year, the Thai navy has been implicated in the trafficking and outright murder of refugees fleeing Myanmar, Thailand’s seafood industry has been the subject of damning reports from nonprofit organizations and journalists revealing outright slavery in the industry, and in just the past two weeks over 100,000 Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand, many of whom worked under slave-like conditions, have fled the country in panic, fearing that the junta is going to arbitrarily detain and abuse them.

Keating highlights another angle:

The report is also worth considering in light of the World Cup. It specifically highlights the role that trafficked labor can play in the preparations for mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics as well as the heightened risk of sex trafficking during the events themselves. Qatar, the 2022 World Cup host whose manipulative practices toward foreign laborers have recently become a topic of international interest, was downgraded this year to the “tier 2 watch list,” the second-lowest designation. Russia, the 2018 host, was downgraded to Tier 3 last year.

“There are many homosexuals, who neither desire nor are suited for homophile marriage, that ridicule what they call the “heterosexual” institution of marriage. This is only a clever twisting. Marriage is no more a strictly heterosexual social custom than are the social customs of birthday celebrations, funerals, house-warmings, or, for that matter, sleeping, eating, and the like. I participate in those, not because they are heterosexual or homosexual things, but because I am a human being. Being homosexual does not put one out of the human race. I am a human being, male and married to another male; not because I am aping heterosexuals, but because I have discovered that that is by far the most enjoyable way of life to me. And I think that’s also the reason heterosexual men and woman marry, though some people twist things around to make it appear they are merely following convention.

After all, there must be something to marriage, else what is the reason for its great popularity? Marriage is not anybody’s “convention”. It is a way of living and is equally good for homosexuals and heterosexuals.

I think it is high time the modern homophile movement started paying more attention to homophile marriage. … Homophile marriage is not only a strictly modern idea that proves our movement today is something new in history, it is the most stable, sensible, and ethical way to live for homophiles. Our homophile movement is going to have to face, sooner or later, the problem of adopting a standard of ethics. We have got to start laying the groundwork. I can’t think of a better way to begin than by pushing homophile marriage,” – Randy Lloyd, One magazine, June 1963.

It seems to me vital to appreciate that the idea of marriage equality goes back a long, long way. It was raised as a subject worthy of a cover-story in One magazine as early as August 1953 (see cover above to the left) – although, as Jim Burroway notes, at that point it was mainly to dismiss it as a reduction in human freedom. Ten years later, you have a somewhat “conservative” case for gay marriage – and its main audience are gay men and women who obviously oppose such an idea. And it’s hard to convey to people in their twenties that, for the longest time, the strongest opposition to marriage equality came from within the gay community itself.

No one believes me any more when I recall how unpopular it was among gays to support marriage equality in the 1980s and early 1990s. Jim Burroway rightly, I think, sees the AIDS epidemic as the turning point:

In 1970, Jack Baker and James McConnell tried to get married in Minneapolis (see May 18) and sued in state and federal court when their request for a license was denied. That ended with the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Most gay rights groups at that time were caught up in the broader sexual revolution rhetoric, and had little interest in pushing for something as conventional as marriage. That attitude remained through the 1970s and the 1980s. But when AIDS hit the gay community in the 1980s and partners found themselves blocked by law and relatives from caring for and properly burying their partners and remaining in the homes that they shared together, it finally dawned on a lot of people that they really were married, regardless of whether they had thought of themselves and each other that way or not. And so here we are, a half-century later, and marriage is now at the forefront of the gay rights movement. And in just a few short years, we’ve already seen it expand in ways that Randy Lloyd probably never could begin to imagine.

Somehow, he managed to omit the vital role played by Ted Olson and David Boies.

In a ruling handed down on Thursday in Alice v. CLS Bank, SCOTUS invalidated a set of software patents because the software in question only used computers to apply an abstract concept. Julie Samuels casts the ruling as a death blow to patent trolls:

Most software patents are both vague and overbroad, making it hard for anyone—lawyers, engineers, everyday inventors—to understand what they actually cover. And there are tons of them: The patent office issues approximately 40,000 every year.

So entered the patent troll. These bad actors do not usually make or sell anything. Instead they take these meaningless, low-quality (but valuable) patents to troll the companies that are inventing and producing. This problem costs our economy billions of dollars annually and should be taken seriously. But patent trolls are simply a product of our broken patent system. The root of the problem—and the troll’s weapon of choice—is the low-quality software patents that have flooded the system.

And this brings us back to the Alice v. CLS Bank ruling.

The Supreme Court did not abolish software patents—something some advocates had hoped for but was by all accounts highly unlikely—but it did significantly tighten the standard for what is and what is not patentable. This will undoubtedly lead to fewer low-quality software patents. And that is excellent news. Specifically, the court unequivocally stated that if you have an idea so abstract that it cannot be patented, simply tying it to a “generic computer cannot transform a patent-ineligible abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.” It also stated that tying an abstract idea to “purely functional and generic” hardware similarly would not make the idea patentable.

But Timothy Lee argues that the distinction the ruling makes between abstract and less abstract software is meaningless, because “at root, software is nothing more than a sequence of mathematical operations.” He makes the case for throwing out software patents altogether:

In practice, the courts have only allowed patents that claim complicated mathematical algorithms. For example, in a 2011 decision the Federal Circuit approved a patent because the mathematical algorithm it claimed “required the manipulation of computer data structures.” Of course, a “computer data structure” is just the way a computer organizes numbers and symbols. …

If a patent claims a mathematical formula simple enough for a judge to understand how it works, she is likely to recognize that the patent claims a mathematical formula and invalidate it. But if the formula is too complex for her to understand, then she concludes that it’s something more than a mathematical algorithm and uphold it.

But this makes the law highly unpredictable, since it effectively depends on the mathematical sophistication of the judge who happens to take the case. And it’s also logically incoherent. The courts originally excluded algorithms from patent protection because they are basic building blocks for innovation — that’s as true of complex algorithms like data compression as of simple ones.

The latest move by the administration:

The United States on Thursday cut aid to Uganda, imposed visa restrictions and canceled a regional military exercise in response to a Ugandan law that imposes harsh penalties on homosexuality.

Kim Yi Dionne weighs the risks:

Some analysts raise concerns that punitive measures by Western governments will generate a backlash that will “have the unintended effect of emboldening homophobic rhetoric that links aid and LGBT rights to neocolonial intervention,” and could further endanger the lives of sexual minorities. The anti-homosexuality act in Uganda has already yielded an increase in human rights violations.

But the answer might be different if we draw from University of Florida political scientist Conor O’Dwyer‘s study of gay rights in Poland. Prior to Poland’s accession to the European Union, the European Parliament warned it would block accession of any country that violated the rights of sexual minorities. Initially, the EU restrictions generated a political backlash against sexual minorities in Poland. But the political backlash against same-sex rights in Poland can be partially credited with mobilizing same-sex rights activists.

Tim Fernholz puts the plummeting of Uganda’s currency in context:

Since passing laws mandating the life in prison for “homosexual acts” in February, Uganda has seen its currency weaken considerably, with US dollars now costing nearly 6% more since the day the law was signed. (In the same period, the euro has weakened against the dollar by less than 1%.)

It’s not that markets are moral. The latest sell-off comes after the United States announced Friday that it would cancel aid programs and military exercises with Uganda; other Western countries are doing the same, including Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Threats to enact responses like these helped kill an earlier version of Uganda’s anti-gay bill that included the death penalty for some violations, but the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, went ahead with the new version anyhow.

Foreign aid makes up about 4% of Uganda’s gross national income, and is equal to more than a third of government revenues. If its volume continues to decrease significantly, that’s going to be noticeable—already, local traders are predicting dollar shortages.

Previous Dish on the issue here.

In his memoir Life, Animated, Ron Suskind recounts raising a son, Owen, who was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. In a review of the book, Rachel Adams describes how the family stumbled into a surprising form of therapy:

The only time Owen seems calm and relaxed is while he’s watching Disney videos. One afternoon, there is a breakthrough. The entire family is watching The Little Mermaid when they make an exciting discovery: the seemingly meaningless phrase Owen has been muttering for the past few weeks, which sounds to them like “juicervose,” is actually a stanza from the film’s last song, “just your voice.” Some of Owen’s therapists dismiss his vocalizations as echolalia, an autistic tendency to repeat sounds without understanding. But the Suskinds are convinced that Owen’s words represent a genuine effort at communication. Soon after the “juicervose” episode the family visits Disney World, where Owen is transformed. Surrounded by beloved characters and themes, he is more focused and receptive than he has been since the onset of his symptoms. The Suskinds become convinced that Disney may be the key to recovering their son’s ability to express himself.

Back in April, Hanna Rosin talked to the Suskinds and Dan Griffin, Owen’s therapist, about how the Disney treatment took hold:

Adam Davidson maintains that “the latest recession was only part of the boomerang generation’s problem”:

In reality, it simply amplified a trend that had been growing stealthily for more than 30 years. Since 1980, the U.S. economy has been destabilized by a series of systemic changes — the growth of foreign trade, rapid advances in technology, changes to the tax code, among others — that have affected all workers but particularly those just embarking on their careers. In 1968, for instance, a vast majority of 20-somethings were living independent lives; more than half were married. But over the past 30 years, the onset of sustainable economic independence has been steadily receding. By 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent.

These boomerang kids are not a temporary phenomenon.

They appear to be part of a new and permanent life stage. More than that, they represent a much larger anxiety-provoking but also potentially thrilling economic evolution that is affecting all of us. It’s so new, in fact, that most boomerang kids and their parents are still struggling to make sense of it. Is living with your parents a sign, as it once was, of failure? Or is it a practical, long-term financial move? This was the question that the photographer Damon Casarez, who is 26, asked when he moved in with his parents after graduating from art school. So he started searching for other boomerang kids, using tools like Craigslist. The result is this photo essay. And the answer to whether boomeranging is a good or a bad thing depends, as Kasinecz noted, on how you look at it.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital famously uses the 19th century bourgeois novel – Austen and Balzac especially – to give a sense of what life was like in that previous age of inequality. Stephen Marche finds that he could have done the same for our own day, noting that the processes the economist describes “have already been reflected in American fiction with almost ridiculous specificity.” One example? The novels of Jonathan Franzen:

Future economic historians won’t have to look very far to find fictional descriptions of our current financial realities. The social realist novel of the moment can be identified by the preeminent, almost exclusive, emphasis it places on social expressions of the changing economic reality. Currently, the large-scale realism of Jonathan Franzen, articulated in his famous article for Harper’s in 1996 and achieved most fully in The Corrections and Freedom, stands utterly triumphant. The narrative forms that thrived in the mid-nineties — minimalism, with its descriptions of poor and rural men; magical realism which incorporated non-Western elements into the traditional English novel; the exotic lyricism of John Berger or Michael Ondaatje — have been pushed to the side.

The principal subject of mainstream literary fiction today is the way we live now, meaning the way the upper middle class lives now. The characters’ lives are aimed, with single-minded purpose, toward the achievement of comfortable and socially acceptable financial security, which is threatening always to collapse or is in the process of collapsing. If Raymond Carver was the master of the death of the American dream, Franzen is the chronicler of its ghostly persistence — the combination of economic growth with deepening insecurity. His characters run on the currents of two polarizing forces — a sense of entitlement and a sense that those entitlements might soon be taken away. “The problem was money and the indignities of life without it,” Franzen writes in The Corrections. “Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous; he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.”

Scott Esposito isn’t as impressed with Piketty’s literary chops:

To be sure, Piketty does invoke Balzac and Austen, as Marche says, but not nearly enough to warrant the claim that “Capital in the Twenty-First Century is perhaps the only major work of economics that could reasonably be mistaken for a work of literary criticism.” If only. Piketty mainly invokes Austen to help support his observations that monetary inflation didn’t exist in the 19th century. Balzac gets a little more play, as Piketty uses him to demonstrate both his inflation claim, and another claim: that the aristocrats of Balzac’s day were so far ahead of the rest of society in the 19th century that there was really no point in ever trying to catch them by hard work—it would be much better to marry into wealth and live off of that money (as many of Balzac’s characters attempt to do). That’s it. As far as they go, Balzac and Austen are fine ways of making Piketty’s points more concrete for a mass audience, but Piketty makes no attempt to demonstrate the existence of something called the patrimonial novel. (And nor should he; he’s writing a work of economics, not literary criticism.)

Read previous Dish on Piketty here, here, here, and here, and read the Dish thread “A Global Tax On The Super Rich?” here.

Fallows has a sobering piece by William Polk on the devastating consequences of American meddling in the Middle East:

Starting in the west and moving east: in Libya, having destroyed the Qaddafi regime, we unleashed forces that have virtually torn Libya apart and have spilled over into Central Africa, opening a new area of instability. In Egypt, the “non-coup-coup” of General Sisi has produced no ideas on what to do to help the Egyptian people except to execute large numbers of their religious leaders; he has also made clear his suspicion of and opposition to us. In occupied Palestine, the Israeli state is reducing the population to misery and driving it to rage while, in Washington, its extreme right-wing government is thumbing its nose at its benefactor, America. Our relations have never been worse. In Syria, we are engaged in arming, training and funding essentially the same people whom the new Egyptian regime is about to hang and whom we are considering bombing in Iraq. In Iraq, we are about to become engaged in supporting the regime we installed and which is the close ally of the Syrian and Iranian regimes that we have been trying for years to destroy; yet in Iran, we appear to be on the point of reversing our policy of destroying its government and seeking its help to defeat the insurgents in Iraq. And on and on.

He reminds us of a time when the US was not regarded as a constant menacing meddler in almost every nook and cranny of the planet:

Admittedly, in my day in planning American policy in the Middle East, we never had to find our ways out of such a disarray. My tasks were comparatively easy. So, perhaps, our actions are aspects of a shrewd, nimble and skillful policy that I am simply not clever enough to understand. I certainly hope so.

But, even if they are, what is the “bottom line,” as businessmen like to say, in terms of our objective of being “secure?”

Allow me a personal answer. When I first traveled through the deserts, farm lands, villages and cities of Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, unfailingly, I was welcomed, invited into homes, fed and cared for. Today, I would risk being shot in any of the areas most affected by American policy.

The US is addicted to controlling the planet. And we just hit another bottom. I don’t think a single, small scotch on the rocks will help.

Katherine Mangu-Ward restarts the debate about plastic-bag bans:

You know what’s gross? Reusable grocery bags. Think about it: You put a leaky package of chicken in your cloth or plastic tote. Then you empty the bag, crumple it up, and toss in the trunk of your car to fester. A week later, you go shopping again and throw some veggies you’re planning to eat raw into the same bag. Ew.

And that’s just the yuck factor. There’s also an ongoing debate about the environmental and economic impact of these increasingly popular bans and taxes. Luckily, Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine, issued a new report today that looks at the issue from just about every angle. The report addresses my pet peeve, the health impact of reusable bags, quoting one survey in Arizona and California which found coliform bacteria in half of the bags tested.

Writing from the other side of the Atlantic, Pamela Yeow is disappointed that the UK government just exempted businesses with fewer than 250 employees from a planned plastic-bag surcharge:

Research has substantially demonstrated that plastic bags are harmful to the environment. Lightweight bags are carried by winds to litter roadsides, trees, and streets throughout urban and rural landscapes. The thin plastic breaks down in the environment into tiny pieces that lead to the deaths of birds and marine life. And it has also been shown without doubt that the billions of single-use plastic bags used each year – eight billion in 2012 in England alone – are produced at great cost. It is estimated that the amount of energy needed to make 12 single-use bags could power a car for a mile.

Previous Dish on plastic-bag bans here and here